Darragh Ó Héiligh blog and accessibility guides

I've not done much development work in ages.  But I'm enjoying it! 

I'm writing a site at the moment.  Details soon.

It's blog based however there's a strong photo galary influence.

It's going really well but it's very difficult to use functions all over the shop so it's very modular but the style sheet connections are a pain in the ass to get right!

I'll announce the address soon when it's ready for testing.

Darren Byrne had the nastyness to meme me today. Actually, fair play, it's the first time I've been memed! I think that's very sad actually. The fact that I'm just slightly happy at the fact of being recognised enough to be memed. Here's me thinking I've been writing to my self for all this time.

This started over at Skillet.com/a> and has been doing the rounds for the last day or two. I saw it over at Head Rambles this morning.

It's called "Getting your Goat". Basically it's a good excuse to have a good old rant. I'm good at that so, first with the rules:,/p>

1. List two things that irritate you for a reason (and list the reason!), and two things that irritate you for no apparent reason whatsoever!!
2. Give credit to the person who tagged you.
3. Link your answers to the original blog, that’s here (at Skellet.com).
4. Tag four new people to participate.

That's kind of different' isn't it? ok. Here goes.

1. Two things I hate for a good reason.
   1. People saying they'll do something with absolutely no intention of doing it! Why say it! Why not just be straight and admit that you couldn't be bothered!
   2. Cars stopping in front of traffic light crossings. There are road markings for a reason. why ignore them! It makes no sense to me! And pluss, have you ever seen a guide dog who doesn't want to cross at an angle? I have one and he's fucken stubbern! If he doesn't want to cross because he thinks something shouldn't be there it doesn't matter if you put a rocket up his ass. There's nothing that can move him.
2. Things I hate for no particular reason:
   1. The feel of Styrofoam. There's just something really horrible about it! I cant even listen to someone lift it! It goes through my head.
   2. The Accordion. It's the one instrument I absolutely hate with a passion! There's no particular reason either! It's just ...... horrible!
3. Darren Byrne Is the person responsible for this.
4. I answered this twice earlier. There's no point putting another link in.
5. Ah, now, who to send it to...
   • Abby, your definitly it. You can rant as well as the next blogger. Even if your outside Ireland, I suppose we cant hold that against you.
   • StuartYour next! Go on, let it all out. You know you want to.
   • Elly, I don't see this on your site, want to give it a go?
   • Laura, if your reading, I haven't seen it on your blog either! Go nuts!

Now, ordinarily, I wouldn't look at stats much however todays caught my eye. 

For some reason, a total of twelve searches resulted in people coming to my site in the past ten hours. 

People searched for Darragh Ó Héiligh, Darragh O Heiligh, Darragh O'Heiligh, DigitalDarragh, Digital Darragh, O Heiligh and darraghoheiligh. 

Is there a reason that someone or some people are finding it very interesting to search for me by name?

Well, for those of you who couldn't just find me at www.digitaldarragh.com or www.darraghoheiligh.ie , pleased to meet you.

I'm Darragh / DigitalDarragh, I'm from Drogheda, working in Dublin, I've a dog called Freddie, my girl friend is Emma, My two main loves in life are Technology and Irish music.  Emma, don't be picking things out of that that I don't mean.  .  . 

And you are??????????

Wasn't that a great song?

I think I have it here somewhere.

It's the song that I think of for some reason while looking through my site statistics.  Every day, any site owner gets hundreds of hits from people using search engines most of which are completely unrelated to the topic they focus on.  That's what I love about blogs though, their so dynamic.  One day I could be talking about technology, the next about local news, the next about music and I could even drop in an opinion or too as well just to be a bit different! So, the keywords at any one time are endless!  Oh plus you have comments too!  Google has picked up on a few comment keywords recently as well which has got me some really strange visitors. Unfortunately, most of them just sit quietly to one side without commenting so their of absolutely no use to me!  Come on people, comment!

Quite a lot of people Email me privately for some reason.  Someone sent me a message Yesterday asking me to tell them more about the Bodhran!  I'll get around to that at some stage. 

To all of you who find my site via a search engine, Welcome!

To all of you looking for a way of putting up door frames, You're out of luck!

Oh, I don't repair or recycle fridges either sorry.

BTW, on a completely random note that will only make sense to a few nosy readers out to do no good, you may not reproduce any of the text on this site without my prior permission. Please take notice of the copyright statement at the bottom of each page. You should also be warned that all of the content on this site should be considered my opinion unless stated as fact.  If you believe any content to be in error or offensive you may of course use the Email link or the comment form associated with each post.

On the way to work this morning I had a read of Marie Borans blog supplement in the Irish Independent. I like her writing! I’d possibly disagree with some of her conclusions when assessing technology for SiliconRepublic.com as in my opinion the conclusions should be less personalized however; I really appreciate her giving this little site a mention! So, Marie, if you’re reading, I owe you a pint!

Now, the one thing that’s got me thinking is her focus on the fact that I’m blind and I occasionally write about issues directly effecting blind people. My aim while writing this blog is to keep it as unrelated to stuff regarding blindness as possible. Of course, as I’m learning about something or setting a new application or operating system up it will invariably come up as a point to note for anyone who finds my experiences helpful but it’s very rarely my intention to write about something that only appeals to the small group of visually impaired readers that visit this dodgy domain.

At some stage while in a more reflective mood I must read back over some posts to try to assess exactly what image this blog and indeed I portray. As I said in a post in March, my reasons for blogging are complicated, different and yet as normal as all the other bloggers out there however I think my main aim is to illustrate through this medium that because I’m blind, there are occasionally tasks where I need to apply slightly different methodology in order to succeed in completing them. Applying that positive and optimistic policy of believing there is always a way of adapting your self or the tools available for a given task in my hope will assure that I am never recognised by the fact that I cant see and instead recognised by my flexibility to adapt to any situation / task / environment and interact with it with the same efficiency as any one else. I suppose to a reasonable degree that necessitates a certain amount of content where I refer to different techniques that I use for adapting to various environments however I’d hope that this is only viewed as a side note and not the most prominent attribute. It’s possibly a balancing act. What do you think? What is the most prominent topic in your opinion on this blog? What do you get from it? Why do you bother reading? What brings you back? Is this a blog orientated toward people who are blind? God that would be ironic wouldn’t it?

You know, I think this is a bug I’ve caught from other bloggers. Spending an entire post blogging about blogging. Its crazy isn’t it? I should just get back to writing the same old nonsense as normal.

Thanks for giving me something to think about…

Oh to finish up, there are a few things I need to correct. Not just in the Irish Independent mention but in the blog in general. Their more updates than corrections really.

Firstly, I no longer work with Novell. Even when I was there I never worked directly with accessibility. I took this on as a side project that I worked on when I had the time and outside work hours. My ongoing work creating Audio walk throughs for new users of Linux" is done in my own time and only for the benefit of this very worthy cause.

At the moment, I’m working with a company contracted by the OIREACHTAS. The Houses of the OIREACHTAS is basically the centre of Irish government. I’m working here as an IT administrator primarily responsible for backups and supporting members. Members are TD’s, Senators and their employees. My job takes me to Kildare, Lenster, Phoenix and agriculture houses on a daily basis. I really like the job as I have a lot of exposure to everything from rooms packed with racks and racks of servers to Members PC’s to testing new laptops and software for future implementation. Coming from the previous company I worked in, coming to work doesn’t feel like I’m actually working. I suppose that’s the best way to have it isn’t it? One final note that could actually get me into trouble with some people, I’m employed by a company contracted by the OIREACHTAS. This means that I did not get in because of my disability. I got this job by working very hard, building on my qualifications and proving via experience with other companies that I was the right person to meet their requirements. I don’t mean to say this to belittle anyone working in the civil service however I recently got an email from someone praising the Irish government for taking someone on with and: I quote: “My problems”. So, I felt it necessary to make that clear. Sorry, minor rant over.

My work does not involve accessibility however I’ve had to do a bit to make this environment accessible to allow me to work with the same efficiency as everyone around me. This involved ensuring that my screen reader was on every server and work station in these offices and purchasing a bar code reader to allow me to read tape labels used for organizing backups. Funnily enough, these were the only two changes that were required and I purchased both adaptations my self. Not because they were not offered by my employer but because I believe that if people with disabilities expect that they should be considered equally it is unfair to expect perspective employers to shell out for costly adaptations. If needed of course, there are grants that can be sourced from employment organizations such as Fas to cover this however I haven’t needed to go down this road in quite a while. As you can probably guess, this is not something that many blind people agree with.

Just thinking, maybe I should change my blog slogan to: Dodgy Darragh, trouble maker!

Morning all, well as a result of last night I thought I'd better add to the blogrole now that I've been able to put a face to the name for a few of the great Irish bloggers out there.  I encourage you to go take a look at a few of the other blogs out there.  There's a great community of Irish contributors. 

www.stuartlawler.ie

Take a look.  I think he's settled on wordpress now for his blog engine which is really easy to navigate if your using a screen reader.

I don't think he's finished developing the navigation but the content has potential.

Doesn't really have the same ring to it does it.

Why isn't Blog in the dictionary in MS Word?

Ok.  I’ve not blogged properly in a good while so I’ll try to do some updating in this post.

Firstly, the new job is going really well.  I’m basically one of seven system admins supporting the houses of the Oireachtas.  That means that on a daily basis, I solve problems from locked out log ins, to Lotus Notes ID problems to fixing the air conditioning in a server room because the air humidity is too high to configuring remote RAS solutions for remote offices.  It’s not all sitting at a desk either.  There’s plenty of freedom to access a machine remotely or walk to someone’s office and fix it directly.  It’s a really nice change.  In one way its help desk department but in another way there’s so much exposure to server equipment and so much flexibility to move about that it’s completely different.

I’ve had a few very difficult challenges here though.  Accessibility to some of the systems is a real problem.  For example, VNC is used for remote access but VNC will not work with my screen reader.  Even if I could get VNC to relay the sound from the remote PC to the local computer I’d be happy enough but as it stands it gives me absolutely nothing.  It’s making my job very difficult.  Another problem I’m having is because I do so much with the servers, I need to use VNC or remote desktop.  As again I need to use Jaws, all the servers in the Oireachtas first need to be restarted.  This is an obvious problem.  There is a restart schedule but waiting for it is not exactly nice when there are things that you must therefore hand over to someone else.  I hate depending on people.  Especially when it’s so crucial to very clearly illustrate my independence and ability to do everything that this job requires.  The people I’m working with are fantastic however I still need to be on my guard.  The last problem that’s worth mentioning is when accessing servers on site.  I.e, when I’m in front of the terminal in one of the server rooms.  How do I get access to it?  There’s obviously no sound output.  They don’t need it.  Plus, windows server operating systems disable sound output by default!  Plus, if one goes down, how do I read the bios and other screens that are shown before Windows starts?  I’ll not beat around the bush.  These accessibility problems are going to be very hard to get over.  If I can’t get over them I hope my new employer isn’t going to take it badly.

Still though, although this is something that is constantly at the back of my mind, it’s not hampered me much yet.  I’m really enjoying the work and I’m constantly learning.

Speaking of learning, I installed Windows Small Business Server 2003 at home during the weekend.  It’s possibly going to replace my Linux" server running OpenSuSE 10.3.  I never thought I’d actually replace that Linux" server.  It’s still running with only using 3.4GB of disk space and the processor performance never jumps above ten per cent.  That’s very impressive considering everything its doing.  But, in saying that, the Windows server integrates everything on the network so well that it’s really hard to justify using Linux" again.  I was actually thinking of connecting the Windows and Linux" servers to make some kind of cross platform type domain system but I’ve not really found any kind of need for this yet.  Even if there’s not a need but something that could be interesting I’d still do it but there’s just nothing that comes to mind at the moment.  Any ideas?

Anyway, the installation and configuration of the Windows server basically took me 5 hours in total.  That included installing the operating system, configuring DNS and the domain, setting up exchange, configuring the pop3 connector, setting up Stunnel and OpenSSL. The server is currently acting as the networks DHCP, DNS, Domain, Mail, Web, FTP and soon, Antivirus and Proxy server. That has all been done with very limited knowledge.  I know a bit about Windows Server but after yesterday I know realise just how much I need to learn.   I really want to do more with group policies and the GPO.  Exchange is another beast I want to tackle too.  I think it has a lot of power and it would be really good to try to pull more out of it.  At least now though, with it up and running at home I have the resource there to use. 

Oh, on the Linux" front, I’ve also updated to Ubuntu 8.04.  Give it a test drive.  You’ll be really impressed! You can even install it using windows without repartitioning!  I think this is a really excellent way for new users to get started.  With the installer, you can also enable accessibility so when you boot into Ubuntu, it will come up talking right away.  I’ve had a few problems with Ubuntu’s accessibility of administration tools but I’ll do some more testing before I write about that further. 

In the next two to three weeks, I need to do a few more audio reviews and tutorials for Ubuntu and Fedora.  I just need to set the equipment up at home again.

Ah, speaking of home, that brings me nicely onto my last topic for this morning.  The house is coming on well.  I’m *Still* waiting on Emma to resize those pictures she has but I’m sure she’ll get around to it eventually. We’ve been in the house two weeks now.  The floor in the living room has now been put down and the walls have been painted.  Once I get the skirting boards sprayed and lacquered I’ll get someone to put them down so we can start moving in furniture.  Who knows, all going well that will happen some time this week.  However, my Granny is kind of unwell at the moment and was in hospital yesterday so depending on how things are going, I might not be in a position to get much done at all this week. Not that she’s that bad.  She’s got an infection as a result of an operation she had about a month ago.  It’s just that I’d say my mother will be kind of busy and she’s coordinating the preparation of the man who’ll spray the skirting boards.

The bedroom is almost done.  There’s just one more thing for me to do and I need to get around to it soon.  I need to paint the wardrobe doors.  Yes people, you heard it right.  I’ll be painting the doors.  It’s not that shocking really.  Doors are easy enough.  Just follow the grain of the wood and your grand.  Because their smaller than a wall, obviously, it’s not really possible to loose track of where you painted last.  Unless you get distracted.  I’ve restored the wardrobe by sanding it down and painting it to match the room.  It’s a built in wardrobe that hopefully will only be needed for a few years but from what I gather, now that it’s been painted and cleaned up it looks well so who knows.  Maybe it will do for a while.

The kitchen, as I said the last time is now fully tiled.  We just need to under coat it.  Emma’s sowing room has been under coated and probably needs one more coat to get it read for the colour.  I also need to get someone to fit that floor.

There’s a bit to do yet but we’re getting there. It’s just a slow process when you’re working full time and the budget isn’t a bottomless pit. 

Now, that’s all for the moment.  I need to write up a document that describes a new system that was rolled out last week and I’ve a few emails to respond back to later as well.

I was thinking to my self that things had been a bit quiet over the last few days.  I was getting absolutely no comments at all since around Saturday!

I had been doing some modification last weekend when I had some time.  I rewrote some of the response form to get rid of an annoying little bug that was emailing me the responses twice.  Only problem was, I enabled a validation feature that I didn't want and therefore didn't allow for.  So, nothing was let through as a result.

All is back up and running now.

I was thinking this morning; quite a few people read this blog.  Some of you lurk in the shadows without commenting or emailing me or without even giving me a hint of feedback.  Some of you email or call me privately to talk about posts that interest you.  Others comment and make this a pleasure to write and the odd few just talk about it quietly, questioning the motives behind such a public display.

Some of your comments are great.  I’m not going to mention names but one person who read the site about a week ago bluntly told me it was boring!  When I asked her why, she said it was too technical!  Hmmm.  You come to a website called digitalDarragh.com and you don’t expect it to be technical?  There’s something funny about that.  It gave me a laugh anyway.  I know about four friends who read it to keep up with what I’m doing.  I don’t email as much as I probably should so posts about the house and things I’m doing from week to week are for some reason interesting.  God knows why.  Taking down doors and writing about my dogs weird personality is far from interesting to me! But hay.  I’ll not knock it.  I’m glad their reading.  A few others just read it because their nosy and they’ve nothing else to do.  Again, why not!  I read blogs for the same reason.

Someone asked me though in an email yesterday, why do I do it.  What’s the motivation behind writing a blog.  Why tell the world that last weekend I spent all my time working in the house or last night, I installed service pack one for windows Vista.  Who cares or more to the point.  Why do I think people want to know.

It’s a really good question and it’s not one that can be answered easily.  Originally, I started blogging because a woman I use to work with Cat, got me interested in it.  I enjoy writing so the words easily came to my fingers.  The only thing I can write about with any kind of proficiency is what is happening to me at that moment in time.  Don’t ask me to write fiction or even real life events.  I’ll probably have no interest and that will be reflected in what you’ll read.  Technology and my day to day events are something I can speak about so why not just let it out there.

I suppose, when you really boil it down, a blog for me is a form of advertising.  It advertises that I have a keen interest in Technology and when ever possible, I take the time to learn about new software or hardware.  Of course, there’s more to Darragh than just the digital side and from writing about things that I encounter from time to time, I’m showing a bit of my personality as well.

The other side of it though is when I blog about something, it is there in the archives for ever.  I’ve looked back at blog posts that are over three years old and instantly, I’m taken back to the mood I was in at the time and even the worries or expectations that were on my mind.  Unlike a private diary, Friends and even perfect strangers have commented on these posts and their input is equally as enjoyable.

Taking a simple example of my post a while back talking about comment spam, a random visitor to the site emailed me with his equally positive experiences with akismet.  It is very rewarding to write a post and receive a response with someone else’s perspective.

On the technical side of things, Blogs are a great source of information on almost any topic you can think of.  It’s amazing what people write about.  I’ve found great step by step guides that have been written by people who have documented solutions to problems they’ve overcome.  I’ve only done that a few times but in some small way, I hope a post or two on this blog will help even one person.  I suppose it’s a way of trying to give something back to people. 

Using the example of the post where I describe installing Linux" onto a pen drive, this has received quite a lot of posts.  Most of which have been as a direct result of people searching for a solution via a search engine such as Google.  I’ve had a lot of emails with questions specific to this task so I hope that it’s been a help to people.

When I started with Linux" years ago, I posted hundreds of questions on dozens of mailing lists.  I got help from strangers all over the world whose only motivation for assisting me was to help me learn about a system that they were enthusiastic about.  On this blog, some of my posts are written with this same aim.

So there you have it.  A very long winded but hopefully informative explanation as to why I bother to write blog posts most days. 

I've had a feedburner account for a while now but I haven't really done anything with it. 

I decided today though that I was going to leverage it's power and change my RSS to it.  I hope my existing RSS file is still updated however I cant be sure just at the moment.

To subscribe to feedburner and receive updates when a new post is added, point your RSS reader at http://feeds.feedburner.com/digitaldarragh

If your using Internet explorer 7, just put this into your address bar, press enter or click go and add it to your RSS list.

Finally!  Akismet now works!  It wouldn't do what it was suppose to before because of the sites trust level.  For security, I won't write the solution here however comment and I'll send it to you privately.

Akismet is not working for me.  I've registered, got an activation key, configured the blog to use it and still nothing!  Very frustrating.  I hat twenty spam comments last night.  Twenty!  I've not got time to remove them all yet today so their just going to have to stay where they are for the moment.b

You know, it's interesting,  I set up this blog origionally to talk about technology and all that kind of thing however it looks like a lot of my posts recently are about the house.  A friend ocmmented about this when I spoke to her on Tueaday evening however while looking at the referor history this morning, I was really surprised to see that most of my traffic is coming from people searching about home D I Y topics. 

Example:  one person searced a while ago about how to insulate a roof and was given my post where I spoke about insulating the roof of the extension.  the search page is shown below.  A few days ago, someone got to me when they searched about removing fire places, another got to me when searching for wall paper designs.  Really, it's facinating to see what drives traffic to your site.  So, to all you people looking for a DIY site, Welcome to DigitalDarragh!   Sorry, you'll not find much of interest here unless you find my rambling interesting and if you do,   I'm sorry.  Very sorry.

Of course, It's not all house related.  A lot of searches have focused on my Linux" on a pen drive, and in fact I've received quite a few private emails about this as well so I'm really happy to see my site is generating some interest around that and specifically accessibility.

OH, that search engine result is at: http://www.search.com/search?q=HOW+DO+I+INSULATE+A+PITCHED+SLATED+ROOF&nav=2.10.5.10

By popular request, I made a few changes to the blog last night. 

Two readers asked for a link back to the home page when reading indevidual posts or categories.  I created that change last night. I also added a navigation section to the top right of most pages.  This will be added to all pages but there's a small bug I need to work out first. 

Ask and you shall recieve.

As you probably noticed as soon as you got here, I've made a change to the blog. 

I liked the wordpress theme so this is a very close copy of that. 

This greatly enhances the accessibility of the site as well. And has not required any dirty hacks to make things work as expected with screen readers. 

Let's hope that's the end of the spam.

I've changed a few things so lets hope.

Sorry, that's all for now.  Short and sweet.

Ah I hate comment spam.  I'm going to have to find a way of removing it.  For the last two days it's just gone beyond belief!  For the last week I've been receiving ping back spam.   That was new to me!  But I got round that and now I'm back to the old reliable comments from automated bots using gmail addresses with stupid links to stuff about Viagra!  Go! Away! I don't want it and my readers don't want it!  So, basically, leave it with me.  If you see anything in the comments of any post that doesn't look right, odds are that it's spam.  I'll look into a way of stopping this later.  I have an idea that's worked on other blogs before but I'll just need to think of a way of doing it on this type of set up.

Anyway, I'm writing very early and I really must go get ready for work. 

I'm trying to do up the blog a bit at the moment.  I've added a few blogs to the blogrole and if I get time later on I want to clean up the style sheet that I'm using.  It's a bit  messy in places. 

Anything else you would like to see done while I'm at it? 

Oh,  another thing I have to do very soon is figure out why I've suddenly started getting comment and ping back spam.  It's fucken irritating!

As well as digitaldarragh.com, this website can now also be found at www.darraghoheiligh.ie Don't worry, the site will still be exactly the same.  I'm just increasing it's footprint slightly by copying it across a few descriptive domains.  This is one of a number of key changes I will be making to the site over the next few weeks and months.

I've wanted to make a few changes to the blog for the last few days.  I just didn't really know what I wanted to do differently.   Today, I've modified the style just slightly to make the site more accessible.  The result is that each blog post is now marked with a heading at level one,  so, if like me, your blind and your using Orca, Jaws, Window Eyes or Hal, you can press the number 1 to jump right past the navigation links on the left to the post titles.  From there, just down arrow to the content.  It couldn't be easier. 

Of course, if you want, you can feel free to email me using the link provided on each page.

I've been away for almost a year!  for over twelve months, there has been no blog on this site but for some reason, here we go again!  This time, if I stop, Emma has permission to hit me with something. 

So, what's happening?  well, We're buying a house.  we should have it on the 25th of this month. We need to do a lot with it like install new heating, windows, internal doors, repaint etc. but hay.  that's all part of it isn't it.  On the upside, we'll get a house that we've fully customized to our own needs and taste and it should really feel more like ours.  I've lived in apartments and rented accomidation for so long, I'm really looking forward to setting things up the way I want them.  ehem.  sorry.  The way "WE" want them.  :) 

I've a lot of technical things going on as well.  Oh Wait until you see what is in store in the world of Linux"!  I've been doing a lot with OpenSuSE, server administration and technical support and I'm hoping that I'll get time to introduce a lot of that on this blog. 

So, your going to get a mixture of everything.  Hopefully, after tonight, you'll get a recording of a session that I'm playing in with the legend Maurice Lennon from stocktons wing and Tony Byrne, a guitar player who entertains with the fantastic, At first light. 

   All coming up soon.  Stay tuned.