The floods reach Cyberspace

The recent awful floods have even reached cyberspace - at least one provider of web space in Gloucester is off the air as I write, which means that none of the websites that they look after is available at present, wherever the owners are based.

This could be major issue if those sites transact a lot of business online, and it simply higlights how important it is to have alternative arrangements available in case of emergency like this.

It also demonstrates the very high value of online back up systems such as Mozy, that I recommended once before.  The beauty of these remote systems is that encrypted copies of your files are stored somewhere a long way from home (in Utah, in Mozy's case) and so if your computer is ruined by water, or just floats away on the tide, you can recover the files once you've bought a new bit of kit.

There are a lot of other online services like Mozy, but for what it's worth it's the one I use, and you can store up to 2GB of data (plenty for most of us) free.  You can see my original article (which still holds good) by clicking here.
 

Update on August 7, 2007 by Webster

As ever, I find I completely agree with Bob Willcox's thoughtful posting - well worth a read. My only point is that for many Oldie readers (though perhaps not those who have found their way here) the idea of installing a second hard drive is a bit daunting.

It also does not get around the issue of recovering data from a burgled or flooded office.  A second hard drive won't do you much good if it's not there any more, or has floated away.

Sausages and software

Oh golly - now Tesco is selling their own brand of software - a basic set of programmes for £20. Is there no area of our lives they do not want to inveigle their way into?

Actually, the software is not as cheap as it sounds - it's simply a re-branded version of a set of programmes called Ability Office which normally costs about £2 to computer manufacturers if they sell their machines with it built-in, and you can buy for about £17.50 as a full retail product under it's own name.

It's perfectly respectable stuff, but I doubt if it is much better than the Microsoft Works package that is given away for free by Bill Gates - although, such is the power of marketing, many of us feel happier having paid for something.  That's what Tesco hopes, anyway.

Good luck asking for some technical help from the nice ladies on the till, though.

Guilty pleasure books for the summer

I came across this list of reading "guilty pleasures" as recommended by a number of well known authors, intended to give you some summer holiday reading.  I haven't heard of all of the "famous" authors, but that's my ignorance no doubt, and probably some are American, as the list is in Time magazine. 

It has some good ideas, though, and I can save you ploughing through 16 pages on the very clunky Time website with the list below.  Mind you, if you do have the time to wade through it, click here.

Or you can be more selective and read just some of the excellent justifications of their choices produced by the writers,  by clicking on the titles in the list.  I was especially pleased to see Alexander McCall Smith's recommendation of Dick Francis.

Jane Smiley	Justine by Marquis de Sade
Tina Brown	The Manny by Holly Peterson
Alexander McCall Smith	Anything by Dick Francis
Joyce Carol Oates	Mad Magazine
Anne Lamott	Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Margaret Drabble	20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Nathan Englander	Literary Murder by Batya Gur
Martha Southgate	Carrie by Stephen King
Janet Evanovich	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comic books
Susanna Moore	Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
Pete Hamill	Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Giant Cataract by Roy Rockwood
Ann Packer	Love and Work by Gwyneth Cravens
Karen Russell	The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Doug Stumpf	The Best of Russian Cooking by Princess Alexandra Kropotkin
David Baldacci	Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde
Tom Hayden	Boomsday by Christopher Buckley

  

Dave Brubeck plays for Webster

Here's a little gem to enliven your weekend - a film from 1961 of The Dave Brubeck Quartet playing "Take Five", easily his most famous piece.  It's especially notable for the sublime drum solo from a chap who looks to 21st Century eyes as if he should be an actuary, but is actually Joe Morello.

Double click on the arrow in the picture to start it, and make sure your loudspeakers are on.

Dave Brubeck, in Oldie parlance "Still with us" at 86, and still playing.

Smugness in emails

A pointless waste of space is the note companies tend to put on the bottom of their emails along the lines of "this email has been checked for viruses by..."  It is pointless because only if the virus checker is bang up to date is that assurance of any use at all, and you have no way of knowing if it is - or indeed if it has been virus checked at all.

As a someone put it to me this week, it's a bit like saying "We doubt if you need to beware of the dog.  If we have a dog."

The truth is that if there is a virus attached to the email that the senders system or your own protection did not pick up, it will do its worst to your computer before you know what's going on anyway.  So what do we do?

• Keep your own anti virus software and firewall up to date
• Ignore smug notices from smug email senders - they aren't worth the paper they aren't even written on.

Passwords not to use

Passwords are a necessary evil, and I've written before about how to make them more secure - the basic rules are

• don't to tell anyone what they are,
• use words and numbers together,
• don't write them down (really - never do it) and
• have two sorts of regularly used passwords - a complex one for important sites (banking, tax, money generally) and another simple one for general, non-fiscal use.

DON'T use one of the top ten passwords that PC Magazine claim are the most commonly used.  I don't know how they found out, because you are not supposed to admit what your password is to anyone, but here they are:

password
123456
qwerty
abc123
letmein
monkey
myspace 1
password 1
blink182
(your first name)

If you are using any of those I recommend you change.

Translation and back again

A great time waster is the back and forth translation game afforded to us by the Babel Fish Translator (named after a creature from Douglas Adams' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). If you paste in up to 150 words it will do its best to translate them into a number of other languages.  It's not perfect, but it often helps you make some sense of, for example, foreign language web pages.

For fun, though, you can establish a translation chain.  For example, here is the description of The Oldie that lives on the front of our main website:

We are a monthly magazine founded in 1992 by Richard Ingrams, who for 23 years was the editor of Private Eye. The Oldie is an eclectic mix of humour, cartoons, reviews, interviews and eccentricity.

Fair enough - and now here it is after Babel Fish translated it into Italian, from that to French, from French to German and then back to English:

We are one in the year 1992 justified monthly department of Richard Ingrams, which was for 23 years the reserved author of lorgne. Oldie is it a eklektische mixture of the mood, drawn volumes, revisions, interviews and the eccentricity.

I think that's a pretty good effort, for a machine.  I also quite like the idea that we are a "department of Richard Ingrams".  I wonder which floor we are on.

Talk Talk and Orange suffer

Two Internet providers suffered some criticisms over their levels of service from one of the comparison web sites - Uswitch.com - following one of their surveys, which interviewed over 10,000 people, so I suppose it might be worth something.  It's worth a read if you are considering changing your provider - and we all should, every so often, as it's such a fluid market.

You can download the whole report from uSwitch by clicking here, but the main points that seem to emerge are

• Overall, satisfaction with Broadband is tumbling.
• Small is beautiful - users are happier with the little providers.
• BT is voted best for customer support (they didn't ask me, is all I can say) but worst for value for money.
• Orange (which was Freeserve, once) is bottom of the poll for the second time.
• Talk Talk's massive investment has not paid dividends yet.

Is there anything in common with the main criticisms?  Well it might be that both Orange and Talk Talk offer "free" services - which seem to be worth every penny. they cost.

As the MD of uSwitch.com says in the report "Our message  to broadband companies  is  to stop  telling us what you’re doing and actually start  doing  it." 

Makes sense to me.

Freedom loving Russian website crushed by protectionist Westerners

Sadly, we have just seen the closing down of a magnificent example of the communist's revenge for all those jokes we used to make about how you could only buy 1960's goods in Moscow.

The highly capitalist world of the recorded music industry has managed to close down an entrepreneurial Russian website from which we could buy, cheaply, and download, almost every recent pop music CD you might want.

For less than a couple of quid you could get the latest stuff from the latest big thing.

The music industry didn't like it, as the only people who made any money from it was the website themselves, not the publishers or the artists. So, they mobilised all their influence - first they persuaded the credit card companies not deal with it, so it became pretty well impossible to buy anything, and now it's been closed altogether.

They’re now spouting a lot of righteous stuff from the industry claiming this shut down as being "another important step for the recording industry as we seek to direct consumers away from illegal online services towards the many legal alternatives."

That would be fine if there really were an alternative. If you pay a full price to download a track from one of the "legal" sites, you'll find what you get comes with a number of built in elephant traps - you'll probably find that it can only be copied 10 times, for example. Allofmp3 Tracks had no such restrictions.

So where is the "legal alternative"? Nowhere, that’s where.

Still, you can’t keep a good site down, and the cunning old Russians have pooped up again under another name www.mp3sparks.com. Same prices, same stuff, same management, I think.

On the internet, it’s called The Hydra effect - cut one head off and others will grow back in its place.

Update on July 6, 2007 by Webster

www.mp3sparks.com seems to have died already, but the old site has popped up at www.alltunes.com  and so the game of hide and seek goes on...

Misery for Tiscali users

If you use Tiscali as your ISP, you would do well to check that the emails you sent in the last week actually arrived.  It is likely that they have not been arriving for more than a week - and you may be quite unaware of it, as you may well have been receiving emails as normal.

Tiscali's problem is that they have been hijacked by spammers, who have piggy-backed on their system to swamp the world with millions of emails - and this has meant that most other ISP's have taken steps to block anything coming from Tiscali.

Everyone makes mistakes, or may be subject to the work of scoundrels, but the measure of a company is how they deal with these problems when they find them.  The golden rule in crisis management is to keep you customers informed - "tell it all, tell it truthfully and tell it fast" as an expert on crisis public relations once put it to me.

Tiscali, on the other hand, told very few, in fact except for a few modest announcements on their service status page (who ever looks there?) which were of the "we apologise for any convenience caused" platitudes that we expect on delayed trains, they seem to have told no one.

And the problem isn't fixed yet.  In response only to specific Press enquires they have admitted that that although they have completed the work needed rectify its status as a spammer, the changes will take between seven and ten days to take effect, as they have to convince all the other ISPs that the problem is fixed.  This is not likely to please users - if they are even aware of the problem, as they blithely email their friends and business contacts.

If you are affected, for the time being you should use a web email company, like Hotmail or Yahoo.  You might also consider shifting entirely to an ISP that gives damn about keeping their customers informed.