Something for the future? Maybe. Personally, i kind of like my laptop bag and all it’sl extra pockets i cram stuff into. Ipod, USB modem, mouse, disks, ipod, power charger, phone charger, laptop charger, headphones. You’ll notice they’ve missed out a decent mouse in this one. No space for the mouse eh? Well maybe the mouse has had it’s day. Stick your laptop on the wall and turn it into a painting.

Posted by Spod

Not content with world domination, Google finds it necessary not only to invent everything, but to re-invent everything as well and it’s calling on developers to make it happen.

So what is this wave? Well, i only got through half the wave demo , but it certainly has a few neat features and as it runs in the browser, it’ll be running in the cloud. Developed by the brothers who created Google maps, it’s certainly got some brains behind it. Here are a few of the features, i like about it:

Real-time typing view – watch as your colleagues make mistakes in their emails and notice how good their spelling really is.

Multi-user document editing – this is pretty cool – have an army of ants all working on the same doc and watch it develop in real time.

Playback – playback the email/doc to understand how it developed.

Integration into blogs and website via the API. Oops! I accidentally pressed the blog button  on my confidential email and let the world know.  Might want to disable this on the CEO’s config

Is it the next big thing? Well, it’s another attempt to push us all into the cloud – maybe this will do it. We shall see.

Posted by Spod

Now here’s a cheeky swipe at Microsoft – Google have developed a plug-in that turns Internet Explorer into google chrome. The whole thing is a bit weird and I have to question what the developers were thinking when they made this plug-in – surely you would just download chrome if you wanted it as your default browser? The reason this has tickled me is because this could be considered an ie upgrade and will no doubt be raising some serious blood pressure over at MS HQ.

Two observations

1. What do you possibly call an IE / Chrome hybrid?
2. How long until the lawsuit starts

Every time I read another article about how online Fraudsters are becoming slyer & more sophisticated with their techniques – I start to wonder what the answer is. Today I read an article about how crooks have started to incorporate instant messenger on fraudulent e-banking websites. The tactic is designed to trick prospective marks into handing over the answers to secret security questions needed to access their account. It reminds me of the last time I purchased something online with a credit card – at some point in the transaction I must have incorrectly entered a digit and was therefore called by the company asking me to confirm my credit card number over the phone.

Mmmm – alarm bells always ring when stuff like this happens to me. Instantly I start thinking that someone has intercepted the confirmation email or the transaction itself was not encrypted properly. At this point – the best thing I can do on the phone before I hand over my digits is ask the operator a few security questions of my own – for which is has to be said that I feel a complete idiot for doing. The ways things are going, it will be a two way street of the banks and vendors asking their usual security questions followed by us on Civy Street asking our own as a double precaution – welcome to the future me thinks.

Just checking out this new Ustream App available on Android. Now we can all be live journalists, broadcasting anything and everything from every corner of the globe. Not only business, but now reality is surely set to become globalized. Leave the webcams behind and take them for a ride on the mobile broadcast train!

But what i find really interesting, is how these technologies can be applied to education. Nothing can beat learning your trade from an expert and  if you start falling asleep when you reading a book, being able to tap into real experience is unbeatable.
With broadcast technologies being used by professionals, you could  spend the day on the shoulder of a computer scientist, architect or palaeobotanist and be learning from some of the greatest minds in the world. And better still it would be real, things would go wrong, things would blow up. It would be great!

Posted by Spod

It looks like Cloud computing is going to take another step forward into the world with the White House CIO poised to announce the move of governement computing into the air – up up and away!

Well, after losing all your cash in the credit crunch, there’s obviously a fitting alternative to printing another run of loot and devaluing your currency to a rupee.

Sensitive data – no problem, they’ll be using private clouds away from the possible mistakes of sharing information with public clouds,  so we can all sleep save at night.

Surely, the UK needs to follow on this and save us some cash too.
Get your certificate in cloud computing today and leave the floor behind you!

Posted by Spod

Not for the first time has Microsoft escaped real punishment by the software police. This week it gets away with $290 million slap on the wrists (just take it out of the kitty). One can only tremble to think what would happen if they lost their license to sell Word in the US. Could it have brought catastrophe to the giant as manufacturers?

Just what they would have done is anybodies guess, would they have somehow freed up trial downloads to be used until they’d sorted out the patent issue, one can only wonder.

Microsoft escapes again

Posted by Spod

So im a normal bloke who likes his gadgets - I saw this and my palms got sweaty. Can someone tell me what the battery life is??

As we bypass the need for cashiers at Argos and Tesco, remove the need for bobbies on the beat with CCTV cameras on every street and automate business with scheduled tasks, service-bots, FAQ’s and on-demand portals. One wonders what will be left for us to do?

Monitor everything – that’s what we’ll be doing. Reading this article on Tesco overhauling it’s security, monitoring and management makes me realise that’s all that will be left for us. Fat chance we’d be allowed not to work at all!

It’s just a a case of setting those alerts to wake you up and we shall all be dozing behind banks of monitors, but then who will be monitoring us? Well, the monitor of monitor of course.

Posted by Spod

I have never quite been sure why there is always such a difference when checking websites in different browsers. Surely they should all adhere to the same set of rules right? At minimum that’s what they should all be aiming for. And by ‘they’ I mean the many different web browser vendors who are dipping their toes into the relatively un-lucrative web browsing market. So it doesn’t really make much sense to hear that IE6 is going to be supported until 2014. All the egg heads I know absolutely hate IE6 because of the complete hassle it causes when building or developing web pages. I will put this slightly odd decision down to some good old MS logic or perhaps an oversight as they face the prospect of completely removing their best XML product of the shelf – naughty naughty.

Would the world stop? Well, it would certainly put business back into the dark ages for a while. Go on admit it, you wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall. Check this out.

Posted by Spod

Memories of Die Hard 4.0 come rushing back as news of yesterday’s widespread online social media assault begin to unravel. The mystery started for me personally when one of our sites went down for no obvious reason. It later turned out our Twitter script had been responsible – but without explanation until today. Something this big is nearly always political so it’s no surprise to find out the damage was inflicted in an attempt to silence one particular individual who used the social networks as a platform to voice his political beef.

No one knows who made the attacks but my guess is that he is seriously ticked off with a character known as Cyxymu – they must be related (possibly married).

I am not endorsing the online attacks but ten years ago it could have been an assassination making the headlines rather than Facebook slowing down for a few hours. Either method of silencing is not ideal so let’s just hope no one figures out how to execute people online – those lazy crims could send the global homicide rate soaring.

Oh, I wish I had started in IT today. Young starters don’t know how lucky they are to have so much free information available to them to learn. No need for expensive out of reach training courses or expensive text books, now anyone can learn how to run an advanced server OS and you can get started on that old x86 pc lying about in the garage. Plug into your home broadband and you’re up and running with your own web-hosting service overnight.

From to Constantinople to Timbuktu – there’s information going free for everyone.

Just check out the  free Solaris How-To Guides to get stuck right into Solaris today.

Posted by Spod

Well, all we ever wanted was a pc that booted in a few seconds and a few simple tools to surf the web and write a few emails. 20 years on and we’re still waiting for our pc’s to boot up and desktops to load, with a groan.

Enter Google. There is an opportunity here and they know it. If Linux can’t steal the hearts of the masses then Google is surely in with a chance to take over control of desktop domination.

If the news is to be believed, we’ll be looking the Google Chrome OS next year as the 3rd option in the shop and that’s where there mighty brand is going to come into play. Will it really be secure, just because it’s Google? There’s one thing for sure, history has taught us that we can never think of everything and it’s unlikely even Google can either. We shall see…

Posted by Spod

Got stuck this morning with an Office 2007 Small Business Edition OEM version on the wrong pc. Wanting to switch this with a basic version hasn’t been straight forward yet and i’m left tinkering with ideas and googling to find a workaround.

OEM licesnsing may lead to cheaper pricing, but it can certainly be a pain when you just want a bit of freedom. I prefer the activation / deactivation of products like Adobe’s suite. That works well for all and easy as pie. Better still, give me Open Source anyday.

Posted by Spod

I totally forgot about the BOFH archives. I have to admit to sympathising with the minority of Sysadmins who abuse their beloved Lusers – we all know tough love is so much more character building for our victims in the long term so its nice to have it all documented. My favourite quote this week from BOFH has got to be this – “You’ve got to think of it in terms of sticks and carrots,” I say to the PFY, “because users are complex – but stupid – stubborn animals, like donkeys.”

The good news is that most Sysadmin folks are normally ‘people people’ who don’t like to play the ‘blame game’ or get dragged into bureaucratic arguments when the health & safety officer needs a 6 month notice period to open a door so we can run a network cable 3 feet – If you cut us, angels will come out – were the good guys.

Anyhoo, BOFH – Its worth rediscovering

With Windows Vista being a bit of a duff operating system, one has to ask whether Windows 7 will actually offer anything more. Do we really need another version of Windows? For those that experienced the insanity of working on the blue screens of the previous years, there’s a lot of people out there quite happy now to just roll along with 2003’s XP release that seems to do the job quite fine. On the same note, do we really need to update versions of Office any further?

It seems with Office 2007, the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it rule’ has been neglected by Microsoft. People just aren’t interest in learning their new ribbon interface. Yes, in theory it probably does have loads of benefits, but the general office worker doesn’t have time to retrain on a product they already ‘know’. Windows 7 does seem to have been hailed as a big step forward, but with the economic downturn expected to be around for a while, I expect XP will be quite enough, for quite sometime.

Piggybacking your neighbours internet connection – is that legal? Well if you’ve got their permission, you can knock yourself out. Otherwise, as a 16 year old lad in Lincolnshire recently found out – Wi-Fi pinching is a very arrestable offence. The lad was hauled down the police station after his neighbour complained his connection was running slow and spotted the boy’s laptop had been allocated an IP address by the DHCP server. Not exactly crime of the century but it did get me thinking, if you leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition – would you still be insured? Probably not.

Here’s my solution – every wireless router should come pre-installed with a unique password as standard. We already do this for software, whereby a unique serial number is needed to unlock the software – why not replicate this on wireless emitting devices? On the packaging of every wi-fi router would be a unique 16 digit code that relates back to that device only. Obviously, passwords and encrypted codes can be changed but initially the device would be secure from the start.

I am not saying this is exactly how it should be done but the bottom line is – securing wireless internet connections should be made compulsory. Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is technically an offence under the Communication Act 2003. If the administration is keen to enforce this law then the router manufacturers are ultimately making us all victims until we read the technical support manual. The minor involved was eventually let off after it was revealed he already had his own internet connection and accidentally clicked on the wrong wireless signal. Combine this with the high volume of illegal file sharers hijacking other connections – things need to change!

Secure wireless routers straight out the box – who said change had to be complicated?

Employees at a well known software company in the US are currently trialling one of the first public BYOC (bring your own computer) programs. Employees can enrol in a three year voluntary program that will see them receive $2100 to buy a laptop of their choice and look after maintenance during that time. Other technology companies are rumoured to be following suite but keeping things firmly under the radar.

The integrity of this scheme regarding the boundaries of work and home life are definitely up for debate. As much as it’s unhealthy to bring work home during personal hours, it could also prove to be unproductive for employees to bring personal media centres into work during office hours. Workers who are taking part in BYOC are apparently lapping up the chance to be able to express their geek cred at work and use devices they feel most comfortable with.

Bearing in mind the company involved estimate it will reduce their IT costs by 20% a year, it has all the hallmarks of a mastermind manoeuvre. Reduce costs, encourage employees to work out of hours and bill it as a perk – that’s genius.

Watching the news headlines over the last few days, one can’t help feeling not that things are just bad at the moment, but rather that our very existence is at stake (with a little over-active imagination, maybe). I’m sure there are plenty of people out there having flashbacks to the post 2000 dot-com bubble burst and trying to think what the battle plan should be as budgets are cut.

So how does the IT pro stay alive in a recession, how do you stop your job being outsourced? How can one point out the savings, the efficiency and productivity gains and the future business opportunities to the directors, keen to cut heads and keen to cut spending on kit. It’s a tricky one, but an essential skill to be mastered nonetheless, not taught in a manual or training course. One shouldn’t assume anything and especially one shouldn’t assume anything isn’t worth communicating, but as we battle against the crunch, will our standards start to slide as we struggle to stay alive? Are we all destined to become the sneaky smeagol administrators, jumping to the attention of the chiefs, but neglecting our colleagues and systems in turn? We shall see.