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**** NewsBytes ****
Games without frontiers
If Snake Robots fulfil our fears of gadgetry gone mad, the Best in Show offerings are decidely down to earth at the annual geek's Nirvana, the Consumer Electronics Show 2007. Phones without buttons? Apple's iPhone isn't the only one employing touchscreens; Synaptics Onyx is feeling its way there too, but it's still 'filmware' rather than hardware. Mobiles are increasingly aimed at he professional 'Blackberry end of the market with PDA and Wi-Fi functions packed into phone-size packages, like the I-mate Jaq3, though Samsung's Simpson phone is clearly reaching for the faddy punters. TV is no longer something to slouch front of. Soon the content we desire will follow us around the office computer network just like phone systems (are supposed to), with Motorola's Follow Me TV. As if designed to mess up the principle of BBC TV licensing, SlingCatcher is a box that puts web content on to any telly, or TV on to another TV - from the company that popularised TV-on-your-PC. Moreover, TV distribution no longer requires a clutch of new wires, with Sharp's AQUOS bringing new meaning to the term "network TV", demonstrating a product capable of streaming two high-definition feeds simulataneously over the power lines inside a buiding. Putting the power back into all those rechargeable batteries that populate our everyday handhelds will cease to be a matter of scrabbling for the right charger, finding a spare socket, remembering to unplug when it's already at boiling point. In future, all our battery-powered MP3s, cameras and PDAs can be charged wirelessly when placed on a contactless, clipboard-sized pad by WildCharge & co. Bit like a microwave: remove when cooked.
Double standards see eye to eye
LG has crossed the optical format divide with its BH100, a player for both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD high-definition content. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Entertainment has tackled the disc instead of the player by bringing its patent to market in the form of the Total HD, a hybrid disc that hopes to remove confusion by combining both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats, and which is likely to appear later in 2007. Elsewehere, the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) that was to protect the digital rights management of both formats has now been shown to be cracked, flollowing a spate of sci-fi and action HD DVD movies posted on the Internet.
Windows Defender
Windows Defender Beta has now expired. Anyone running still running this should uninstall it, then download and install the latest release. Defender also no longer runs on Windwos 2000 because mainstream support for this operating ceased in 2005. The full release of Windows Defender is a free download and newcomers get 2 free support incidents. Windows Defender details and download.
Byting off more than we can chew
While we are on the subject of technological advances, recent deliveries of TeraByte (1,000.4 GigaBytes or 1012 Bytes) servers made us pause for thought as we considered the now tiny 10 MegaByte drives availablle on servers 20 years ago. Disc drive capapcities had been approximately tracking Moore's 'Law' (although that relates to the doubling of processor speeds) until about 2004, predicting that we should be more than satisfied with 120GB discs at present! Start getting your tongue round peta-, exa-, zetta- and yotta Bytes! (1015 to 1024 Bytes respectively).
Spam joins the Borg
Spam distribution has now entered the realm of sci-fi. Armies of software Trojans are placed on Windows PCs that themselves become transmitters of spam in Borg-style collectives of spam bots reminiscent of Star Trek, and just one reason why security companies reported email traffic containing 9% spam in the run up to the New Year.
The human programmers behind these bots are increasingly organised too, working in gangs with new techniques, that are the cause of computers users being swamped with spam over holiday periods, overwhelming conventional spam filters. Bot innovations include embedding anti-virus scanners to remove other malware that may be present on the host PC, breaking into web sites to download list of subscriber names and keeping stats about the efficiency of spam targeting. The result is potentially one spam per day for every computer user on the planet, and all because someone, somewhere will click on a stocks and shares scam. This ExtremeTech article by Ryan Naraine makes boggling reading even for non-techies, though the good news is that a dramatic decrease in January could signal spammers losing control of a major bot network.
CHASE 15
The fifteenth annual CHASE Exhibition takes place on 14/15 February at the Business Design Centre, London. Continued growth means over 70 exhibitors and nearly free 50 seminars on the schedule. For bookings go to www.conferencehouse.co.uk/chase
Blessed are the cheesemakers
Ranked in the category "things on the Internet that happen very slowly", cheese ogling is the latest 'activity' for viewers with an attention span of several weeks.
Those who remember the orginal (but sadly now defunct) Cambridge coffee pot cam will be riveted by West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers' cheddarvision.tv an opportunity to experience live cheese maturation.
Prodding the controls of this virtual TV set are quite fun too.
Even slower and less exciting than waiting for paint to dry, cheese watching could enter the modern couch potato's arsenal for maximising sloth.
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Backups: Off-site, out of mind?
The last year has seen a plethora of services touting data backup over the Internet. Are they trustworthy? | ||
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Disc-to-disc not disc-to-tapeSurely this has to be the elegant way to do backup. The transfer is encrypted so it's secure, and it all gets piped directly on to a remote hard disc via a broadband connection, so there's no messing about with tape drives where the cartridges eventually wear out and forgetting which one to put in next. In fact, the most expensive running costs of tapes can be the part that involves taking them off site. Traditional methods revolve around someone in authority taking them home (and traditionally forgetting to bring them back), or a costly weekly trip to a bank vault, both in staff time and deposit charges. Hard drives have lately become both huge in capacity and affordable in price, with a variety of NAS boxes and extended storage devices for potential service providers to choose from. But how practical is this form of off-site backup when push comes to shove? In terms of looking after that most vulnerable of groups - home users and small branch offices with little or no IT support - Internet-delivered backup at least addresses the most fundamental of problems, namely the complete absence of any backup procedures at all. However when we start looking in detail, some of the drawbacks become apparent:
Upload speedGet your calculator out. Within a few taps we can work out that the major bottleneck in the transfer from disc-to-Internet-to-disc is the outgoing broadband connection from the home or office user's PC, which for basic broadband is 256Kbps (Kilo bits per second). Assuming this speed is degraded only 222Kbps by broadband sharing or contention (it will often be more degraded), then our calculator reveals that 1 GigaByte (GB) of data will take about 10 hours to transfer. And 5GB would take 50 hours – a whole weekend! Compare this with a local disc-to-disc backup such as a USB drive or NAS box: 1 might take just 30 minutes. Documents onlyThe corollary we can draw from that simple calculation is that nobody is going to be backing up an entire PC (50GB or more) let alone a server, since a whole weekend is just about the largest continuous time frame that any broadband connection can dedicate to one task without impinging on users who want to surf the web and send email. So it's documents only. Many home users currently store around 1GB to 5GB of data but small offices may have more and the ubiquity of audio MP3 tunes and video is swelling the size of everyone's personal data inventory. How often can backups take place?Having established that complete machine backups are not viable every day (or even overnight), it emerges that a sensible pattern is to implement incremental backups so that, following the first one, each subsequent phase just looks at the changed documents and files, transmitting just those changes to the backup disc. Employing compression software in the transfer will also reduce the backup size and transmission times might then be reduced to a manageable one or two hours – fine for an overnight backup. A side issue is that backups should be scheduled and as automated as possible, because even the best techie will forget to run a backup if the procedure has to be kicked off manually every time. Privacy and confidentialityThis is about “who do I trust with my data?” If you are fortunate enough to own (or have control of) a physical backup drive in another building and access to it via another broadband connection, then it's just a matter of configuring the box. Indeed LogMeIn's Backup service takes advantage of this idea very neatly, but does require a whole spare Windows computer dedicated to the task. More often it's a question of knowing whether sending your data (securely of course) to someone else's storage warehouse will put its contents at risk. For example concerns have been discussed about the privacy and security of Mozy's online backup service, (whose free option includes 2GB of storage space), even though a user can choose their own encryption key and despite the existence of a privacy policy. The worry is that any provider must still gain overall control of the data if assistance is needed with the restore procedure. Anyone even remotely responsible for IT management of storage will understand that last thing one has time for or interest in is poking around in other people's files, but we may be more justifiably nervous about hi-tech spambots drilling into poorly-protected data on Internet-accessible servers. A more extreme example is AllMyData, which employs a peering solution (ie not centralised) to grab a bit bit of storage someone else's hard drive, an arrangement you reciprocate as part of being a signed-up user to the scheme. While this may be fine for backing up downloaded tunes – where the only personal information at risk might be one's musical tastes – others may be wary of submitting their contacts and documents to this regime. Who will manage the restore process?It's this last sting-in-the-tail that most often overlooked. “Well I've got my backups running so everything's OK” is the sentiment behind the almost tangible sense of relief as staff in a small office sit back bathing in a false sense of security. Even where we trust our chosen off-site backup service provider in terms of privacy, can we rely on them in a crisis? The time comes to hit the virtual button marked "Restore": will it work? Will we find those crucial files that went missing last week? Will the backup drive even be in contact at the other end of the Internet just when you need it? If our computer has a problem anyway, what chance of reliable Internet connection? Last resortA good backup strategy, assuming one wants to avoid the hassle of taking tapes off-site, is to implement:
The use of incremental appended backups should reduce the broadband time slot to allow them to run overnight. Should the building be burgled, burnt, flooded or whatever, at least your life's work is safely stored on a disc in another location, but it may need more than a little help to replace the IT facilities at the office before you can push that "restore" button. So perhaps the bottom line for backup via the Internet is to 'go for it' if:
Contacts
-IB-
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2. TextAloud: hear yourself think
An ideal piece of speech software for press officers, CEOs, chairs and lectern-pushers alike. | ||
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In the simplest terms, TextAloud is a piece of software that speaks a word, passage, anything from the clipboard, a single document or a whole series of files. However, such a plain technical description fails to bring alive this package's versatility. How TextAloud worksFor some time, Windows has made available to programmers a means of hooking up with voice-like sounds via its Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI). It's not an out-of-the-box deal because no user controls are available and by default there is just one moderately irritating voice (see below). Who would use it?It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to see that TextAloud can server two vital needs: 1) Spell-checking and grammar-checkingReading documents aloud is a time-honoured method of verifying written text while doing something else - it's no different to listening to the radio or an MP3 2) Dummy run a speech before presenting itReading a masterfully-crafted script gives you confidence and practice with the intonation and body language of presenting it, but without a recording, you won't know how it sounds from the front row. Traditionally, that means two run-throughs: one to record and a second to listen. With TextAloud, one goes straight from the writing to the listening stage, and because the reading voice is effectively a stranger (not yours), you pay more attention to how the speech sounds. For the well-rehearsed presenter, TextAloud skips the "Is this thing recording yet?" stage and turns the speaker into his/her own audience in one leap. Save it for laterThese audio presentations can even be saved to large but universally playable .WAV files for passing on to colleagues or for future reference. Recordings can even be batched up to save time. Hearing voicesThe default voice on offer may sound grindingly familiar: it's the cracked, old tones of Microsoft's "Sam", as always in tones apparently forced through a bubble bath. Want to test your aural stamina? Go to: Fans of the Melanie Griffith and Ray Liotta movie Something Wild might want to try setting the (highly inappropriate) voices of Charles and Audrey to this extract of script. "Just shut up, Audrey! I'm gonna tell you something, Charlie. When l used to do this for a living, I used to pull a job at some liquor store, run around the corner, pull off the ski mask l was wearing, put on a different coat and walk right back into the place l just robbed. Man, it was wild! They'd be so flipped out, they wouldn't know their own mothers. I'd be standing there when they described what happened and who robbed 'em. Half the time, they thought it was some spook that did it." Don't despair, you won't have to accept a robot as a lodger for very long. For US$35 you can tap into the AT&T Natural VoicesTM collection, offering UK English the prim tones of Audrey, and her equally dated Chumleigh-Warner-style partner, Charles. Going more multi-cult, we have the lilting Indian Accent of Anjali, the slightly effete tones of German Reiner and the decidedly camp Mel. Moving right off the planet altogther, Ray is clearly Mr. Data straight out of Star Trek, but fortunately a sexy French Juliette brings it all back down to Earth again. The lower-quality of the 2 voice sets does save some disc space but is hardly worth the $5 cost-saving. To get any of these digital voice-overs to work, an obligatory $25 purchase of the AT&T standard speech engine is required, but it does bundle in a couple of personae to start with: two decidedly East Coast characters, Mike and Crystal. There are lots of neat extras in TextAloud, like the "Watch Clipboard" feature offering to capture any text that is pasted into the clipboard buffer and remembering what you saved from last around. Text can be set to be spoken as well as churning through multiple files automatically. A batch converter processes swathes of text into audio wav files for later listening. 
By setting the speech interface to SAPI-5 one can insert voice changes along the way (under the edit menu), thus for instance, allowing a script or play to be read aloud automatically but in a fairly authentic fashion. More mundanely, a 'round-robin' voice change can be implemented simply to avoid the spoken passages becoming monotonous. Crucial to the plot, one can improve the listening experience of the piece being spoken with advanced editing of the pauses between sentence and between paragraphs and also pronunciation: thus by fiddling with phonemes, we can set "e.g." to sound like "ee gee" instead of "egg", and "messaging" definitely shouldn't come out as "massah-ging". And yes, you can even make it say "Doh!" Finally, (and you can use Microsoft's Narrator to do this too), even those of us who are not public-facing employees should at least have a go at pre-reading outgoing emails before sending; by the time the TextAloud trial finishes we will probably be writing emails that actually make some sense. Contacts-IB-
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3. Web site accessibility checkers
Still having trouble getting your website together in terms of its accessibility? Your in bad (but ubiquitous) company. The vast majority of sites are in the same boat. | ||
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What is web content accessibility? It's all about making content understandable and navigable without necessarily resorting the latest flashy techniques. All the common sense guidelines - like explaining an image with 'tag' text for the visuaaly impaired - are in there and the Holy Grail that web developers should work towards are all espoused in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 10) at www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/. Only a 3% pass rate All the sample sites in the accessibility audit conducted by Nomensa were from commercial sectors, covering the accessibility of 100 leading websites from 20 countries from around the world. The only 3 passing the minimum requirement were government sites from Germany, Spain and Britain. Among the rest, common failings (apart from the lack of image tags) were over zealous JavaScript (which excludes 10% of Internet users) and fixed text sizes instead of scalable ones. Sad to hear then that a recent report concluded that an astonishing 97% of web sites fail to meet accessibility standards. Of course the guidelines themselves are enough to put anyone off, encapsulated as they are in a weighty 31-page tome, for anyone contemplating a printed version. Experienced web developers will dip in and out of this document, cherry-picking the bits that have slipped the mind - especially where clarity is required - for accessibility checkpoints come in three different priorities: those that must, should and may be addressed, these being Conformance Levels "A", "Double-A" and "Triple-A" respectively. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are some welcome, easy-to-use analysis tools available.
Once the first accessinbility check has been run and the result is say, 6 errors, don't assume that 6 edits will sort out all the conformance for that page. It's still a slog. Set aside a good few hours for analysing your web pages, because fixing one accessibility flaw often reveals another, so it's a converging process of test, edit page, publish, test, etc. And when someone adds further pages to the site, try to enforce adherence to the WCAG standards and remember to re-check the published pages afterwards. Contacts
-IB-
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4. Give your memory stick the finger
Biometrics could be the ultimate solution for securing data held on a USB drive. | ||
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Losers weepers
Stand up if you have ever left your USB memory stick behind. (That should be most of us then. Everybody sit down now). Fine if it was left at home, or at the office in a locked drawer. Nine times out of ten however, that precious drive conatining heaps of confidential data will have been inadvertently abandoned at another organisation, in a café, or – most irretrievable of all - on a train. Next time that happens, you will want to be sure that data doesn't end up being prodded and analysed by the finder. A memory stick dedicated uniquely to youPlenty of encryption software exists out there just at the click of a download, but often that needs to be installed and configured on the drive and passwords have to be remembered. What's needed is a unique self-locking memory device. Perhaps the answer may be a drive that only responds to its owner – by recognising that person by a fingerprint. Such biometric technology is already embedded into the Cruzer Profile USB drive produced by SanDisk, a company with an established name in the Flash memory field. 
The drives come in 512MB and 1GB capacities and offer two built-in partitions – a smaller unsecured area needed to set up the fingerprint recognition and as well as a utility that enables the secure log in, or for non-sensitive data; and the larger secure one - 470MB on the 512MB version. Access to the contents is achieved simply by swiping a finger over the fingerprint reader bar. The CruzerLock 2 software enables use the fingerprint scanner instead of a password and provides additional encryption of files. Where the data on the Flash drive must be shared between several owners, say an income spreadsheet for the fundraising department, the fingerprints of up to other owners can be enrolled. The hi-speed USB 2.0 port is also backwards-compatible with USB 1.1 ports and claims a minimum writing speed of 5MB/second, equating to around eight and a half minutes to write the whole device. SanDisk's Flash drive includes trial versions of its CruzerSync™ (synchronization) and PocketCache™ (backup) software, so all in all is ideal for use with a shared office laptop, especially since the 512MB version can be found for under £30. Contacts-IB-
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5. Holographic Storage
Will 2007 be the year that holographic storage finally takes off? | ||
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Most of us only know holographic storage as the multi-coloured flash on our credit cards and passports. These 3D embedded pictures don't hold a lot of infomation, but in recent years developers have been aiming at much larger capacities - hundreds of GigaBytes in fact. The most successful innovations so far come from company InPhase, who has managed to pack 515GB into just one square inch of holographic media. In the thick of the Blu-ray and HD DVD optical format wars, the overlooked holographic storage story was quietly playing itelf out last year has culminated in the release of Tapestry 300R drive, a box that can store 300 GigaBytes (GB) of information on a single CD-sized 5 ¼-inch disc. 
In January, InPahse signed an agreement with DSM, a leading worldwide developer of optical jukebox storage systems for major enterprise customers, a deal that promises to push the technology further. "Holographic storage is now, finally, a reality for customers and will provide the high-capacity, high-density solutions for secure, long-life storage that leading companies seek today, and in the future," said Art Rancis, vice president of sales for InPhase Technologies. With a transfer rate of 20 MegaBytes per second (MB/s), or 160 Megabits per second (Mb/s) the two companies claim they will provide the highest-capacity optical storage solution on the market. With a potential media life of greater than 50 years and a possible capacity of 10 TeraBytes (10,000 GB) on a single CD disc, archiving is a clear candidate for applications If units can be produced soon enough and with appropraite volume and pricing, holographic technology could come to the rescue of rapidly expanding requirements for data archiving and backup. Contacts
-IB-
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6. Q&A: Missing Windows Show Desktop shortcut
Question 
Hi Mark, I've lost the Show Desktop icon from my Quick Launch bar. I have tried making a new shortcut with the words "Show Desktop" but that doesn't seem to work. Help! | ||
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Annoying, isn't it? Fortunately there are several methods to fix and/or work around it. The Notepad method
Command=2 IconFile=explorer.exe,3 [Taskbar] Command=ToggleDesktop
(To turn the Quick Launch toolbar on or off, right-click the taskbar and select "Toolbars".) The Run Command method
Wait a few moments for the icon to show up, especially if your PC is slow or busy. 
The WorkaroundDon't bother replacing Show Desktop. Save the sapce in the Quick Launch toolbar and use the keyboard shortcut Windows key + D instead. The official MS version: How to re-create the Show Desktop icon on the Quick Launch toolbar. -IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - search inside a site with Google
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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