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IB is on holiday next month
**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
IT not just for boys
With only 20% of women currently making up the IT workforce, a new programme launched by e-skills UK hopes to address this future IT skills shortage. The Computer Club For Girls (CC4G), part of the new Skills Sector Agreement for IT & Telecoms action plan for IT skills in the UK, is aimed at making IT careers more attractive to young people. In particular, it hopes to continue the experience of the southeast of England pilot project where a majority of the 3500 girls felt more likely to pursue a career in IT, and will be targeting 150,000 girls aged 10 to 14. The scheme, funded by the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA), is being rolled out to 3600 schools across England from September.
CC4G at eskills.com
Speaking out where the Sun don't shine
The outspoken CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, has spoken again: today's computers are too expensive and too complicated. Pushing his vision of simple network computers, preferably Sun's SunRay terminals, McNealy wants to persuade businesses to adopt easily-maintained central servers as the hubs of applications which are accessed by cheap 'thin client' computers. Not a new proposition by any means, but one that promises to consume fewer resources and reduce the obsolescence factor of PC-based networks, he argues. Mirroring this strategy is Sun's Grid-powered on-demand computing, offering pay-per-use computing at $1 per microprocessor per hour and storage at $1 per GigaByte.
Sun Microsystems network computing
Software piracy is 'the norm' but beware US ruling
A study by two UK university researchers has found that people who download illegal copies of films, software and games do not view the piracy as theft. The report, Fake Nation, saw its formal presentation at The International Games Summit as part of ELSPA's two-day conference by Dr Jo Bryce of the University of Central Lancashire and Dr Jason Rutter of the University of Manchester and suggests that campaigns to deter software piracy are failing.
Meanwhile in the U.S., motion picture and recording industries as represented by MGM have won a major battle in U.S. Supreme Court against Grokster and StreamCast Networks who can now be held liable for copyright infringements, even though these are committed by users of their peer-to-peer file-sharing software, like Morpheus, rather than by the companies themselves. File-sharing supporters say the ruling has wider implications for new technology companies.
News story from Infoworld
Just a minute - a free minute
What would you say, given one free minute of anonymous, uncensored speech? This 'mobile sculpture' (bike trailer + mobile phone + 200 watt speaker) realises the peripatetic equivalent of Speaker's Corner and allows anyone a minute's audience with whoever happens to be listening. Have something you desperately need to get off your chest? Want to make an impassioned fundraising plea? (Assuming you can be heard above the noise of Live 8 !) Call +44-20-7871-9533 in the UK or 1-614-441-9533 in Ohio, USA. Be proud, say it loud!
See the video ... er, of the phone call, at www.onefreeminute.net
Live 8 thumbs up for old rock?
Sir Bob has promised Status Quo fans that he will get the rockers on the London stage of Live 8 if enough people petition him with text messages. Shake down your hair and warm up those thumbs. Dear Bob ...
BT fuses fixed and mobile service
BT Group will launch an Internet phone service to allow users to switch between mobile networks and fixed-lines using a single handset combining lower fixed-line prices with the convenience of just one phone. The pioneering service, called BT Fusion, employs a special Motorola v560 mobile phone accessing BT's fixed-line network when making calls at home or in the office. When out and about the phone and its hybrid service connects to Vodafone's wireless network. Indoors, the mobile phone switches to a broadband line using Bluetooth wireless and a BT Hub which would also work as a wireless home Internet router. BT Fusion would be offered as two tariffs of £9.99 and £14.99 a month with UK landline call rates of 5.5 pence for up to an hour, and 3p a minute at peak hours. The trial, culminating in a September launch, is clearly aimed at countering mobile networks and companies offering cheap Internet telephony.
Windows 2000 - not dead yet?
... by popular demand. Still stuck virtually in that last century, nearly half of corporate desktop PCs are running Microsoft's Windows 2000 client operating system, despite its official end-of-life status come the beginning of July. Compared with this, the market share for successor Windows XP is only 38%, according to asset analysis company AssetMetrix. The shift in Windows 2000 status, as defined by Microsoft's Windows Product Lifecycle Dates, marks the move from mainstream support into the extended support phase and means that customers will no longer get feature updates after 30 June. Steve O’Halloran, managing director of AssetMetrix Research Labs, said "Companies re-deploying PCs, without a policy to manage and support their operating systems, will have their Windows XP transition rate dictated by PC obsolescence rather than by intelligent planning and forecasting."
Report by AssetMetrix Research Labs
Senseless technology
A new survey has found that Deafblind people find technology difficult and frustrating to use. Everyday items like remote controls, cookers, mobile phones and washing machines cam under scrutiny and common concerns were information not being available in alternative formats such as audio, large print or Braille, the trend for mobile phones to get smaller and the print size in instruction manuals being too small. The study was the largest ever asking the views of deafblind people and was commissioned by national charity Sense to mark the start of Deafblind Awareness Week and to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Senseless technology study
Websites turn away Firefox users
Ten per cent of UK websites still fail to work when viewed with the Firefox web browser, according to a study by web-testing firm SciVisum. Among those stumbling blocks were sites such as
the government's Jobcentreplus.gov.uk and the cinema giant Odeon.co.uk. Firefox has proved to be a popular open source alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer growing its share of the browser market to 8% in May. SciVisum's advice is to develop web site code only in the World Wide Web Consortium official standard of Cascading Style Sheets 2 specification (CSS2). The success of Firefox, widely expected to reach 10% usage in the US this year has spurred Microsoft to announce that IE version 7, countering previous announcements.
IE7 embraces news feeds
Microsoft's next browser, Internet Explorer 7, will help people to keep tabs on website updates automatically. An orange toolbar button will adorn IE7, lighting up when a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed is detected on a web site, making news feed subscribing as simple as creating a bookmark.
A similar button in the bottom right-hand corner has already been a feature of Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser for some time. RSS formats will become an integrated part throughout Longhorn, Microsoft's latest developing version of Windows, due around end of 2006.
Learn the ways of the Force Farm
Nothing to do with IT, but a very neat Flash animation espousing the benefits of organic veg. Storewars is a heroic tale as told by characters like Obi Wan Cannoli, C3 Peanuts and Tofu D2.
A must for Star Wars fans and right-on consumers everywhere!
www.storewars.org
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Recycling: WEEE man, big problem
Soon consumers will be able to take back electronic equipment, otherwise classed as waste, to the original equipment manufacturers via collection facilities, but it's taken a long time to get there. | ||
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A new Directive will make this end-of-lifecycle change a legal requirement, to reduce toxic wastes and consumption of energy and raw materials. However, the original deadline of 13 August 2005 has been postponed to next year because of practical difficulties in meeting the Directive’s deadline. To help visualise this vast amount of modern-day detritus, a sculpture called The WEEE man has been created to bring home to consumers the impact of their personal burden of waste produced. 
WEEE man he isn't! At around 7 metres high s/he/it weighs in at over 3 tons, a person's lifetime scrap - or the equivalent of 160 mobile phones every year. Among this throw-away pile you can find 7 monitors, 8 toasters, 12 kettles, 15 printers and 23 mice (the teeth, in case you were wondering). The sculpture, an RSA and Canon joint venture and brainchild of Hugh Knowles and Mark Fremantle, aims to represent the total amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) that an average UK person is likely to consume in their lifetime. From its display outside City Hall on the South Bank, WEEE Man will move to the Eden Project during the summer. Project director Rob Holdway says this all adds up to "at least a million tonnes of WEEE every year and 90% of this ends up in landfill sites, which we are running out of. Both the public and business need to realise the huge environmental damage our current consumption causes." 
The WEEE Directive will enable private householders to return their WEEE to collection facilities free of charge and require producers (manufacturers, sellers, distributors) to be responsible for financing the collection, treatment, recovery and disposal of WEEE from private households deposited at these collection facilities by 1st January 2006, if the legislation is passed. By the end 2006 producers will be required to achieve a series of demanding recycling and recovery targets for different categories of appliance and the aim is for the UK to have reached an average WEEE collection rate of four kilograms for each private householder annually. Last year two leading IT equipment manufacturers took a laudable, and perhaps marketing-inspired, leap forward and jumped the recycling gun. Contacts
-IB- Acknowledgements: RSA |
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2. Why outsourcing IT is a good idea
An assessment of the benefits. | ||
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Do you sit next to a colleague with all the tact of Homer Simpson, the congeniality of Charles Montgomery Burns and the manners of Barney Gumble? Even worse, when this model citizen demands you help them with their favourite screensaver installation for the 28th time, do you drop all your other jobs and jump to it, for fear that the entire office gets to hear about your reluctance to respond to this 'IT problem'? Just another familiar dilemma in your weary rounds as the charity IT manager, who also happens to have five other roles in the office, but nobody seems to register that when computer problems come up! There's a simple way to end this and other IT support dramas, but when the word "outsourcing" is mentioned, most people often think of what it costs, instead of analysing the benefits. Here we present a run-down of the benefits a good outsourcer should provide. Call escalationA computer suddenly stops connecting reliably to the internal network, or a DVD is recognised in one DVD drive but not another. When an IT problem suddenly extends beyond your capabilities of diagnosis, who ya gonna call? What does 'the person responsible for IT' do in these circumstances? Phone a friend? That's exactly what many administrators do - but it's no guarantee of a solution. Ironically, Co-Operative Systems employs the same technique, except that we do provide a solution. Formalisation of the call logging processWhen a colleague tells you about an IT problem, (eg "my PC doesn't work"), they often consider that problem logged, no matter how casual the terms in which it was stated. In other words, I've said it, so now you know. No opportunity for further diagnosis as the complainant legs it down the corridor to that meeting they're late for! The resulting support job may depends not only this (lack of) upfront information, but also on the prevailing informal office relationships (both good and bad) which often cause a biased approach to IT support rather than a consistent one. With an outsourced service, it takes no longer to make a support phone call, and there is no 'blurring' of the process as is associated with office politics. The formalised process makes for efficient logging, with the same attitude and efficiency being applied to each job. Separation of rolesFor similar reasons, separating the person from the support schedule draws clear lines between who is doing which job. With outsourcing, it's a physically different IT support person who arrives to fix a network card, or dials in remotely to increase the privileges on a user's account. With an in-house multi-tasker, it's a struggle to avoid being drawn into other roles (for instance, office manager/IT manager), even where those roles are split across specified days in the week. Priority managementOne of the primary job requirements for running IT matters in-house is the ability to manage priorities. If one user has no Internet access and another can't print, who is more important? There's no easy answer, you have to dig deeper, take into account the speed of a fix or a workaround. However, when there is only you to carry out the actual work, jobs can only go either up or down the priority list. An outsourcing agreement allows jobs to be shifted sideways too; when necessary, you just farm out the work to someone else! Thus you can literally buy time and flex your support priorities to take account of the quantity and quality of support provided to in-house users. Technical skillsEventually you will reach the limit of your technical skills. Research, study and training courses can remove such barriers, but you could spend days acquiring the skills for a new technology, perhaps even months by the time that is interwoven among all your other duties. Project plans may not allow that kind of luxury and often don't reap the benefits for that kind of cost. Furthermore it's an expensive way of researching technologies you may never take on board. An outsourcer brings all these skills with them. They are continually sifting and filtering out the technologies that work well and, if they are good, they will instinctively know which are best suited to you. Dedicated to supporting youOutsourcing IT companies like us only have one job function: to serve you. Whereas you are perhaps an office manager, web designer, general admin officer, campaigns assistant, as well as someone who tries to sort out computer problems on the side, we slave away all day long specialising in the one function that continually gets shelved until there's a crisis: Information Technology. We know, because we outsource our own IT too. Contacts
-IB-
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3. Creating PDF files for free
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How many ways to create a PDF?If there's one software goal that's been around for a long time and that people are still having a crack at, it's making a better PDF Creator. Adobe's proprietary, but indispensable Portable Document File format that is used universally to embed text, font information and pictures into one file, is a format one has to buy into, usually by purchasing one of the Adobe PDF creating products like Photoshop. But the expense of such products has generated an 'alternatives' market aimed at those consumers who don't need the sophistication of the Adobe suites. The latest in the line-up, and one we have been testing with success is by PrimoPDF - and what's more it's free! 
Metro - All change for PDFs? The next version of Windows, will feature a new document format code-named Metro, which would seem to go head-to-head with the successful PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) technologies owned by Adobe Systems Inc.
PrimoPDF's client-based 10.2MB offering follows a well-trodden path to 'PDF-dom' by printing to a virtual printer, where you can then select the folder to save the converted PDF file. Although there aren't security and self-signing features associated with even Adobe's free Acrobat Reader utility, we're only talking about basic access to the format. So the result is a free, full-version, non-trial PDF Converter that works from almost any application and allows optimisation of the PDF output for printing or a viewing screen. Unfortunately, the installation is one that requires a restart of the PC, but it's happily installed on anything from Windows 98 upwards. A free online support FAQ is provided on the site. Nothing else left but to give it a go! ContactsMore alternatives:
-IB- Acknowledgements: Nishal Rooplal, Suki Gandial, Ken Flury |
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4. Interpreting Terminal Server licensing
Are you stealing a licence from a remote server? | ||
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Many workers are nowadays 'dialling in' to their office server, not just to find and work with documents and data, but to run applications from the server too. Typically, this may mean employing a Terminal Server session and running the copy of Microsoft Word or whatever that resides on the host server, instead of from their local machine. Clearly, there are many advantages: the user knows they are getting the exact version of Microsoft Office they need, with all their preferences; the reliability of the suite doesn't depend on the local installation, say on the office-loaned laptop, which has had all the MS Office menus messed around by the last borrower. But how does the licensing work?Do such users need a Terminal Server licence? The answer to the first is that you must also have at least one Terminal Server (TS) licence server (a physical machine) and for small organisations this usually means installing both the Terminal Server and Terminal Server Licensing service on the same physical computer. After the TS licence server is activated and you have purchased Client Access Licences (CALs), the license server can issue permanent CALs for machines that connect remotely to the server (Terminal Server clients). For applications, however, this central 'licence distribution' mechanism does not apply. As a rule, Microsoft application licensing follows a `per device' logic, in other words, a licence is needed per machine running the application software, eg MS Access. Ideally this licence allocation happens locally; if not, work backwards and trace it to the server offering the application.
To take some examples:
ContactsLearn more about End User Licence Agreements (EULA). -IB- Acknowledgements: Mark Curtis, Zorina Baksh |
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5. Excel auto-fill
Let Excel do the typing for you! | ||
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Excel auto-fill
Got lots of repetitive typing, charts or tables to set up? Using Excel you can repeat a cell's content any number of times one clean drag motion.
But we can go one (or two ... or two hundred) better. Excel can fill in series of dates, weekdays, months, numbers, exponential sequences and a lot more. 
Following the same procedure above:
For instance, you could create all the weekdays in August, or all 12 months in 2006 from January to December, or a range of percentage numbers from 100 down to 0 spaced at 5% point intervals .
For more sophisticated text duplication, consider employing DupBlock, a freeware product that generates blocks of text that are alike except for one or more sequenced variables.
DupBlock can perform multiple 'Repeat Block' iterations which can be output to a file or to the Windows clipboard. -IB-
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6. Q&A: Archiving Outlook mails
Question 
Hi Mark, I used the Outlook archive function to archive all my emails over 6 months old but it doesn't pick anything up. It just creates the correct folder structure in my .PST file but leaves it empty. | ||
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It's true the auto archive feature in Outlook is a useful tool for dumping old email with a kind automatic ageing process. Where it's going wrong for you however, is that many utilities like mail scanners, spam preventers and even Microsoft's own Mailbox Merge Program, ExMerge (a tool for disaster recovery and merging mailboxes from one mail server into another) interfere with the dates on the email messages and skew what Outlook thinks of as being the date of the message. A closer examination, in fact, shows that the Archive function actually operates on a field called Modified date, rather than the Received date, which is what most of us look at. We can reveal this field and see the clue to the workaround. In Outlook, pull down:
Now we can compare the oldest "Received date" field and the "Modified date" field. So for example, if we want to archive emails with a Received date of 12 months old and they equate to a Modified date of 3 months old, we set the auto-archive setting to 3 months. The difference between the two dates will depend on which utilities access your Exchange mail server. It's a crude adjustment, but it still saves a lot of time over sorting and handling emails manually. -IB- Acknowledgements: Stuart Lunn, Mark Curtis, Adrian Hallet, Spencer Buck |
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Clicks of the Trade - The Ooops key ... for your mouse
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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