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**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Win £5000 for your web site
Is your web site an effective one? If it's really good, CAF could be awarding you a £5000 cheque. Their Charities' Online Accounts Awards 2005 competition judges how well an entrant use its web site to tell visitors about its charity work. Particular attention will be paid to those that display annual report and accounts online, demonstrating transparency and accountability. Entries must be in by 18 July 2005 and judging takes place in Autumn.
http://www.cafonline.org/onlineawards/
Metro - All change for PDFs?
The next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, will feature a new document format code-named Metro, to print and share documents. The new format, demonstrated by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle recently, would seem to go head-to-head with the successful PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) technologies owned by Adobe Systems Inc. Users will be able to open the XML-based Metro files without a special client and the format will be licensed as royalty-free. Learn more about Longhorn.
Someone you know is hacking you
Those organisations who are all geared up for protection against Internet hackers may literally have lured themselves into a false sense of security. And the reason? The vast majority of computer hacking is done by current and former employees, according to the Metropolitan Police. Focusing on the flaws in the operating systems and software may leave us blinded to the fact it is more commonly the flaws in the security procedures of the company against which successful attacks are aimed, explained the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit the InfoSecurity Europe Conference. The obvious tip is that, on discovering a security problem, one of the first steps in any investigation is to check employee details.
Deal yourself a cool hand
Aimed at intensive, here-for-the-duration gamers, the Air Flo Mouse pushes air through 'pores' in its outer casing to cool sweaty hands. However, the ergonomically-designed dual-button shell with its built-in fan will suit anyone who spends extended sessions at their PC, like graphic and layout designers, people who suffer from hand perspiration problems. Be cool on your PC with the Air Flo Mouse.
Bargain deal at around £25. No sweat.
http://www.nyko.com/nyko/products/?i=10
Credit cards develop affinity with ID theft
HSBC Bank has had to warn 180,000 credit card holders about potential ID thefts; in particular those holders of its General Motors branded MasterCard have been asked to replace their cards in case their confidential information may have been compromised. The concern about data compromise may extend to other credit card companies, as well as charities who employ affinity card schemes for fundraising, not least because of the threat of bad publicity to their reputations. The source has been traced to a faulty point-of-sale (POS) system at a major fashion retailer in the US, which retained and stored credit card information instead of purging the data immediately after processing each transaction.
Phishing protection joins CloudMark fleet
The latest Immunity anti-spam product from CloudMark also tackles the rising problem of phishing and pharming, techniques used by spammers aimed at extracting confidential information (often financial) from unsuspecting email recipients. Immunity uses the technology pioneered by SpamNet whereby organisations and individuals apply feedback to CloudMark's classification decisions, resulting in collaborative, responsive spam protection.
Learn more about CloudMark.
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Storage on tap
How repository technology is changing our lives. | ||
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Probably for the first time since personal computing began, around the 1980s, we have more than enough storage for everyday activities. Early computers had so few drives and so little space that you had to swap out the operating system (leave it in memory) and then put another disc in to store documents on - and hope it didn't crash! One wonders, perhaps, if such fragile machines were modelled on those filing cabinets that (literally) crash when they have more than one drawer open. 
Eventually there was enough space to store the operating system comfortably on the hard drive, but with the arrival of Windows 95 onwards, the system suddenly became the hungriest consumer of space, with little left over for data - the bit we are more interested in, after all. Windows 2000 installations typically consumed up to around 1 GigaByte (1000 MegaBytes), but with Windows XP, the space demands of the system have levelled off somewhat, while the available disc space provided by disc manufacturers has rocketed. So, for example, it is now common to find consumer PCs with 400GB of space to play with, even though that may be supplied as two 200GB drives. CompartmentalisationIn days when student campuses possessed the only commercial networked computers, the rational for large networks was that the technology and the storage was expensive, and thus more accessible if shared. Nowadays the discs are cheap and the networking technology is slowly bridging the gap to commodity status. So why bother to share the hardware that is compact, pocketable and affordable? Perhaps we are reaching an age of 'compartmentalisation', a new age of personal computing, but not the one defined by "a PC and printer on every desk". In this paradigm shift we might carry our lifetime's accumulation of data with us all the time, only sharing certain portions - like work-based documents, personal contacts, family photos, and so on - depending on the social context - namely office, cafe/club, home. We may be witnessing a reversal of the traditional, centralised nature of retaining all of a group's work in just one place. The 'collective work' as such may thus exist only when all the personal contributions come together, as people increasingly spend time, however short, working in spaces other than the traditional office. Synchronisation of files plays a large part here in keeping everything up to date, but already the we can see the embryonic versions of, say, a campaign project scattered, not throughout the folders on the office server, but around the memory sticks and hard drives of workers' home PCs and handheld computers too. This won't necessarily be an ideal scenario for some organisations, who prefer to maintain tight control of their information, or indeed for certain types of information, but it may well happen anyway: because of 'gadget' marketing pressure; because the ease of use of personal storage is undeniably an irresistible force for today's consumers; and because the cost of such technology is plummeting. My-memory-stick-is-my-officeNo longer do we forget an idea because we can't jot it into exactly the right file where it will be relevant later. A triumphant round-up to that presentation speech can be dictated straight into your phone (that contains a voice-to-text converter), instead of trying to recall the exact words the next time a desktop PC comes to hand; many people already use their voicemail as kind of Dictaphone. Gone are the days when a particular machine (being the office PC for most of us at present) is the sole gateway to sending and receiving email or creating and editing documents. Look at some examples:
Conservation trendsIronically, nothing is changing faster than the technology employed to conserve information. Witness the surge in Internet backup services from ISPs and data centres: for them storage costs have fallen dramatically, bringing the possibility of offering more web server space by default. The big draw of 50MB free web space is now commonplace. Getting personalHowever, what if that "other side of an Internet link" actually belonged to you? As more hard drives appear in mobile phones, such 'smart' devices will become predominant as multi-purpose data hold-alls, storing any data format that office computers do now. Cleaner carpets: Landline phones now universally have digital-chips to answer calls instead of the old tape-based answering devices. Such chips could store all the data concerning your utilities service usage (electricity, gas, etc) and maintain it on chip. This data can then be polled by a code from the respective utility companies without disturbing the householder. No more 'meter men' trudging through the slush and then tramping it through the house. Weave your own webWeb-grabbing tools like HTTrack, a freeware web site copier, and Yahoo's My Web, which allows any number of searched web pages to be saved exactly for later, effectively building your own personal web, are taking advantage our access to increasing amounts of data storage space, as well as its versatility. Is it worth the disc it's written on?Will we need to worry about discarding old data at all? The human time cost in housekeeping our data is commonly offset by the cost of buying cheap new storage, especially where large numbers of users share the resource. Can you keep a secret?Once again, data security raises its omni-present head as an imperative issue, especially where vast numbers of machines are disposed of with hard drives intact. Large enterprises are more diligent in this respect and enforce thorough disc-wiping procedures. Fortunately, the days of simply employing the physical destruction of the machines (usually by the most brutal of those corporates) to ensure their data security will come to an end with the rise of the WEEE directive. Contacts
-IB-
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2. New search engines
You thought searching was just for text ... ? | ||
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Who is the fairest of them all?Which is the best engine to use? Nowadays, it might seem like an easy question to answer, but in fact it's the wrong question! What we really want to know is: Which is the right engine to use? The basicsFor simple searching and bog-standard queries, you still have to go a long way to beat good old Google, but nowadays 'a long way' is actually only as far as Yahoo's search engine http://search.yahoo.com/ which is regaining its respectability. Clusty http://clusty.com has a user-friendly front-end. Clusty's 'Customize!' function enables combining and filtering of different search categories, such as Web, news, wikipedia, blogs, which can be saved as a preference. All that's fit to printAll of the above also have news sections, each with their own searches. A better bet for breaking stories is News Now (www.newsnow.co.uk) a UK-based site refreshing every five minutes. Simple searches give results in timed categories, 30 minutes to 1 hour, 1 to 2 hours and so on. The NewsNow "Hot Topic" feeds each provide 'what's hot' sub-category filters along with the regular news feeds, and these show even finer timings down to the last 5 minutes, with national flags indicating the country of origin of each report. Audio and videoSinging Fish http://search.singingfish.com/ dedicates itself entirely to multimedia content - files like Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, and mp3s. "Fish" the word "moonlight" and you get 152 moonlight-related serenades, fantasies and mixes showing how long each track is and which formats are presented. Groovy! Research ExpertsA commendable research tool, Teoma (www.teoma.com) generates 3 results-in-one, showing the usual web page results, a set of Refine links to help narrow down large returns, and a set of Resources links collected from experts and enthusiasts. Thus a search for "European constitution" pulls up:
Where Teoma differs, from engines that rank pages simply popularity of cross-linking, is in its ability to organise and present sites that are about or related to the same subject to determine which ones are most relevant, an organic approach they call Subject-Specific Popularity. Contacts
-IB-
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3. Housekeeping disc space
Death, taxes and ... dwindling disc capacity. Another of life's certainties. | ||
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Are you the sort of person that throws out clothes not worn in the last 12 months? Or do you keep everything until it spills out of the wardrobe on to the floor and down the stairs, obstructing free passage through the front door? 
So it is with disc space. We all work alongside 'chuckers' and 'hoarders' alike, and from Day One of a new server installation, the capacious drive does nothing but pursue its relentless, wardrobe-like path towards saturation. It is made worse by the fact that users don't see the limits of this communal commode and therefore assume it must be infinitely expandable - which, of course to some extent, it is. But the bottom line is that what is available on your server hard drive is a shared resource and adding to it costs money. Tackling the incessant chipping-away at this resource is not so daunting if we establish some simple guidelines. For this purpose, we can separate the data into 3 types of files.
Store organisational projects on a group or shared drive to ensure people don't work privately on their own copies. Educate staff and volunteers to recognise, within any given project, the stage at which they should make a transition from private working to collaboration. At this point they need to 'let go' of the relevant documents, images, etc, to some extent and open them up for shared scrutiny, and that means moving the originals to a space with shared access, not leaving copies behind that result in scattered, confusing duplicates. Duplicate files Encourage people to do their own housekeeping - they will understand the context best. Common causes of 'jumble' are generations of report drafts throughout their various phases, and consecutive edits and refinements to images and photos. The resulting trails of file copies are of historic interest only. Personal data Develop a policy on storage of personal data. It may be somewhere between "anything goes" to "never darken my doors", but some guidelines are better than none at all. Don't forget that there is still some contention over what constitutes company data and personal data and its true nature remains largely untested. A 'Housekeeping 1-2-3'Here is a progressive method to ensure the weeding process gets easier not harder, using an ordinary everyday Windows tool: the 'Search/Find' function (Start | Search | File or folders).
Examples
The final stage is an admirable attempt at archiving (keeps everything together) and saving space - but none of the originals are removed! Total bill 616MB. Well over half a GigaByte, yet all that was needed was to keep 16MB-worth, a saving of around 97.5% in disc space! ConclusionIt's no easy ride, allowing creative people their freedom while trying to keep the resources they consume in check. However, a degree of pro-active monitoring will prevent a surprise disaster. -IB- Paul Craig |
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4. Overheating: When the bits hit the fan ...
Over-worked, under-cooled and here to serve. But for how long? | ||
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Summer's a-comin' and the heat is on. Spinning away in a corner of the room, the server disc drives and fan units in your average charity slave away, forgotten and ignored (except by us, of course). Server farm means health farmDepending on how expansive your organisation becomes usually determines the sophistication of your IT environmental facilities, as a rule and thus, the server's well-being. Yours probably fits into one of these categories:
The first valuable piece of advice to appreciate is that the closer you can move to the top of this list, the less likely are the chances of losing services temporarily or even a server 'meltdown'. A side benefit is that locked spaces mean that valuable equipment stays put. Fanning the flames?
The good news it that, when it comes to the fans that push air through a server box, you can tell a lot by listening. A regular change in tone or any 'moaning sounds' often mean a fan will soon be heading for propeller heaven, that great blade-yard in the sky. So take advantage and make good use of the advance warning: fan units and power supplies can be replaced before it's too late. However, if your crucial server is in an inherently 'uncomfortable' (read: hot and dusty) environment, then a better bet is to give it a happier home, rather than feeding it spare parts on a diet of stress. Solutions
Where the server is in a room or secluded area, then a portable air-conditioner might be a good temporary option and such units are certainly easy to buy locally - assuming you can beat the sweaty rush of humans all with the same idea! Other short-term fixes are simply to open a window, but only of course if this doesn't open the place to thieves, and not if the room or space is a natural sun trap. Even moving the server just a few inches off the floor will bring benefits tackling two major problems: a simple trolley or stand reduces dust being sucked up and clogging the vents in the server case and the height gain will help air to circulate all around around the case and aid cooling. 
If you are completely 'rackless', perhaps now is a good time to think about moving your server out of its bedsit and upgrade it to 'Mon Repos, 5th floor'. Cabinets and racks come in standard sizes and heights and allow room to accommodate all those other odd boxes like routers and switches, but much more usefully, allow all these boxes to take advantage of the same cooling equipment, saving on costs. However be careful not to place high temp gear so that it blows hot air over racks that are already cool anyway. Some cabinets with built-in fans, have glass doors, which certainly aids viewing the server status while keeping it under lock and key, but not all of these designs have good air circulation. Removing a back panel can help keep the temperature down as temporary measure while still preventing access to controls at the front. An improvement is a cabinet with a mesh door. Where servers are already mounted in racks it's relatively simple to add another tray containing some rack mountable fans. A side benefit is that future expansion of equipment is provided for and cables can be tidied neatly out of the way. For those with the space for a server room and air-conditioning or an AC unit, it's good to aim for about 15° Celsius. An indoor thermometer on the wall is the best way to monitor it, but until you get one hooked up, wok on the basis that you have it about right if it's cold enough to make you want to wear a jumper if you spend any length of time in there! Finally, some wag phoned suggesting a bag of ice placed of top of the server. As you can guess, it's a really, really short-term solution. -IB- Acknowledgements: Spencer Buck, Chris Harris, Anslem Munroe, Nishal Rooplal |
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5. Updates on servers
Service Packs and servers - don't try this one at home! | ||
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It may appear that applying Windows Updates and Service Packs is now a trivial affair with the automated Windows Update service, and this is certainly so for Windows client PCs, that is desktops, laptops and the like. However for servers, it is entirely a different. Even Microsoft's own recommendation is that you (the end user) should test new patches and Service Packs before applying them to a 'production server', meaning a server in daily use. What this translates to is having a spare server setup just for these kind of testing purposes, a common practice in large enterprises, but very few not-for-profit organisations can afford to be so lavish in their workshops! That is what Co-Operative Systems is here for. Please don't download and apply Microsoft service packs or other 3rd party software updates manually unless you are fully capable of doing so and able to cope with any resulting problems. If you think any service packs or updates need to be applied or have any worries or questions do give us a call. -IB-
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6. Q&A: Help! My mail is being blocked
Question 
Hi Mark, I am getting quite a few messages returned as blocked from 'blacklist.mail.ops.worldnet .att.net.'. I don't know if this is actually AT&T, but can we get our organisation off this blocking list? | ||||||||||||||
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The reason this happens at all is that you appear on the Realtime Blocking List (RBL) of a site that records spammers. To do this the quick-n-dirty way, you could just type your domain name into the "Spam database lookup" section of http://www.dnsstuff.com/. It will likely tell you to enter the IP address for your mail server (see below) to get accurate results, because that is the machine that someone claims is sending spam. The results show a (now vast) list of sites who are keeping tabs on spammers and blocking reported offenders. If you have a highlighted entry against one of these, then it will show a number of seconds in the TTL (Time To Live) column, which usually translates to something less than 48 hours.
If you are being blocked by one of these RBLs, its link in the left column will take you to the site where you should be able to find instructions for removal. To do a more accurate check, it helps to find the IP number of your domain. Go back to http://www.dnsstuff.com/, find the "Reverse DNS lookup" section and type in the name of your mail server. Don't know? Ask us. For this example, we are going to suppose this produced the IP address "66.195.18.24" - a known spammer at the time of writing. The site used by AT&T as a Realtime Blocking List (RBL) http://spamblock.outblaze.com/ may help remove your domain directly. Just add on the IP number to the address above, thus ...
http://spamblock.outblaze.com/66.195.18.24
If you are being blocked here and it continues to persist (or happens again), you can use a link that will appear at the bottom of that page to "REMOVE IP", meaning 'unblock me', which basically sends an email request to the postmaster of that site. -IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - End Of Message timesaver
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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