How Fragile is Our Technology

Our recent trio of storms, while bringing us an abundance of fabulous powder snow here in Whistler, has not brought good cheer to many of our neighbors in Vancouver, or those on Vancouver Island. The arctic cold front descending south, combined with the low pressure system coming from the west, has produced hurricane force winds on the west coast. This has cost hundreds of millions of dollars in damages due to fallen trees, and consequently knocked out electric power to many regions, causing considerable financial hardship to retailers who are usually experiencing the busiest week of the year, as Christmas shoppers scurry to buy gifts at the last minute.

Whistler has been lucky, though not exempt. Ordinarily, I submit this column via email; this week, I had to use something I rarely use any more – my fax machine. As we all know, there has been no internet in Whistler since Friday morning, and as of this writing (Sunday evening), there is still no internet service from either of the two local providers. The reason? The weather has taken out the fibre-optic line between Vancouver and Whistler, though there is precious little information about the severity of the situation. Rumor has it that it may be as many as ten days before service is resumed.

Keeping this in perspective, it is certainly not life-threatening to be without internet for a few days, but for many businesses it is inconvenient and extremely costly. A few of my clients, who run accommodations businesses, depend on the internet for the majority of their bookings. Many of their customers use email as their sole method of communications; the booking companies, in order not to lose business, must resort to phoning or faxing every single customer in order to avoid losing their bookings, and to reassure customers that their unanswered emails were not being ignored. Others who have been hard-hit are all the retailers whose Interac and credit-card processing terminals have been converted from dial-up to high-speed internet authentication – these businesses are unable to process bank card transactions, and have had to return to the old imprint swipers for credit cards, for the duration of the failure. What a hassle!

Walk around this town and you can’t help but notice the number of internet cafés and internet kiosks that are temporarily out of business as well. I own nine internet kiosks, and this is ordinarily one of the best times of year for usage, so I am somewhat less than happy myself.

I decided to tackle the issue head-on and find a work-around. I thought, what about returning to dial-up? So I phoned Telus and asked for the local number. It didn’t work, as I had suspected it might not, because it probably uses the same fibre-optic line that was damaged. I phoned Telus again, asking for the toll free number to Vancouver. The agent said sure, here it is, but it will cost $2 p/hour. At this point I became terse with the agent; I asked - why do you call this toll-free when you charge a toll? I also explained that a toll seemed unreasonable given the circumstances, but of course he was just an agent. In corporations the size of Telus, mere agents have no ability to provide customer service (though in my opinion, this is a casualty of modern times). Anyhow, I tried the number and it worked. If internet is still down when you read this, the so-called toll free number for dial-up is 1-877-666-1179. You will need your Telus username and password. Hopefully, you still have a dial-up modem – many new systems today ship without them.

If not, forget your worries, and just go skiing. It’s epic right now.

Convergence, TV's and PVR's

Convergence is a term you may not have heard yet; it is the merging of PC technology with home entertainment technology. I remember about 10 years ago I got all excited about one of those Multi Level Marketing companies that promised to make me rich, and its product was a set-top box, a home-entertainment component that would bring internet to the TV set. High speed internet was still not widely available, and the set-top box provided low-res, dial-up internet on TV. Unimpressive as this sounds now, I was excited about it, and I felt that having internet on your TV was the future, so I signed up. Eventually, I was shipped my first evaluation unit. I spent a bunch of money having a TV wall-mounted in my retail store so that I could demonstrate the unit to all my walk-in customers. Unfortunately, that early prototype was an absolute piece of garbage. The modem rarely connected to the internet, and when it did it was agonizingly slow, even when compared to dial-up on an ordinary PC, and the image-quality looked horrible on a low-resolution TV. I phoned the company to complain, and they told me to send the unit back; I was promised a replacement unit. This must have been shortly before the company went bankrupt, because I never saw the replacement unit, and never heard from the company again. I began to think that this “convergence” thing was just a flash in the pan, and would never materialize.

Fast-forward to the present, and convergence has become commonplace. There are all sorts of PVR (Personal Video Recorder) products on the market, the best known being Tivo, which offer far more utility than mere “internet on your TV”. With these products, internet-on-TV is a given; what the new products bring is the ability to record TV broadcasts onto a hard-disk for later viewing, the ability to view digital photo collections on TV, and to rip CD collections to mass-storage (a big hard-disk) for convenient listening without all the hassles of shuffling, storing, cleaning and cataloguing all those CD’s and CD cases. The only problem is deciding which technology to choose.

In my most recent edition of PC Magazine, the front page topic is about HDTV. HDTV technology and the shift to LCD PC monitor technology have accelerated the evolution of convergence. Before HDTV became commonplace, TV resolution was terrible compared to the resolution of PC monitors. Now that the technology is shared between the two, making it easy to view TV on your computer, or vice-versa, displaying PC output on your TV.

If you have a modern computer with decent specs and a large hard-drive, preferably 500 Gbytes or more, without too much effort or cost you can build your own Media Center PC which will nearly match the capabilities of a Tivo set-top. You need two things; a TV tuner card and an upgrade to Windows Media Center Edition. The windows upgrade provides you with a nifty remote control unit which will put all your entertainment center functions on your TV screen. Alternatively, you can buy a Media Center computer which has been designed specifically for placing with your existing stereo components; some are even rack-mounted systems which will blend right in with your existing components. One example is the Niveus Media Center (http://www.niveusmedia.com).

So there you are; an over-simplified guide (due to my word-quota restrictions each week for this column) to the world of Convergence. If it captures your imagination, try googling “PVR” or “DVR” on your computer.

The high-tech world of skis

Let’s take a break from business technology and celebrate the snow! Wow – what a fantastic opening season! We’ll take a look at ski technology for this week’s topic.

Skis and snowboards have benefited greatly from advancement in high-tech modern materials, some manufacturers even incorporate microchip technology, to the great advantage of us wanna-be super-hero powder hounds and weekend warriors. Thanks to these advancements in technology, it is now easier than ever to ski or snowboard like a pro. It goes without saying that since the advent of “shaped” skis, a design innovation evolved from snowboard design, beginners more rapidly become intermediates, and intermediates more readily master the perfect carved turn.

Head Ski Co seems like one of the top technology innovators, and also happens to be one of my favorite ski manufacturers. Head has a few key technologies worth highlighting, namely Intelligence technology, incorporating “smart” fibers, a microchip in the premium models, Liquid Metal and SuperFrame construction. According to Head’s website, the Intellifiber technology is a kind of energy feedback system. The fibers react to mechanical energy; the flex of the ski can generate up to 400 volts of electrical energy, and this energy is fed back into the fibers, causing them to stiffen, thereby reducing torsional flex and increasing edge grip with the snow. Head’s premium ski models also incorporate a microchip, whereby the electrical energy produced by the Intellifibers is not just recycled, but accumulated and released bit by bit through a pre-programmed chip – individually timed to match the oscillation properties of the ski.

To describe Liquidmetal technology, Head’s website gives us a physics lesson, and describes the differences between water and ice as a way to describe how Liquidmetal works. Quoting directly from the site, “Water and ice are the same material – H2O. Water is H2O’s liquid state, ice is the solid state. The molecules in ice are in a fixed array, with more distance between the molecules and thus, less dense than the free-moving molecules in water.” Presumably, this means that Liquidmetal has a liquid-like molecular structure which cannot break, and does not break down with use.

It is highly unlikely that the average skier is consciously aware of all these physics principles at work while blasting down the couloirs, or racing down the groomers, but if the sport is easier and more pleasurable as a result, who cares? Expert skiers can feel the difference this technology provides, and will settle for nothing less. It’s kind of like the increasingly popular “active handling” of modern cars, perhaps not noticeable to the average driver, however indispensable to the driver who likes to push the limits.

Most ski manufacturers now integrate ski design with binding design, and nearly all ski models now have a “floating” binding bed. Instead of simply bolting the toe and heel of the bindings directly to the ski, which until recently was the norm, modern bindings are secured with a single screw in the center. The toe and heal slide on a rail as the ski flexes, allowing the ski to maintain a perfect arced shape as load is placed on the ski, providing a superior carve.

Go grab a set of these fantastic, modern boards, and shred like never before!

Getting high tech in business has never been cheaper

For anyone wanting to start a business, there is no better time from the perspective of cost. Thanks to the booming economy of China, the production of most electronic consumer goods, like PC’s, has moved offshore. Dell, Acer, Gateway, even IBM computers, all bear the label “made in China” now. It is now possible to have a fully equipped, computerized office, with a powerful PC, 17” flat panel monitor, and color multifunction printer, the whole package costing south of $1000. A color laser printer, which only 5 years ago cost $6000 or more, can now be had for under $500.

When it comes to software, the news is even better – most of it is free these days. Except for Microsoft, which has managed to buck the trend and still charge exorbitantly for its software, it is now possible to obtain nearly all your essential software tools off the ‘net for zero cost. Even the cost of internet is cheap, so setting up an office is significantly less expensive than it would have been ten years ago, I would venture to guess one tenth as expensive.

With ubiquitous internet everywhere, suddenly there are an endless variety of online services that can also save money. Online banking, online recruiting, online payroll are all easy-to-use, cost-reducing services. Services like Vertical Response and Intellicontact provide sophisticated marketing tools for as little as $10 p/month. One of my customers brought to my attention a service she uses called Virtual Assistant, which is a contracted employee who does computer tasks from a home computer. The virtual assistant concept makes a great deal of sense – a worker that you use only when needed, a worker that does not need to be supplied with a computer or workspace, who invoices only for work done (no payroll hassles), a worker that does not need to be provided benefits. The virtual assistant can work from any town, or indeed any country. Virtual assistants are not paid for cigarette breaks, sick days, powder days, whatever, and can be fired and replaced without hassle. My customer claims that virtual assistants are a higher caliber worker because they don’t need to be trained to use computers; this is a given. Virtual assistants usually have an entrepreneurial mindset too – if they aren’t good at their work, they won’t have any. The virtual assistant enjoys many benefits too – no commute, no transportation costs, no micro-managing boss; it’s a perfect fit for a stay-at-home parent. I just love win/win ideologies.

Most big businesses use Microsoft Exchange in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook and Blackberry devices. To set this up used to be very expensive because it involved the installation of dedicated file servers, expensive operating systems, expensive backup solutions, and expensive professional installation and configuration. Exchange Server systems usually require a full time IT staff to keep it humming along, and any downtime will cripple a company, as it strikes at the very heart of its communications. This type of system has also become virtualized, and now it is possible to use Exchange with a Hosted Exchange provider like AppRiver; all the server equipment and IT staff are already in place, and the user can “rent” Exchange on a monthly basis for as little as $20 p/month, and enjoy most of the same benefits as big corporations with deep pockets.

Don't waste time with networking problems

As we continue to investigate the role of technology in business, this week we’ll focus on computers, and describe a few simple things you can do to make you love your computing tools rather than hating them. It goes without saying that you need to protect your computers from virus and spyware infections, but I will say it anyway, and you should also be sure that you have a firewall of some kind to prevent unwanted intrusions.

Most small businesses, and many homes, have some kind of basic computer network with a shared internet connection, and though these small networks are pretty simple to set up, they are prone to failure for a variety of reasons. Internet failure is a very common problem, and it is usually very easy to fix, but most businesses panic and immediately call the help line. Use the “divide and conquer” methodology when troubleshooting this type of problem. If any type of failure is narrowed down to a single component, it is then very easy to diagnose. Learn to distinguish between your modem and your router and take a close look at the LED lights on each of these devices – they will often tell the whole story. If either of these devices has become unplugged (very common) or has a failed power supply, there will be no lights and the diagnosis is complete - plug it back in or replace the power supply. In general, lights solid-on is good, lights steady-blinking is bad. If all the lights are lit as expected, try unplugging the modem for 30 seconds. If this fails, unplug the router for 30 seconds, and try again. Check to see if all the computers are affected or just one. If only one computer fails to connect to the internet, it is probably not going to find shared files or printers on the network either, so now you can focus on the computer rather than the network. It’s all just common sense; don’t be afraid to solve your own problems.

Very often, computer networks are thrown together without giving any thought to cable management. There is nothing more frustrating for me than finding a mass of tangled, knotted network cables stuffed behind a desk, right next to a baseboard heater, with a bunch of cheap power bars interconnected to each other, and the modem and router just tossed into the tangle. This situation makes troubleshooting very tough, if not impossible, and is probably best approached by ripping the entire mess out and starting over. If your office is not pre-wired for networks, get an expert to make your wire runs so that they remain neat and tidy; troubleshooting, if ever necessary, becomes much easier and subsequently less expensive. Keep network cabling well away from baseboard heaters, or the cable will become brittle over time and ultimately fail. If your “computer guy” is confident that there is no problem with the cabling, he can very quickly troubleshoot a network problem. If the cabling is suspect, such as cable runs that lie next to heaters, intermittent symptoms are often the result, and they are a nightmare to troubleshoot.

Having a rock solid network with tidy cabling provides many benefits and ensures minimum down-time. Internet will be dependably delivered to all the computers on the network, and resources on one computer can dependably be shared by others. If you build your network on a well-designed, solid foundation, you can expand your network and add more computers with confidence; if you don’t, you’ll waste a lot of time wondering why they don’t work right. Time is money! Don’t waste it; have it done right from the beginning.

Making technology work for you — not vice-versa

As a computer consultant, I very often find myself privy to the frustrations and concerns of the many entrepreneurs and business owners in our community. Most of my clients are self-employed, and like me, few of them have any kind of formal training in business. In other words, they are just winging it. The results vary widely – some seem to have a natural gift for business, and do very well right out of the gate; others seem to be constantly putting out fires, juggling phone calls, expenses, customers, staff, payroll, appointments etc, without any clue how to prioritize. These people have let their businesses take control of their lives, and they merely react to the day’s events instead of doing what is important – growing their businesses.

One thing that stands out with most businesses is that their owners have little idea how to effectively utilize the technologies that they have invested in. I have some personal experience with this dilemma. My own store, which closed in 2003, was typical of a business which had taken control of its owner. Our phone traffic was a big problem; our phones rang so often and with such persistence, I found it very difficult to get anything useful done because the phones were constantly interrupting me. My ill-found solution was to purchase a very expensive, and as it turned out very cumbersome, phone system. It was a case of “I have a big problem, and I will spend whatever it takes to solve it”. Unfortunately, I was shooting from the hip, I did virtually no research, and I invested in the wrong solution. The vendor was inexperienced, and I was sold a system that was utterly unsuitable for my business. Additionally, the system never worked as expected, due to the inexperience of the installer. The result was that my customers began abandoning ship and taking their business to the competition, simply because their calls got lost and I never knew that they had been trying to contact us. I know now that that phone system cost me many times more than its very substantial cost.

Since closing my store, I made a decision to re-invent my business from the ground up, eliminate unnecessary expenses and distractions, take control of my finances, and focus on my core abilities. As a result, I have become more skilled at what I do, I have more time, I make more money, and I have virtually eliminated the stress that I believe was slowly killing me. I am happier, healthier, and more abundant than ever before.

Technology is a great interest of mine, and I utilize it to my advantage every day; however I have come to understand that many technologies are only vaguely understood by those who invest in them, and in many cases the technologies are hurting business-owners more than it is helping them.

My parents ran a Dairy Queen in the sixties and seventies, and there were no computers in those days. My mother kept all the records in the form of manual journals and ledgers, they had no email, no faxes, no book-keeping software, no voicemail, no cell phones, and they yet did just fine without all the technology available to us today. It’s one of those things that makes you go, “Hmmm”.

Next week we’ll continue with the topic of technology as a tool of business; meantime, if you have a story about how technology has helped you, or hindered you, please drop me a line.

Blessings and Hazards of Technology in Business

As a computer consultant, I very often find myself privy to the frustrations and concerns of the many entrepreneurs and business owners in our community. Most of my clients are self-employed, and like me, few of them have any kind of formal training in business. In other words, they are just winging it. The results vary widely – some seem to have a natural gift for business, and do very well right out of the gate; others seem to be constantly putting out fires, juggling phone calls, expenses, customers, staff, payroll, appointments etc, without any clue how to prioritize. These people have let their businesses take control of their lives, and they merely react to the day’s events instead of doing what is important – growing their businesses.

One thing that stands out with most businesses is that their owners have little idea how to effectively utilize the technologies that they have invested in. I have some personal experience with this dilemma. My own store, which closed in 2003, was typical of a business which had taken control of its owner. Our phone traffic was a big problem; our phones rang so often and with such persistence, I found it very difficult to get anything useful done because the phones were constantly interrupting me. My ill-found solution was to purchase a very expensive, and as it turned out very cumbersome, phone system. It was a case of “I have a big problem, and I will spend whatever it takes to solve it”. Unfortunately, I was shooting from the hip, I did virtually no research, and I invested in the wrong solution. The vendor was inexperienced, and I was sold a system that was utterly unsuitable for my business. Additionally, the system never worked as expected, due to the inexperience of the installer. The result was that my customers began abandoning ship and taking their business to the competition, simply because their calls got lost and I never knew that they had been trying to contact us. I know now that that phone system cost me many times more than its very substantial cost.

Since closing my store, I made a decision to re-invent my business from the ground up, eliminate unnecessary expenses and distractions, take control of my finances, and focus on my core abilities. As a result, I have become more skilled at what I do, I have more time, I make more money, and I have virtually eliminated the stress that I believe was slowly killing me. I am happier, healthier, and more abundant than ever before.

Technology is a great interest of mine, and I utilize it to my advantage every day; however I have come to understand that many technologies are only vaguely understood by those who invest in them, and in many cases the technologies are hurting business-owners more than it is helping them.

My parents ran a Dairy Queen in the sixties and seventies, and there were no computers in those days. My mother kept all the records in the form of manual journals and ledgers, they had no email, no faxes, no book-keeping software, no voicemail, no cell phones, and they yet did just fine without all the technology available to us today. It’s one of those things that makes you go, “Hmmm”.

Next week we’ll continue with the topic of technology as a tool of business; meantime, if you have a story about how technology has helped you, or hindered you, please drop me a line.

Starting a Business from Scratch

Entrepreneurs are a unique breed. They are people who have decided to buck the status quo and quit working for somebody else. Most have acquired some type of marketable skill, and have come to believe that their bosses are exploiting their skills and making most of the dough. Rarely is this the case, but it’s a common perception. So they bravely quit their jobs and optimistically announce their new business idea to family and friends. This is a frail first phase, and human nature being what it is, family and friends, with the best of intentions, may knock down the dream before it gets off the ground.

If the would-be entrepreneur can handle the probable initial negativity, she will bravely go out and start her own business. She is confident of her skills, but she has no idea how to handle the other myriad aspects of running a business. She will need to learn about advertising, marketing, hiring staff, understanding contracts, legal considerations etc. Many business startups ignore the single most important first step, and that is to find a paying customer. A few years ago, a friend of mine came up with an original but unproven business idea, and he was determined to hire an accountant and a lawyer before doing anything else. He essentially had decided to take on two major expenses without ever proving that his business concept was viable. He didn’t understand the most critical first step in starting a business – finding a customer. If you can find someone who is willing to pay you for your skills, you are well on your way – the other challenges of running a business are important but secondary.

Another important aspect of succeeding in business is to be unafraid to fail. I would venture to say that it is absolutely impossible to run a successful business without first experiencing some failure. Failure is a bonafide, essential component of success. Without failure there is no way to learn the right way. Scientists, inventors and athletes are all well aware of this. If you are strong enough to endure failure, sooner or later you will succeed. Don’t be afraid to copy others who are successful.

Something to be wary of is the temptation of the get-rich-quick fantasy. I don’t know how many MLM’s I have been lured into, believing the righteous promoters (who usually have no money to quantify their claims) who will promise the world. If you become wealthy in MLM, you’re one in a million, and those aren’t good odds.

But if you have a skill that’s in demand, and a relentless urge to become your own boss, there is nothing more rewarding than running your own business. It is deeply satisfying if you can get past the initial hurdles.

A great way to start is to launch a home-based business, but don’t quit your day job right away. With a home-based business you can get started right away without spending a fortune. You likely already own a telephone and a computer, maybe a fax machine as well. Try to avoid selling products to begin with, sell your skills. That way you eliminate the cost of inventory, which can overburden your business in very short order, particularly if you find that you can’t sell the products you’ve bought. Add products to the mix (cautiously) as your SERVICE business takes off. Control your spontaneous tendencies, and carefully think through each step as you grow your business.

Next week we’ll take a closer look at some of the finer points of running a small business, and we’ll examine the role of technology and its relevance in the small business environment.

Keeping Tabby Safe - and Indoors

I apologize for veering off-topic for this week’s column, but I feel I need to offer an unofficial public service announcement about cats. On Friday October 20th, I let our cat Maxi out for the night; this is when she insists on her nature visits. If we don’t let her out at night, she howls and protests and keeps us awake, so we always felt there was no other choice but to let her out. Unfortunately, last Friday was the last time we saw her.

On Sunday, we went to WAG to see if our kitty had been reported or turned in, but alas, she is still missing. The folks at WAG, after letting us vent about our unfortunate loss, gave us some insight about how to look after cats in Whistler. We haven’t entirely given up hope, but it seems that many people in Whistler are missing their cats right now, and the cause is pretty much certain – coyotes are the culprit. The two women who greeted us at the WAG reception desk, Wendy Wahl and Joanne Russell, were incredibly sympathetic to our plight, and they gave us some very good information that we wish we had known before our cat went missing. I have decided to repeat some of their pearls of wisdom in this column so that others may avoid losing a beloved furry family member.

The first and most important lesson we learned is that Whistler cats should be trained to be indoor cats only. Until Sunday, I had always been fervently opposed to the idea of keeping cats inside, partly because all the cats I have ever owned have been allowed to go outside. I always felt that it was part of their nature to go out and explore and play in the great outdoors. Of course, there was also the rather selfish expectation that letting a cat out was a way to reduce the chore of maintaining the cat litter box.

Wendy and Joanne patiently explained to us that cats, by their nature, need to chase things. It may seem obvious that cats like to chase things, but by spending a little time playing with your cat and offering it some toys to chase, the outdoor chasing instinct can be supplanted with a little human play time. So if you are thinking of adopting a feline, you should expect to spend some time programming it to chase things that are inside your house. It was surprising to learn that a great deal of research has been done about modifying cat behavior, and training a cat to be an indoor cat takes about 2 weeks. There may be some cat-protesting that goes on during that two weeks, but if don’t want your kitty to become a wild animal’s next meal, take the time to program your cat to stay inside.

I don’t know much about coyotes, but apparently they are extremely cunning animals and they are very adept at hunting in numbers. They work as a team and they gang up on their prey. No matter how athletic or nimble your cat may be, it is no match for a pack of intelligent, hungry carnivores. Our neighbor told us that she witnessed her border collie get “rolled” by a coyote in broad daylight just the other day. Fortunately her dog got away unscathed, but be aware that dogs are targets too.

I really want to thank the folks at WAG, particularly Wendy and Joanne, for their empathy and insightful information last Sunday. If your cat has gone missing, fire up your computer and print some posters of your cat and distribute them around town; apparently there is a 40% chance you might get it back again. Not great odds, but enough to give us all a little hope. And if you don’t get your cat back, train your next cat to stay indoors so that it may live a long and healthy life.

Please let me know if our petite gray tabby shows up on your doorstep. She is/was an Emerald resident.

Windows Vista Conclusions

This concludes my Windows Vista Experiment. Last week I took the plunge and upgraded my computer with more RAM (1 Gbyte), and suddenly Vista burst into life. With 1 Gbyte RAM, Vista zips along very nicely – even with the Aero interface enabled. My graphics card is quite basic and shares system RAM, which is why my system bogged down with the Aero interface enabled. Systems with high-end graphics cards, like the kinds used by gaming enthusiasts, will probably run OK with only 512Mb of system RAM. However, my graphics card worked fine once the RAM was upgraded. I was wrong to say Vista is slow – it isn’t. Just remember one word – RAM.

One of the really great new features of Vista is the search tool. A few years ago, Apple Computer introduced their Tiger OS, which had a search tool named Spotlight - a search far superior to that of Windows XP. Microsoft has responded with Vista’s new Desktop Search. The search window is now the very first item above the Start button, and when you begin typing the search term, the results appear instantaneously as you type. The new tool not only searches for file names, but also content within files, email subject lines, and email content; all of this at speeds that will astonish. Add to this the ability to do Boolean searches, (the use of “and” and “or” to link search words) and this new search tool really shines; now you can find the item that you need in a fraction of a second. It’s one of those things that you didn’t think you needed until you try it, then find that you cannot live without it.

Vista has upgraded Internet Explorer, an upgrade which is long overdue. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has taken a fairly large market share away from Explorer, mainly because it’s a safer browser and resists spyware infections much more effectively than Explorer 6.0; add to this a few extras that Explorer hasn’t offered in the past, the most obvious of which is the tabbed browsing feature. The new Explorer, version 7, is reported to be much more robust in terms of security features, and also includes tabbed browsing (see a pattern here? Microsoft is not so much an innovator as it is an imitator; when other software companies innovate, Microsoft simply copies the concept. Microsoft has been doing this since MS-DOS, which itself was based on QDOS, and Microsoft bought it from a university student).

Vista includes a new thing called a Sidebar, and in the sidebar are things called Gadgets. With the Sidebar, your favourite Gadgets are readily available as an integrated part of your Windows Desktop. Vista offers eleven Gadgets to start, and more are available from Microsoft’s website. I’m sure that other software vendors will offer many more. The Gadgets I chose are Weather, a Calendar, a CPU and Memory meter, an RSS news feed, a Google Search box, an analog clock, and a Currency Converter.

Speech recognition has been around for many years now, usually as an add-on, but in my experience, very few people actually use it. Anyhow, Windows Vista has it.

In conclusion, I’d say that Vista will be a worthy successor to Windows XP, which is growing old and is ready for retirement. If you are thinking of buying a new computer in 2007, it will most likely have Windows Vista; if you want to upgrade your existing computer, just make sure that it is no older than a year or two, or you’ll likely be disappointed with performance. Vista is nice, but it’s a bit piggy.

Windows Vista Experimentation Continued

Windows Vista is still not ready for primetime. It is however, an interesting new Windows, and it does have some interesting features of merit. In my last column, I gave a few first impressions of the Operating System, the most aggravating of which was its slowness; however, I suspected that the new Aero interface, which relies heavily on advanced graphics capabilities of the higher end video graphics cards, was in fact the culprit in making my system seem slow. The Aero interface is really just a bit of flashiness, making windows appear translucent over the background picture. With just a basic graphics adapter, however, it just sucks the life out of the processor, and every task becomes an agonizing chore. Fortunately, it is easy to turn off, and once I switched to the “Windows Classic” theme, the OS became much faster. With more RAM, which is planned, I am sure the speed will become quite respectable.

When Vista is officially launched, it will be offered in five different flavors; Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate. The pre-release beta version offered by Microsoft is the Vista Ultimate, which has all features of each of the others wrapped up into one, including Windows Media Centre. Microsoft has changed the way it sells its various versions; for example if you start with Windows Home Basic, and then decide that you want to upgrade to Vista Business, you can use your credit card and download the upgrade from the web. This really makes a lot of sense, and allows users to continually upgrade until they have the feature set they want, without losing their original investment.

The computer with which I am experimenting with has an AMD Athlon 64 processor, which is a 64 bit CPU, and Windows Vista is the first 64 bit operating system I have experienced. I was hoping for increased speed and stability, but I was disappointed. I guess it’s a matter of waiting for some 64 bit applications to come to market. I was impressed by the speed of MS Office XP, which was slow to install and crashed the system on the first install attempt– a crash so severe that I got the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death); there is no recovering from this type of crash without turning off the computer completely and starting again. Once I got Office successfully installed, it runs noticeably faster than it does on Windows XP, despite the fact that this version of Office is only a 32 bit application.

Probably the most exciting feature, from my own personal standpoint, is a new bundled program called Windows Photo Gallery. This is so superior to the previous Windows Explorer photo feature-set, the old system seems almost annoying by comparison. I have been using Google’s Picasa photo organizing software, and it looks like Microsoft has been paying attention. Photo Gallery looks like a copy of Picasa, but with more and better features. Now you can tag all your photos with categories you devise for yourself; for example, you could have your photos organized by labels such as Friends, Mountain Scenes, Parties, Holidays, Children, Pets etc. You can also tag all your photos with a one-to-five star rating system. Then it’s a simple matter to look up your photos by whichever category you choose, saving much time if you have a lot of photos.

One thing I was very glad to see was the inclusion of Remote Desktop in Vista Ultimate, though it wasn’t a real surprise. Remote Desktop is still the fastest, best remote control method I have ever used, and it works great with Vista.

The next step for me is to load Simply Accounting and begin using Vista as my daily workspace. Stay tuned for more discoveries as I learn more about this exciting new OS.

Windows has gained some weight

Windows Vista RC1 is the official Pre-release version of the next major update of Microsoft Windows, due out in January of next year. Without too much effort, anybody can apply to become a Beta tester of Vista, and I decided to take the plunge; after all, as a Windows expert, I decided it was probably not a bad idea to get a head start, because soon the whole world will be using Vista.

The first step, after signing up to become a beta tester, was to download the DVD image and create the Vista installation disc. The image is 3.9Gbytes, and the download took about six hours on my ADSL account. After the image had finished downloading, the next step was to burn the image to a DVD (CD’s are rapidly becoming obsolete as DVD-RW’s have become the norm). I had decided to use my home desktop computer, which I recently acquired from Futureshop for $450, for the upgrade, and not my laptop; I depend on my laptop as my daily computer and I didn’t want to risk messing it up. I did, however, use the DVD burner in my laptop to create the install disc, and this provided me with my first challenge in the process… The new install disc booted as expected, but then told me that I needed a special driver for my DVD drive. This was a surprise, as windows has not required any special drivers for CD or DVD drives for many years, they are automatically recognized. After some reading on the Microsoft Vista forums, I decided to try reburning the image using my other DVD burner, the one on the actual machine being upgraded; lo and behold, this solved the problem.

Before installing Vista, I used Partition Magic to create a new 20 Gbyte partition in which to install Vista, and make my PC dual-bootable, maintaining my old Windows XP configuration in case the new Windows experiment failed; I would advise other experimenters to do the same. After that, installation of Vista took about an hour, which is a bit longer than it would take Windows XP. The installation wizard was easy, the only questions asked are the desired name of the computer, and what username and password to use. Strangely, after taking so much flak for its security flaws, Microsoft still does not force the use of a password – a real no-no. This is one of the major differences between Windows and Linux; you cannot create an account in Linux without a password, one of the reasons Linux is still more secure than anything Microsoft has to offer.

The first boot after installation was painfully slow, it took about another half hour for Vista to configure itself for first use. This came as no real surprise, I remember Windows XP did the same way back when, and Windows 2000 before that… the best explanation for this is that current low-cost hardware is fine for XP, but not really enough for Vista, and the next generation of processors and other hardware will run it just fine. Also, my machine has a paltry 512Mb of RAM, which is listed by Microsoft as the minimum for Vista.

After Vista finally settled down and presented itself to me for the first time, the first thing I really noticed was the speed, or lack of – that is to say, with only 512Mb of RAM, Vista is sloooww. Again, my first impression of Windows XP was the same 6 years ago, but as the hardware caught up, Windows XP started to seem snappy – I’m sure the same will be true for Vista. Next week, I’ll give you the low-down on the features of Vista and whether they really are worth all the fuss.

TIVO - Peace in TV Remote Land

Anybody with a family and cable TV is likely familiar with the “battle for the remote”. Until Tivo the only solution was to place multiple TV’s in different rooms throughout the house, and each family member can then watch their favourite show in isolation, without a family battle. Perhaps this is why the modern family unit is so screwed up, but I won’t get into that. Probably the best solution is to throw your TV out the window and actually talk to each other, but if TV has entrenched itself in your life, then perhaps you should consider Tivo.

A friend of ours was telling us about her Tivo, which I hadn’t really known much about until a few days ago, but this is an interesting device. Tivo is yet another “set-top box”, and it takes up where the venerable VCR left off, and does what a DVD player simply cannot do – record TV shows. However Tivo has taken TV recording to a higher level – with Tivo you can watch a TV show in real time, pause the action while you take a phone call, record another program or even several programs at the same time, and fast-forward through commercials. Tivo also has an idiot-proof on-screen guide which also incorporates a search engine, allowing you to search for your favorite programs by genre, actor name, show name, director name etc. You can also refine your programming so that, for example, you can specify that you only want to watch first-run programs, never repeats. Tivo has partnered with TV Guide, so that you never have to thumb through a paper copy again. All TV Guide’s listings are available through the Tivo interface up to two weeks in advance, so you can set your Tivo unit to record anything you want that is available on TV Guide. With the Season’s Pass feature, you get your favorite series to record for its duration, giving you the power to go beyond TV Guide’s two week ahead limitations. As a Soprano’s fan myself, this would have been a great thing to have last year, as I always wanted to watch it but couldn’t because the language wasn’t appropriate for our nine-year-old. I wound up missing most of the final season last year because of this.

Another cool feature of Tivo is the ability to join your computer network. This means that you can connect Tivo to any of your household computers and use it to view photos or play music that resides on one or all of your PC’s; now you can show your photo collection on your TV, or play your MP3 music collection over your Hi Fi system. I have never actually tried Tivo, but I am already convinced that I cannot live without it.

Microsoft has done what it does best and stolen the Tivo concept by introducing a new version of Windows XP, called Windows Media Center Edition, which does exactly the same thing as Tivo and even trumps Tivo with a few tricks of its own. By adding a computer with Windows MCE to your entertainment system, you can actually burn recorded programs onto a DVD, and you can run the computer on your TV if you want to. It’s a neat trick, but I wonder if it’s really necessary, as anybody with Tivo will have a computer anyway.

The whole secret to all of this is the ubiquitous availability of Hard-Disk storage. Hard-disks are so big and so cheap, that they can be used to record many hours of TV, something only dreamed of even five years ago. For more information on the Tivo phenomenon, visit www.tivo.com.

Tips for Organizing Your Digital Photos

Since acquiring my first digital camera three years ago, and a further two digital cameras since then (not counting the one in my cell phone), I have taken close to 6000 pictures. Since I no longer have to worry about film processing costs for “dud” pictures, I have become very experimental and snap-happy. My color multifunction inkjet printer cost around $200, and it prints absolutely amazing color photos. I now have at my disposal all the equipment necessary to take unlimited photos, without paying any penalty for over-exposed, out-of-focus, or just boring photos, and I can print the photos I want to keep, right in the comfort of my own home.

Ironically, I still don’t have any picture albums or framed photos in my house – all my pictures, duds included, are all stored on my home computer, my laptop, or my Nurturing Loving Partner’s computer. Additionally, probably two thirds of all the pictures that I have religiously moved to my computers are worthless to me in terms of sentimental or artistic value. This week I decided to take control of this situation and start weeding out all the bad and uninteresting photos from my collections, and make prints of the photos that I really like so I can start making scrap-books. This laborious exercise has taught me a few things for the future, and so I am passing along what I have learned for the benefit of those just embarking on their digital photography adventures.

The first thing I have learned is that it would have been much easier to organize my photos if I deleted the bad ones right away, before moving them to the computer. Deleting 4000 photos out of 6000 (two thirds of all my photos) is a lot of work and very time-consuming! The bad photos take up a lot of hard-drive space, and as they are deleted one by one, my hard-disk becomes more and more fragmented. Lesson? Delete bad photos the same day you take them. Delete them right off the camera if you know the photo you have just taken is no good. It will save you a lot of time when you start your scrap-booking project.

The second thing I learned is to get a card-reader for your computer. A card reader offers many advantages over connecting your camera to your computer, namely, you don’t deplete the batteries on your camera as you transfer photos, you don’t need to load any additional software, you can view and delete before transferring, and you can readily grab the great photos from your friend’s camera which has a different card type. Card readers are a must-have accessory, and cost about $35.

Weeding through 6000 photos is difficult enough, but without good organizing software, it is more like a nightmare. Using standard Windows folders to view and sort is so cumbersome, you might just give up on the whole project and your photos will be imprisoned in your computer forever. Google’s free Picasa software is a great solution to this problem, and it makes organizing fun and easy. It also offers an easy to use red-eye tool for on-the-fly editing. For more difficult editing tasks, you might think you need to spend several hundred dollars on Photoshop – but you don’t. PhotoPlus 6 by Serif Software is free, it will work for practically all your advanced editing needs, and it’s easier to use.

Now - go take some pictures - lots of pictures!

Mass Emailing for Marketing Your Business

Mass-emailing campaigns are a legitimate way to market a product or a newsletter, but with the massive, chronic problem of spam, mass-mailings have gotten a bad name. These days, the way legitimate companies do mass-mailings is to send their message only to subscribers who have voluntarily signed up, or “opted in” for the service. To do this, marketers had to purchase expensive, complicated mass-mailing programs, and tie up their own computers to do the mailing. It was always a big hassle, and with programs like Outlook, all the subscribers get is a plain text message, which is not especially eye-grabbing.

Many people who attempt an email campaign try to use Outlook or Outlook Express to send out the message, by cc’ing everybody in his address book. In most cases the email hosting company will block the campaign because it has been identified as a mass-mailing, which these days has the reputation of being a BAD THING (because of spam), and mail-hosting companies don’t allow it. In addition to this, Outlook-type programs aren’t very good at mass-mailings, because they only offer rudimentary tools, and are extremely complex to use for this purpose.

As with so many things computer-related these days, the process has undergone a good deal of refinement, and products are getting not only better but also cheaper. Fortunately for companies wishing to send out product announcements or newsletters to their database of customers, the process of sending out a mass-mailing is now very simple to do, and also very cheap.

A friend of mine, who is always on the lookout for ways to market his company and send his customers offers and newsletters, turned my attention the other day to company called Vertical Response (http://www.verticalresponse.com/). This product is truly amazing; it makes the process of designing and sending mass-emails so easy and fast that anybody can do it. Once subscribed, the mailer uses a control panel in his web-browser that takes the user through the process of designing the message, importing the email addresses from the company database or address book, creating subscriber lists, and using templates of previous campaigns as the basis for the next one, eliminating most of the work of starting from scratch each time. All campaigns are saved and can be repeated at will, or slightly modified and sent to a different subscriber list. All the templates include an opt-out offer, which cannot be omitted, allowing the subscriber to unsubscribe at any time. The pre-designed templates are excellent; the finished results are HTML formatted, and include all the elements of a well-designed web-page, including graphic images, background designs, etc.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of Vertical Response’s product is the outstanding statistical reporting that it provides. Once a campaign has been sent out, the marketer can then see how successful his campaign has been by viewing a web-stats page that will provide accurate percentage information about how many mails are successfully sent, opened, unsubscribed or bounced. If the campaign contains links, the stats will report the percentage of click-throughs.

Companies like Vertical Response are extremely cautious that this system does not get abused by spammers, and therefore include a very legal disclaimer about the product being misused, so don’t try to use this as a spam weapon. The law will bite you if you do. Vertical Response has a “no tolerance spam policy”, and complies with the CAN-SPAM act.

However if you need to reach your customer base with a legitimate, important message on a regular basis, Vertical Response is the best thing going.

Basic Steps Setting Up Your Wireless Router

Wireless routers are cheap and plentiful these days, and they are becoming commonplace in households and offices that have high speed internet. These gadgets allow people to distribute their high speed internet throughout their houses or offices, to as many PC’s as they wish, without the need for wires. They have been steadily improving in quality and declining in price in recent years, and from my experience they seem to work pretty reliably. Wireless routers can also be used to network PCs together so that files and printers can be shared without the need to run wires through walls, which is an expensive proposition. Most new notebook computers have wireless capability built-in, and desktop PC’s can have wireless cards added for about $50, so with the addition of a wireless router for around $80, wireless networks have become a tidy networking solution for buildings that do not have Ethernet wiring already integrated.

I have noticed that many people don’t bother to do any configuration with these devices. Out of the box wireless routers do not have any security turned on, and they will work with minimal configuration. Once turned on, wireless routers broadcast up to 200 feet or more, and anybody with a laptop can connect to an un-configured router without the owner’s permission and “borrow” the owner’s internet connection. This is generally a harmless crime, and most people will never know that someone is “borrowing” their internet connection. But bigger problems can occur by not securing your wireless router.

If the “borrower” is a music downloader, there is the risk that he will exceed the maximum bandwidth specified by many internet providers, such as Whooshnet. Once this bandwidth allowance has been exceeded, the provider may turn the high speed connection to a low speed one. Usually there is no warning when this occurs, you will just notice that one day your internet connection speed has reduced to a crawl for no apparent reason.

Another danger that can arise by not configuring your wireless router as secure is that your sensitive data can often be accessed, changed, infected or deleted by the uninvited poacher. As identity theft becomes a bigger threat to all of us, this is Not A Good Thing. There is generally no danger if the computers on the network have individual firewalls turned on, such as the Windows firewall that comes with Windows XP service pack 2, but many businesses turn off their software firewalls to enable file and printer sharing. Wireless routers themselves do provide firewall protection, but only from people on the “outside”. People connecting to your unsecured router are actually on the “inside” of your network, and often have free access to your shared network resources, if your software-based firewalls have been turned off.

The first step to a properly configured wireless network is to set a new password on the router’s configuration menu, and then the next step is to turn on encryption so that any would-be user must enter a 10 or 26 digit WEP or WPA hexadecimal code before they can access the network. This is a very simple procedure and takes less than five minutes to configure. I urge anybody who is considering purchasing a wireless router to thoroughly read the instructions or hire a pro before turning it on, or you will be opening yourself up to some unwanted visitors who may wreak havoc with your valuable personal data.

Wife-Like-Units and Motorcycle Waves

In past columns I have jokingly referred to my partner as my wife-like-unit, and several of my readers (more than 2) have enquired about whether or not she minds being called this, and all I can honestly say is that she goes along with it in good humor. However, it made me think about it, and I realize that it isn’t the most flattering of monikers. It was probably a joke that seemed funny at one time, but it doesn’t really cast her in a positive light. So please allow me to start over.

Regina is my hot, sexy, smart, kind, funny, generous Nurturing Loving Partner. How’s that? So from now on she shall be my Nurturing Loving Partner for future stories, or NLP because we computer guys love acronyms. I hope this is an improvement.

I really don’t have a story idea for this week, so I must resort to idle ramblings.

Anybody with a trace of observational ability will have noticed that a lot of guys on motorcycles wave at each other on the highway, even though they don’t know each other. It is so firmly established a tradition that no biker ever questions it, but I think the whole thing needs revision. I have been riding motorcycles for 28 years now, and I guess when I started I thought the wave was pretty cool, and I participated wholeheartedly. Today I am not so sure about the waving thing; there are so many bikers on the roads in summer, and I am not really sure I want to wave at all of them. I mean, what does it really mean? Does it mean, “Hey, I see you ride a bike! Same here! Hi!” or does it mean “Hey I’m a cool motorcycle dude, hang five brother”. A lot of it depends on your status as a biker too. A Harley rider is usually a purist who will only wave at another Harley guy, because if it’s not a Harley it’s not really a bike, that’s the rule with Harley guys. It must be confusing for them these days, with so many “Honda Davidson” and “YamaHarley” clones on the roads. They look the same, sound the same, are more reliable and better built, cost a quarter as much, but hey they are Harley rip-offs and therefore not real bikes. If I accidentally waved to you I didn’t mean to, rice-rocket!

I have always ridden Japanese bikes, mostly classic big bore Suzukis, but for the past five years I have been riding a dual-purpose dirt bike, because it allows me to explore logging roads and get to remote places fast. Oddly, when driving on the highway, this has promoted my status among the Harley guys, I get waves all the time now, but when I had my kickass Suzuki GS1100 tire-burner, I was lucky to get a mere nod. The rice-rockets are just flashy pests, but the dirt-bike seems to get some respect. Strange.

I have noticed a huge increase in the number of female riders on the roads these days. They don’t seem to have the need to wave at each other like guys do – why is this? Is it because the fairer sex are less egotistical and don’t need to do the wave thing? I get the feeling that the secret message among female riders is “hey sister, cool you’re on a bike, but I ain’t waving cuz that’s just a ridiculous ego-prop for boys”.

Anyhow, I am tired of waving, I don’t initiate the wave, and I usually don’t wave back either, although sometimes the automatic wave reflex takes over. Don’t take it personally, great that you ride a motorcycle too, but I don’t think it’s really necessary to continually congratulate ourselves about it.

Taking a Look at Control 4 Home Automation

Home Automation has been an empty promise for many years – either it was too expensive or it was based on X-10, which is really more of a toy than a serious standard. The serious players in the home automation market are companies such as Lutron, which is primarily a lighting control company, and AMX, which manufactures LCD touch panels. These panels allow for control over lighting, audio, security, and other functions such as watering etc. However, if you want to equip your home with high-end home automation products from these established companies, expect to spend a king’s ransom.

There is a new home automation manufacturer that blends state-of-the-art technology with very reasonable pricing, and the company’s name is Control 4. This company has brought together Lighting, Audio, TV and Security into one component that fits right in with your existing home entertainment system. With this system comes a very well-designed remote control that replaces all your other myriad remote controls.

Depending on how fancy you want to get with this system, you can replace all your existing light switches with Control 4 “smart” switches that can be programmed to do just about anything one’s imagination can come up with. For example, let’s say you want to be able to walk into your living room, touch a button on the wall, and with that single action have the TV turn on, the channel set to the news, the fireplace come on, and the lights all dimmed except the one over your reading chair. A little later on perhaps you’d like the ability to touch another single button on the wall, and have all the lights in the entire house shut off after ten minutes, or whatever given period of time (so you have time to get to bed) and have the security system set to armed. These scenarios are a piece of cake for Control 4.

The Control 4 remote is an exceptional design, finally a remote control that is not only easy to understand, but one that will literally do anything you can think of. The only requirement is that the Control 4 base unit be programmed with the functionality that you want. The remote looks similar to other remotes, but with one very important button in the center, the only button that is colored bright red with the logo 4 printed in the center. If none of the other buttons make any sense, just press this button and your confusion evaporates. The red button evokes your TV screen to display a simple menu, with these offerings: Control Lights, Watch TV, Play Music, Watch a Movie, among others. Around the red button on the remote are the familiar directional arrows, and you simply move around the menu on the TV until you have selected what it is you want to do. Even better, the remote does not need to be “aimed” at the central unit, it can be used anywhere within the house.

The base unit comes with a CD-ROM and a hard-drive, allowing you to archive your entire collection of music onto the system. No more lost CD’s or stooping to reload your 5 disk player. Your entire collection is one red button away, and all the Artist/Album information is displayed on your TV.

Taking my Notebook on My Vacation

I just returned from a fabulous 4 day vacation up the Sunshine Coast. My wife-like-unit and I car-camped for 3 of the 4 nights and treated ourselves to a motel room in tiny Egmont on the second night. During the booking process (even campsites need to be booked ahead these days), I noticed that many of the places offered internet hook-up, even the tiny motel in Egmont, so I decided to bring along my laptop.

The internet at the Bathgate Motel turned out to be just a dial-up offering, but not to be deterred, I phoned Telus to find out what my local access number from Egmont would be. I was then given a temporary dial-up account (free, as I am already a Telus subscriber), so my dial-up modem was pushed into duty, something I thought I’d never do, because my laptop has all the latest wireless do-dads built in, and I never use anything but high speed these days. After about half an hour of dial-up access at the Bathgate Motel, I very much doubt if my dial-up modem will ever get used again. I don’t remember dial-up being this agonizingly slow back when that was all we had, but going back to it was like torture. I decided that bringing the laptop was a mistake, and stuffed it back into its bag.

But in the end the laptop proved to be quite useful for this holiday. My wife-like-unit has a very expensive digital camera with a massive zoom lens, but alas, a tiny memory card. I am a bit of a shutter bug, and I take pictures of everything. The 64Mb memory card in her camera was soon full, and I berated myself for not having purchased a bigger card for her camera. However, digging around in my laptop case I found that I had brought along my card-reader. So at the end of each day, I emptied the photos from the card onto my laptop and started each day again with a fresh card. The laptop allowed me to edit and purge right away, and another benefit was that during the course of our camping nights we had made some campsite friends, and at night we gave them a slideshow of our photos taken earlier that day. As all these benefits of the laptop became apparent, I came across a fellow camper who had filled up her card and was now stuck with no room to take pictures for the rest of her vacation. I offered to help her out by burning her photos onto a CD (yes, I actually had a few blank CD’s in my laptop case), and her brother-in-law and husband then insisted on keeping us supplied with beer from that moment on. Further proof that Karma works!

The last two nights we spent camping at the Pender Harbour Resort, a funky little campsite with trailer hook-ups, tenting spots, 3 Yurt huts, several cabins and a dock with boat and kayak rentals. Unbelievably, they also had free wireless internet, and the signal reached our little site without any problem. There was a small meeting room building next to our site, and I found within it an extension chord for recharging my trusty little laptop. Right about this time, my MP3 player battery died; no problem, I just plugged it into my laptop as it was charging up, and charged up my MP3 player at the same time.

Now you might be thinking that I spent the entire holiday staring at my computer – quite the contrary. We hiked, swam, explored, biked, paddled, watched a car show, drank copious amounts of beer with some new friends, and smoked a few cigars. And I took a whole bunch of photos. The laptop was just a handy extra, but I will be sure to bring it for my next vacation. See my vacation blog at: http://sunshinecoastholiday.blogspot.com

A Look at Blogs and Podcasts

Last week we explored the evolution of the internet to Web 2, and this week we’ll explore two more interesting internet developments, the Blog and the the Podcast.

The term Blog is the shortened form of the word Weblog, which is an online diary or journal. Before Blogs became popular, there were Usenet online communities, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS’s), and Internet Forums. BBS’s have more or less disappeared, and Usenet is a medium generally used by Universities and other intelligentsia, but Internet Forums are alive and well and in widespread public use. For those of you have an area of interest for which you want to share ideas, whether you are a car nut, a musician, a Linux geek, or a gardener, Internet Forums are the place to find answers and share your knowledge; I am a BIG user of Forums to get answers for everything from where to find parts for my Volvo, to how to find information for configuring a wireless card in Linux.

Blogs are online diaries consisting of text, pictures and links to other blogs or web resources. Many are topic specific, giving commentary on subjects such as news, politics, or food, while others are personal journals documenting a blogger’s personal life. Most blogs are chronologically reversed, with the most recent entries at the top, however the blogger is free to choose however he/she wants to display entries. At first I could not understand why anybody would want to air their dirty laundry publicly, but suddenly I found a reason to have my own blog, when last year I had a chance to reconnect with some British buddies I haven’t talked to for twenty five years, in fact not since we had all ridden bicycles together from Antibes, France to Corfu, Greece in 1981. Last year one of these guys went to the trouble of contacting each of us and suddenly we were all re-united by email. I decided that I would put together a blog documenting some of the highlights of my life in Whistler. I discovered that setting up a blog was dead easy with the free blog software provided by Google. Within a few days, I had a blog up and running, which greatly exaggerates my lifestyle, but my pals in England found it entertaining. You can view my blog at www.blixy.blogspot.com. Even my 83 year old dad has a blog, viewable at www.herryallix.blogspot.com. Set up your own blog, it’s free, and it’s fun!

Podcasts go one step further than Blogs, in that they allow anybody to produce their own online audio and/or video broadcasts. It is the modern equivalent of setting up your own private radio or TV station. The word Podcasting is a compound word, blending the words iPod with Broadcasting; the iPod reference is a bit of a misnomer, in that an iPod is not required for producing or hearing a podcast (however, it is possible to store a podcast on an iPod or any type of music player, using podcatcher software such as that offered by iTunes). Though podcasting is a relatively new term, with the first podcasts showing up in 2003, the concept has taken off and podcasts are everywhere. One can find a podcast dealing with any topic, ranging from politics to jokes, and then subscribe to that podcast via an RSS feed. Once subscribed, that podcast is then pushed to the user’s computer each time he runs his web-browser.

There is some fascinating stuff out there in blogland and podcast-land. For a good directory of both mediums, check out www.blogexplosion.com.

What is WEB 2.0 Anyway?

A new buzzword, Web 2.0, is starting to creep into our consciousness, and I have heard it often enough that I decided I had to investigate its true meaning. Wikipedia, increasingly my favourite look-up resource, defines Web 2.0 as, “a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online” (Interestingly, Wikipedia itself is a perfect example of Web 2.0, as it complies with the collaborative definition. All the content of Wikipedia is submitted by volunteers, and any content can be edited and updated by anybody who can be bothered to do so).

By contrast, Web 1.0, the original World Wide Web that kicked off the Dot Com revolution resulting in a few dazzling tech success stories, and also produced many more tech startups that crashed and burned. Web 1.0 was really the emergence of static web-pages and search engines that were really nothing more than a new advertising medium. Everybody piled on board, and suddenly every business, big or small, had a web-site that ranged from flashy, splashy and exciting to boring, dull and ugly. None of them really offered any kind of user participation, except perhaps a “contact us” email button.

Napster, the first music sharing service, was one of the first collaborative services available on the internet, so it would have qualified as a Web 2.0 application, but the term did not yet exist when Napster was launched. Napster originally employed a technique known as peer-to-peer file sharing, since copied by many others, Kazaa, Limewire, Gnutella and Grokster are other examples. What is technically interesting about peer-to-peer file sharing schemes is that it does not depend on a single server or group of servers; anybody with a file sharing program installed has unwittingly turned his/her machine into a virtual server, though many users don’t realize this. Songs which have been downloaded from somebody else are then “served” or passed on to other music downloaders. This makes for efficient use of internet bandwidth, in that a single song can patched together from many different sources simultaneously, instead of bogging down a single server somewhere trying to cope with hundreds or thousands of download requests. More recently, for really large files such as those used to create entire CD images, BitTorrent is the new champion of peer-to-peer filesharing.

Although eBay has been around longer than the term Web 2.0, it is also a reasonable example of a Web 2.0 application. One of the things that ensures a good experience for purchasers of eBay items is the Feedback Rating system. Purchasers of items are asked to give either positive or negative feedback on their purchasing experience. If buyers post more than 5% negative feedback, the seller will not survive for long on eBay; buyers have shaped a marketplace that has virtually eliminated shifty, lazy or dishonest vendors. The simple idea of having customers participate in the eBay marketplace by posting a comment has fundamentally changed the way we shop, and has turned eBay into one of the most successful internet businesses in the world.

There is not enough space to cover the entire topic of Web 2.0 in just one column; if you want to find out more about it, and the future direction of the internet, search Google or Wikipedia with the search term “Web 2”. Next week we’ll explore the new children of Web 2.0, Blogs and Podcasts.

The Importance of Backups

Perhaps the biggest area of neglect for PC users is the regular data backup. The modern hard-disk is a miracle of reliability; never-the-less all hard-disks eventually fail or wear out, and so the question is not IF one will experience data loss, but WHEN. A typical PC user doesn’t bother with backups until he/she experiences the loss of vital data. It’s like flossing your teeth – it’s a pain in the ass (mouth?) to do, but if you don’t want to lose your teeth it is something you probably should do. It’s called preventative maintenance.

Another problem with backing up is that, until quite recently, it has been difficult to implement. In the old days, it meant purchasing a tape drive, which were notoriously unreliable, and the tape media extremely expensive. With time, wear and dust accumulation, they eventually stopped working without warning their owners. Backup procedures often seemed unnecessarily complicated also; software vendors were terrible at explaining the differences between full, incremental or differential backups. Often in my career I have been called to restore data from a tape drive, only to deliver the unfortunate news that the backup hasn’t worked for past 8 months, or perhaps a year or even longer. Usually accounting data is lost – this is a true catastrophe for any business.

Fortunately backing up has become much easier since the advent of CD-Burner and DVD-Burner as standard equipment. The DVD-Burner is better as it holds much more data than the older CD format. Combined with backup software such as BackupMyPC or Cobian Backup (another example of great free software), this can be quite a good solution.

If you have more data than can reasonably fit on a CD or DVD, another very popular solution is the portable hard-disk. These are very handy and easy to attach, and they will connect to Windows 2000 or Windows XP without special device-drivers. Most of these devices come with bundled backup software, and 80Gbyte units can be purchased for around $100. These make sense for backup as they can be taken offsite after-hours, providing extra protection. This is another thing to consider, data loss is not always caused by hardware failure; taking backup data offsite daily adds that extra protection against fire and theft.

Another very feasible method of backup is to copy data to another PC on your network. Although not likely to protect against fire or theft, it is a great way to start doing backups without having to purchase any new hardware. Chances are there is already heaps of unused hard-disk space existing on one of your networked computers. If you are a home user with a tight budget and no network, another option is to bring that old attic PC back to life, or go and pick up a second computer at the re-use it centre for under $50, create a network, and copy your data to the spare machine every day. Caveat – be sure to start with a “clean” windows install! You don’t even need the clutter of an extra keyboard, mouse and monitor – you can run the box without these extras, or better, you can use a KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch, which allows you to share your existing keyboard, monitor and mouse with a second computer. I depend heavily on mine for repairing computers. An excellent model is the Linksys ProConnect KVM, available for about $80

For more information about backing up using a networked computer, see the excellent article, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1938267,00.asp. Start backing up your prized data today – with so many options, you are out of excuses!

Hybrid Cars

There’s a saying that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but in the case of Hybrid vehicles, this definitely is not true. We are all aware that there are concerns about our global, insatiable thirst for fossil fuels (to run our cars primarily), and that we are harming the environment with the resulting emissions. Hybrid vehicles are here to answer that call.

Purely electric cars never really caught on because they required massive batteries that required long charging periods, and they had a limited range which prevented drivers from going any great distance. They were also not particularly powerful, and definitely not sexy. Hybrid cars have been cleverly designed to marry traditional internal combustion engines with electric engines, and although details differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, they all work in pretty much the same way. The first vehicles to appear with Hybrid drive trains were the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius. GM now also produces hybrid trucks, and all the other major manufacturers all have plans to introduce hybrid models in the next year or two.

The “cake” is that these vehicles get exceptional gas mileage; the “eat it too” is that they are very low emission vehicles, and they are also quite sporty and powerful. Here is how it works: Hybrids tend to work as electric cars in the city for stop and start driving tasks, and the combustion engine starts only when the battery is getting depleted, or when extra acceleration is needed. The nice thing about Hybrids is that you can benefit from the electric motor power and the internal combustion power simultaneously when needed. Another interesting feature of Hybrids is that they don’t idle when stopped, as traditional cars do. This is a great “eat it too” feature of the cars. I found one government website that estimates that 2/3rds of US vehicles are driven in urban areas, and time spent idling is 18% of total urban drive time. The US department of Energy estimates that if all vehicles were shut off when they normally idle, the US would save 20 billion gallons of oil per year; this also would translate to an annual savings per car/owner of $300 per year in gas costs. It would also contribute to reduced emissions, a big concern right now.

Another interesting feature of the Hybrid cars is the regenerative braking systems they employ. Traditional brakes use friction brakes, which produce heat energy, and this heat energy is merely dissipated into the atmosphere and not captured or utilized in any way. Regenerative brakes, however, utilize the electric motors that drive each individual wheel, and when braking is needed they become generators; the resulting energy is captured and used to charge the battery cells in the vehicle. How smart is that?

Hybrid cars cost about $2000 more than their combustion counterparts, but the savings in fuel costs can be recovered within 5 years, so the manufacturers claim. Many countries will pay a tax credit to Hybrid owners (see http://www.hybridcars.com/tax-deductions-credits.html for more info), so here again we can have our cake and eat it too.

There are a few celebrities that have become hybrid owners - They include Ted Danson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Billy Crystal, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Donny Osmond, among others. I have noticed some taxi companies are starting to use Hybrids for cabs in Vancouver. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hybrid becomes the de facto standard in the next decade or so. Soon we all will be driving them.