Following on from the article on this site and Dave F, I thought I’d do a response on my thoughts on working from home.

I work from home on a one day a week basis, and so does my partner.   We both commute to London or a more local office the rest of the week (generally London for her, and a 50/50 mix of London/local for me).    One thing we have learnt is that we should not work  at home on the same day…. it presents problems as we only have one office, so the other person ends up st in the living room.    This results in no place to go for downtime, and no clear home/work divide.

On a normal day from home, I’ll go into office at 8am, venturing downstairs only for teas and coffees from the Coffee machine during morning while on the phone - have a distinct 30 min Lunch at 12:30 (watching working lunch!), and finish around 5.     This represents a longer day than I would do in the office, and I do as it represents part of the travel time in the car or train I save by not driving/taking train in.

Communication - A combination of internal Instant Messaging via VPN and phone is used to stay in touch with the office, and meetings..    Also most teams I work with are not in UK - and WebEx/other online meetings are used to demonstrate applications and processes, so we’re already in an online world, as the company I work for can’t send me to a far flung region of the world every week or no actual work would be completed.

Reliability - The biggest issue has proven to be the power locally - this year so far in 7 months we have had 3 days where the power at home has been out for extended periods of time.     This was fixed by placing the DSL router on a UPS which lasts for 3-4 hours after the first experience.      This is sufficent to continue working for at least half the day using the office laptop.    Beyond this our employers have been happy as theres not much that can be done without power.

Overall for me and my partner the experience is positive, but neither of us would be prepared to work 100% from home.    We both realise the benefits of the office and meetings with colleagues.   We both would prefer to be at home 2 or 3 days rather than the current one.

Do you work at home with your partner?   Do you have 2 offices to deal with this if you both work for different companies, or do you get along fine?

With the advent of OS 3.0 being released imminently, I thought it’s time I highlighted a particular bugbear of mine on the iPhone - well not on the phone itself, but on websites designed for it.

As I spend a fair amount of personal time on the train, I spend it surfing the internet -often following useful links from this site, digg and slashdot.   However around once/twice a week I find that the link doesn’t take me to the linked article where I want to go - but to an iPhone specfic website “thats more optimised for a mobile handset”.

A lot of these sites don’t even have a mode to offer to “take me back to the regular browsing experience” - although some thankfully do.      Annoyingly those that do have the option don’t you generally to the original article - but it does at least present a way for the normal website to be viewed.

The only way around this appears to be to install an alternate browser sending another user-agent to the website in question - but should we really have to resort to the appstore to fix this?

So I am asking all website designers nicely.   Yes you can create an iphone version of the site…  but please don’t force it upon us…     Some of have iphones for the “real web experience” but on the move, not a “for handset” experience.

Please comment with your thoughts and a list of sites that appear to force this on you if you feel like naming/shaming these annoying sites…

My personal bugbear being a science fiction fan is scifi.com - which on my last visit forced a version of the site that you couldn’t get out of on the handset.

Hardly a year goes by without something seeminly going wrong with my PC.

Last week the graphics card died a death - nice corrupted graphics on the bios screen a sure fire sign.    It worked fine when cool, but 2 mins after booting, corruption occurred.    It wasn’t cooling as the fans were running fine..    So bye bye Nvidia 8800GTS to the graphics card maker in the sky (it was 2 months out of warranty typically!).

Now without a main  graphics card - it left me with research to do - I used tomshardware.com to look at which card would be best for the money, in combination with the 3 online component retailers in the UK that I trusted.    I ended up ordering a Zoltan Nvidia GTX 260 with 896Mb of graphics memory- for£135 including delivery charges.    I chose Nvidia over ATI due to previous bad experiences with ATI cards and drivers prior to me having the 8800 card from Nvidia - and overall being happier with the Nvidia 8800 than any previous graphics card.

When the card arrived, I was frankly amazed - it was a bigger physical footprint than the old 8800 - in fact it took difficultie and alignment to actually get it in the slot (I think I have 2mm clearance!).    I  also needed 2 PCI X addtional power connectors compared to the one before - this is the hurt fingers incident.     For PC builders thinking of using stanley knifes to cut cable ties, experience and a bandaged up thumb now tells me snips are the way to go.

Overall, I’m totally happy with the new graphics card - its a bit quieter than the old 8800 - and a lot more powerful - gaming using it is quicker.     And it cost considerably less than the 8800 did at the time I purchased it as always.

Last year you’d read a lot about Second Life online - from various trusted media sources such as this site, the BBC, TheRegister etc.     Now I don’t know if its just me, but the Media appears to have stopped reporting about the famed Virtual World environment from Linden Labs..

It was a result of this media attention that I downloaded and started playing with the client as the avatar Dan Ramona.     My initial impressions at the time were not good, the client was slow, bandwidth intensive, and walking and flying around the environments was sometimes like pulling teeth.      Not only that, it was an assault to the senses - some environments would have music in them, and simply getting in the area would result in an assult of the eardrums.

However there were good things.   Players could build, script, and design their own items in game.  They could also own their own land, and build their own houses.     It was like the sims but for your own avatar.   There were a few games created by the players which were fun, in a very basic fashion - they weren’t brilliant though or interesting enough for long-term play.

The sandbox like creationism did lead to a somewhat strange situation - there was quite a sexual focus to many of the items being created (probably down to most of them being created by 15-21 year old male teenagers if I’m playing the stereotypes card).   Second life to me basically did not appear very child friendly.      Creating items also required you to pay for credits and funds to allow you to upload textures etc.    This was the income stream for the game - as someone viewing content didn’t really need to pay a monthly fee.

Overall after a few days of playtime I was done with SecondLife.    I don’t think I’ll revisit the environment as quite simply I can’t see the point of it all..   And I can’t honestly believe our government thinks spending money in the envioronment can really be a valid use of public funds.     They of course are claiming it saves money by preventing staff travel to see technology (I do wonder why our  goverment hasn’t discovered video conferencing!)  - my view is simple - maybe our ministers and civil servants enjoy the alternative lifestyles Second Life offers….   I’m sure its safer from the prying eyes of the press with their long lenses at least!

How was your Second life experience?   Have you binned it like me?

I thought I should mention this - as  one thing I love is “Free Stuff”.

Basically Eurogamer/Codemasters are giving away 2000 free copies of their MMO “Lord of the Rings online” - or LOTRO as its more commonly known on this Friday, including all expansions up to date, and 30 days of free play time.    Thats quite a saving from the shop price -  which via play.com at least is currently retailing at £14.99.

Look at this link for details of the offer, which starts Friday - if you have been interested in playing LOTRO in the past, its a chance to do so free.

This post is related to the OnLive technology that is due to be demonstrated at the Game Developers Conference (GDC)  this week.    Articles on the technology for background are here and here.

A basic description of the system is thin-gaming - similar to Thin-computing as devised by Citrix for business applications, but for gaming.     Basic low-powered machine is needed to display the graphics, which are all generated by powerful gaming servers in the center.     So basically controllers and screens (plus a big broadband connection) at the client end.

Will it work?    In my opinion as a technician - No, I do not believe it can be made to work - and I can explain several reasons why below:

1. Latency - gamers really hate latency - some Counter-Strike gamers and game servers reject users with ping times of over 50ms.     In my opinion there is no way they will be able to get the latency to an acceptable level to make this product a viable concern - 80ms in gaming is an age, and that is what is being touted as normal latency for this.    The reason - compression/decompression adds considerable latency - also the raw internet speed.   Example, my home 5.5Mbit connection has around 25ms-40ms latency to most sites in London without the compression touted.
2. Resolution - PC Gamers and now PS3 gamers are getting used to 1920×1080 and similar resoultions on their kit when playing games.     On a PC even 1024×768 is deemed a “low resolution” now by many gamers.   At the moment this tech is producing 720p.   That is 1280×720.    By even modern standard in PC gaming, thats a low resolution.
3. Bandwidth & Fair use policies- The above 720p resolution is toted as using 5Mbit/sec (listed in the article as high-def).     By my calculations 5Mbit a second is around 37.5Mbyte/minute, or around 2Gb an hour     Gamers being “hardcore” tend to play for a few hours at a time - how many people will hit their ISP’s fair use Policy, which in many cases is around 40Gb.     Ie, about 20 hours of gameplay.    How many gamers play over 20 hours a month? - I would say quite a few.     Virgin/NTL in the UK throttle users using this quantity of bandwidth down from 50Mbit/sec to a far lower figure if this kind of transfer is common - would this even stop the Gaming working?
4. Economics - How many high-end graphics cards & CPU’s will be needed at the server end to support users?   If the OnLive company is having to buy thousands of servers to handle user-load, I question how this can be viable.    Especially when compared to game-download/subscription services such as metaboli.
5. Reliability - If a node crashes and takes out several clients at once, thats >1 pissed off gamers.      Games nowadays in their 1st interation past release are often unstable from my experience at least, needing a patch to improve stability.  In some cases they lock up your computer fully.    If this happened to a server node and impacted someone 2 hours into a mission that had not saved on another client this would greatly annoy the latter user for having to replay 2 hours of content.    If this happened frequently - it wouldn’t be great.
6. The multi-gamer home - Bandwidth to most UK homes at least wouldn’t support 2 concurrent clients - and this is likely the case globally in the non-fibre world at least.   Also some games are great in multi-monitor mode (Supreme Commander is excellent in this mode) - there doesn’t appear to be capability for this now..

I would be very interested from the press visiting the GDC as to their impressions of this technology in the demonstration - and whether they could note whether the server is > 80ms away!    I could be wrong - but still am of the opinion this cannot be made to work without fibre broadband and 100Mbit connections to the home (allowing say 2 x1080p screens to play games simultaneously).

Basically in my mind potentially a great idea for future, but would need severe broadband investments to work, and a very reliable back-end for users to think about subscribing.    I also have doubts when compared to Gametap/Metaboli type services as to which is going to take the upper hand (or pureplay distribution such as Steam).    If such a service was available for the PS3 or similar console,  ie a console with a monthly fee and subscription for all the games you would want would be ideal for me at least.    I would consider signing up in a heartbeat.

What are your views on OnLive - or do you agree with me that Gametap/Metaboli services long-term will be the winners.

My home computer recently kept powering off when doing anything requiring CPU power (say transcoding a video or editing it).   This was annoying, and I thought I’d got a hardware fault - but strangely no part of the kit was reporting errors.

So, Sunday morning after the 5th try at editing a video and a power-off (and the inevitable swearing at the computer and technology in general), I popped off the lid of the computer…

The CPU fan was “caked” in dust.     Now checking the airflow of the machine, the CPU fan sucks in air from outside (side of case), distributes it over a massive fan above the Quad core processor in the machine, which then makes the heat leave into the case.    The case then has 2 fans keeping a constant airflow front->back to expunge the air.    Basically what was happening was the airflow from outside was hitting a wall of dust at the front of the CPU fan, and thus not cooling the CPU blades and causing a thermal overload and thus a power-off by the mainboard to allow cooling to occur.    As this only occurred when CPU was over 75% utilised in normal day to day use, or when gaming it had not happened before this weekend.

A quick trip to PC world later, and air-duster in hand, the fan’s blades were cleaned (due to location, under the fan, I couldn’t get to all the blades without a air-duster).

I had not spotted this as I had not installed any ACPI monitoring to monitor CPU temperature.    Prior to cleaning the fan’s -  I went to the Asus website, installed this, and where-as pre-cleaning the CPU was hitting over 80 Celcius, it stayed at a constant 55 Celcius with the fans cleaned.

A side effect is according to my girlfriend -instead of the PC sounding like an aircraft taking off (full fan noise) - it now sounds more like a hairdryer on low…  She actually says she can work in my office now (before it was too noisy)… Although I am unsure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing !

So a lesson to all PC builders, and users - don’t forget to clean your fans on a annual, or more frequent, basis as not only will it result in a noisy machine, you may endure the pain of a thermal shutdown event by your motherboard.

Anyone else suffered this joy ?

I’m lucky this credit-crunch hitting year in I have funds available for a holiday… holidays are one luxury I’d hate to be without…

This is great as late last year one of my close friends announced her wedding this year would be in Las Vegas.   Due to the distance, and hotel prices,  Las Vegas isn’t a cheap holiday for UK residents right now (dollar rate at 1.4 instead of the 2.0 it was last year).   I also didn’t have a chance to combine the holiday with a work trip, so thus myself and my girlfriend decided we would have to book a package holiday to join the 10 other friends who are taking a holiday for the occasion.

This brings me to one of my 1st IT gripes for 2009.     Virgin Holidays.    Using Virgin as thats who the entire party is traveling with.   Virgin have a *great* website, which I can price a holiday up on, and book.   However I get maximum discount not by booking online, but telephone to their call centre..
This is because Virgin offer frequent flyers of Virgin Atlantic 10% discount, not 5% for a period until late Feb.    And to get said discount, I need to go through everything I’ve already priced up online again on the phone - to an agent.    At least the Agent was in England, and not an offshore call centre (or if they were it was good enough I didn’t notice).     This is a gripe, as surely its simple to make a website recognise a frequent flyer code and price accordingly, and NOT require a phonecall.

I admit it’s not the most annoying thing of the year to some, but it’s a minor gripe to me, and surely the cheapest prices sold shouldn’t be via the phone (as the costs MUST be higher!).?

Any vendors that do similar that I should avoid?

Intego has found that a trojan’ed version of iWork 2009 is doing its rounds on the usual Bittorrent places as Pirate software.    Link here to advisory

Installing the software installs the software in question - but also installs a Trojan horse - to quote Intego below:

“The malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet; this means that a malicious user will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac.”

I admit it, when I wrote my “Security predictions for 2009“, I didn’t expect the 1st prediction to be potentially met by end of January…    I believe his could well become a botnet.

Trojans have been a common risk if you download pirate software for years - so anyone doing this should already be aware of the risks of doing so…. although admittedly Apple users have had it light compared to PC users, with not many being targeted at them.

Is this, as I predicted last year, the first in a wave of attacks aimed at Apple users?

In recent months, financial bloggers have really hit the press with in some cases scarily accurate predictions.

In this linked BBC News article, the BBC are reporting that Park Dae-sung has been arrested for the spread of false information by his government and may be facing 5 years in jail. This despite successfully predicting the demise of Lehman Brothers (1 week prior), and massive slides in the South Korean currency. The government are arguing that his very predictions move the market, and were affecting the money markets. Scarey in a way..

Robert Peston also moved the markets last year when he gave an exclusive “rumour” of a merger between the HBOS and Lloyds banks back last October. This was also quoted in the observer as having the possibility of being investigated by the SFO, but I can’t find any more recent updates.

The worry I have really is given the financial markets trust these bloggers so much and they have so much ability to move the markets in a positive or negative ends.    This leads to the possibility for potential insider trading to also more concerning items:

My concern is knowing the above - if a prominent bloggers account was hacked and was then used by hackers for nefarious ends. Recently several Twitter accounts have been hijacked - which shows blog/messaging services can be vulnerable.

For example imagine a hacker posting a bank was in severe financial problems on a prominent blog. At worst this could lead to a run on the bank, and thus the bank failing. At best, if its a respected blog, it’d cause a temporary blip on the world financial markets. Temporary as once the real blogger discovered the hack he’d probably remove the post..

The issue you see is RSS however - the moment the Hacker posted the message it’d blip on many peoples screens globally… and the message would be out there. After all, most people I know prefer to use a RSS reader than use the native websites nowadays. Hacking is also big business nowadays, with a lot of money being made by Russian hacking groups. These would easily have money available to “short” a stock and thus have good cause to make it want to drop like a stone.

Will we this year see the markets moved by a Hacker? I wonder….   Or have we already seen this and its just not been spotted by the FSA or US regulators (SEC)?