The phone rang at 7.30pm last night. The usual thoughts flashed through our minds: is it double-glazing, a Hotel Metropol invitation to join their gymnasium (Me, are they mad?), a relative has just died, or maybe ma wanting a long chat? It was Panasonic calling about the TV I bought a couple of months ago. It seems that Panasonic contact customers after a while to make sure they are happy with their new sets. Can you imagine Dell or IBM doing the same?
I told Mr Panasonic I regretted the purchase and had it been from a local shop I’d have tried to swap the TV for a Sony. Yes, the picture is brilliant, the fast refresh rate means action has the crisp edges of a CRT and colour fidelity and viewing angles are excellent. No, the problem is the operating system

We spent the weekend house-hunting. Our present home and office suits us perfectly: town centre location, large garden, just off the sea front and newly modernised. That’s why we bought it, to renovate and make money, but it’s 5-up, 5-down and I go into some rooms once or twice a year. Thank goodness for a robot vacuum cleaner to keep it all clean. We could sell up and buy two or more houses with no mortgage, an attractive proposition. With this in mind a chunk of the week is spent trawling the ‘Net, Google-Earthing potential locations and trying to find the next one.

This weekend it was Eastbourne, home of the blue-rinse brigade and a university full of potential tenants. The only problem being we couldn’t find any part of the town we liked for us. We ask ourselves: “Would you live in this house If I paid off your mortgage and gave you

Alastair Crooke, the Director and Founder of the Conflicts Forum, has said that in his experience of negotiating with terrorists it is pointless to ignore groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hoping they will go away. There is no nice, fluffy, occidentally inclined organisation waiting to take their place. It will be al-Qaeda who replace them and things will change for the worse. Much the same seems to be said about the adoption of Vista and Microsoft’s Open XML format.
Over the years there have always been headlines about such and such company abandoning Microsoft Windows, or Macs or Office. This time there seems to be more about firms deciding they are not abandoning Windows XP to move to Vista and there’s even an active movement to stop Open XML becoming recognised as an ISO standard.
Torpidity
In both cases the move

“Welcome to HSBC Premier. Please enter your sort code

The weather forecasters tell us that all the rain we’ve been having recently is due to the Rocky Mountains and a sluggish jetstream. They say that standing waves build up behind the Rockies and if we get a trough hovering over us, it means rain. I can tell them they are wrong.

The reason we have so much rain is my fault. After years of a hose pipe ban I took advantage of a Wickes special offer and installed water butts everywhere in the garden, some even daisy chained together. Obviously it needed a lot of rain the fill them all up, enough to bring a smile to St. Swithin. The people flooded out of Doncaster and Hull will have to hope the weather clears up before ‘his day’ next Sunday. Unless, that is, they don’t stop whinging that us Southerners would get more help than they have, conveniently forgetting their huge rate support grants for a local infrastructure us Southerners fund and look on with envy.

Flooded out
It is pretty similar in the broadband world. With deregulation, loads of small suppliers sprang up in much the same way as happened with bus companies. Our towns were flooded with umpteen buses driving near-identical routes. The broadband market has become deluged by different offers, ‘up-to’ speeds, download limits and local loops unbundled. Eventually the bus companies sorted themselves out, simply by one or two buying up their competitors, almost back to as it used to be before politicians fiddled with things in the first place. The same is about to happen with high-speed Internet suppliers.

British Telecom, from whom the near monopoly rights were whisked away, is slowly grabbing them back, purchasing Plusnet in January and recently the Brightview Group who have operated some of the country’s best-run brands such as Waitrose.com and Madasafish. Pipex, current owners of Freedom 2 Surf, Nildram and Bulldog, hung a for sale sign out in March, soon to be followed by Virgin Media who recently merged with NTL and Telewest. Tiscali are rumoured to have grabbed a large residential customer base.

Five hundred quid of BS
These are all names we have considered or used as broadband and Internet solutions suppliers. Meanwhile Carphone Warehouse quietly gets on with destabilising the market by undercutting everyone and making broadband free if not trouble-free, the latter being a speciality of the likes of Bulldog and the (not) much lamented Business Serve in this office. BS consistently offered no email service then charged us five hundred quid to dump them

Many companies have been integral to digital printing since the day Caxton spread pressed inky fingers to paper. Adobe and Quark are obvious examples, alongside them are the smaller niche products made in someone’s spare bedroom or garage. One of these old timers is Markzware here. Born 1989 in a Santa Ana mobile home where their first application, XState, was developed as a project management XTension for QuarkXPress.
Markzware’s first major product, MarkzTools is still on sale today and arose from co-founder Patrick Marchese’s need to keep his job at a major advertising company. He was working with QuarkXPress but his colleagues couldn’t open his jobs in their earlier versions. Facing possible redundancy as a result, he asked Markzware partner, Ron Crandall, to come up with a converter for QuarkXPress documents. MarkzTools were born. This was soon followed by a Pagemaker to Quark converter, and again, spurred from personal necessity at the advertising agency, in 1995 FlightCheck, the first pre-flight tool.
While QuarkXPress was the de facto industry standard, document conversion became less of a problem. As soon as Adobe’s inDesign grabbed market share the need was there for another batch of converters. Markzware have given me copies of their latest versions of MarzTools, Quark to InDesign and inDesign to Quark converters to play with.
MarkzTools
I started using QuarkXPress at version 3, even now at version 7 a feature common to them all has been the ability to screw up. QuarkXPress gets its knickers in a twist just because an imported Word document has clashing style sheets or an image is not to Quark’s liking. Usually this just crashes the application and hopefully leaves one or two rescue documents as a starting position. Sometimes the whole document can be corrupted, or won’t open at all.
This is where MarkzTools come to the rescue by offering various ways to salvage the offending document. Each process by-passes the more likely trouble-makers one-by-one, such as complex run-arounds (a regular Quark crasher), applied style sheets and picture imports. A last resort is the option to extract all text from a document. Markzware also magnanimously offer to try to salvage the document for you. Not bad for a

When BMW released their second generation of the Mini, they didn’t bolt on more gimmicks, make the car slower, more thirsty or corner worse than before. Instead they put in a brand new range of more efficient engines, redesigned just about every body panel and cleaned up some of the annoying weaknesses of the previous iteration of the Mini. Very often it appears web designers accomplish the exact reverse.
All too often, websites which used to work fast and perhaps a little dirty, get redesigned to remove the dirt but in the process their practicality is completely ruined. Form is allowed to intrude into function to the detriment of the inner workings of sites.
Digital Vault
A classic example of a good web site ruined is BT’s Digital Vault. It has been running very successfully since last year, providing free on-line storage for BT’s Internet customers and a smaller free space for ‘outsiders’. We grabbed at 2GB each when it was made available just before last Christmas and have used the space for large file transfers since then. As BT provide our Broadband Max service, albeit wholesale through a third party, our speeds to and from Digital Vault were just about the maximum our line could give. Up to 7MB down and more importantly 86KBps up. The up-speed being 50% faster than our first ADSL line of a few years ago.
It meant we could happily bung up to a gigabyte at a time onto our Digital Vaults for clients to collect and the whole process took a couple of hours or so. Then BT redesigned the site.
Sunday morning at 7am, I tried to put 860MB into my Digital Vault. Where once the upload speed would have jumped straight to maximum and stayed there, the upload started to trickle through the wires at a miserable 40KBps. Okay, I thought, it’s a slow starter, we’ll leave it for 15 minutes and see if it gets better. Not a chance! And typical of the new improved Digital Vault.
Apple’s iDisk
Instead of waiting the 9 or so hours the upload was estimated to take, I sent it into my iDisk over the Atlantic at Apple’s mac.com. The speed immediately maxed-out and stayed there for the 2 hour upload. Then, later, it was collected by the intended recipients in Montreal and Chicago who downloaded at the unbelievably fast connections their cable companies give them (Jealous, me? And they’ve both got iPhones