I was going to say what is the point of a tech journal like IT Pro when MSN has it’s own Tech news. My tongue was going to be firmly in my cheek as MSN’s idea of News usually involves Paris Hilton so I assumed the tech stuff would be the same. However, I did actually find an interesting story 

http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/article.aspx?cp-documentid=11130442

 and I agree with the comment. This is the way to use the net to sell stuff not just get it ripped off. The point the record company people have missed since the days of cassettes is that 5,000 personally made illegal copies  is NOT 5,000 lost sales. 4,000+ of those people would just do with out and of those 5,000 some at least will be new fans who will go on and buy a genuine copy at some point.

Of course if we are talking about Hear Say X’s latest single then it will be totally forgotten in a couple of weeks so no one will buy it. But what kind of loss is that?

A company that shall stay nameless (because I don’t want to get in trouble) launched a new social network type facility today. The email extolled the virtues of the numerous facilities available. The link took you to a “Closed for Maintenance” page. Brilliant.

To be fair I guess there is always a major scaling issue involved in this kind of thing. The nameless company is a big one and that mail shot will have gone hundreds of thousands of people - maybe the site got a few more hits than it could cope with.

I’m not a web developer but surely there are ways of testing that accurately simulate (is that an oxymoron?) heavy usage? Microsoft Visual Studio used to come with a “Stress” tool which no longer seems to be there. I liked it because the icon was an elephant hopping on a trampoline - a feeling we are all familiar with (as the trampoline not the elephant). This let you consume X amount of resources (memory, CPU, windows handles (yes it was a long time ago), etc) and see how well you app responded when the system was “stressed”.  Thinking about the snail like bloatware that comes as business applications these days you can see that “stress” isn’t used as part of testing anymore.

Anyway, is there not a facility to stress a web site? If not I feel a business opportunity coming on. Buy me www.rentamob.com and knock up some spoofing s/w that generates thousands of random clicks & keys from thousands of random addresses. I know a few people who ought to pay a fortune to use it…

Having got both in laws in different hospitals all 120 miles away you can imagine everyone here jumps when the phone rings. Certainly whenever it is the NHS / Social Service or the various care homes and relatives we are trying to coordinate it does usually seem to be bad news so the initial jump is followed by gut churning worry as you answer. So when the message comes that it is a free public service announcement about debt it is at the same time a relief and an infuriation that you had to go through that in the first place.

We are X directory so we hadn’t used to get too many cold calls but these days assume it’s random dialling and recorded messages. Maybe I should listen long enough to get the company name, trace the directors and keep phoning them at odd hours but I don’t have the time or energy at the moment.

Sometimes it’s an embarrassment to work in an industry that makes such things possible.

The current add on the IT Pro home page gives me an excuse to plug one of my hobbies - cryptic crosswords. I’ve been doing them for years but some time ago I thought “that’s a rubbish clue, I could do better than that” and after a while I gave it a go. 

Only once I had computers and the internet to help did I manage to achieve much - however it is still very difficult and deserves a huge payment ;-) Anyway I regularly write a crossword for a guitar magazine (so it has a guitar theme) and occasionally branch out to other themes.

There are several basic types of cryptic clue - if you don’t know how they are code here’s a couple of clues with hints - I’ll publish the answers tomorrow.

1 Heavy metal from guitar to amplifier (4)  - Double meaning - so something that is a heavy metal and is spelt the same as something that goes between a guitar and its amplifier.

2 Vocalist reigns awkwardly (6) - Anagram of reigns (implied by “awkwardly” or confused, cooked, stewed, upset or a million other code words) and it means “vocalist”

3 2 Across seen in chapel visit (5) - Word hidden in “chapel visit” (implied by “seen in” or conceals, contains,….)Linked to 2 ie it’s a vocalist

4 Look at what is reportedly the summit (4)  - Homophone (implied by “reportedly” or we hear, sounds like,…) so it means “Look at” but sounds like another word for summit

There are other types of clue - I’ll do some more egs another day. And I’m always open to commissions!

I blogged a while back about the exciting(!) purchase of my new Dyson http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/09/09/hoovering-up-engineering/

I’ve just had an email asking me to write a review. Being an opinionated guy and someone who values user reviews I thought I would just type a quick “yes it works” at http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/406848/DYSON-DC14-ANIMAL. but what do I get?

“Done, but with errors on the page” and no chance of making an entry.

I’m using ie 6.0.2800 - if it don’t work with that what does it work with? More to the point what did the designers check it with?

The email is from a  no reply address and I’ve got better things to do then spend 20 mins trying to get a contact address from the the website so the world will have to live without my opinion. Anyway it may explain why there are so few user reviews on the Comet site!

Stop press on that - I have tried to track down a contact and on their “contact” page I noticed “we recommend using the Firefox web browser ” I’m cool with OSS but things do need to work with MS stuff if you want to maximised your audience!

I don’t know about the end of the world - though my son keeps pointing out CERN won’t get round to colliding things for a while (in fact they are ahead of schedule and may even start today!) - but I had a more serious worry myself.

I few nasty beeps like a disk in pain, windows “hard error” messages and I had to power off the PC yesterday. Today it tried to boot from the CD as there weren’t any hard disks

I took the PC apart waggled some wires and I’m typing on it now.

Maybe we should all take it as a hint to BACK UP. The trouble is removable media is always so far behind fixed disks. Just when CD’s seemed a good option HDD’s leaped up to the 10’s of GB. Even with a DVD writer how am I supposed to back up 40G?

I actually have some removable drives - biggest spare I’ve got is about 10G though. I guess it’s time for a usb hard drive. I noticed when doing the weekly shop that Tesco (can you remember when the thought of a supermarket selling hard disks was insane?)  had a 150G USB drive for about £50. Be cheaper still on ebay I guess - but harder to return if it’s faulty.

Can you remember when buying a spare hard disk for backup would have seemed insane?

I’ve just checked out PC World online. What’s the difference between Desktop External Hard Drives and Portable External Hard Drives - apart from one gets 500GB & the other only 150 for abou the same cash?

Having finally given up on my Hoover which needed its filters cleaning after every room (seriously!) I found a cheap (relatively) Dyson online at Comet (the animal at £200 is way below Dyson’s own price). I have just been to www.dyson.co.uk to register it and from there drifted across to http://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/ to have a look at ways they are encouraging engineers. They seem to do stuff with schools and all sorts so if you have young (potential) engineers around you may wish to take a look.

One thing that was a bit depressing was that the downloadable diagram for making your own cyclone was a JPG in a ZIP file. What kind of engineering example is it to put a lossy compression like JPG inside a lossless compressed container (ZIP)? Hardware guys, what do they know?  Once you have downloaded (and unziped!) the diagram you can make your own cyclone but it still doesn’t explain how it extracts the dust. Wikipedia it is then… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclonic_separation

Too much security? I’m always complaining about it - however unless my wife has really spent £160 on XBox games like Metal Gear Solid (or something like that) then I may have to slightly change that to - Too little security, I’ve always said so.

It would be typical if if my wife’s card had been cloned / abused / whatever (what do I mean “if”, do I really think she’s got an Xbox stashed in the wardrobe? All those shoes are just a false lid to her gaming haven?) as she is always shredding innocent details (I keep saying “your name & address is in the phone book”, “yes it’s a receipt that has 4 digits of your card on but no one can use it”) and warning her aged P’s to look after their details. In fact we spent last night shredding years worth of her mum’s financial records. She still leaves a check on the step for the milkman though - name, address, bank details!

Anyway looks like we’ve got to spend hours on the phone getting it sorted

I’ve got to decide what outcome I want here, do I want it to be stolen card details? Hmm, which is going to be cheaper - a ripped off credit card or marriage counselling and gaming addiction counselling?

I’m sure I’ve said before that if you make safety / security procedures too complex people will just bypass them and leave you worse off than before. Another example has just arisen from good old Tesco. To get into my account they want the 1st 3rd  & 4th digit of my pin & the 2nd 5th and 8th letter of my password. Typing all of it would be easier, missing 1 digit out of my pin isn’t going save my account from hackers is it? As for my password I end up either writing it down & counting which letter is where or reciting it down my fingers (usually out loud or at least with moving lips!). Either way it would be more secure if I just typed the damn thing in. My other gripe with Tesco security is they only accept 8 character passwords. Well I say accept, you can type 12 characters on the register page but they trim it to 8 and if you enter more than 8 on the login they reject it.

All in all longer passwords and none of the 1st 3rd & 8th would make life easier AND more secure.