Twitter Ye Not

Some of the cleverest, most tech-savvy people I know use Twitter.

Stephen Fry (IQ 1000) uses it.

My friend Flit (IQ 10⁸) uses it.

Tech colossi like Rupert and Kenny use it.

Lesser mortals also use it. Lots of them. In fact the (hiss!) Daily Mail think it could replace Churchill in the primary school syllabus. Oh yes !

To me, it's an updated version of those tiresome business execs who made a show of leaving themselves messages on a portable dictaphone : "Note to Self : Must leverage my synergy." Or those Japanese tourists who spend so much time snapping thousands of photos that they hardly notice where they are and forget to actually do anything. It's like the shiny-suited young men shouting banalities into their mobile phones in public : "I'm on the train." No-one cares !!!

I prefer to blog. To spend a couple of days mulling over in my head whether something is worth the wear-and-tear on the keyboard. To spend an evening chasing down les mots justes.

And between Bloggages, I do what I need to do in the real world without stopping to update cyberspace re: the progress of my day.

Just what am I missing ?

Update : I was SO proud of the title of this post. I was therefore crestfallen to find that that over 266,000 other pages on the Internet used it before me.

Enough about me...

... Let's talk about you.

I recently installed Google Analytics on Radio Free Stan. There's a tiny itty-bitty, tweeny-weeny piece of javascript that sits quietly within the code of the page near to where it says "Google Analytics" over to the right in the margin. This records arrivals to and departures from my half-acre of cyberspace. I can also see what you click while you're here. 

I've been using Statcounter almost since I started blogging - you can see the stats from this over to the right where it says "View My Stats". Google Analytics is pretty similar, except that it has a much more complex reporting package behind it - good enough for a much bigger site whose owners actually care how many "eyeballs" view their pages. 

So, what do I know about my readers ? Well, I get 30 or 40 people dropping in every day (double that if I'm dissing the Magistrates' Association). Half of you are still using Internet Explorer, but the rest of you are pretty intelligent. 40% of you arrive from Bystander's blog, while Google has led around 10% of you here. Some of the Google searches leave me wide-mouthed in disbelief - my favourite recent one was "desinges that a thirteen year old boy could put on a bakewell tart".

I can also tell that 100% of the female readers are beautiful and that 80% the males have more charisma than you would expect from a random sample of the population. 14% of you read Radio Free Stan while sitting in your underpants. 95% of you will have an uncontrollable desire to scratch after reading this sentence. 5% of you have a grizzly bear standing behind you (made you look).

I'm joking, obviously. Radio Free Stan is a low-tech, amateurish thing - but the big-name websites have an awesome ability to track your behaviour. I've seen one of these customer behaviour systems up-close and I can tell you that among other things it's possible (from the pages the user visits) to be about 80% certain of the gender of the site visitor. I reckoned I could work out if the user was left or right-handed by the way the cursor moved across the page.  

So, what's my point ? 

Well, please never assume that your web activity is anonymous. If you think CCTV is intrusive, think of all the invisible bits of javascript around the Web, tracking everyone's behaviour.

The World Wide Web is 20 years old today. It has been a force for good and a considerable force for evil. It has allowed people to organise against political oppression, but it has also given the State more tools to more tightly control their citizens. Even after 20 years it is a jumble of contradictions and appears always to be in a state of unpredictable creative chaos. 

It's a beautiful, ugly, liberating, dangerous mess. And I love it.

Musical Overload

Oh yes, do definitely sign up for a Spotify account.

For those even slower off the mark than myself, Spotify is a free and legal way to listen to music streamed to your computer. It's like being left alone in a massive record library. Or like finding Steve Jobs' iPod.

At first, it seems like every piece of music ever sung, struck, plucked or blown is available, but you soon find gaps where certain records labels have not signed up. No Beatles, for example.

They do have the current Numbers One and Two (Flo Rida "Right Round" & The Saturdays "Just Can't Get Enough") and they've got the originals from Dead or Alive and Depeche Mode that these two are based on. A while ago I was eyeing up the soundtrack album from the first series of "Teachers", which contains a fair cross-section of what I was listening to in 2001. Spotify had 9 out of 16 of these tracks. Pretty impressive, and I'm sure they'll fill in the gaps before long.

It's churlish to complain what's missing when the sheer volume of what's available is exhilarating. For example, tonight I listened to Jack Teagarden, Billy Connolly, a half-dozen different versions of the "Queen of the Night" aria from "The Magic Flute", Philip Glass and now I've got the entire works of Jacqueline Dupres lined up to calm me down for sleep.

Which is what I think I'll try to do now.

Update : just as I typed the above, the late great Ms. Dupres started playing the Bach Cello Suite #1 - which is my ringtone and so not all that restful.

Lights, Camera, Geek

It's an old family tradition (3 years old to be precise) that between Christmas and New Year I assemble a DVD slideshow movie of the best of the Family Stan photographs from the year.

Every year I get more ambitious, which is fine because every year the technology to support the ambition gets better.

Firstly the soundtrack. Linux has a wonderful range of free toys in this area.

1. Download the video containing the tune you want from youtube using the youtube-dl application.
   
2. Extract the tune from the video using mplayer
3. Use the dvd:rip application to extract a file from a DVD of Stanetta's church play. This contains numerous stills and pieces of her dialogue that I cut into separate files for later use.
4. Use the rather wonderful Audacity application to mix the tune with samples of dialogue. I could have played with this for weeks.

I couldn't find anything in Linux that came close to Windows Movie Maker, so I used that to organise the still pictures into order and set up transitions between them.

It was then I realised that I had done this in exactly the wrong order - you really shouldn't mix your soundtrack until you know how long your video is going to be.

To finish the job I burned the finished movie onto DVD using Microsoft's DVD maker.

Hopeful next year someone will have produced something that does all of these operations in one neat application. But next year I'll want to be even more creative with the year-end movie. Animation ? 3-D ? Guest Stars ? Behind-the-scenes DVD extra features and interviews with the cast?

Looking at the finished movie I was reminded that I've had a cracking 2008. Business has been lousy but everything else has been just wonderful.

Happy New Year to all my readers and may 2009 bring you the vast majority of what you think you want and all of what you need.

Stan xxx

Join the IT Crowd

I can't stand one particular advert on TV. And I'm worried it's the just the start of a new trend.

There's a worried man. You can tell he's worried because he's hamming it up like a silent movie actor. He's in a cramped black-and-white room. The bills are piling up and he's afraid of losing his job which totally sucks. His sexy but fickle wife is probably going to run off too. Oh, woe is he.

But wait ! He's signed up for some IT courses and we cut to a confident man striding in living colour from a big house towards his big car (presumably after being a total stud with his wife). The advert ends with him driving off contentedly towards a satisfying and lucrative job in IT.

The reality is more disappointing. The industry is in retreat. In the 1990s any bozo could have parlayed a few basic IT skills into a significant living, and many did. But things have changed. The industry is in retreat in line with the world recession, and there is a significant and growing supply of cheap offshore labour. This hits old lags like me hard, but it's even worse for people just starting out.

For example, imagine you are attracted by the starting salary for Junior Database Administrators (around £25k) with the prospect of doubling that when you get experienced. You work hard to pass the required exams in your free time (one year if you are clever and hardworking).

Unfortunately to get your feet on the ladder you are competing with a large number of Indian guys and gals who have IT degrees and are significantly cheaper and usually more polite and smarter than you are. Eye-wateringly cheap if they don't even have to leave India. Database Administrators don't need to be on the same continent as the machines they tend and the machines don't need to be on the same continent as the people who use them. I've worked with a client in England whose machines were in Holland and whose administrators were in India.

So basically your qualifications buy you a lottery ticket to compete with the entire world to get a job with a shrinking salary that is unlikely to improve either your finances or your sex life.

My message would be that if IT interests you, then get stuck in and compete for whatever jobs aren't being outsourced by being more persuasive, cleverer and harder working than any other applicant. I've enjoyed working in IT and I hope you do too. But don't give any money to these people selling dreams. All you'll likely get is a list of qualifications (you could have got this by googling "IT certification") and a standard recruitment consultancy service (there are thousands of these - or try www.jobserve.com and phone whichever agency has the job you fancy).

I don't like the fact that these people are profiting from fear and selling something you could get for free (and which might not be worth much anyway). I hope they crash and burn and I won't ever have to sit through similar adverts ever again.

Some hope. The coming Depression is likely to lead to a lot more more fear and I suspect that profiting from it will become one of the few growth areas.

Escape Text

Update Final : I have closed this down. Works fine but I can't see how it would ever pay. Think I'll be able to cope with my loss of my £2.47 investment.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Have there been times when you've wished your mobile would ring so that you could escape from a meeting ?

Thanks to Stan Industries you can escape in three easy steps

1. Send an empty text message to ????????? (+?????????? if outside the UK - it should work anywhere in the world; please could someone with a non-UK mobile try it.)
   
2. My computer will phone you back. As soon as you answer, it will hang up.
3. You leave the room pretending that you're on a call.

Give it a go. It costs only the usual price of a text message and is only very slightly immoral. Let me know if it worked, and tell me what it was you were escaping from.

Text Stan.

Update 1.0

This application is running on my second-best computer at home which is rather ancient and produces a wicked amount of fan noise, so I'm going to switch it off at nights. So you'll just have to feign a heart attack if you want to get out of an uncomfortable meeting in the small hours.

My plan was to see if anyone would use the service for free, then if there was sufficient interest I would move it onto a premium rate number so that I could actually get some revenue.

My costs are very low :-

* Machine : old computer that was gathering dust - £0.00
* Software : all free - Linux, Skype, SMS Tools, some self-written Python code - £0.00
* Internet Access : using my home connection so no extra cost - £0.00
* Mobile hardware : old Nokia 6230i, otherwise gathering dust, with the USB cable that it came with - £0.00
* Mobile service : Cheapie SIM card from Tesco - £2.47
* Outbound calls : I use Skype (an internet phone service) and my program hangs up the phone in less than 1 second, so I am not charged for the calls - £0.00
* Inbound SMS : You don't pay for receiving text messages - £0.00
* Electricity : my biggest cost - not sure how much it costs to keep an antique PC and mobile phone juiced

So I wouldn't need much revenue to make a profit, but I have a sinking feeling that only-a-few people would be willing to pay not-very-much for this service. I suspect the Dragons in "Dragon's Den" would laugh me out of the room - let me know what you think.

Update 2.0

My ex-colleague Fiona has successfully tested the application with her German "Handy", which just goes to prove that my potential audience is everyone in the world who owns a mobile phone - about 2,000,000,000 people. I'm not greedy - I just want 1% of them to sign up and for 1% of those to pay 10p for the service every day.

That would be £20k per day - anyone who's been in IT for a while knows this kind of false business case only too well - it's how Web companies got such absurd valuations during the dot-com era.

Buy Stan

My current field of expertise is "Data Warehouse Appliances" - a field that has recently come to prominence now that the mighty Oracle have come into the game this month.

My Headless Laptop (picture in a previous posting) could be considered an example of such an appliance. Not a particularly good one, but it has the following features, all in the same box :-

• An operating system (Linux Fedora 9)
• A database management system (choice of MySQL or PostgeSQL)
• Storage for data (a 40Gb hard drive)

Doesn't sound like a big deal, but traditionally in database systems you need to buy these separately and get them talking to each other, which doesn't always end well. For example,

• A big Hewlett-Packard server running Unix
• An Oracle database with lots of whistles and bells for working with big databases
• A shed-load of connected storage

Oracle and HP have got together to produce a pre-configured set-up so that (if you believe the hype), like a 'fridge, all you have to do is to plug it into the wall. This is why they call it an Appliance.

There's a lot of debate about how much it actually costs. It's reminiscent of the "free holiday offer", where once you've paid taxes, arrangement fee, compulsory insurance, airport transfer etc it doesn't look terribly "free" any more.

In the case of the HP-Oracle appliance, the quoted price is $650,000, which is actually very reasonable for a system of that size. However, this price does not include er ... most things. For starters it doesn't include the Oracle whistles-and-bells, which at around $100k per processor adds $3.2m to the price. Then add on the storage software costs (around $1.6m) and now instead of $650,000, we're looking at a real-world price of $5.5m. Quite a difference.

If you're not in that financial league, I definitely recommend the Stan Headless Laptop, where the costs are more modest :-

* Broken laptop - around £100
* Fedora Linux 9 - free
* PostgreSQL and MySQL - free
* Storage - free with the laptop - can easily be expanded with external disk drive(s). These will cost money but there is no software cost associated.

Very reasonable, I'm sure you'll agree.

Buy Stan.

Pour Encourager Les Autres

If your laptop is misbehaving - show this picture to it and say "Stop that, or I'll get Stan round to rip your screen off".

This is a previous laptop of mine which I dropped, busting up the screen. I've used it on my home network for a while to play around with Linux, but I didn't do anything about the screen, which lit up with an abstract tessellation of jagged shapes.

Yesterday I was running a huge fever from a bout of man-flu. I had a sudden crazy desire to remove the screen - after all, it was just wasting power lighting up a screen that wasn't being used. Sweat was dripping off me as my shaking hands levered up the keyboard cover, unscrewed the monitor retaining screws, removed the screen and relocated the bits-and-bobs that were attached to it. I felt like Doctor Frankenstein creating a monster.

So now I have a headless laptop that has been very well behaved. As have all the other electrical appliances in my house. I think they're scared that the same will happen to them : either that or they're plotting silent revenge for mutilating their comrade.

Just Browsing

How much of a geek are you ? A good rule of thumb is to look at your attitude to web browsers.

Class Zero Geeks (a.k.a dumb people) don't even know what one is - which probably means that they aren't reading this page and won't be insulted by me calling them "dumb people".

Class One Geeks (a.k.a Civilians) are still using the web browser that was installed when they got the machine - usually the small blue "e" of Internet Explorer.

Class Two Geeks (a.k.a "The Slightly Geeky") have played around with the competitor web browsers, either out of pure curiousity or because Internet Explorer is driving them mad with all the crashing, advertising spam and unexpected behaviour.

Class Three Geeks (a.k.a "Me") don't even know how many web browsers they have on their various machines. I would put myself in this category - as well as IE, Firefox and Safari I've got an old copy of Netscape on the main PC, on my mobile phone I've got Opera and on my Linux box ... well, there's SeaMonkey, Konqueror, Dillo .. er and a few dozen others I've never used.

Added to this list now is Google's Chrome browser which I've been trying out and,in brief, I don't get it.

It's quite similar to Firefox, except without its infinite customisability. It has an equivalent of Safari's "Private Browsing" called "Incognito Windows". It's supposed to fast, but I couldn't prove it was any faster than Safari, which is the fastest of the mainstream browsers. This is not a surprise as under the bonnet, the same WebKit HTML-rendering engine is being used by both.

I looked at their marketing literature and I test drove it myself and nowhere could I find a valid reason to make it my browser of choice. Presumably Google will be demonstrating how Chrome adds value to their suite of office applications and Google Earth in due course, but personally I'd say the responsibility was with the application developer to ensure their application runs well on any browser, rather than forcing us to use a particular browser.

By the way, just in case you think I'm one of the geekiest person in the world, there is a Class Four of Geeks, who despise and distrust all browsers and have either written their own in Assembler Code or are still using slide-rule technologies like Gopher. You're not likely to meet these people, as they don't tend to have friends and tend not to get out much.

iPlayer fix

Allow me to provide a technical solution that I've been working on recently. It's boring if you don't have the problem, but it took a while for me to work out for myself, so the chances are I could save someone out there some time and effort. Who knows, that person might invent a perpetual motion device or a cure for cancer in the time I save them.

It concerns the BBC iPlayer. If you don't know what it is then either :-

(a) You are technologically illiterate : in which case you probably aren't reading this
(b) You don't watch TV : the only one of my readers meeting that criterion works for a broadcasting organisation (go figure).
(c) You don't have decent broadband speeds : Mother & Father Stan being an example.

For the rest of you, iPlayer and the similar Channel4 application are a means of downloading TV programmes so you can watch them on your PC.

It's great for train journeys - on a recent journey on the Manchester to London service, for every suit doing an Excel spreadsheet there were two watching Shameless.

The problem comes when you've installed the BBC iPlayer and also the Channel4 equivalent and one or other other of them stops working as a result. Quite likely, as they are both built on the same technology and use a lot of the same files.

The directory you need to look in is C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Kontiki. There is a config file here called zdata.db.

Rename the file to (say) zdata.c4.db

Now you need to stop and restart the zservice service. If you don't know how to do this, you might be safer switching PC off and back on again.

You should find now that the BBC iplayer will work. It will create a new zdata.db file when it starts up. If had a bunch of good stuff downloaded from C4 that you now seem to have lost, you can always just switch the files back.

The Next Bigger Thing

Two years ago I was a speaker at the first conference devoted to a promising new technology. Delegates were enthusiastic techies and generally represented smaller quirky companies with a taste for early adoption of risky "bleeding edge" technologies.

There were also, I was told, a smattering of blue-sky thinkers from consultancies and large companies looking for their "Next Big Thing".

On Thursday I went along to the third conference. Five times the number of people and the customers speaking about their experiences were from a major world Stock Exchange, one of the UK's largest retailers and one of the UK's largest banks. I also completely misjudged the dress code - every one had pricey suits and there seemed suddenly to be a lot of tall, confident people with great hair from the leading consulting groups in the room.

I felt greatly ambivalent - on the one hand there's pride in seeing your hunches being proved right, but on the other, there's a feeling of losing "your" little secret.

It was bizarre hearing the senior guys from these huge companies saying exactly the same things I did two years ago, the only differences being the price of their suit and the quality of their hair.

The good news is that there's gold in them there terabytes. The bad news is that tailoring and coiffeur are probably going to be more crucial than technical skill in the next phase of the product's life-cycle.

Plus I have this insane urge to shout out "I've been saying that for years ! Years, I tell you !".

So now I'm on the lookout for the next, next big thing. If you have any ideas, do tell.

Social Not-Working

I never really "got" Social Networking. I'm not on MySpace, Bebo or Facebook and I don't feel at all disenfranchised as a result. It's not that I'm a fuddy-duddy technophobe : I have my own blog for heavens sake.

Now it seems the bubble is bursting and people are bailing out. I'm sure the tide turned a long time ago, and a lot of so-called active accounts are owned by people who can't work out how to close the accounts. I have heard tell that the process is purposefully made excruciating difficult. And you just know it's like Gym Membership - a load of people sign up for the year and stop coming after a week.

People are finally working out that the pain of membership outweighs the rewards. Your details are pimped to advertisers, your potential employers and journalists
can dig up dirt on you and your family, and identity thieves can have a field-day. And for what ?

It constantly surprises me how little I.T civilians understand about how exposed they are online. Forgive me if I don't go into detail, but you should always assume that all of your online movements are an open book to the government and to too many people inside your Internet Service Provider's I.T department. It gets worse if you use the likes of Facebook - your movements within that site will be available to whoever they fancy. And they don't seem to be particularly fussy who they share that information with.

Even with respectable sites like Google there are issues. There have been cases where Google China has shopped dissidents to the government. Of course that couldn't happen here, right ?

Wrong - they're a commercial organisation that is likely to cave in to an American or British government request. Why would they make a stand for you ? You're just one of a billion customers to them - you're not even paying them any money ! Balance that against upsetting the government that could stop them operating in a particular jurisdiction. Never, ever believe that you are protected and anonymous.

So what do I recommend ?

(1) Act as though you are being watched online. It's similar to assuming that you are on CCTV when you're walking down the street or shopping.

(2) Think about what information you give online. People who shred their bank statements before disposing of them at home will quite freely give their name, date of birth and address and to a faceless organisation online. At the extreme, I recommend inventing an alter-ego for online use. It's a lot of fun - everyone should try it at least once.

(3) Don't be a sheep - quit the social networking sites today and start your own blog. You get to control the look and feel of the site, no details are sold to advertisers and you're not a clone of a million other sites. Start with the blog publishing systems like blogger.com and either stay there (like me) or learn HTML and PHP and move into the world of build-your-own (like m'colleague Kenny). I can't guarantee you'll make more online friends that way - but it'll be a better quality of online friend.

Browser Wars

This morning I got sick fed-up with Internet Explorer's annoying habit of doing stuff I didn't ask it to. There were also times when it didn't do stuff I explicitly asked it to, but mainly it's the feeling that I'm not in control of my computer that hacked me off in the end.

You would hope that Microsoft never have a crack developing software for Life Support systems or Nuclear Power Stations. Sometimes you just want a machine to do what it's told to and not get ideas above its station.

So, as of this morning, the Stan Clan's three computers are all Firefox'ed up. There's no simple way to uninstall Internal Explorer, but you can take it off the Start Menu, and set Firefox to be the default browser, and this is what we've done.

And the difference is amazing. No unexpected actions from the browser, more reliable pop-up control, fewer hard-to-find settings (never did work out to get Java working properly on IE).

And also the ease with which the browser can be customised - I have a high-tech masculine skin on my laptop's browser (RedShift v2), Stanetta is experimenting with the "Simpson's Movie" skin where all the icons are donuts on her laptop, and in honour of Mrs. Stan, we are having a mad Hawaiian rainbow theme on the main PC upstairs ("The Computer in the Sky").

All of this, plus the ability to set multiple "Home" pages and probably a whole host of cool stuff I haven't worked out yet.

There's also something pleasing about not using a Microsoft product, in much the same way as it's pleasing to not buy your groceries from Tesco and to get your coffee from a local independent and not from Starbucks.

And how much did all this cost me ? Well, exactly the same "Nothing" that Internet Explorer cost me. It just took ten minutes to make the changes (and then as long as you feel like clowning around with the new features).

I don't know why I've stuck with IE so long. Sheer blooming laziness I'm sure. I hope there's nothing else in my life that I'm persevering with for that reason - although not everything in life is as simple as changing web browsers.

Confirm Your Price !!

Last month I posted the username and password of one my yahoo accounts stan_project@yahoo.com on the blog, in the spirit of experiment.

In that month I have :-

* Won the Irish Lottery 11 times
* Won the British/UK National Lottery a disappointing twice
* Won a Euro Lottery twice more

The fact that I haven't bought a lottery ticket anywhere in the world wasn't an obstacle to this.

I have also been approached by 6 different people to help them get a combined total of over $1bn out of various accounts in Africa.

If that isn't enough money, a bank with a hotmail email account have also invited me to borrow "within therange of $5,000 to $100,000,000 USD" at only 3% interest.

Result of the experiment ... er, nothing much really. I only received 25 pieces of spam mail - less than one a day. And the level of sophistication of the spam was laughable. In fact the title of one of my Irish Lottery winning emails was "Confirm Your Price!!", which contained the following passage, which has the highest density of geographical and typographical errors I've seen

The Irish National Lottery is approved by the Uk Gaming Board. In other to claim your won Amount (Four Hundred and fifty thousand pounds
sterling).prize from the lottery board you are required to contact our
Claims Agent here in the UK with the details below:

... and then a hotmail email address and a UK mobile phone number.

And the African ones were even less convincing.

Just how insane, stupid, gullible or just blinded by desperation would you have to be to fall for one of these ? I do read that people do get suckered and the mails wouldn't keep coming if no-one took the bait.

Some people use junk mail as fuel for their fires - I wonder if it will ever be possible to use spam email as a power source - it is plentiful, free and shows no signs of running out anytime soon.

Google News

If you look down the right column of this blog you will see the link called "View My Stats". A couple of extra clicks will take you to some of the basic details as to who is visiting and how in the heck they managed to find my unfashionable corner of CyberSpace.

Stealing the idea pretty well completely from Arctic Fox, here are some examples of how some of the last 100 visitors to this blog came to be here :-

(1) A Google User - Search String = "iain diack"
I'm glad Radio Free Stan is now recognised as a reference source for those looking for information on obscure (but heroic) Scottish footballers

(2) Another Google User - Search String = "wibbly wobbly timey wimey"
A reference to the Doctor Who "Blink" episode which I raved about blooming ages ago - still gets me more hits than nearly anything else. I blame repeats on Digital TV.

(3) Yet Another Google User - Search String = "she is ... than the ... among which she"
Someone still trying to solve an Araucaria "Mona Lisa" crossword from last month. The phrase you are looking for is : "She is older than the rocks among which she sits". And using Google to solve crosswords is cheating - tut tut.

(4) Oh no, not another Google User - Search String = "english poetry dead"
You would hope not.

(5) Here comes another Google User - Search String = "definition of a stan in hip hop culture"
I can only think they are wondering why the Eminem track "Stan" is so-called. Think it's just a name, homeboy.

(6) Last of the Google Users - Search String = "erotic radio for man"
Remember that posting I did that used as many dodgy words as I could think of for no good reason to see if I could bump up my number of visitors ? It worked.

Really not sure how you could do Erotic Radio, and even less idea how to make it appeal to the people on the Isle of Man. Why am I reminded me of the Scissor Sisters track "T*ts on the Radio" ?

So, in conclusion - everyone seems to use Google to the exclusion of all other search engines, and hardly anyone who finds their way here ever find what they are looking for.

Stan's Email Project

I was wondering to myself what would happen if the password to one of my email accounts ever became public knowledge. How could people use that information ?

Only one way to find out :

I have set up a Yahoo account "stan_project@yahoo.com" with a password of "stockholm".

Use it any way you want - send an email you've always wanted to, but never dared to. Use it to sign up with a website. Or just see what someone else is using it for.

Of course, don't use it to threaten any world leaders or obtain goods through fraudulent means. And don't delete anything.

I'll report back in a month.

UPDATE 6th Jan 2008

Only 24 hours after creating and posting this email address on this blog (and nowhere else), I already have won the Irish Lottery and have two separate banks in West Africa working to remit a shedload of money to me. What a goldmine !

Security ? What Security ?

Don't give a second's thought to the recent news that disks containing the personal details for every Child Benefit claimant in the UK has gone missing. If you spend your life around data like I do, you'd never have assumed it was safe in the first place.

I have in my time had access to billing records, payment details, dates of birth and passwords for a number of large companies. I had innumerable opportunities to download them and walk out the door with them, but I'm fundamentally honest and am anyway clueless about how you'd turn them into money. Set up false identities, I suppose.

The thing is, there were many techies like me with god-like access to all data, and a large number of low-paid call-centre workers with scary-enough access to the data. Heck, even the cleaners at one Utility I worked for could have helped themselves to one of the CDs an ex-colleague of mine had on his desk, helpfully marked "Customer Database Backup".

I believe you should live your life as though every piece of information about you is public-domain. Because frankly, that's probably the case. Your bank details are known to any number of people you pay DDs to - not to mention your bank and their offshore call centres and their offshore IT support. Somewhere along the line, someone who got their job because they were the cheapest available will have access to your details. Might as well put it on a screen in Times Squares.

And then there are fraudsters and good, if incompetent, people who screw up and lose your data in the post.

So how can I be so unworried ?

(1) My bank password is secure
(2) Stanetta's Child Benefit is paid into a tiny account we set up specially for the purpose
(3) If criminals had this information they would already have attempted to fleece a few milliion people. It wouldn't suit their purposes to wait and let the data become obsolete. Where's the evidence this has happened ?

The people I feel sorry for are those that are getting their Child Benefit paid into their Northern Rock bank accounts ...

Pretty Amazing New Stuff

Geek Warning : The following posting contains barely coherent techno-waffle. Non-techies should skip to the bottom for a joke I enjoyed.

You would think that after a few decades in IT, I'd be pretty hard to impress. The truth is that with every passing year I'm more and more blown-away by all the pretty-amazing-new-stuff (PANS) that keeps coming my way.

PANS 1 - I was able to sit at my desk in London while a world-expert in Boston took over my PC and dialled into a server in Amsterdam with which I was having problems. The technology involved ("Webex") is not new, but it was new to me. In the old days you just had to put the expert on a plane and consign him to a life of airports and hotels.

PANS 2 - Google Apps : A free Word Processing, Spreadsheet and Presentation suite of programs that allow you and a few dozen of your colleagues to share information online. The "sharing" is a bit flaky, but I can see this taking off big-time.

PANS 3 - Knoppix running under VMWare on my Windows laptop. A wonderful way to work with Linux on your laptop without having to give up Microsoft products. There's a sensationally straight-forward guide of how to set it up on http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=linuxDevijverVMWare2&fromSeriesID=38
. The only thing I'd have added is that if you want to get data back from the Knoppix environment to Windows, you need to use Samba.

That last idea tickles me. I imagine that if my laptop is a brain, then Windows is a dream that it is dreaming. Knoppix in VMware is a dream within that dream - and the idea that within a dream-within-dream you can push stuff into the dream ... Maaaan, my mind, it is blown.

And that's just from the last month, and truthfully I was too busy doing the day-job to do all that much of my own stuff. And I never mentioned Vista - because I've tried it and ho-hum I'm not over-excited.

The speed of technology is so fast just now and I count myself fortunate to be alive at this time in history.

And now for the joke ...

Five cannibals get appointed as programmers in an IT company. During their induction course the boss says: "You're all part of our team now. You can earn good money here, and you should go to the company canteen if you need something to eat. So don't .. er .. you know ... eat the other employees".

Four weeks later the boss returns and says: "You're all working very hard, and I'm very satisfied with all of you. One of our cleaners has disappeared however. Do any of you know what happened to her?" The cannibals disavow all knowledge of the missing cleaner.

After the boss has left, the leader of the cannibals says to the others: "Which of you idiots ate the cleaner?" One of the cannibals raises his hand hesitantly, to which the leader of the cannibals says: "You FOOL! For four weeks we've been eating team leaders and project managers and no-one has noticed a thing, and now YOU have to go and eat the cleaner!"

So much data, so little time

The truth is out there. But it's lost in the static.

Terabytes of information every day and somewhere in there is the pattern that will create a new drug, predict financial markets or catch fraudsters. Terabytes of information. Er ...excuse me .. wazzat ??

A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes is a thousand megabytes is a thousand kilobytes is a thousand bytes and the byte is the unit of storage equivalent to a word.

So imagine a terabyte is like a thousand billion words.

A kilo-word is a short story, a mega-word is a set of encyclopedias, a giga-word is a library, a tera-word is all the libraries in Europe.

So when you hear 10 terabytes, visualise someone trying to search all the words in all the books in all the libraries in the world and youre getting a taste of the scale of the problem.

In fact youre only getting a taste of the scale of the problem circa 1980 when the first terabyte Data Warehouses were built to run programs that took days to mine the data in their mainframes.

Now in the internet age, we're beginning to look into the realm of peta-bytes - thousands of terabytes. And the users of Data Warehouses dont want to wait days anymore, they want the answer in real-time.

Search engines need to know what searches are popular, which links are being clicked, how long people are waiting for an answer before clicking elsewhere in disgust.

Financial markets are vast, but within the chaos are patterns. Imagine reading those patterns a second ahead of your competitor.

Retail companies need to know which lines are moving and which are stagnating, which offer is bringing in business and which are a waste of time.

Drug companies generate insane amounts of data from clinical trials : spot the pattern, or else a harmful drug is released or the next-big thing is poured down the sink.

In most modern industries the right answer at the right time can be worth billions, supplying the wherewithal to find that right answer has become the fastest-growing sector of the IT industry.

The world of data warehousing today is an almost religious clash of design philosphies: ETL versus ELT, Inmon versus Kimball, Appliance versus Big Database. All the usual blue-chip computing giants versus a crowd of crazy start-ups like you thought had all died in the Dot-Bomb bubble in 2001.

The truth is out there but it'll cost you.

It turns out that I AM a number

I met a man yesterday who can predict with 80% certainty whether you take milk in your coffee.

Sure, he has a small army of statisticians with PhDs, a daily feed of supermarket shopping behaviour and one of the big, cool, expensive databases I specialise in. In fact he’s got the biggest database of its type in the world - but still it’s a pretty cool trick.

It’s no trick to find people who buy milk and coffee. But that doesn’t mean they put the milk in the coffee.

So what they do is they give vouchers to a few thousand people willing to fill in one of those book-length questionnaire. Only one of the questions is about your coffee/milk preference - the rest are nothing to do with coffee, milk or liquids at all. But the answers identify you like some sort of DNA sequence, to the extent that they can say that what kind of people are four times more likely than not to take milk in your coffee.

Armed with this information they know which of the 300 million Americans it’s worth trying to sell coffee-creamer to.

I’d love to think I’m an individual and rather more than the sum of my Tesco Clubcard transactions. But presumably someone mining my shopping data can say that I’m a married left-of-centre asthmatic blogger with one child and a taste for Indie music and technology. Also that I take my coffee black.

I’m going to take my coffee with orange juice from now on – nobody’s going to pigeonhole Stan.