Simon Bullen's Weblog

World Post Day

The UN celerbrated World Post Day yesterday.

What were the british postal workers doing ? They were on strike.

Event Type: Observances
Event Name: World Post Day
Event Description: Since 1969, member countries of the Universal Postal Union celebrate World Post Day.
Location: Worldwide
UN Sponsor: Universal Postal Union (UPU)
Activities: Posts celebrate World Post Day in a variety of ways, including the introduction of new products and services, as well as stamps, and holding public events and manifestations.

Event URL: http://www.upu.int/world_post_day/en/index.shtml

Date & Time: From: 9-Oct-2005 TO: 9-Oct-2005

Posted at 12:16PM Oct 10, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[1]

Network world rates Sun bloggers

Sun shines, IBM lets loose, Microsoft disappoints, Apple is a no-show

The good

Corporate bloggers are often at their most interesting when they write about broad issues that face IT executives.

For example, Cisco employees write a high-tech policy blog examining how government decisions affect technology. IBM master inventor Barry Whyte blogs extensively about storage virtualization.

Sun hosts dozens of blogs on Blogs.sun.com, a space the company says "is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything."

The bad

Massive Microsoft has just five blogs. Apple doesn't have a blog, unless you count one written by students. The list of blogless vendors includes Avaya and Juniper Networks. Juniper says it plans to launch one soon.

The ugly

Out of the 15 blogs we surveyed, the worst by far is maintained by Foundry Networks.

Click here for more

Posted at 03:31PM Oct 08, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

Jobs apologises for dropping $200 off the iphone

Letter posted on Apple's website:-

To all iPhone customers:
I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions.

First, I am sure that we are making the correct decision to lower the price of the 8GB iPhone from $599 to $399, and that now is the right time to do it. iPhone is a breakthrough product, and we have the chance to 'go for it' this holiday season. iPhone is so far ahead of the competition, and now it will be affordable by even more customers. It benefits both Apple and every iPhone user to get as many new customers as possible in the iPhone 'tent'. We strongly believe the $399 price will help us do just that this holiday season.

Second, being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon. The good news is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, like Apple tries to do, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service from them even as newer models are introduced.

Third, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple's website next week. Stay tuned.

We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers. We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple.

Steve Jobs
Apple CEO

Posted at 09:41AM Sep 07, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[1]

New iPod from Apple ?

Interesting gossip going around in the states at the moment about Apple launching a new iPod next month.
The new unit is said to be more like the iPhone with a full touch screen and an inch shorter that the current iPod. No news on capacity but it is bound to look the business.
Apple are hoping that the new iPod will become this years Christmas best seller, put it this way, I will not bet against that happening !

Posted at 04:33PM Aug 30, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

iPhone unlocker trades phone for a new car

A hacker who figured out how to unlock the iPhone has traded an unlocked phone for a new car.

After facing problems trying to auction the phone on eBay, George Hotz received a call from CertiCell a company that refurbishes mobile phones. "Terry Daidone, the founder of CertiCell, contacted me this morning, and offered to make a trade for the iPhone," Hotz wrote on his blog. "I traded it for a sweet Nissan 350Z and 3 8GB iPhones."

Click Here for more

Posted at 12:58AM Aug 29, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[1]

Some rejected petitions to the UK Prime Minister

Petitions have long been sent to the Prime Minister by post or delivered to the Number 10 door in person. You can now both create and sign petitions on there website too, giving you the opportunity to reach a potentially wider audience and to deliver your petition directly to Downing Street.

But they go through an approval process first and the following didn't quite make it:-

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Give free houses (near a beach) to people called Mike. More details
Submitted by Mike of The Mike Corporation

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to invade France, and hence provide us with a war we can all get behind. More details
Submitted by Alex King

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Agree to allowing trolls to live under every bridge in London. More details
Submitted by Jim McKnight

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to insist that Mr. Mark Gary Banham of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, wash more frequently than once a year.
Submitted by Nicola Kaufman

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abolish cat flaps in living room windows (like my neighbours). More details
Submitted by Chris O'Connor

And one that should have gone through:-

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to STOP SLATING OF 4X4. More details
Submitted by STUART HINCHLIFFE

Posted at 03:26PM Aug 17, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

Weather warning, who cares when you are in a Land Rover Defender (with a snorkel)

Last Friday was a bad day for the southern part of the UK with sustained heavy rain fall over night and the following day. The Met office had issued a severe weather warning so it should have not been a surprise for any one, but it seems that some people either fail to read the paper, watch the news or surf the web because the chaos around where I live was incredible.

I was heading out to a local supermarket to get lunch at midday, the route takes you under a railway bridge which has always been prone to flooding but had been substantially better since they cleared the ditches out.
The water under the bridge was already quite high about 18" deep and flowing fast, as I rounded the corner I came across two cars that were abandoned in the middle of the road, the first was a Merc A class and the owner was still about. He took up my offer of a tow but as we were heading out off a van broke down in the middle of the road boxing me in, the only solution was to push the van out while still towing the A class, interestingly the Defender did this on tick over. Having pushed and pulled both vehicles onto dry road I went off to the supermarket.

This was the view from the Merc, you can just see the van I was pushing:-



4 Hours later I went out to check the roads to let the wife know what route to come to get home, I came across the same Merc A class that was still waiting for a tow truck. The driver David Currums decided that it was the battery that was dead, so out came the jump leads and we got the car started, it did run a bit rough for a while but soon settled down.

Unfortunately the Merc A-class didn't last long, on Saturday it decided to leave most of the engine on the road !



So just a word to all the environmentalists out there who slag of 4x4's, when they need rescuing they will have to produce a written apology first for making my taxes go up.

Posted at 12:29PM Jul 30, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

Windows Vista ReadyBoost

For those that are not aware of this feature you can use non-volatile flash memory, such as that on a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional memory "under the hood."

The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache—that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Windows ReadyBoost relies on the intelligent memory management of Windows SuperFetch and can significantly improve system responsiveness.

Having had some issues getting ready boost to work with my USB flash drive and Vista I did some digging on the web and found this Q and A posting from Matt Ayers who owns the ready boost feature for Microsoft.
It turns out that my flash drive is too slow.

Q: What perf do you need on your device?
A: 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes

Q: My device says 12MB/sec (or 133x or something else) on the package but windows says that it isn't fast enough to use as a ReadyBoost device... why?
A: Two possible reasons:
1. The numbers measure sequential performance and we measure random. We've seen devices that have great sequential perf, but horrible random
2. The performance isn't consistantly fast across the entire device. Some devices have 128M of lightning fast flash and the rest of the device is really slow. This is fine for some applications but not ReadyBoost.

Q: What's the largest amount of flash that I can use for ReadyBoost?
A: You can use up to 4GB of flash for ReadyBoost (which turns out to be 8GB of cache w/ the compression)

Q: Why can't I use more than 4GB of flash?
A: The FAT32 filesystem limits our ReadyBoost.sfcache file to 4GB

Q: What's the smallest ReadyBoost cache that I can use
A: The smallest cache is 256MB (well, 250 after formatting). Post beta2, we may drop it another 10 MB or so.

Q: Ok... 256M-4GB is a pretty big range... any recommendations?
A: Yes. We recommend a 1:1 ratio of flash to system memory at the low end and as high as 2.5:1 flash to system memory. Higher than that and you won't see much benefit.

Q: Isn't this just putting the paging file onto a flash disk?
A: Not really - the file is still backed on disk. This is a cache - if the data is not found in the ReadyBoost cache, we fall back to the HDD.

Q: Aren't Hard Disks faster than flash? My HDD has 80MB/sec throughput.
A: Hard drives are great for large sequential I/O. For those situations, ReadyBoost gets out of the way. We concentrate on improving the performance of small, random I/Os, like paging to and from disk.

Q: What happens when you remove the drive?
A: When a surprise remove event occurs and we can't find the drive, we fall back to disk. Again, all pages on the device are backed by a page on disk. No exceptions. This isn't a separate page file store, but rather a cache to speed up access to frequently used data.

Q: Isn't user data on a removable device a security risk?
A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.

Q: Won't this wear out the drive?
A: Nope. We're aware of the lifecycle issues with flash drives and are smart about how and when we do our writes to the device. Our research shows that we will get at least 10+ years out of flash devices that we support.

Q: Can use use multiple devices for EMDs?
A: Nope. We've limited Vista to one ReadyBoost per machine

Q: Why just one device?
A: Time and quality. Since this is the first revision of the feature, we decided to focus on making the single device exceptional, without the difficulties of managing multiple caches. We like the idea, though, and it's under consideration for future versions.

Q: Do you support SD/CF/memory stick/MMC/etc.?
A: Mostly. In beta2, we added support for a small number of SD/CF cards on internal USB2 & PCIe busses. RC1 has a much broader support range.

Q: Why don't you support SD on my USB2.0 external card reader?
A: We unfortunately don't support external card readers - there were some technical hurdles that we didn't have time to address. In general, if a card reader shows a drive without media in it (like a floppy drive or CD ROM does), we can't use it for ReadyBoost.

Q: Will it support all USB drives, regardless of how they are ID'd to the OS ("hard disk drive" or "Device with Removable Storage")?
A: We have no way to tell what is on the other end of a USB cable so we do some basic size checks (since no one has a 200GB flash device ;-) ) and then perform our speed tests. HDD will not, however, pass our speed tests, and there is no benefit to using a USB HDD for ReadyBoost.

Q: Can you use an mp3 player to speed up your system?
A: Not currently. MP3 players use the 'plays for sure' interfaces to expose themselves to Windows. We require that the device appear as a disk volume. These aren't currently compatible.

Q: How much of a speed increase are we talking about?
A: Well, that depends. On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticable.

Q: I can't get my device to work with ReadyBoost... can I lower the perf requirements?
A: Unfortunately, no. We've set the perf requirements to the lowest possible throughput that still makes your system faster. If we lowered the perf requirements, then there wouldn't be a noticeable benefit to using ReadyBoost. Remember, we're not adding memory, we're improving disk access.

Q: Which manufacturers support ReadyBoost?
A: Well, I hope that all of them do, eventually. Right now, we're working with manufacturers to create a program that will allow them to identify ReadyBoost capable devices on their packaging.

Posted at 01:03PM Jul 18, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

whats the cost of web 2.0 ?

With all the websites out there showing meaningless content such as flickr and You tube, has anyone calculated the cost to business from staff surfing this content ?

Blogs I can understand, most of the technical inquiries I do now end up pointing to a worthwhile blog posting, but do I really need to look at someone's birthday party or other meaningless videos ?

Soon companies will block the URLs to these sites and for good reason if you ask me, back to work then...............

Posted at 12:00PM Jun 18, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

Do We Really Need a Security Industry?

Bruce Schneier has written an interesting blog article and in my opinion some of the statements are both accurate:-

"The primary reason the IT security industry exists is because IT products and services aren't naturally secure "

Then a bit windows orientated:-

"If computers were already secure against viruses, there wouldn't be any need for antivirus products"

I haven't renewed my Solaris or Mac anti virus for some years now

Back to accurate again:-

" If bad network traffic couldn't be used to attack computers, no one would bother buying a firewall. If there were no more buffer overflows, no one would have to buy products to protect against their effects."

To:-

"If the IT products we purchased were secure out of the box............"

That would be Solaris then ?

Click Here for more information

Posted at 02:37PM May 04, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[2]

VoIP not mature enough !!

Vodafone has finally provided an explanation for the removal of VoIP features from the Nokia N95, and apparently it's all for our own good. A Vodafone statement says the mobile operator doesn't offer its own VoIP service because it doesn't believe it's a mature technology.

It goes on to say it require "in-depth testing, a solid end-to-end customer experience, billing integration and customer service support which is not currently available".

The statement goes on to explain: "There is a misleading perception that VoIP services are 'free'. This is, however, not the case when it comes to using VoIP over mobile where customers will need to use data connectivity to establish a service and may incur further charges."

Of course, Vodafone does offer a Data Unlimited tariff, but the details are hard to come by and it's expensive compared to the competition.

"Vodafone feels responsible that customers should not incur unnecessary charges when competitive mobile rates are a cost-effective choice for customers."

So using VoIP is no more expensive than normal mobile calls, and it would only confuse us if we had it, so better Vodafone takes it away.

However, the mobile operator says it's not reducing choice: "Lastly, it's important to note that customers can download VoIP applications if they choose to do so or can use VoIP services via a laptop and data card."

Stand-alone applications such as Fring continue to work fine on the N95 from Orange or Vodafone, but they don't offer near as compelling a user experience as the integrated solutions from the likes of Truphone.

http://www.theregister.co.uk

Posted at 11:35AM May 02, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

Oh dear......New virus comes disguised as IE 7 download

If you receive an e-mail offering a download of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, delete it. A new virus is making the rounds that comes disguised as a test version of Microsoft current Web browser.

Click Here for more information

Posted at 03:56PM Apr 02, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

Freaky start to the day

Well today had an interesting start, I was on the train into the London office when a bloke came and sat down opposite me.

He looked strangly familiar but I couldn't quite place him, then I saw an ID badge with his name on. I used to go to school with this guy 26 years ago !

What I found most disturbing was his hair style was still the same.

Posted at 09:35AM Mar 16, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]

Bike ride through Chernobyl

A girl by the name of Elena took a motorbike ride to Chernobyl and put up this website. This site is absolutely mesmerizing; each photo more interesting than the one before.

http://www.myownlittleserver.us/chernobyl /A>

Posted at 04:57PM Mar 07, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[1]

TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

Every company should be doing this:

As part of an ongoing commitment to address the challenges of climate change Land Rover has launched a CO2 Offset Programme.

This unique initiative, to be managed by Climate Care, includes a commitment from Land Rover to offset its manufacturing assembly CO2 emissions and a customer vehicle package to enable customers to offset their CO2 emissions whilst driving a Land Rover.

All UK Land Rover vehicles from 07 Model Year will be offered to customers with a CO2 Offset package (based on the average CO2 produced by the vehicle over the first 45,000 miles).

What are CO2 offsets? CO2 offsetting is about funding (investment) in projects across the world which avoids or reduces CO2 emissions ensuring that the amount saved balances the original emissions. CO2 offsetting provides a mechanism to take action and responsibility for the CO2 that we produce.

We are partnering with a specialist organisation, Climate Care to offset our own CO2 emissions from our manufacturing assembly and to offer our customers an offset programme at point of sale through our dealerships. Our offset programme will focus on 3 key offset project types:

a) Renewable energy – replacing non renewable fossil fuels such as oil, coal which when burnt produce CO2 by renewable energies such as solar and wind which produce no CO2

b) Technology change – new technologies which avoid or reduce CO2 such as clean burning charcoal stoves

c) Energy efficiency – improving efficiency to reduce the amount of energy needed, such as using energy efficient lighting Additionally many of these projects deliver additional environmental and social benefits such as conserving wildlife habitats and species, and providing employment for communities.

All of the projects go through a rigorous process of verification and validation to ensure and demonstrate the CO2 emissions saved.

What is CO2 and climate change? Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused by the burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas have risen significantly over the last few hundred years, as a result of industrialisation and transport in general. This is occurring on a global scale.

Present levels of CO2 emissions exceed the amount the Earth is capable of absorbing, which means that levels of CO2 are rising and contributing to the Greenhouse Effect causing the planet´s temperature to rise. Current scientific evidence suggests that this could lead to severe changes in weather, leading to the melting of polar ice caps and changes in sea level. Rising global temperatures will affect all aspects of the planet´s ecosystem, leading to loss of animal and plant habitats, and impacts on agricultural production.

A consensus is emerging around the world that action needs to be taken to reduce our present emissions of CO2 and to stabilise the Earth´s climate. Many countries are already acting and Governments, companies, and other national and international organisations are reducing emissions through energy efficiency and use of renewable energy.

Posted at 11:59AM Feb 28, 2007 by Simon Bullen in General  |  Comments[0]