Saturday 03 May 2008 18:12
The consensus view of the mass media today seems to be that if we don't cut our energy use now and reduce CO2 emissions, global disaster could be no more than a couple of decades off. I'm sorry but I don't believe it. And neither does former British Chancellor Nigel Lawson, whose book "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming" has recently been published. In it, he expresses skepticism at many of the claims made by global warming believers, and argues that the proposed solutions are absurd or inadequate. Read more...
Soapbox no trackbacks § ¶
Thursday 01 May 2008 17:25
We have just opened a hosting account with Hawk Host, and will be migrating the sites that we currently have hosted at iVhosting.com over to it during the couple of months that our subscription with the old host has left to run. Those sites include The PC Guru and our URL shortener site xaddr.com, as well as my personal ham radio hobby site g4ilo.com, but not tech-pro.net itself. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Tuesday 29 April 2008 09:45
As regular readers of this blog know, a few months ago we switched to using Linux on our office systems. We're happy with the relative immunity to viruses and malware, and with not having eventually to upgrade to the appalling Windows Vista, but almost daily I find examples of how the Linux environment is under-developed or plain amateurish compared to Windows. Geeks who trumpet that Linux is superior to Windows just don't live in the real world. It's all too easy to see how many people who are tempted into trying Linux on their desktop eventually give up in frustration and go back to Windows. Read more...
Software no trackbacks § ¶
Friday 25 April 2008 11:09
There are times when I wish I had never started Tech-Pro Downloads. It's based on a commercial script that came with a database from the RegNow software distributor and receives updates from it, as well as manual submissions. But removing the dross and the spam from Chinese software developers with their third rate clones of DVD rippers and video converters takes a lot of time and is extremely tedious and boring, and editing the descriptions of the products that remain takes even more time that sometimes seems not worth the effort. But every now and then it brings to my attention a product that is really worth promoting, such as Live File Backup. Read more...
Software no trackbacks § ¶
Sunday 06 April 2008 17:59
There is a bit of a stink being stirred up at the moment over a new online advertising service called Phorm. It's an online advertising platform that works like this: ISPs will scan the text of content downloaded by web surfers, analyze it and insert relevant ads on participating sites. Presumably ISPs will receive some of the advertising income for their participation in this scheme, which will help keep down the costs of web access. Predictably it is the ISPs with the most aggressive pricing that have signed up for this. But a lot of consumers are not happy about it, saying that it invades their privacy, and some security experts have even claimed it breaches data privacy laws. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Saturday 05 April 2008 11:21
Security firm Comodo recently introduced a product for webmasters called UserTrust, that allows users to rate your site and displays the rating online. As it is a free product Comodo hopes that many web sites will use it, which will promote the idea that users should look for indicators that a site can be trusted before downloading or buying anything online. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Friday 04 April 2008 09:49
Is it just me, or is everyone sick of the music industry's constant whining about how it is everyone else's responsibility to stop piracy of their products? They have apparently convinced the government, that well known expert in information technology, that ISPs should take steps to prevent ilegal downloads, or face sanctions. Now Charles Dunstone, head of Carphone Warehouse, operators of the TalkTalk broadband service, has refused. He has said the demands are unreasonable and unworkable, and it is not his job to be an internet policeman. Good for him. The next step would presumably be for the government to make telephone companies cut off people who use the phone to arrange crimes. That would put an end to illegal activity at a stroke, wouldn't it? Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Wednesday 02 April 2008 18:04
I've been running the business and developing our sites using Linux for a couple of months now, and there have been no Windows applications I've really missed or been unable to find an adequate replacement for. However until a couple of days ago I had just been too busy to do any web server log analysis to see what our site visitors were up to. Under Windows I had been using Web Log Storming, a powerful interactive web log analyzer that lets you quickly set filters and do drill-down analysis to find out exactly how people arrive at any goal, and what search keywords they were using. Linux seems to have nothing remotely equivalent. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
