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November 29, 2006

Free Wifi for you?

Well, the Victorian elections are over. Over in NSW, there are incentives.

update Central business districts of key cities in New South Wales will get free Wi-Fi broadband within the next three years, under a plan announced today by the state's premier Morris Iemma.

The NSW state government will in early 2007 go shopping for suppliers to establish "universal coverage" of free Wi-Fi in Sydney's central business district (including North Sydney), in addition to the suburbs of Parramatta, Penrith and Liverpool and outlying cities Newcastle, Wollongong and Gosford.

Torture 2.0

Posted by Anandasim at 05:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2006

Behind the Scenes at the Bleeding Edge Pond

For those of you curious about how the toads here at the Bleeding Edge pond get our posts out to you, I can now provide you with this exclusive video showing our staff hard at work.

OK, I admit that's not actually our staff. It's a clip from Monkey Dust, an award winning animation series shown on the digital-only ABC2.

Posted by Jeremy at 08:27 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 25, 2006

Western Australia Daylight Savings

In a similar vain vein to the earlier issues this year with adjustments to the end of daylight savings time  due to the Commonwealth Games. Western Australia are now facing a similar issue with the trial of Daylight Savings commencing the 3rd of December 2006 through 2009, Michael Kleef has been hard at work keeping to keep people informed on what's happening and the implications regarding Microsoft's software applications.

Microsoft have updated their Australian Timezone website to list the products that need updating and the links for the associated patches (at least the ones available at the moment).

Posted by Stephen at 10:15 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 24, 2006

One Note Song (no Dance though)

Charles likes Info Select, Stephen I think, prefers OneNote for storing information clips and information. I just came across an entertaining anthem (with lyrics and MP3) called My One and Only OneNote - I can't think of any other info storage programs I've used that have motivated that fervour.

Me? I have relied on the free edition of Evernote for some time, currently use Zotero for local clipping, with Google Notebook for that odd clip when it needs to be available on the different machines. Not to mention, Furling a lot. I just received OneNote 2003 with a new low end Toshiba notebook so my curiosity is piqued. One misconception that the OneNote team are quick to stress is that OneNote isn't just for TabletPCs. And it appears to have more features than one might think. Maybe I'll samba along.

Posted by Anandasim at 09:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 22, 2006

The thin end of the wedge? OpenOffice.org Calc adds support for Excel VBA

A Linux.com article reports that Novell has been extending OOO Calc to support VBA for Excel. Although OOO Calc appears very similar to much of Excel functionality, one big problem is the lack of support of the Microsoft proprietary Visual Basic for Applications language. OOO has a Basic but it's so odd that I gave it the cold shoulder.

As an Excel user, you may have looked at OpenOffice.org and found that it doesn't support Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the Microsoft Office macro language. If you've spent years building hundreds of Excel macros, the fear of losing them all could keep you locked in to Office. If so, it's time to look again; Novell has taken OpenOffice.org's source code and create a version of its own that supports Excel VBA.

Will Microsoft sue Novell? Maybe not, if they have recently become chums again.

Source: Linux.com | OpenOffice.org Calc adds support for Excel VBA

Posted by Anandasim at 12:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Java doesn't make coffee, .NET does

Ah, what a droll thing to come across. A programmable coffee machine from Melitta.

Every tech nerd will tell you that the two monster programming frameworks, Sun's Java and Microsoft's .NET are fierce competitors for the hearts and minds of programmers and developers. Although it is not clear how the the IT version of Java originated, many will point to Java coffee being a source of naming inspiration. Yet, somehow, Melitta decided to use the Microsoft .NET MicroFramework. Presumably using managed code gives you more reliable coffee.

Posted by Anandasim at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Desperately Seeking Wifi Access Point

As Stephen said, we bumped into each other at the Microsoft Ready Summit '06 held at Crown Towers (the Melbourne sessions). It was a worthwhile experience unlike some of the more recent MS events (put that in your eval sheet). What makes a Microsoft event worthwhile. Lucidity in communication and some honest rehearsing of materials to present. More importantly, an understanding of how to pace the presentation to the audience and some heartfelt insights yourself dhwnd.

The first thing that was interesting (for me) was this time, the organising people had sent out barcodes for attendee attendance via web and email. And a day or two before, they again sent barcodes, this time as graphics in mobile phone SMS. I wanted to see whether that would work with the scanners there. Unfortunately, the young fellow at the event decided to type in the attendance registration number manually rather than use his scanner.

The next thing was, geek-males and geek-females were all over the place. You would had not seen so many O2 Atoms, Blackberrys. Stephen was surfing the rooms with his Nokia trying to latch on to a free Wifi Access Point. So was I - I had to be available for fix-this with clients. With so many people willing to deprecate one day of work or business $$$ to attend the event - some party should have offered free or impromptu paid Wifi access, instead of the free baseball cap and tee shirt?

Maybe Microsoft thought that we would welcome a break or release from our daily grind. IT geeks + end users / clients = it don't work that way. Why do you think we carry mobile phone / pda / GPS / notebooks with us? Like I really want 2.7kg of bling in a notebook.? No way!

Posted by Anandasim at 12:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 20, 2006

Vista RTM - First Impressions

So I now have Windows Vista Ultimate RTM fully installed and am very impressed with the speed increase compared to the previous 'Build 5744 RC2' that we had access to. The RTM version is full of newly designed icons & sounds with new Vista themed wallpapers.

Vista RTM

Currently running is Windows Media Center tuned into Ch7 HD, Age of Empires 3, NYTimes Reader, Vista Aero Theme on Dual 17" Monitors @ 1280x1024 each. That is around as close as I could push the system without the TV starting to drop frames and stutter. The machine spec is a P4 3.06Ghz (Socket 478/533Mhz FSB), 3GB RAM and a NVidia 7600GS 256MB GPU. Overall I have a Windows Experience Index of 4.1 which ain't too bad for a machine that is easily 2 years plus in age.

Posted by Stephen at 12:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2006

Microsoft Vista & Office Interface


On Wednesday a few thousand people converged at the Crown Casino for Microsoft's Ready Summit '06 covering Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 Server with break out sessions for IT Managers, IT Professionals and Developers.

I bumped into Ananda mid-morning though I was heading more down the IT Pro sessions whereas Ananda was looking more into the Developer streams.

So I am busy backing up systems here and getting ready to install both final RTM versions of Vista and Office over the weekend. I have the video camera, digital camera and screen recorders ready to be fired up and record a few demos. A will focus most of the demos on what is new in Vista [Wikipedia Link] 

Posted by Stephen at 06:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Windows Sysinternals now on TechNet

Sysinternals created by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell back in 1996 now has an official home at Microsoft TechNet where the old URL redirects to the new link  here anyway.

Process Monitor,  PsTools, Process Explorer, RootkitRevealer and BgInfo are just a couple of the essential utilities that have come from the Sysinternals team. Mark's blog and the Sysinternals Blog are also now hosted at TechNet.

Posted by Stephen at 04:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Andrew Olle Media Lecture 2006

Tonight Federal Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Minister, Senator Helen Coonan will deliver the 2006 Andrew Olle Media Lecture. If you cannot come to grips to hand over the $165 for a seat you can tune into 702 ABC Sydney Streaming live tonight from 9pm or you can tune into ABC TV Saturday Night at 10:35pm to see the visual version.

Last year's lecture was presented by John Doyle which was excellent and I still rate this speech as one of the best I have heard in a very long time. More information about Andrew Olle and the lectures with previous transcripts can be found here.

Can 'Coonan the Communicator' step up to plate? Lets wait & see...

Update: Transcript now available here

Posted by Stephen at 02:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 12, 2006

Phishers target the wealthy?

According to Gartner, high income-earners are being specifically targeted by phishing scams. One of their surveys, reported by the BBC, says individuals earning more than $100,000 per year receive 50 per cent more phishing emails than the less well-off. And they lose four times as much money to the stunts - averaging around $4362.

Overall, the number of US adults who have received a phishing e-mail has doubled from 57 million in 2004 to 109 million in 2006, with total losses up too - at $2.8 billion.

We're partial to a good scare story, but we'd just like to know - if Gartner is correct - how the con men know which email addresses belong to high income earners? They're fiendishly clever, of course, but it strikes us as being highly improbable. Our observations would suggest the scammers take a completely scattergun approach, given the number of scam emails we receive that try to make us nervous about bank accounts that we don't have.

It seems more likely to us that either the wealthier respondents to the survey over-estimate the attacks, or the less well-off simpy don't recognise half the attempts to swindle them. Either way, it would make the survey total garbage, wouldn't it? Unless we've missed something.

If you can think of any way these email attacks could be tailored in this fashion, please let us know. Then we could start to really worry. In the meantime, our major concern is that reporting standards at the BBC seem to have declined dramatically. Even if the claims are true, wouldn't you think that a good journalist would have realised that if scammers had worked out a way to target high income earners, they were looking at a MUCH bigger story!

Posted by cw at 07:27 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 08, 2006

Windows feeling slow? Again?

I was recently working on several clients' machines. One was a Windows NT 4 Workstation, corporate managed. Response was amazingly good. Another was a SOHO Dell PC with a CRT screen (gives you the idea of how old that would be). Ran well as well even though the kid(s) had installed Kazaa and some AOL dialup was startup although this was a machine on broadband. Again quite good performance considering there was junk there that should be removed (except that the uninstall programs were broken of course).

But once in a while, back in for Bleeding Edge Forum, we get cries for help because peoples' machines have begun to slow down. Probably because Forum members might be tinkerers who may knowingly try out every program on the net (just kidding) or  who may not know what goes with with.

I was interested to see this blog entry on What Really Slows Windows Down and some statistics. You might be interested.

Posted by Anandasim at 10:52 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 04, 2006

Missed the Sony Rootkit Anniversary

Twelve months on I have missed (just) the opportunity to inform Sony BMG that the chief toad's immediate blackban on Sony BMG due to the addition of Rootkit technologies of legitimate music purchasers is still in effect throughout my realms, no PSP, PS2, PS3, CD's or DVD's or Blue-Ray products have been purchased since nor are any in the planning stage.

Congrats Sony, Anyone else still have Sony BMG Blackbanned?

Edit: I also keep well away from anything to do with Copy Control which is rampant in Australian music stores, so as the festive season draws near and you are thinking of a CD or two for prezzies then keep an eye out for this logo on the back of the disc you are checking out, if it exists, run.

Posted by Stephen at 06:57 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

The new way to reach the people

There's been a lot of fuss from media watchers about how the old media (classic TV) is slowly losing eyeballs to the new media (YouTube). And how, if you want to get elected, you might also consider using the Internet to get your message out. Well, Robert Ryang has posted a spoof of Gorilla Political Marketing. How long before our pollies take it seriously?

Posted by Anandasim at 10:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Novell (maybe) strikes gold

Reading Stephen's blog entry,  I was gonna congratulate Novell for finally pulling themselves out of the mud that Microsoft and market evolution pushed them into since early the 1990S. The relevance of a Network Operating System - Novell Netware was pushed into relative obscurity as Microsoft produced Windows NT - a one-size-fits-all solution that could be deployed as a workstation and a server. Novell's original bread-and-butter NOS kept losing market share, only surviving in entrenched shops even though Netware services were initially much superior to Microsoft's Active Directory. Novell tried getting into desktop Office applications by purchasing WordPerfect that disappeared with lots of cash and was sold to Corel. Eventually, they bought into SUSE Linux and decided to deprecate their Holy Grail of Netware - a very brave decision but I thought, well, everyone else does Linux, what's the diff?

Well finally, after all these years, Novell has something that Stephen Ballmer wants.

Ok, at 0908hrs AEDT 4th Nov 2006, I followed the Novell Press Release link and ended in an Apache/Jasper exception.

HTTP 500 Error at Novell Press Release

Shall we read too much into this? Linux sucks? Novell's incompetent? No. It's what I have said all along.

IT and Computers break. Regardless of how much it costs, how much effort you put into it, how well engineered it is. The better solutions break less often. That's life.

Posted by Anandasim at 08:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 03, 2006

Microsoft & Novell Collaboration

Today Microsoft and Novell entered a strategic partnership that will bridge the divide between Open Source Software and Proprietary Software.

The components that make up this new alliance are quite a combination to say the least. One of the core results as Jeff Jaffe Executive VP at Novell stated "As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux". This is nothing new so to speak as we have been able to do most of this for a fair amount of time now though "Microsoft will purchase a quantity of coupons from Novell that entitle the recipient to a one-year subscription for maintenance and updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server." meaning that Microsoft will effectively officially support Novell SUSE Linux in-house, now that is news.

On the Novell side of virtualisation Suse Linux Enterprise 10 comes complete with XEN 3.0 the Open Source Virtualisation platform, whilst Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn Server will include its Virtual Server product out of the box. This will no doubt see both Xen and VS have greater interoperability and migration streams between the two as "IDC projects the overall market for virtual machine software revenue to be more than $1.8 billion by 2009, and the overall market for distributed system management software to be $10.2 billion by 2010"

Among the other sections of the agreement between the two firms include that "Microsoft will work with Novell and actively contribute to several open source software projects, including projects focused on Office file formats and Web services management. Second, Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual noncommercial open source developers."

More details on the Office file formats and patent agreements that form the other parts of this collaboration are available from the Microsoft and Novell press releases.

Posted by Stephen at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Putting a finger on info you've come across

We've been on the look-out for information managers - those that keep track of scraps of information for yonks. And information managers rise in popularity and subsequently vanish. So does our earnestness in keeping up with our filing of information. The Web Browser Bookmark (sometimes known as Favourite's) has become so mainstream that everyone who uses an Web connected machine keeps a few (to say the least). So, what's new this time? Well, it's Zotero. It's good. It's well featured. Take it for a ride. You might just fall in love with it.

Zotero is formally called a Citation Management tool. A what? "Pretty Academic" you say. Well, don't let the terminology fool you. It has many uses. But, let's start at the beginning.

Webpages (and articles, scraps of information) are fine, but they soon breed so, that you have difficulty keeping up with them. So, the idea of the Bookmark or Internet Favourites was invented. Once you saw a page you wanted to return to, you could flag it and the Bookmark would be stored - the Title of the webpage and the URL. Well and good, except your Favourites menu becomes so tall, it scrolls vertically.

So you then spend time organising Bookmarks into Folders. And Sub-Sub Folders. Soon the Sub Folders are nested deep and each Subfolder still has heaps of Bookmarks. But an item can only exist in one Folder. What if the item can be described by several attributes - like ToDo and also IT and also Get Money?

So, Tags were invented. You could then file an item in a Folder and Tag it as well with multiple Tags.

But what if you wanted to track items by Author. Or Date? Or you wanted to file not just the link to the content but a snapshot of the text, graphics of the content as well? What if you want to annotate? And maybe you want to peruse all these offline, rather than be permanently connected to the Internet?

So far, there have been several products. Onfolio was a good effort. It lived in Internet Explorer as an Add-On. It was for-money, then free, then bought and incorporated into Microsoft's Windows Live Toolbar. And there it has languished. Because some people just don't want to run WLT. Or use Internet Explorer as the preferred browser.

Those who have academic pursuits use a desktop product called EndNote for bibliographies. I don't believe Onfolio integrated with EndNote or interchanged data with EndNote.

Along comes Zotero. It is to my mind, like Onfolio. Except it lives in the Firefox 2.0 camp, as an extension. It's free. What does it do?

Very conveniently, Zotero sits at the bottom of Firefox 2 as a status bar button. When revealed, it will create an adjustable bottom pane within Firefox.

I've discovered a "moment of truth" feature of Zotero - an Enabling Feature.  For Forums and Discussion Groups on the web, it is often very hard to bookmark and/or categorise interesting discussions and posts. Well Zotero makes that a cinch.

Give Zotero a try. It could just be the one extension that enables Firefox 2.

Posted by Anandasim at 05:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

So where is your heart at?

Following on from the 'My heart does NOT belong to iPod' post and if you are eagerly awaiting a Zune, you can download a fresh theme for Windows XP from the Zune website or keep up to date with the Zune Insider Youtube Channel.

Sadly for Microsoft and Apple I will stick with my Nokia N91 for another couple of months. Then I will be jumping ship with a  bundle of cash on the upcoming N95 that was announced at the Nokia Open Studio event held in New York back on the 26th of September.

With the N95 having a 5 Mega Pixel Camera, 30FPS DVD Quality Video, GPS, TV Output via the same 3.5mm headphone jack.

I'll leave it up to the Mobile Pirates to show it off and leave you with the final quote from the guys. "Throw away your digital camera, your phone, your GPS, your computer, your MP3 player or whatever else you have."

Posted by Stephen at 04:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Microsoft revises Vista Licensing

Microsoft revises Vista Licensing

You may uninstall the software and install it on another device for your use. You may not do so to share this license between devices.

.....

Our intention behind the original terms was genuinely geared toward combating piracy; however, it’s become clear to us that those original terms were perceived as adversely affecting an important group of customers: PC and hardware enthusiasts. You who comprise the enthusiast market are vital to us for several reasons, not least of all because of the support you’ve provided us throughout the development of Windows Vista.

Ed Bott has all the finer points summed up on his post about it including what will hopefully clear up the virtualisation scenarios that Ananda and I have tried to debunk over in the forums here and here.

Posted by Stephen at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 02, 2006

Sorry. My heart does NOT belong to iPod

No doubt this is going to come as a surprise to Steve Jobs, who seems to think that he owns the portable music player market, but a survey of iPod users shows that unlike the average Mac user, who tends to regard Apple as a blood relative, they're completely disloyal to the brand. In fact, an exceptionally high percentage of them are apparently busting to jump ship. They're positively itching, it seems to run out to the shop and buy a Microsoft Zune.
'
Could it have something to do with the fact that (a) they're over-priced and (b) an extraordinary number if iPod users have had the things die on them - some we know have had four of them turn up their heels in less than two years - and discovered that Apple isn't terribly interested?

Posted by cw at 06:03 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

So much for the Mac Pro: Intel doubles the bet

Too bad for those inveterate toads who shelled out $3999 for a Mac Pro - that delightfully powerful box from Apple that ships with two K2.66GHz Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors and 3GB of RAM.

Today Intel announced it's brought forward the shipping date of its Kentsfield Core 2 Quadro: essentially two of those 2.66GHz dual-core processors on a single chip. According to the Tom's Hardware preview of the new chip, you can expect an 80 per cent performance jump in an application like HD video encoding and conversion from Kentsfield - essentially two Core 2 Duo E6700 cores in one socket package. Most software hasn't been re-written to take advantage of the extra cores, but when that happens, no self-respecting toad is going to be happy with a slow old Mac Pro. So much for that $3999.

And we should possibly mention the fact that we just happen to have one of those hot little CPUs in our possession for testing.

Posted by cw at 05:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Google your new house

Just got an email from Mark F., drawing our attention to his Australian real estate search engine, which uses Google Maps to show property listings by suburb: SuburbView.

The site was launched in early August and I believe this was the first Australian site using Google Earth to display Property Listings. It slowly morphed to use Google Maps where the visual look and feel of results is the same on the Google Map vs viewing in Google Earth. This site is my own project which I created to help myself look for a new property, and thought others would find the site handy. The main goal is to provide a visual search showing number of bedrooms, and more importantly, the price.
We've taken a very quick look at it, and it looks pretty good. What do you think?

Posted by cw at 03:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Let's correct the Internet, and keep it free

Having invented the Web, you can understand why Tim Berners Lee might get a touch anxious about its prospects. He's worried, for instance, about the fact that it might be used to "spread misinformation and undemocratic forces". He wants to start a research project to study its social and technological implications.

Sounds much like the ABC, doesn't it? What we need is someone like John Howard to have a word with Tim, and show him how one can keep misinformation and undemocratic forces - all that commie pinko anti-business garbage - off the Internet.

Maybe we could start by giving the Internet a budget. Not a terribly big one. It's important not to give them a terribly big budget, so that when we cut it, they have to start removing things. It won't take very long for them to learn which things to remove. Sites that spread misinformation and undemocratic stuff of course. That way, no one can be accused of censorship.

And there's no point in wasting money on research. The Howard government has done all the research that's necessary. We'll just have to give Tim the PM's email address. When you want to preserve democratic freedom, it's best to talk to an expert.

Posted by cw at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Don't buy your music. Rent it!

An MTV service called URGE is a significant add-on component of the newly released Windows Media Player 11. It's by no means perfect - according to one critic, it's no iTunes - but who knows, it might get better. The ability to fill your music player with rented music, rather than buying it could be appealing.

The problem for Australian music lovers is that it isn't available in Australia. According to Microsoft officials, however, they're negotiating with an Australian music provider, and they expect to have a local equivalent by January.

Posted by cw at 11:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack