Granted I probably do bash Microsoft a bit too much and that’s probably a bad thing but I used to embrace that technology. I’ve owned at least two windows mobile devices and in 2005/06 I even picked up a copy of visual studio and started writing apps for them in VB. I decided to get rid of my Dell Axim X51v PDA because it was just too limited in what it could do. I used to use it as a tomtom because that was what it was good at. Skype was good on occasion when I wanted to make skype calls on the go via wifi. Apart from that is was a £320 brick that spent most of it’s life in a draw.

I see that those kind of devices are pretty good for commercial hand held applications but I think that’s only because Microsoft are the only people targeting that market. The mobile market is fiercely competitive when it comes to smart phones but it seems that microsoft smart phones are fairly uncommon nowadays. The whole PDA market seems to have died a death because smartphones with 3g data connections are so much more practical. I’ve only ever seen windows mobile 6 on a few clunky smart phones but given the choice between that and an i-phone I think almost everyone went for an i-phone because they look good and the UI is much better.

Microsoft have released their latest breed of mobile OS to compete with the likes of Apple and Android but it seems they are so late to the market with their offering and people just don’t seem to be buying it. I don’t know a single sole who owns one of the new windows mobile devices.

The clunky gui of windows mobile 5/6 lends it’s self rather well to commercial applications where things have to be signed for on a screen. You just couldn’t do that with an android or apple device right now. I don’t know how well the latest breed of MS devices works in this situation but it seems windows mobile 5 is still the OS of choice for commercial use. Perhaps apple and android are missing a trick there.

As for windows on the pc it seems XP will never die. It’s been around for 8 years and I’ll bet it’ll still be on desks in another eight if not sixteen years. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. Perhaps MS are falling behind. It seems the only way they are making money is by the market dominance they have been building up over the last 20 years. Netbooks took off because they were lightweight cheap and simple and a lot of this was down to Linux but now there is little difference between a netbook and a laptop since Microsoft subsidised XP and windows7 basic for netbooks to push Linux out of the market and they seem to have succeeded as last time i went to buy a netbook there wasn’t one anywhere with Linux on it and the prices are on the way up towards that of a full size laptop too.

I don’t think I can’t say i haven’t embraced Microsoft because I did. The problem is that technology moves on and although Microsoft have eventually released new products they were late to market and highly flawed. Even the person who told me I should embrace all technology has said vista and 7 are rubbish. I needed to challenge myself with new things and the only way i could do that was to find something else that had something more to offer which was why I moved over to linux. I invested a lot of time and money using windows and windows mobile but the world has moved on since 2005. Perhaps I’m an early adopter but I think microsoft have reached their peak and are on the way back down now. Granted they still have a few areas that they dominate because they are the best at it but they are being out paced in other areas and they are clinging on using the strength they have built up over the years but they can only fight for so long. There are other alternatives out there and not just Linux and Apple. Haiku is one I’ve been meaning to try for a while. It’s designed to be compatible with BeOS who went bust and got bought up by Palm yeas ago but I’d always wanted to try BeOS back in the day but it was commercial and as a teenager I had no money.

I’d be more than happy to use a Mac but again cost is all that stops me. To me Mac owners are like people who own sports cars. All money and very fancy but if all your going to do is drive to the shops why bother. I can see why certain people use Macs because a lot of software for music and video production is only written for Mac.

I’d be more than happy to call myself a Mac user if only someone were willing to let me have one. I wouldn’t turn down the chance to play around with an old first generation i-mac. As for Microsoft if they did something new that was any good I’d be all over it like shit on velcro but they just haven’t. For me the only thing that is moving with the times and is accessible to me is open source.

My little sister bought an i-phone 3gs recently and I love it as a piece of hardware. It’s well built and feels solid and is nice to use but I’ve not had a chance to get used to the software but I have to admit I did consider getting one myself for a brief moment. Then I looked at the latest android devices and decided to get one of them instead because android makes things more accessible to me as a user.

I do embrace technology but show me something I’ve not seen before. Show me a windows powered i-pad style device that kicks the competition out of the market. Oh hang on there isn’t one but there working on it according to this news article. OK so they might be making one but will it be any good? time will tell but I’ll not keep my hopes up.

I don’t want to be a Linux fan boy but give me something worth embracing and I will welcome it with open arms but when I see stuff as old as windows mobile 5 still in use because it’s the only option it feels like time has stood still and that’s just not right in my mind. I don’t see a reason why that market will stay with WM5 if someone else comes up with something that does the job better for cheaper and I doubt it would take long to sort that out. The only reason I can suggest why it’s not already been done is that it’s such a small market but one well worth getting in to.

In short signing for those tickets reminded me of what I thought was a by-gone era but it seems it’s alive and well in a corner on it’s own. I just hope the the IT world doesn’t go the same way as the airline industry and end up going backwards like aviation did by grounding Concorde.

Anyway it’s high time I wasn’t here

Ben

Enjoy

It’s not often I’m on the receiving end of any of the common online scams that are always hitting the news. I can count the number of emails I’ve had fishing for my bank details on one hand. I suppose I’m relatively lucky but today I had a classic and one which I thought had died out years ago. I seem to remember it being called a 419 scam for some reason and commonly originated in Nigeria. Anyway to show what I mean here is the email I got while eating dinner today. If you want to know the detail of how this scam works go HERE for the Wikipedia article that explains it all.

STANDARD CHARTERED BANK OF GHANA,
ACCRA GHANA.

Mr Nana John

Should you know someone who for what ever reason is particularly susceptible to such scams perhaps the example I’ve posted can be used to help educate them.

Ben

= 5.6

After much faffing around and things breaking and having rebuilt all of my virtual host files several times bshephard.com kept pointing to the default root folder in /var/www rather than what I’d put in the config file.

I found the reason for this was that bshephard.com was the first entry in my system hosts file (/etc/hosts) rather than the host name of the machine so I swapped those around and restarted Apache and bshephard.com was alive once again. It seems apache takes that first hosts file entry and assumes that’s what it’s intend to serve up over and above the defined virtual hosts in it’s own config files.

Anyway this thing just cost me about 12 hours of my life and there is very little out there on the forums so I thought I’d post it to try and save someone else hours of pain and frustration.

In other news http://crazytrainmusic.co.uk is the latest project I’ve been working on. It’s still a work in progress but things are coming together nicely and it’s live. Fingers crossed it will start to sell again after the lest few weeks of outages due to the old site getting hacked twice and rushing to rebuild it and get it going again. If you need some new pickups it’s well worth checking out.

= 5.5

Ben

The way I’ve always done DNS is to let someone else deal with it. I’ve always used no-ip.com for bshephard.com and since I’ve bought some from 123-reg I use their DNS servers and I’ve had business broadband which comes with a static IP address which is costing me about £33 a month and I only get 3.5Mb downstream and about 600Kb upstream probably due to saturation on my local phone exchange. Today I stumbled on an article on how to host my own dynamically updated DNS server for my 123-reg domains.

The idea is to set up a BIND9 DNS server on my box and then use my no-ip.com account to point to that and run a script every time my IP address changes that updates the zone files and reloads BIND9 thus serving up the correct IP address for the likes of sts-it.co.uk without me having to spend a fortune on business broadband or registering the name through someone like no-ip.com. I found this all written up HERE by a chap called Ian Atkinson from Leeds. As soon as I read it everything just clicked into place in my mind and I knew what I wanted to do was possible. His article is really well written and apart from the initial sticking point of getting my head around the Debianised BIND config files on my system I was pretty much there.

By running my own dynamic DNS server in this way I can abandon my expensive business broadband account and move to Virgin Media’s cheapest domestic package which is three times faster than what I have and half the price and means a saving of just over £200 a year. The only problem is that I can’t test this setup yet as my IP address is static and never changes and until my Pipex contract expires and I can get Virgin Media installed I’ll not know if it works or not. as soon as my contract is up if they won’t offer me a better deal I’ll get Virgin installed side by side with Pipex and port everything over once it’s tested on bshephard.co.uk which I’m using for trying this out at present.

Over the last week or so I’ve also been testing out Google Analytics to monitor traffic to my site. I don’t have any real use for this kind of thing but it’s interesting to see where my visitors come from and see everything graphed out nicely and be able to run custom reports to look for trends and stuff. I can see why businesses want to use things like this as it helps them advertise effectively and to improve their site to get the most out of it. I don’t get a huge number of hits but I’m hoping perhaps someone will have read down the page this far and that will show up in a nice graph when I go back to check in the next few days.

All in all I’ve not got much housework done today because I’ve been on the computer setting all this up but hopefully in a years time I’ll be a bit better off for it.

Ben

= 7.8

Apart from exploring new technologies in my spare time I also seem to have made a few new friends recently via twitter. I like using twitter but I not on the level some use it and I’m starting to find it’s detracting from the reason I turned the computer on in the first place which is mainly to spend time researching and learning new things. If I’m going to have a conversation with someone then I’d rather use instant messengers because the message is private and you generally get an immediate response. I think the idea of twitter is as a status message about what I’m doing or events that are unfolding in front of me. Of course it’s useful to be able to send feedback to others but if that’s going to turn into a conversation then twitter is not the place for it. I’m increasingly noticing my time line getting filled up with the conversations of others which I have no interest in. It feels like twitter is slowly taking over my life like facebook once did so I think it’s time i put the brakes on a bit and limited myself. Social media is good in small doses but too much can be bad for you and become distraction.

Bed time now I think

Ben

= 6.5

Dear Ben,

Thank you for your email. I am helping Gloria de Piero answer the vast amounts of email being received. The Digital Economy Act was passed by parliament by the Labour government and the Conservatives. Obviously, you understand why it was felt necessary to pass the bill. Artists and the record companies are losing a lot of money and many people refuse to pay for their downloads, even if they are reasonably priced. The situation is this, any business, regardless of their trade, expects payment for their service. At the moment, this is not always happening. The situation will only get worse as the internet expands more and more. In order to protect future in this area, it was felt that as a country we had to try to ease the problem.

As I understand it the Act will take around 2 years to be fully functioning. Ofcom have to draw up an Industry Code for consumers, IPS’s and copyright holders. Any illegal activity will activate a notice asking you to stop. You will therefore know that there is a problem before any further action is taken. The ISP’s will work with you as much as they can as it is in their interest to do so. The code will be reviewed by the government and they will then consider how it should be enforced. Nobody wants people like you to suffer but people do have to accept they have to make payments for the service they are receiving the same as what they would expect to do so in any retail outlet.

I understand this Act is emotive but am confident a Labour government would monitor the situation carefully and do the fair thing.

Yours Sincerely,

Melanie Darrington

The line that annoys me most is this one “Nobody wants people like you to suffer but people do have to accept they have to make payments for the service they are receiving the same as what they would expect to do so in any retail outlet.” This act states that I can be cut off without a trial. If I’d walked into my local branch of HMV and stuffed a CD in my jacket and I’d be put in front of a judge accused of theft before being sentenced but not if I steal the same music by other means. I’m not against this bill’s intentions but I am very much against it in it’s current form. I think this email just confirms my disappointment with the Labour party. This bill was pushed through when it was as it would never have gone through if it had been properly debated. Sadly the media were focussed on the fact that an election had been called and very little time was given to what was going on in the background in the mean time.

The Lib Dem’s seem to be doing very well so far but I’ve also emailed Jason Zadrozny my local Lib Dem candidate but I’m still awaiting a reply.

Ben

= 6.5