Is your business XXX rated?

This weekend presents a bit of a milestone in the domain naming world as the .XXX domain finally makes an appearance. Its intended use needs little explanation.

For most businesses (or certainly the ones we have as customers), the owners might, at the very most, raise an eyebrow at the news. There’s certainly no need for them to contemplate such a registration, or is there?

We’re starting to see a school of thought forming, that although most businesses will have no need for such a domain suffix, there is perhaps a “lock out” benefit in registering them. After all, do you really want to find a legitimate adult-entertainment site is trading using the .xxx version of your domain name?

It will be interesting to see over the coming few weeks where companies with registered trade marks start snapping up these domains with no intention of  using them.

Fortunately there is a process for companies to register their trademarks and indicate they have no intention of hosting a live web site at that domain. Anyone accessing the domain will be automatically redirected to a blocked page which is apparently going to be managed by the registry.

It also appears that some 15,000 names have been pre-blocked. Many of those relate to celebrities.

Interestingly, Wikipedia states the internet registry is expected to make around $200m per year from the registrations, many of which will be in the form of blocking registrations which will never be used!

So will it all be worth it? It would seem, probably not. Any expectation that blocking access to *.xxx will remove access to all pornography sites is just not the case. Registration is voluntary and many sites are expected to continue to use their existing .com domain names. At the end of the day, it may all be a waste of time.

It should be faster, but it’s slower

This afternoon my laptop is slowly grinding itself into oblivion with the CPU banging up to almost 100% every second or so. This is no slouch of a laptop – Dell Precision with 8Gb RAM. However, it’s no match for a rogue bit of software.

Task manager was sufficient to get a quick handle on it being the Search Indexer (SearchIndexer.exe) process. A bit of digging later using some of the Sysinternals tools and it turns out to be a mammoth indexing exercise on my outlook.ost file.

Now that sort of makes sense.

This morning I moved a some very large chunks of e-mail out of my inbox and into some archive folders (still within my Exchange mailbox). I archive my e-mail into a yearly folder rather than splitting it up by groups like customers, suppliers etc.

So my efforts this morning to make things quicker (as Outlook struggles more with the volume of messages rather than the size) has made my afternoon worse.

It’s cool to know it’s hot

One of the things we monitor is temperature, which we can pick up from a number of different places. Some equipment will provide us with internal temperature and then sometimes we have external sensors available (e.g. from a UPS).

One of our customer’s was having problems with their air conditioning unit, which we were able to detect. Having had the maintenance company out, things dropped back to normal.

However, this morning we’ve had another alert, from an external sensor which sits in the cool airstream coming out of the aircon unit. A quick call to the site and someone is able to confirm the room is transitioning from air conditioned server room to sauna.

Another quick call, this time to the maintenance company, and someone is re-visiting the site to have another look.

As we move more towards the lights-out style of operating where we can’t even rely on the daily visit by someone changing the tapes, this sort of issue could easily sit unnoticed until it starts causing equipment failures.

JCB doesn’t have a look in

When we talk about comms lines (phones, broadband, leased lines etc), the discussion always at some point touches on the man in his JCB digger (or backhoe if you are from across the water) going through the cables.

Well, it seems we should be revising our views on what can cause a catastrophic line failure…

In the UK there seems to be ever increasing occurrences of cable theft! This is where people are stealing BT and the other telco’s cables for the copper and presumably head off down to the local scrap merchant to make a quick buck.

Last year there were a reported 400 arrests for cable theft.

Whatever next?

DDD Scotland

Last Saturday the entire development team attended “Developer Developer Developer (Scotland)” at the Glasgow Caledonian University.

This takes the form of a series of talks (on development, of course) lasting about an hour each, starting first thing in the morning and finishing at 5pm.

Attendance for the Exmos team is entirely voluntary, so it was great to see everyone there. By all accounts, it was a thumbs up all round.

The session topics are pretty varied and some of them pretty wild and very much “out there” rather than mainstream. The attendees are a pretty hardcore bunch, as are those doing the talks.

Let’s face it - you need to be pretty “into” your development to want to spend your whole Saturday with a bunch of (fellow) geeks, many of whom follow the “must look like a programmer” fashion. Thankfully, none of the Exmos people fall into this fashion category(?) and there’s an equal amount of “normal” looking people there as well.

We try to split ourselves over sessions that are new and interesting as well as some that are directly related and beneficial to the work we do. Invariably, due to the way the timetable works, you end up in at least one session that will leave you scratching your head in bamboozlement. That’s the great thing about programming – no matter how many years you work at it, you can always find someone who can make you feel like a novice when you see what they are doing. For me personally, it’s a call to try and become even better. Sometimes you catch just a snippet of something from this sort of talk that you can factor into your own applications.

This week on “The Apprentice” they had the mobile phone app challenge. Part of that involved a presentation to a bunch of gamer geeks, who also seem to follow “programmer fashion” by the looks of them. Someone said to me “tell me you don’t go to anything like that?”.

“Last Saturday!” I said - “Last Saturday I was at one… and it was awesome.” :-)

Some photos…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikniemann/sets/72157626555877493/with/5702963196/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikniemann/5702963196/in/set-72157626555877493

Word for Windowz or Windows?

I’ve been using Microsoft Word for Windows since the early 90’s. These early Windows versions had a very annoying bug where they would often forget the default paper size of A4 (for the UK) and keep reverting back to Letter (the US default). Back then we didn’t have the automatic resize between A4/Letter that the operating system and some printers are able to do. Instead you had to keep jumping over to the printer to confirm it should just print on A4 and ignore the request for Letter size paper.

Jump forward nearly 20 years and thankfully, that “anomaly” is a dim and distant memory.

Unfortunately, it’s been replaced with something else, which is equally annoying.

Word 2010 seems to have a real habit of hanging on for grim death to “English (U.S.)”. I don’t have it installed as a language in Word and it’s therefore not available for proofing. However, I find it constantly making an appearance and worse still, taking precedence over the default I have selected.

Check the screenshot below. Word started off by kindly doing an autocorrect on Ruggedised to Ruggedized. Having corrected it myself and then right clicked the wiggly red-line, I get the “correct” spelling being offered. Checking the language settings, my default is “English (U.K.)” and my “U.S.” option makes an appearance despite not being configured.

Better still, the Microsoft tool I’m using to write this article seems to have the same issues.

Smartphones–brilliance and a nightmare all in one.

This year is looking to truly be the year of the Smartphone. Sure, they’ve been around for a while now, but really came into their own with the launch of the iPhone. Now we have Google with their Android OS taking a major stance on the playing field and HTC manufactured Android phones really taking the lead. In fact, we’ve seen a number of customers who were early Smartphone adopters recently switch from iPhone to HTC Android devices. This year we also have Windows Phone 7 making an appearance.

The Blackberry, that mainstay of business mobile e-mail, is starting to get pushed into the background.

However, with all this brilliance comes a true nightmare – “APPS”. Apps (or “Applications”) are rapidly becoming the bane of the IT Department’s life. IT has spent probably the last 10 years fighting the installation of non-company approved software. Sure, it still goes on, but through technology and written policy, it’s now much harder for the perpetrator and much easier for IT to identify.

Suddenly however, we’ve re-lit the fire for these people who almost couldn’t help themselves when it came to installing rogue software on their laptops. We give them a Smartphone, an almost unlimited amount of the most crazy software conceivable and no rules, policies or even guidelines as to what is acceptable.

With the iPhone and Apple, the biggest worries were just time wasting and over-use of data. Apple have a very stringent vetting process for every application in the App Store. It’s probably only a matter of time before someone manages to get some malware in there, but it’s going to be pretty hard. To install Apple apps without the App Store needs some relatively complex hackery to jail-break the phone.

At the other end of the scale we have Google – all open and laid back. Pretty much anyone can put an application into their Marketplace and there’s no checking. When someone downloads an application, it can tell them what data it might request access to on the phone. However, it generally doesn’t matter that it reports it will have access to almost every facet of the phone – people just click “OK”. To download apps outside of the Marketplace just needs a box to be ticked – because Google trusts us to be grown-up and safe about these things. Ha Ha.

The IT Department has no methods to control the app element of the Smartphone. Apple’s AppStore has over 350,000 apps. Android is gaining fast with over 250,000 while Microsoft with Windows Phone 7 have just surpassed the 10,000 level and Blackberry sit at 20,000.  Still, that’s over half a million applications at the disposal of the Smartphone owner.

This really came home to roost just last month when the Google Marketplace managed to acquire around 50 or so virus laden apps. Google removed them quickly once the issue was spotted, but still over 200,000 downloads took place before that happened.

The mobile phone virus isn’t a new arrival, but using these readily available apps to carry them is. Unfortunately peoples’ uncontrollable desire for apps and their gullibility will allow this new type of malware to spread easily.

It’s only a matter of time until someone is reporting that all their corporate e-mail, confidential documents or photos of their new product have been hi-jacked off their phone by some innocent app they were “just having a quick look at”. Start to factor in the data costs the company incurs (especially when data roaming abroad) and the nightmare starts to become a bit clearer.

Right now, the only reasonable way to control this is through IT Policy, employee education and some vetting of apps for corporate approval.

Sure, there will be people who will revolt big-time and do their damnedest to still play with the apps and hopefully not get caught. At the other extreme, there will be people who will take this on-board, appreciate the education and the understand the possible impact of not following the policy.

For the full-time and part-time road warriors, mobile communications give them a staggering amount of capability in a very small and easy to use package. Provided the “apps” nightmare can be managed, that should continue to be the case.