Author: Mike

I had a few days off last week and went with some good friends to another fiends house in Southern France just south of the Ardèche gorge.

I had never been to that part of France before, but what a great place, beautiful countryside, great food and great wine.

Needless to say coming back with a few case for the home ‘cellar’.

The high-point of the week was a drive down the road (D290) that runs down the section of the Ardèche river gorge that all the Kayak use. Some fantastic sights and pictures.

Certainly worth another visit to see more of the area and sights sometime in the future, maybe even use a Kayak done the river!!

UK Citizens Online Democracy provides some interesting Web Site that are a benefit to all UK citizens.

• TheyWorkForYou – Sign up to be emailed when something relevant to you happens in Parliament.
• WriteToThem – Find out and contact your Councillors, MP, MEPs, MSPs, send them a letter/email and believe it or not, they will write back to you.
• PledgeBank – Tell the world “I’ll do it, but only if you’ll help me do it.
• HearFromYourMP – Get email from your MP. Discuss it with your MP and other local people.
• FixMyStreet – Having problems with graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, abandoned cars or street lighting. Report, view, and discuss local problems.

Use them freely, they’re very helpful.

My mother lived in Upton Upon Severn for many years till her death and I have some very happy memories of our many visits to her bungalow from our homes in Worcester and Reading.

What a sad sight it was to see the recent flood damage caused by the overflowing river Severn following the recent torrential downpours. Upton is not unused to flooding as I witnessed many times during our visits over the years.

The lower flood marker is 1885, the upper 1947

The reason for a major event this time, was the timing – middle of the Summer and the forgetful government Environmental Agency not turning up with the flood defenses, which in fact should have been kept in Upton in the first place. The resulting disaster can be seen in this aerial shot from the BBC.

Had the flood defenses been in place as can be seen in this picture during the earlier June floods, it would have prevented much of the damage that was created by the lack of flood defenses.

Upton Upon Severn is slowly getting back to normal, and it will face flooding again, but the flood defense must be kept in Upton and maybe local can be trained to erect them as and when needed.

I had a call from a friend of a friend of friend the other day, “my PC won’t start, and I understand that you can you help me?”

After arriving at their home and having a look at the PC (running a non-updated version of XP home!) I found that it was not booting from the hard disk. Asking if the user had tried anything to get it working I was met by the usual blank stare! Cutting a long story short, I finally managed to get the PC to boot.

However, much to the PC owners horror, all their graphic images (they run a small wedding photography business) had disappeared from the hard disc. Stating the obvious, I said that at least they could re-load the latest data from their backup… Can you hear the silence?

I’ve worked in IT for many years and it still amazes me how often I hear the the cry of my PC’s broken and I don’t have a back up!!! What is wrong with people? Don’t people care about their data?

With the cost of backup hardware (the DVD writer in your PC ) at an all time low (£16.00 for a LiteOn 20X DVD+/-RW/RAM L/S black drive) and much free software available (ZDNet reviews), know one can say that they can’t afford to make a back up! Of course there are many more options for backing-up/archiving your precious data, that’s not the point of this post, it’s more about YOU making that backup in the first place!!

Moving on from this basic PC house-keeping task is the question of how long will your backup last? It certainly is question that is getting asked quite lot at the moment as more and more of our world becomes ever more Digital!

I found this interesting article on the Daily Telegraph web site that not only talks about backups, but more about the changing standards of digital media and what that means as we need to protect more of our digital data over longer periods as technology evolves.

My PC phone call person? He lost a lot of business and in fact was sued by a number of people for losing their wedding pictures!! However,  I do know that he now backs his PC up every day! You’ve been warned!!!

Other reference information of interest.

• Backing up your data, what about restoring it?
• Digital cameras ‘not backed up’ – BBC Article
• Back up your PC – PC Pro Guide

Technorati Tags: PC Backup, Data Protection

I was carrying out some research over the weekend on the status of the attempt by the House of Commons MP’s to except themselves from the Freedom of Information Act (pleased find out that they failed) when I came across this article on the Times Online web site.

It’s really an essay by Philip Johnston (home affairs editor of the Daily Telegraph) who is this year’s winner of the annual Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award.

It’s a great article that discusses and shows how under the Blair government our civil liberties have been eroded more than under any previous government (WW1 & 2 periods excepted) of modern times.

The opening sentence gets you easily into the rest of the article…

“In his first statement to Parliament as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown said that “Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the individual.”

Other introductory paragraphs include…

“If Clement Attlee is remembered for post-war welfare provision and the NHS, Harold Wilson for Sixties optimism, Edward Heath for joining Europe, James Callaghan for the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher for reducing the size of government and John Major, however unfairly, for sleaze then we will look back on the past ten years [under Blair – my insertion] as marking a serial assault by the State on the civil liberties of the citizen.”

As the essay points out, individually the changes that have been made have been accepted as needed. However, when viewed collectively, we are now have much less liberty than we had before Blair and his legislative onslaught on our freedom.

I am sure that even George Orwell would not have envisaged such a state of affairs even in his wildest dreams. I also remember watching a Tom Cruise movie a while ago called Minority Report, I did not rate to highly at the time, but the more that I think about the film in light of the current situation, the more I think that we are not far away from the main thread of the movie being a reality.

But back to the essay; I may be behind every other blog post about it, but it is worth a read even though you have to move over ‘nine’ pages to read the whole thing. It make for very interesting reading.

Link to the main article is here

I’ve only been blogging for some 20 months. After I discovered the small feature set and limitations of Blogger’s own editor, I then tried a number of off-line blog editors.

The choice at the time seemed quite small. I started off using an early version of RocketPost, but found that this kept crashing for no apparent reason, then moved onto Qumana, however its then lack of a UK English spell checker and some poor support experiences seemed to annoy me a great deal. I tried some other methods including ordinary text editors and even Word!

During my searching for a replacement, I then discovered a Beta version of Windows Live Writer lurking on a Microsoft web site.

Since then and with the latest upgrade recently loaded, I think I have now found a blog editor that fits all the requirements that I certainly need. It’s consistent, it has many good features and it runs well with no crashes. Its easy to install and set-up and there is a good set of forums to deal with those tricky questions.

If you’re new to blogging and want a good off line blog editor, then Window Live Writer may be the one for you. – No I don’t work for Microsoft and I wish I could say the same for Vista! But it’s getting there.

Another broadband story appeared yesterday about the ongoing poor performance of broadband speed delivery in the UK by Internet Service providers (ISP’s).

According to the BBC news article, Which Magazine carried out a survey of some 300 UK broadband users and found that…

The average speed achieved in the Which? trials was 2.7Mbps, with the lowest coming in at under 0.09Mbps, barely at dial-up rates, and the maximum only reaching 6.7Mbps.

It’s very clear from this report and conversations that I have had with various users that there is a vast difference in broadband download speeds across the country.

I am sure that the BBC article will receive a high number of comments from users, but I am surprised that some of these have not already appeared on the BBC Have your Say page.

Another point that the article discusses is the overselling of potential speeds that users can expect as part of their contract. For example its pretty much accepted that unless you live in or right next to your local telephone exchange, no one is going to get 8MB download speeds.

Of course, it is possible to purchase dedicated (and expensive) lines that will give you 8MB (and above) speeds, but this post is relates to the general consumer products sold by the likes of BT, TalkTalk, Orange, Tiscali and others as can be found in listings such as these [1], [2], & [3].

But back to the overselling of speed, it seems strange to me that ISP’s can still get away with implying that their product is one thing; when, in fact it clearly is not. Just about the selling of every other product seems to be highly regulated in the UK, why not Broadband Speed. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) seems to be pretty limp with it’s approach to monitoring and even Ofcom (who are supposed to be the regulator) seem somewhat uninterested in sorting out the situation.

Looking back at the Which Survey figures – I was not one of those surveyed and I don’t subscribe to their publication, I wonder how those surveyed measured their Broadband speed. After having some speed issues last May (the related support issues could fill ten more posts, maybe they will!) – I’ve been a broadband user for some years I decided to monitor my download speed on a more regular basis. Partly for my own interested and partly to feed back this info to BT who are my ISP – how uninterested they were, I soon found out. – Another post perhaps.

There seems to be quite a number of non-ISP tools available in the Internet for testing broadband download speed, not all of them work well, but the once I’d spent some time searching and testing, I use these three, One Stop Click, Audit My PC & tcp/IQ.

By using the first two tools and working out an average, I’ve produced a set of graphs since I started monitoring my broadband speed.

Some background info, I’m served from the Reading South Exchange which is approximately 1.5 miles/2.5 km.

May 2007 Averages: Download – 4.066 MB, Upload – 384.2 KB

June 2007 Averages: Download – 3.436MB, Upload – 359.7 KB

July 2007 Averages: Download – 3.380MB, Upload – 355.3 KB

So far August has thrown up some small issues, not helped by poor support, but the speed seems to be building up again.

Do you have speed graphs that you can share? I’m sure that everyone would be interested.

More on the state of support in a later post.

Will this be the title of a future post? It could be the final event in the ever increasing progress by the UK government and police to capture the DNA of the entire UK’s population.

If Kath Mashiter, of Lancashire police, and Brian Pincher, of Norfolk police get their way this is what might happen after they manage to get the law changed to capture the DNA of speeders & litter louts even before they have been prosecuted!

The English and Welsh police already have the power to take your DNA when you’re arrested and keep it (forever) even if you’re not charged with any offense!

The government has announced that it will open a public debate on this subject, but if it goes the way of past debates, in my opinion it will be another white wash and in the end, it will result in the title of this post becoming a reality before very long.

See related story here.

Another survey on the decline in the numeracy skills of 18-25 year olds in the UK with this BBC article.

It’s old hat now, but I still go back to the fact that the teaching of old fashioned ‘times-tables’ should never have been dropped from schools. Of course there is the common response today, that you don’t need them as we ‘all’ now have calculators!

To me, mental arithmetic (using tables based calculations) is fundamental to just about everything that you do today.

I may be in a minority here, but surely if there is to be any progress in securing any final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, Blair has to talk with and include Hamas in any discussions.

If as Blair might claim, he helped with the final agreement for the Northern Ireland situation, he then has to understand that unless you include equally all the interested parties, you will never achieve a total solution.

But their terrorists!!! I hear the cries; yes and so were the IRA, the UVF, the UDA, the LVF and many other splinter groups, but in the end, it seems that peace has finally come to Northern Ireland!

There will be many pitfalls in this round of the peace talks, but if the Northern Ireland example can be used, providing everyone is included in the talks, common sense will prevail. Will it happen next week, next month, next year, who knows. But one thing is sure, it is only by talking an making agreements that will finally sort this terrible mess out.