Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly September 2009 Podcast

Zen Internet ranked as the UK's best broadband provider for the fourth year running in the latest customer satisfaction survey by Which? magazine, scoring five out of five for speed, reliability and service.

Rochdale Borough Council has signed up for Zen Internet's Ethernet solution, the next generation of business class connectivity, offering speeds up to 1Gbps. The Council provides hundreds of services and online information access for residents, visitors and the business community, which used to push connectivity to near maximum capacity, provoking internal network problems with employees experiencing very slow responses. The increase in capacity and speed of connectivity provided by the new solution meets peak time demands, enabling the Council to maximise service efficiency and resolve productivity problems. Ethernet leased-line services for the Internet provide on-demand bandwidth flexibility and speeds from 2 Mbps up to a free flowing 1 Gbps maximum.

News stories about A-Level results last month were dominated by reports of another yearly increase in passes, but ICT and computing A-Levels continued to slide. Across the UK, the number of students taking an A-Level in computing fell from 5,068 last year to 4,710 this year and the percentage of students winning an A grade fell from 16.1 per cent to 15.7 per cent.

Tom Arah at PC PRO wants to know if your Web site includes a page that shows your privacy policy. He says that almost every site needs one. If your site tracks IP addresses, you need one. If you have a reply-form that asks for an e-mail address, if your site has a line of code for Google Analytics, if it uses cookies - you need one. Every site, no matter how small, should have a privacy policy. Staying on the right side of the law is always a good idea in any case and having clear links on your site to a privacy policy adds credibility that is recognised by search engines as well as end users. Search for "privacy policy template" and you'll find a number of customisable privacy policies on the Web that you can adapt and use without charge.

Skype has answered ID theft criticisms, following an increasing number of complaints from users who have had their accounts hijacked and PayPal accounts drained in the process. Computer Shopper contacted Skype to find out why ID theft was happening, how it could be prevented and how to report a problem and get a quick resolution.

A full copy of the Home Edition of Windows 7 can be pre-ordered in the UK for much less than in the US. British buyers will be able to get Windows 7 for £65 ­ a big discount on the full retail price and much less than Americans will be paying. On Amazon.co.uk, a Home Premium version of Windows 7 can be bought at what the site calls a 57 per cent discount. The Professional version is on sale for £149.98, a discount of 32 per cent. In the US, on Amazon.com, the same versions are selling for $199.99 and $299.99.

An injunction against Microsoft has been granted to Canadian software company i4i (Infrastructures for Information) to prevent sales of Word that infringe i4i's XML patent. The Guardian reports that Microsoft was ordered to pay $40m by a Texas court for infringement of i4i's XML patent by selling copies of Word that can open .XML and .docx files containing custom XML. The court also ordered Microsoft to pay $37m in interest and a further $21,102 per day until final judgement is reached. On a brighter note in the same month, the company got Nokia's signature on an agreement to install Office software on the Finnish giant's mobile phones. Microsoft and Nokia have been rivals in mobile phone operating systems for years - Nokia rejected Windows Mobile in favour of Symbian software - but now the popularity of Microsoft Office has convinced Nokia to allow their long-time rival a bigger foothold in the mobile phone world.

Microsoft and Google are at the forefront of new 'cloud computing' development, preparing office productivity suites that will allow you to access, work on, and permanently store documents, spreadsheets, calendars, contacts, and more, all in one place online. But because some upstart competitors have moved in to begin exploiting this new territory ahead of the two big-brand rivals, it's already possible to see for yourself what cloud computing has to offer. You may decide that the efficiencies of a centralised computing infrastructure that can be easily accessed via the Internet are just too compelling to ignore. Or you might remember that the personal computer itself came about because the old model of business computing had desktop workers connected to one big cloud (aka mainframe) that they couldn't wait to escape from. Either way, CIO Magazine has reviews of nine up-and-running Web-based office productivity suites that you can try today.

A Web site - ie6offenders.com - that encouraged users to blow the whistle on businesses that force users to browse the Web using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been taken down after arguments from software developers who said the browser was still needed. Although it dates back to 2001 and has been upgraded to version 8, some estimates show IE6 usage persisting at around 25 per cent. But 'IE6 Offenders' was not the first site to encourage users to switch. The 'IE6 No More' Web site encourages designers to embed a warning on their sites to persuade users to upgrade to a newer browser and offer links to install Mozilla's Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4 or Google's Chrome. Another site, IE6 Update.com, suggests a similar warning that pops up in IE6's Information Bar. And the 'Bring Down IE6' site encourages readers to educate their colleagues and friends about the "dangers" of using IE6.

Remember Netscape Navigator? If you were online before 2000, you could hardly avoid the popular Web browser that was the predecessor of Internet Explorer and the ancestor of Firefox. The original Internet success story, Netscape doubled its revenues every quarter in 1995 and had 90 per cent of the browser market for most of that decade. But by the end of 2006, less than 1 per cent of Internet users were navigating the Web with Netscape's offering. Today, the company's founder, Marc Andreessen, says he is close to launching a successor to Netscape Navigator - and he doesn't mean Firefox, the child of Netscape's open-source Mozilla initiative. It's another, as-yet-unseen browser that Andreessen is putting the finishing touches to. He calls it RockMelt. The browser's Web site so far offers nothing more than the logo and a signup for update news, but industry watchers are expecting some integration with Facebook (where Andreessen serves as a director) and that RockMelt will be tailored to display Facebook updates as users browse the Web. Another browser, Flock, based on Firefox, already incorporates feeds from social networking sites, letting users keep track of activity on sites like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and others. Alliance with Facebook is viewed as a promising marketing strategy, given the difficulty of promoting and distributing a new Web browser to users. Despite Google's heavy promotion of its Chrome browser, it has achieved only a two per cent share of the market. Getting Facebook's millions of users on board would be a major boost for any new launch.

The history of science is written in many locations, and if you're a traveller who loves science, you'll definitely want to check out this new book at your local library: The Geek Atlas - 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive. It's a unique guide covering destinations in the UK and around the globe where major breakthroughs in science, computing, mathematics, or technology occurred - or are happening now. "Unfortunately, finding great scientific places to visit isn't as easy as finding homes of long-dead poets, painters, or writers", says author John Graham-Cumming, a self-described wandering programmer, late of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory Programming Research Group. "This is a pity, because if there's one thing that stands science apart, it's the willingness of scientists to freely share what they do". "In my case, I've tried to simplify the science without dumbing it down to the point of using analogies and metaphors instead of actually describing ideas", adds the writer. "So as you flip through the book, you'll see the sorts of pictures you'd find in most travel guides, but also a lot of diagrams and equations as well as information that any general reader can handle. The book is organised geographically by country and comes complete with latitudes and longitudes for GPS devices. Destinations covered in The Geek Atlas include Bletchley Park in the UK, where the Enigma code was broken, the Alan Turing Memorial in Manchester and the author's 'must see' choice - the Difference Engine at the Science Museum in London.

The longest standing Land Speed Record was set over 100 years ago. The car that has held on to the title for so long used a power source that has been neglected since then. It was a Stanley Steamer, built in Massachusetts, and faster than any of its petrol-driven rivals at the time. Now a British team, based at University of Southampton, has developed a new steam-powered vehicle with a top speed exceeding 200 mph that will crack the 1906 record this summer at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) held in on-board tanks in the new supercar is ignited to fire up burners producing three megawatts of heat - equivalent to 1,500 domestic kettles. This is used to heat 140 litres of distilled water that produces steam under pressure. The distilled water is pumped into the boilers at the rate of 50 litres a minute, where steam is superheated to 400C and injected into the vehicles turbine at more than twice the speed of sound. The force produces the thrust that will propel it from rest to more than 200mph - pouring a jet of white condensed steam out of the back like an angry kettle. The vehicle even incorporates the elements from two real kettles, used to warm up the liquid petroleum gas that fires up the boilers. The British Steam Car Challenge group is currently seeking funding from patriotic individuals and companies. Donations as small as one pound will get any donor's name or company name on the speedster's Union Jack livery as it steams its way into the record books. Interested parties can support the project at the British Steam Car Appeal Web site.

Researchers at Yahoo! are turning to charity to cut down on spam. Currently in private beta, the company's new CentMail service sells 500 e-mail 'stamps' for five dollars. Each time you send an e-mail, you use a one-cent stamp code, which lets the system know it's legitimate. No spammer could afford to stamp every one of the millions of e-mails they send. Previous systems have tried similar ideas, but CentMail is different because the cash goes to charity. "We think this is a more socially efficient approach to reducing spam", Yahoo! told a New Scientist reporter. Spam currently makes up as much as 90 per cent of all e-mail sent.

July's newsletter included an item about the free disk space viewer for Windows, Drivespacio. Feedback reported in August suggested TreeSize was a better choice. This month, we're giving the last word to reader Anthony Cartmell, who recommends another two free applications. There's Windirstat (http://windirstat.info) which offers a 'treemap' view like the TreeSize professional version - and OverDisk, which is "the ultimate disk space utility", according to Anthony. "Its genius is in the graphics it uses: a clickable pie chart to show a disk's entire directory structure at once (or any part of it) and a file size histogram". Also in August, newsletter readers responded to the item about AnyBizSoft's PDF to Word convertor, which is no longer free of charge. A still-free alternative can be found at the second link below and the following three links have suggestions for Mac users.

This report, which includes another PDF to Word suggestion, is from the newsletter of April 2008. "Zamzar is a free file conversion Web site that supports a wide range of file types including the majority of documents, images, music, video, and compression formats. You can make PDF documents editable by converting them to MS Word, for example, or convert Word's new format .docx files back to .doc. Zamzar also handles .xls and .xlsx files as well as .cvs; .odp; .ods; .odt; .ppt; .pptx; .ps; .pub; .rtf; .wpd; .wps; and most sound and video formats. You can easily convert your iTunes (aac) files to mp3. Zamzar has a Web browser button that you can add to your browser's bookmarks toolbar so that, if you are on a video sharing Web site such as YouTube or Google Video, you can click to convert and save the video you are watching. On other sites, Zamzar says it can auto-detect any of the files on the page that can be converted and highlight them for you".

There can't be many people left who haven't heard of the microblogging platform, Twitter. Even non-users know some of the lingo invented by the tweeps (followers) tweeting (posting) and generally twittering (discussing) matters in the world wide twitterverse. But what about business? Companies are told they should be using Twitter to expand the reach of their online marketing efforts. In Twitter's own words: "Twitter is a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected to their customers. You can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company". Naysayers hope Twitter is a fad that will go away; others believe it has marketing potential, but fear they'll have to spend hours online every day to accomplish anything. There are tools that can reduce the effort required. TweetLater lets you build a stock of tweets that can be scheduled for posting over a period of time. TweetBeep is the equivalent of Google Alerts for Twitter and tracks mentions of your name, products, company, or anything else you have a vital interest in. LoudTwitter posts your daily tweets to your blog. TwitterFeed does the opposite - letting you feed your blog posts to your Twitter account. Lastly (at least for this short list) there's Ping.fm, not specifically a Twitter tool, Ping.fm automatically updates all your social networking sites from a single source. The Web sites for TweetLater, LoudTwitter, TwitterFeed and TweetBeep are reached at .com addresses.

Twitter has changed the look of its public home page to make it look and behave more like a search engine, not only competing for attention with traditional results providers like Google and Bing, but more pointedly with some of the new 'real time' engines - like OneRiot.com - that use Twitter to supply most of their results. Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capital firms, has also redesigned its Web site, throwing out its standard page set and reducing the home page to nothing more than a minimalist search bar. If this is a trend, you saw it here first.

Google has announced a pre-release viewing of a major update to its algorithm - inviting users to try an alternative Google nicknamed Caffeine. "For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's Web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits 'under the hood' of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But Web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a preview to collect feedback". User responses are invited via an easy to miss text link ("Dissatisfied? Help us improve") that appears between other links at the foot of the page after a search has been made. It's something that Microsoft provided for years on all their search sites (but recently dropped on Bing) as an option on the Feedback page. The new Google site is at http://www2.sandbox.google.com. Shortly after its release, the company's search PR person, Matt Cutts, explained more about it in a video interview with WebPro News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU5cKDryjy0 - and for the deeply inquisitive, there are independent sites that compare Google's standard search results and the new Sandbox/Caffeine results side by side.

Reports of the death of Yahoo! are greatly exaggerated. The search engine's newly negotiated partnership with Microsoft is not only subject to regulatory review and - if it gets over that hurdle - still up to two years away, but the company is also making it clear that it intends to hold on to its position as the world's number two search engine and will stay in competition with Microsoft's Bing. "We will not be a version of Bing", senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan told reporters as the company announced improvements to its search interface last month. "The agreement with Microsoft doesn't detract from our attempt to deliver the best search experience on the Web".

In development for the past three years, new search engine Lavva started publicly testing a few weeks ago. It adds a "go social" button alongside the usual Web search that displays real-time results from Twitter and other social media sites. The home page also includes a map of the world where clicking on a continent introduces news based on the region from mainstream media organisations such as the BBC and Reuters. Other features have yet to be rolled out. Designers are still working on an option allowing users to chat about search results. Lavva is based in Toronto and Seattle, with most of the technical staff in Canada. In their own words: "The Lavva team has developed a search engine that will change the way the world surfs the Net! We have created a unique algorithm that works organically on the user level and adds the missing human element to browsing, transforming search from a pattern of keywords, to a personalised social environment. Hence our motto, Search Goes Social".