Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet has taken a new suite at 'Best Co-location Provider' Telecity to launch its upgraded ServerConnect co-location service, now up and running in this most secure and resilient of hosting environments for mission critical business systems. Host your servers away from local congestion and bandwidth restrictions and solve bandwidth forecasting problems at the same time with flexible usage projection and tracking. We have pre-sales technical consultants on hand for unlimited free advice on individual bandwidth needs and - best of all - a one month evaluation with no charge at all for as much bandwidth as you can use for a full 30 days.

Bitter news from the online Independent last month: Gladys Althorpe, Boddingtons 'Cream of Manchester' cover girl, may have pushed the brewer's real ale sales outside the North-west from 5% to 50%, but it hasn't been enough to save the 250-year-old Lancashire brewery, which will close when production moves next February - probably to Wales. It's nothing new for brands identified with particular places to be produced elsewhere, says the Independent. Kirin, Cobra and Red Stripe (Japanese, Indian and Jamaican respectively) are brewed in Bedford. Carlsberg Export, said to be so good the Danes hate to see it leave Denmark, is brewed in Northampton. The "reassuringly expensive" Belgian lager Stella Artois is made in south Wales. Kronenbourg 1664 is made in Reading by Scottish & Newcastle, who also brew Fosters, the Australian "amber nectar', and Newcastle Brown Ale comes from Gateshead.

Britain's oldest brewer, based in Faversham near Canterbury since 1698, has opened Wi-Fi hot spots in 15 of its pubs. Next month, the brewery expects to roll out the technology to over 60 premises in Kent, Essex, Surrey and Sussex.

Twelve years in the making, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the largest reference project of its kind. "Knowledge isn't cheap", say Oxford, and the price tag leaves no doubt. The 60 volume set, with 50,000 biographies, retails at £7,500 - although there's £1,000 off if you hurry and buy this month. Fortunately, there's also a cheaper (searchable) version online, and that comes with a 30-day free trial.

Wars have long served as the inspiration for creative works in the visual arts, poetry, film, and photography. The Imperial War Museum Online Database allows access to thousands of photographs, works of art, soundbites, and other visual artifacts. Staff at the Museum have created a number of themed categories, such as "War in the Air" and "Truth & Propaganda" as a way of introducing the daunting collection.

With the result of the presidential election still too close to call, television campaign commercials in America are getting downright nasty. Some of the ads from previous campaigns may be more interesting to watch than the current smear-tactic messages being run by Bush and Kerry. The American Museum of the Moving Image has a retrospective of presidential election ads that go back as far as 1952. Web site visitors can view commercials and read transcripts that include coverage of the bitter fight between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and notorious Alabama governor George Wallace in 1968.

He filed his first tax return as a newspaper delivery boy at age 13, claiming a $35 deduction for his bicycle. Today, Warren Buffet is almost the world's richest man, with a net worth of $41 billion and pedalling fast enough to overtake Bill Gates. Otherwise, the top of the latest 'Forbes 400' list of rich Americans, just out, is dominated by members of the Walton family who take up half of the first ten places. That's the Wal-Mart (and Asda) Waltons, of course, no relation to the eleven-strong Virginia family that survived the depression on TV.

Newspapers in the USA have begun transforming themselves from advertising vehicles to online marketplaces to win back shoppers lured away by eBay and classified ad Web sites. The move has been enabled by new "Click and Buy" tools for classifieds from AdPay Inc and online event auction technology from CityXpress, already installed on over 200 newspaper sites. Knight-Ridder, America's second-largest newspaper publisher, has developed its own Web-based system for placing print and online classified ads and plans to roll out the technology next year to replace third-party software.

This month, it will become illegal in the USA to send "commercial messages" to any Internet domain associated with wireless messaging subscription services. Which means there'll be a ban on sending spam to the e-mail address of a mobile phone or a pager. So far, so good. But to make sure that nobody accidentally sends commercial e-mail to a wireless device as they work through their collection of 'land e-mail' addresses, the Federal Communications Commission will publish a list of all the domains that service wireless devices. It'll be handy for any spammer who wants to import the full set into their database.

A small Yorkshire company says it can guarantee spam and virus-free e-mail. Its service uses Peer-to-Peer technology like Napster, with online communities ring-fenced to avoid hack and virus threats. Subscribers get secure access to their existing e-mail addresses as well as a safe address and e-mails go directly to other machines, rather than via a Web or mail server.

The big-name file-sharing networks like Kazaa and WinMX, have gone straight, buying their music and video from legal sources, and charging end users accordingly. Downloaders who 'can't pay, won't pay' for their music and movies are looking elsewhere and have turned to lesser-known P-to-P networks like BitTorrent, EDonkey, EMule, and Russia's Allofmp3.com, according to PC World. Once boasting over 30 million users, Kazaa is now down to about 16 million.

Checks by a UK children's charity at 37 gambling Web sites revealed that most would accept youngsters between 11 and 16 using their Solo debit cards.

Did you know that pressing the tab key lets you skip through the links on a Web page? Microsoft thinks it's a valuable asset and has patented the mouse-free shortcut.

Does your Web site have a Favicon? Favicons are the tiny icons that show up in the address bar of Opera, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer when you visit certain Web sites - and they'll appear on the desktop if someone likes your site enough to keep a link handy. You can find out how to add a Favicon for your site at http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=e8 and there's even a search engine that lists Web sites by Favicon, although quite why somebody thought that was a good idea is less than clear.

Choosing new software would be easy if you could test drive the different products on offer in one place. If your Web site needs Content Management, you can do just that - without having to install anything.

If you have the time and inclination, exercise your grey matter at the online mental gymnasium of MindBluff.com. This site is a 'mindfield' of mental tests, puzzles, optical illusions and adventure games with hours of cerebral entertainment. Don't miss the advanced exercises in the "Mind and Body Fun" and "Genius Teasers" sections.

Google has job openings for "the best engineers in the world" but wants them to follow a mystery treasure hunt trail and solve a puzzle first.

Google has become a verb, a publicly traded company and a resource for 'anything' - but not quite everything. When you simply can't find it on Google, no mattter how many different ways you try, you can post your query here instead.

See thumbnail preview screenshots of Web sites before you visit.

Microsoft is set to challenge Google's dominant position as the world's favourite search engine by adding more prominent MS Search features to its Explorer Web browser. Could Google be planning to fight back by building its own browser with integrated Google search?

Amazon's subsidiary A9.com has completed the official launch of its search engine and accompanying toolbar, after adding new features to the service that has been in beta testing since April. New features include image results, movie results, and reference information. A9 search uses five information sources: Web and image search via Google; book text from Amazon.com's "Search Inside The Book"; movie information from the Internet Movie Database; and reference information through GuruNet.com. Advertisements, which appear at the top of the Web search results, come from Google's AdSense.

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