Zen Monthly Newsletter

Two years on from the Disability Discrimination Act, the majority of companies have not made the changes they're required to make and are missing out on potential staff and customers by ignoring the law. Companies that have made adjustments believe the benefits of compliance are well worth the effort.

Disabled entrepreneurs hoping to start their own businesses will benefit from a £3m 'Ready To Start' enterprise fund being offered by Barclays Bank and disability charity Leonard Cheshire. The service is backed by Lastminute.com founder Martha Lane Fox, who was confined to a wheelchair for months following a near-fatal desert driving accident in Morocco.

Xerox have some excellent print-your-own calendar templates available online in PDF and Word formats. They are completely free, you don't need any Xerox branded equipment to use them and, although the download site is in the USA, A3 and A4 template sizes are included.

Choosing the right VoIP equipment: Find out what software and hardware is available and what it can do for you.

This story ran in our February issue but, thanks to a reader who wrote to tell us the links were broken (the Web site changed the URLs), it makes a second appearance this month. "A new Web site shows that, against expectations, most acorns dropping from the typical family tree in Britain take root close to home. Showing the geographical distribution of surnames in the UK, the site puts paid to the belief that population movement around the country has left a jumble of surnames with no discernible regional patterns. Visitors can look at maps that compare the distribution of more than 25,000 surnames in the 1881 Census with the pattern revealed by the 1998 electoral register. They show surprisingly similar profiles for many names and indicate that relatively few people move far from their birthplace. Additional search options, of special interest to social climbers, allow users to check the relative status of their surname. Patricia Routledge, who played the ultimate snob Hyacinth Bucket in a BBC comedy series, is at the bottom of the status league, but Vicky Pollard, the Little Britain star, is in the top third. The Web site is the result of studies led by professors from University College London, who spent a year checking 46 million surname records, and used postcodes to locate the ratio of particular names in affluent or impoverished areas, and to trace patterns of emigration to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand".

Do you have an interesting family history? 186 Media, a TV production company, is developing a series that will look at the economic history of several families over the centuries. If your family’s story is selected, it would be worked on by a professional genealogist and, with your help, reconstructed for a documentary covering the times and places that your ancestors lived and worked in since records of its history began.

NASA's campaign to send the names of thousands of Earth Citizens on a four-year, 2 billion mile journey into deep space ends this week. Submitted names will be carried on board NASA's Dawn, the first spacecraft to investigate the dwarf planet Ceres. More than 170,000 people have already signed up for the Ceres visit and tour of the asteroid belt. "How many chances do you get to fly on a trip like this?" asks Keyur Patel, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "When the craft is launched next year, your name and the names of your loved ones can hitch along for the ride and be part of space exploration history." Dawn will carry a silicon chip containing the names of space travel enthusiasts from around the world. Anyone can submit their name for this historic one-way mission by visiting JPL's Dawn Web site - but only up to November 4th.

When Google launched its Froogle shopping service in 2003, it forgot to register the co.uk domain name, which was snapped up by a wily Web site designer in Purley. Two and a half years ago, in issue 39 of the newsletter, we reported Google's first problems with Gmail, writing: "Google's plans to launch a free e-mail service - to be known as 'Gmail' - have been confused by Market Age, an AIM-listed British investment research house which claims that it has been using the name for the past two years. 'When the news came out about Google's Gmail, I went to the US patent and trademark authorities. I thought maybe we were in trouble. But Google hadn't even registered the name', said chief executive Shane Smith". Eighteen months later, in October 2005, Google gave up the legal battle with Smith, lost the right to the Gmail trademark in the UK and renamed the service Google Mail, although users who registered before then were allowed to hang on to their Gmail addresses. Now it looks as if Google has lost another name argument in Europe. Daniel Giersch, a German-born venture capitalist, is adamant that he will never relinquish his six-year-old trademark registration of "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" (translation: G-mail... and the mail goes right off) and a court in Hamburg has ordered Google to remove all "Gmail" references from its German service and to cease handing out gmail.com aliases.

The Internet has a new top-level domain - .mobi - for Web sites that support mobile devices. Early adopters like rolls-royce.mobi, bmw.mobi, businessweek.mobi and, of course, vodafone.mobi, nokia.mobi, et al were among the first to have shrunk-to-fit pages up and running.

Although there is increasing dependence on the Web as a 'library of record', little attention has been paid to the long-term preservation of Web sites in the UK. But now a consortium of leading institutions is working on a project to develop a facility for selective archiving of British sites. An online directory with several hundred Web sites already preserved for posterity, including some business sites as well as those with stores of scientific and reference works, is up and running.

Despite its record of large scale IT spending for small scale IT results, the government is making another major investment in new systems, this time at HM Revenue and Customs, where they are buying an integrated customer management (ICM) system. Rod Street, IBM Global Business Solutions partner, described the project as a "mammoth" exercise, far outstripping similar initiatives currently under way in the private sector where ICM systems are being rolled out by businesses such as banks, retailers and telecoms companies. HM Revenue and Customs fell out with US contractor EDS over a £2.4bn contract to update its systems to cope with self-assessment and tax credits. It failed again when working with Accenture to develop the latest national insurance systems. A Revenue spokesman said that the ICM project offered "exciting opportunities to enhance the way that HMRC delivers services to its customers".

A wealth of freely available, full-text reports are put out by government agencies, NGOs, charities and other public interest organisations. DocuTicker's editors find and post them, putting them at your fingertips.

Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7 on October 18th, but Yahoo! got to the slipway first with an own-branded version of the ubiquitous Web browser for anyone who just couldn't wait.

Allurent, a rich media provider for e-commerce, has a new study that says 83 per cent of Web users would purchase more online if Web retailers "added more interactive and interesting ways to display and purchase products." In other words, it's not enough to drive visitors to your site. If you want them to buy, you have to give potential customers the right experience once they've arrived, and continue providing that excellent experience all the way to the point of conversion.

Well, it didn't take long for the cull to start did it? Under its new you-know-who ownership, YouTube has removed 30,000 video clips in a first step towards legality. The service has deleted the clips at the request of Japanese media companies claiming copyright infringements. What interests onlookers, though, is the sheer technical difficulty of compliance. That's a lot of data. Did YouTube take the objectors' word for it? Did they sit and watch each clip in turn? Was midnight oil burned? Enquiring minds want to know.

Google could be prompted by its acquisition of YouTube to improve its video search capabilities. It is one area where it lags behind rivals. The search engine controls 50 per cent of the world's text-based search market, but its homegrown video offering, Google Video, ranks behind Yahoo! Video, News Corp's MySpace and MSN Video. Announcing Google's YouTube acquisition, co-founder Sergey Brin said that video would become the company's new search focus, but YouTube doesn't make Google's video search technology any better. It simply provides a massive amount of content to index and place ads on. Google's search technology recognises tags, not images in a piece of video. Blinkx, a video-search rival, is able to retrieve results using voice and picture-recognition technology. It says it can identify between 500 and 1,000 famous faces. Voice content recognition is the next step. Podzinger is considered to be leading the field there. It uses a program that 'listens' to the audio in video files and produces a searchable transcript.

Worried about rootkits? Also known as kernel mode Trojans, rootkits are far more sophisticated than the usual Windows backdoor troublemakers that network administrators fret about. You can see one caught on film, courtesy of Google's 1.6 billion dollar acquisition, YouTube. There are a number of tools you can use to check for rootkit infiltrations, including some from brand-name suppliers like McAfee and freebies like GMER, a full-featured scanner from Poland that can find and remove many of the most stubborn examples. GMER is described as a combination of Sysinternals's RootkitRevealer and Process Explorer and it can list running processes, modules and Windows services - as seen in the YouTube clip - in addition to searching out rootkits.

Most readers will never have experienced a full-fledged spyware attack. If you practice safe computing and use an anti-spyware program like Counterspy or Webroot SpySweeper, or run an antivirus program (Grisoft's free AVG is one often recomended in the newsletter) and a zero-day security tool (like Novatix's free Cyberhawk), you probably never will. But you might want to see what you're missing. All is revealed in another YouTube video clip from McAfee titled "Spyware Rubbernecking", best watched from behind the sofa.

This is a useful little online utility. It's like Google Suggest, but for domain names. You start typing into the search box and it immediately comes back and tells you if the domain name is available or taken. It doesn't cover the full range of TLDs - it's limited to com, net, org, info, biz and us - but it's worth looking at, if only for its sheer speed. Separate options list all the 3-character and 4-character domains still available. Only four 3-character dot com domains were unregistered at time of writing.

Microsoft had the idea that hiring an attractive woman to entertain male surfers might be a good way to tempt some of them into trying its Live.com search engine. The actress playing the front-end part is Janina Gavankar, and she responds to queries in different ways, with occasional wisecracks, pearls of wisdom - and put-downs if your searches are too boring. She is impatient with slow searchers, but the interface is not designed for speed and you'll need to avoid the lady altogether if you are looking for quick answers.

ResultR is a new search engine with some surprising differences - even before you find out that it was created by two American 16 year olds and came out of a school project when they were asked to come up with ideas for a search engine that was better than Google. At first glance, ResultR appears to be 'just another' multi/meta search grouper that gets results from a variety of engines. Tabs allow searches of news, blogs, social information, media, job sites, reference works, local information and shopping as well as the Web. But it also lets users create their own 15-strong meta search engine from 40 options with a few clicks and then cut and paste a few lines of code to put the tailor-made search box on their own blog site or Web pages.