Technology Tales

A new phone

For someone with an more than passing interest in technology, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that mobile telephony isn’t one of my strong points at all. That’s all the more marked when you cast your eye back over the developments in mobile telephone technology in recent years. Admittedly, until I subscribed to RSS feeds from the likes of TechRadar, the computing side of the area didn’t pass my way very much at all. That act has has alerted me to the now unmissable fact that mobile phones have become portable small computers, regardless of whether it is an offering from Apple or not. After the last few years, no one can say that things haven’t got really interesting.

In contrast to all the excitement, I only got my first phone in 2000 and stuck with it since and that was despite its scuffs and scratches along with its battery life troubles. Part of the reason for this is a certain blindness induced by having the thing on a monthly contract. As that is not sufficient to hide away the option of buying a phone on its own, then there’s the whole pay as you go arena too. The level of choice is such that packages such as those mentioned gain more prominence and potentially stop things in their tracks but I surmounted the perceived obstacles to buy a Nokia 1661 online from the Carphone Warehouse and collect it from the nearest store. The new replacement for my old Motorola is nothing flashy. Other phones may have nice stuff like an on-board camera or web access but I went down the route of sticking with basic functionality, albeit in a modern package with a colour screen. Still, for around £35, I got something that adds niceties like an alarm clock and a radio to the more bread and butter operations like making and taking phone calls and text messaging. Pay as you go may have got me the phone for less but I didn’t need a new phone number since I planned to slot in my old SIM card anyway; incidentally, the latter operation was a doddle once I got my brain into gear.

Now that I have replaced my mobile handset like I would for my land-line phone, I am left wondering why I dallied over the task for as long as I have. It may be that the combination of massive choice and a myriad of packages that didn’t appeal to me stalled things. With an increased awareness of the technology and options like buying a SIM card on its own, I can buy with a little more confidence now. Those fancier phones may tempt but I’ll be treating them as a nice to have rather than essential purchases. Saying all of this, the old handset isn’t going into the bin just yet though. It may be worn and worthless but its tri-band capabilities (I cannot vouch for the Nokia on this front) may make it a useful back up for international travel. The upgrade has given me added confidence for trying again when needs must but there is no rush and that probability of my developing an enthusiasm for fancy handsets is no higher.

Something to watch?

Apparently, PayPal does recurring payments. This one passed me by until I notice that a certain (reputable) software vendor had set up just such a thing on me. As it happens, I have no recollection of being told about it but it is a little while ago so I may have forgotten. Regardless of the history, I shall be a keeping an eagle eye out for such things from this point forward. You cannot be too careful with your money this days so it’s best to learn as you live…

Running Internet Explorer on Linux

On first sight, this probably sounds daft given how good Firefox is but you cannot ignore those surfing the web using the ever pervasive Internet Explorer when doing some web development. Using virtualisation is a solution to the need but it can mean that you need to set up a web server with Perl, PHP, MySQL and the like in a virtual machine, all for a little offline testing and then there’s the potential for a lot of file copying too. Otherwise, you are trying to sneak things online and catch the glitches before anyone else does, never a good plan.

Therefore, having the ability to run IE to test your offline LAMPP set up is a boon and IES4Linux allows you to do what’s really needed. Naturally, WINE is involved, so some flakiness may be experienced, even after the ever useful API library’s reaching version 1. Otherwise, all usually runs well once you work your way through the very helpful instructions on the IES4Linux website. I did get a misplaced message about the version of WINE that I was using, and Python errors made a worrying appearance, but neither compromised the end result: a working IE6 installation on my main Ubuntu box.

IE5 and IE5.5 are also on offer if you’re interested but, after looking at my visitor statistics, I think that I can discount these. IE7 and the work-in-progress IE8 make no appearance on the availability list. The absence of IE7 is not a big problem as it might appear because coding for IE6 sufficiently suffices for IE7, even now; IE8 may not be the same in this regard but we shall see. Even so, a later browser release does mean a more secure version and I reckon that including IE7 should be next on the project’s to-do list. Saying that, what we have now is far better than nothing at all.

Online favicon.ico creation

I recently updated the icon that appears beside this blog’s address in the address bar and bookmarks menus of some browsers. I gave it a go in GIMP but I seemed to get no joy. I pottered out on the web to discover what I might have done wrong only to find Dynamic Drive offering online favicon.ico creation. Out of curiosity, I decided to give the thing a whirl and download the result to upload onto my web server. GIF’s, JPG’s PNG’s and BMP’s with a size less than 150 KB are accepted and it did work for me.

Ditching PC Plus?

When I start to lose interest in the features in a magazine that I regularly buy, then it’s a matter of time before I stop buying the magazine altogether. Such a predicament is facing PC Plus, a magazine that I been buying every month over the last ten years. The fate has already befallen titles like Web Designer, Amateur Photographer and Trail, all of which I now buy sporadically. Returning to PC Plus, I get the impression that it feels more of a lightweight these days. What Future Publishing has been doing over the last decade is add titles to its portfolio that take actually from its long established stalwart; Linux Format and .Net are two that come to mind and there are titles covering Windows Vista and computer music as well. Being a sucker for punishment, I did pick up this month’s PC Plus and the issue is as good an example of the malaise as any. Reviews, once a mainstay of the title, are now less prominent than they were. In place of comparison tests, we now find discussions of topics like hardware acceleration with some reviews mixed in. Topics such as robotics and artificial intelligence do rear their heads in feature articles and I cannot say that I have a great deal of time for such futurology. The tutorials section is still there but has been hived off into a separate mini-magazine and I am not so sure that it has escaped the lightweight revolution. All this is leading me to dump PC Plus in favour of PC Pro from Dennis Publishing. This feels reassuringly more heavyweight and, while the basic format has remained unchanged over the years, it still managed to remain fresh. Reviews, of both software and hardware, are very much in evidence and it manages to have those value-adding feature articles; this month, digital photography and rip-off Britain come under the spotlight. Add the Real Word Computing section and it all makes a good read in these times of behemoths like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe delivering new things on the technology front. I don’t know if I have changed but PC Pro does seem better than PC Plus these days.

Privacy Policy

Introduction:

TechnologyTales.com (“TechnologyTales.com“) operates TechnologyTales.com and may operate other websites. It is TechnologyTales.com’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, TechnologyTales.com collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. TechnologyTales.com’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how TechnologyTales.com’s visitors use its website. From time to time, TechnologyTales.com may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

TechnologyTales.com also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on TechnologyTales.com blogs/sites. TechnologyTales.com only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that commenter IP addresses and email addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog/site where the comment was left.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to TechnologyTales.com’s websites choose to interact with TechnologyTales.com in ways that require TechnologyTales.com to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that TechnologyTales.com gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up at TechnologyTales.com to provide a username and email address. Those who engage in transactions with TechnologyTales.com are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, TechnologyTales.com collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with TechnologyTales.com. TechnologyTales.com does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics

TechnologyTales.com may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. TechnologyTales.com may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, TechnologyTales.com does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

TechnologyTales.com discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on TechnologyTales.com’s behalf or to provide services available at TechnologyTales.com’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using TechnologyTales.com’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. TechnologyTales.com will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, TechnologyTales.com discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when TechnologyTales.com believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of TechnologyTales.com, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an TechnologyTales.com website and have supplied your email address, TechnologyTales.com may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with TechnologyTales.com and our products. If you send us a request (for example via email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. TechnologyTales.com takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

We collect all information that is sent to us as configured within your web browser including, where available, your IP address, operating system and browser type and may use this information to report aggregate information to our advertisers and any relevant third parties. This information is stored and managed anonymously and independently from your personal details. This information is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns and does not identify any individual.

Like many other websites, we use cookies on the TechnologyTales.com to obtain information about your general Internet usage. A cookie is a small piece of data that your Internet browser stores on your hard drive and is used when you visit the site to tailor your viewing and provide you with customised information. Only the information that you provide, or your preferences while visiting a website, can be stored in a cookie. For example, TechnologyTales.com cannot determine personal details, such as your email address, unless you choose to submit them.

Business Transfers

If TechnologyTales.com, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, or in the unlikely event that TechnologyTales.com goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of TechnologyTales.com may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Your Rights

Full details of your rights set out in the relevant privacy notice provided to you, but you are entitled by law to ask for a copy of your personal information at any time. You are also entitled to ask us to correct, delete or update your personal information, to send your personal information to you or another organisation and to object to automated decision making. Where you have given us your consent to use your personal information in a particular manner, you also have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. To exercise any of your rights, or if you have any questions relating to your rights, please contact us. You should note that some of your rights may not apply as they have specific requirements and exemptions which apply to them and they may not also apply to personal information recorded and stored by us. However your right to withdraw consent or object to processing for direct marketing are absolute rights.

If you are unhappy with the way we are using your personal information you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office or your local data protection regulator. More information about your legal rights can be found on the Information Commissioner’s website. However, we are here to help and would encourage you to contact us to resolve your complaint first.

Other Websites

This website contains links to other websites. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that they have their own privacy policies and we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies.

Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, TechnologyTales.com may change its Policy from time to time, and in TechnologyTales.com’s sole discretion. TechnologyTales.com encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Introduction. If you have a TechnologyTales.com account, you might also receive an alert informing you of these changes. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

A collection of lessons learnt about web hosting

Putting this blog back on its feet after a spot of web hosting bother caused me to learnt a bit more about web hosting than I  otherwise might have done. Here’s a selection and they are in no particular order:

1. Store your passwords securely and where you can find them because you never know how a foul up of your own making can strike. For example, a faux pas with a configuration file is all that’s needed to cause havoc for a database site such as a WordPress blog. After all, nobody’s perfect and your hosting provider may not get you out of trouble as quickly as you might like.
2. Get a MySQL database or equivalent as part of your package rather than buying one separately. If your provider allows a trial period, then changing from one package to another could be cheaper and easier than if you bought a separate database and needed to jettison it because you changed from, say, a Windows package to a Linux one or vice versa.
3. It might be an idea to avoid a reseller unless the service being offered is something special. Going for the sake of lower cost can be a false economy and it might be better to cut out the middleman altogether and go direct to their provider. Being able to distinguish a reseller from a real web host would be nice but I don’t see that ever becoming a reality; it is hardly in resellers’ interests, after all.
4. Should you stick with a provider that takes several days to resolve a serious outage? The previous host of this blog had a major MySQL server outage that lasted for up to three days and seeing that was one of the factors that made me turn tail to go to a more trusted provider that I have used for a number of years. The smoothness of the account creation process might be another point worthy of consideration.
5. Sluggish system support really can frustrate, especially if there is no telephone support provided and the online ticketing system seems to take forever to deliver solutions. I would advise strongly that a host who offers a helpline is a much better option than someone who doesn’t. Saying all of that, I think that it’s best to be patient and, when your website is offline, that might not be as easy you’d hope it to be.
6. Setting up hosting or changing from one provider to another can take a number of days because of all that needs doing. So, it’s best to allow for this and plan ahead. Account creation can be very quick but setting up the website can take time while domain name transfer can take up to 24 hours.
7. It might not take the same amount of time to set up Windows hosting as its Linux equivalent. I don’t know if my experience was typical but I have found that the same provider set up Linux hosting far quicker (within 30 minutes) than it did for a Windows-based package (several hours).
8. Be careful what package you select; it can be easy to pick the wrong one depending on how your host’s sight is laid out and what they are promoting at the time.
9. You can have a Perl/PHP/MySQL site working on Windows, even with IIS being used in place instead of Apache. The Linux/Apache/Perl/PHP/MySQL approach might still be better, though.
10. The Windows option allows for ASP, .Net and other such Microsoft technologies to be used. I have to say that my experience and preference is for open source technologies so Linux is my mainstay but learning about the other side can never hurt from a career point of view. After, I am writing this on a Windows Vista powered laptop to see how the other half live as much as anything else.
11. Domains serviced by hosting resellers can be visible to the systems of those from whom they buy their wholesale hosting. This frustrated my initial attempts to move this blog over because I couldn’t get an account set up for technologytales.com because a reseller had it already on the same system. It was only when I got the reseller to delete the account with them that things began to run more smoothly.
12. If things are not going as you would like them, getting your account deleted might be easier than you think so don’t procrastinate because you think it a hard thing to do. Of course, it goes without saying that you should back things up beforehand.

Rough?

Was it because Canonical and friends kept Ubuntu in such a decent state from 8.04 through to 9.04 that things went a little quiet in the blogosphere on the subject of the well-known Linux distribution? If so, 9.10 might be proving more of a talking point and you have to wonder if this is such a good thing with the appearance of Windows 7 on the scene. Looking on the bright side, 10.04 will be an LTS release so there is some chance that any rough edges that are on display now could be resolved by next April. Even so, it might have been better not to see anything so obvious at all.

In truth, Ubuntu always has had its gaps and I have seen a few of their ilk over the last two years. Of these, a few have triggered postings on here. In fact, issues with accessing the BBC iPlayer still bring a goodly number of folk to this website. That may just be a matter of grabbing RealPlayer, now helpfully available as a DEB package, from the requisite place on the web and ensuring that Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras is in place too but you have to know that in the first place. Even so, unexpected behaviours like Palimpsest seeing every partition on a disk as a different drive and SIL Raid mappings being seen for hard drives that used to live on the main home PC that bit the dust earlier this year; it only happens on one of the machines that I have running Ubuntu so it may be hardware thing and newly added hard drive uses none of the SIL mapping either. Perhaps more seriously (is it something that a new user should be encountering?), a misfiring variant of Brasero had me moving to K3b. Then UFRaw was sluggish in batch but that’s nothing that having a Debian VM won’t overcome. Rough edges like these do get you asking if 9.10 was ready for the big time while making you reluctant to recommend it to mainstream users like my brother.

The counterpoint to the above is that 9.10 includes a host of under the bonnet changes like the introduction of Ext4 hard drive formatting, Xsplash to allow the faster system loading to occur unseen and GNOME 2.28. To someone looking in from outside like me, that looks like a lot of work and might explain the ingress of the annoyances that I have seen. Add to that the fact that we are between Debian releases so things like the optimised packaging of ImageMagick or UFRaw may not be so high up the list of the things to do, especially with the more general speed optimisations that were put in place for 9.10. With 10.04 set to be an LTS release so I’d be hoping that consolidation is the order of the day over the next five or six months but it seems to be the inclusion of new features and other such progress that get magazine reviewers giving higher ratings (Linux Format has given it a mark of 9 out of 10). With the mooted inclusion of GNOME 3 and its dramatically different interface in 10.10, they should get their fill of that. However, I’d like to see some restraint for the take of a smooth transition from the familiar GNOME 2.x to the new. If GNOME 3 stays very like its alpha builds, then the question as how users will take to it arises. Of course, there’s some time yet before we see GNOME 3 and, having seen how the Ubuntu developers transformed GNOME 2.28, I wouldn’t be surprised if the impact of any change could be dulled.

In summary, my few weeks with Ubuntu 9.10 as my main OS have thrown up no major roadblocks that would cause me to look at moving elsewhere; Fedora would be tempting if that situation were to arise. The irritations that I have seen are more like signs of a lack of polish and remain peripheral to day-to-day working if you discount CD/DVD burning. To be honest, there always have been roughnesses in Ubuntu but has the lack of sizeable change spoilt us? Whatever about how things feel afterwards, big changes can mean new problems to resolve and inspire blog posts describing any solutions so it’s not all bad. If that’s what Canonical wants to see, they might get it and the year ahead looks as if it is going to be an interesting one after a recent quieter period.

Photography Kit

This is a list that I want to build up over time and I am going to limit it to the U.K. for now. As should be apparent from any commentary that I have included, I have dealt with a few of the retailers that are listed below so I hope that it comes in useful.

7dayshop.com

My biggest purchase from this Guernsey-based lot was a Canon EOS 10D body that heralded the start of my journey into the world of digital photography at the beginning of 2005. There was a time when I was wont to buy film from them too, along with other bits and pieces but I then turned to Mailshots in Stoke-on-Trent for similar pricing and quicker delivery; it often took weeks for things to arrive from Guernsey after purchase.

Ace Optics

Cameraworld

Ffordes

Prior to my entry into the world of digital photography, this lot became a port of call for several pre-owned film cameras. A Minolta X-700 came from there in 2002 as did compatible Sigma lenses and a flash gun. During 2004, I traded in my Canon EOS 300 for an EOS 30 that they had on sale and an EOS 50E was acquired as a second body. A piece of fooling resulting from a lapse of concentration while on a visit to Harris in August has meant that the 50E has been pressed into service as my main film camera on any outings; it’s always good to have a spare and prices these days are more tempting than when I was buying second-hand equipment.

Jessops

This is a name in photographic retailing that has been brought back from the dead. Before its collapse, it was the major retailer in Britain’s town centres and there was a branch in Macclesfield. However, the focus is more on online sales now with there only being a small network of city centre stores like the one on Market Street in Manchester. Having Jessops back is no bad thing and I wish them well for it was at a branch in Stockport that I bought my first-ever SLR, a Canon EOS 300, in July 2001. Purchases of Sigma lenses followed: a 70-300 mm one in Stockport and a 28-135 mm in Manchester. Admittedly, the latter of these saw more use than the former, but that always happens to me: I seem to be a one body, one lens man most of the time and it is only the prospect of a lost in quality that seems to keep me away from using super-zoom lenses.

London Camera Exchange

Mifsuds

Park Cameras

It seems to have been Sigma lenses for my Pentax DSLR’s that I have been buying from these people. The first was an 18-125 mm offering that is the main one that I use and next came a 50-200 mm one that extends my photographic range further into the telephoto region. That I made the second purchase from them may surprise some given that there was a lengthy wait for the first one but I may have asked for a less common item and I allowed for this. The 50-200 mm lens was a far more timely arrival and there may be more purchases from them yet, subject to my actually having a need to do so.

Picstop

A card reader and SD cards have been what makes up the custom that I have given this bunch. Delivery from the Isle of Man is quicker than from Jersey but you do incur additional charges even if you get that for which you are paying.

SRS Microsystems

Wex Photo Video

Formerly known as Warehouse Express, this operation has occasionally tempted me with promising goods at appealing prices. In the early days, a Sekonic light meter came from them but they now are a first port of call when pondering the prospect of a photographic purchase. Various cameras, lenses, filters and bags have been sourced there over the years.

A self-hosted online photo album option

I was perusing a recent copy of Linux Format and encountered a feature describing a self-hosted alternative to the likes of Flickr: Gallery. From my quick look, it looks fully featured, offering themes and even shopping cart facilities for those who want to sell their wares. The screenshots on the open-source project’s website look promising but, for a fuller appraisal, I would need to spend some time trying to bend it to my will. Before anyone mentions it, I am aware that WordPress can be used for photoblogging, but this tool seems to take things a bit further. It’s the sort of thing about which I might have wondered, given the pervasiveness of content management systems these days. My own custom-built photo gallery is devoid of a slick back end, hence why Gallery caught my eye, but I’ll continue with it and may even get to adding the needful myself.