markwilson.it

Tag: Useful Websites

  • See who’s posting what on Flickr

    Flickr logoThis is a bit voyeurstic, but it’s also a great way to see other peoples photos… Flickr Vision displays a map of the world and uses Flickr’s geotagging capabilities to display photos as they are posted to the web, all around the world. It’s actually quite mesmerising…

  • Google Maps gets better and better

    I used to use the AA and RAC websites to plan routes but these days Google Maps is faster and easier. And I just noticed that the Google Maps service has been improved with the ability to drag and drop the route line to customise the route.

    Another feature (which may have been around for a while – it only seems to be available for US directions at the moment and I generally need to look at UK routes), is the ability to get directions using public transit. I’m planning my trip to the States next week (more on that in a couple of days) and it’s really useful.

  • Secure online backup from Mozy

    Mozy logoA few weeks back I was discussing backups with a couple of my colleagues. I’ve commented before that, despite nearly losing all of my digital photos and my entire iTunes library, I’m really bad at backing up my data (it’s spread across a load of PCs and I almost never have it in a consistent enough state to back up). I had thought that Windows Home Server would be my saviour, but Microsoft rejected my feedback requests for Mac and Linux client support so that won’t work for me. Besides which, I should really keep an offsite copy of the really important stuff. One of my colleagues suggested that I joined in a scheme he was setting up with remote transfers between friends (effectively a peer-to-peer network backup) but then another recommended Mozy.

    Mozy? What’s that?

    For those who haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t, but it does seem to be pretty well known), Mozy is an offline backup service from Berkeley Data Systems (who were purchased by EMC last week). Available as a free service with 2GB of storage (and an extra 256MB per referral – for both the referrer and the new customer – my referral code is L8FPFL if anyone would like to help out…), as a paid service with unlimited storage for $4.95 a month (per computer), or as a professional service for $3.95 a month (per computer) plus $0.50 per GB of storage, it seems there’s an option for everyone – although it is worth understanding the differences between Mozy Home and Mozy Pro.

    With clients support for most Windows versions (including Vista) and Mac OS X (still in beta), data is protected by the Mozy client application using 448-bit Blowfish encryption (with a user-supplied key or one from Mozy) and then transferred to the Mozy servers over an HTTPS connection using 128-bit SSL. Upload speeds are not fast on my ADSL connection and there is some impact on performance but I can still use the web whilst I’m uploading in the background (in fact I have a a backup taking place as I’m writing this post). Also, once the first backup has taken place, Mozy only copies changed blocks so subsequent backups should be faster. The only problem that I found (with the Mac client – I haven’t tried on Windows yet) was that it uses Spotlight searches when presenting backup sets so if you have recently had a big clearout (as I did before backing up), the size of each backup set may be out of date (Apple support document 301562 offers some advice to force Spotlight to re-index a folder).

    I should highlight that backup is only half the story – the Mozy client has a simple interface for browsing files and selecting those that need to be restored. There’s also a web interface with browsing based either on files or on backup sets and the Mozy FAQ suggests that Mozy can ship data for restoration using DVDs if required (for a fee).

    Whilst Mozy has received almost universal acclaim, not everyone likes it. For me it’s perfect – an offline copy of my data but it doesn’t do versioning and it will assume that if I delete a file then after 30 days I won’t want it back. I think that’s fair enough – if I have a catastrophic failure I generally know about it and can restore the files within that month. As for versioning, why not have a local backup with whatever controls are considered necessary and use Mozy as the next tier in the backup model? The final criticism is about Mozy’s potential to access files – that’s purely down to the choice of key. Personally, I’m happy with the idea that they can (in theory) see the pictures of my kids and browse the music/videos in my library – and if I wasn’t, then I could always use my own private key to encrypt the data.

    I’m pretty sure that I’ll be moving to the paid MozyHome product soon but I wanted to try things out using MozyFree. Based on what I’ve seen so far, using Mozy will be money well spent.

  • Attempting to reduce my website’s bandwidth usage

    This website is in a spot of trouble. Over the last few months, I’ve seen the bandwidth usage grow dramatically although it seems to have grown faster than the number of subscribers/readers. We’re not talking vast volumes here and my hosting provider has been very understanding, but even so it’s time to do something about it.

    So I had a think, and came up with three options:

    1. Don’t write anything. Tried that for half of June (when I was on holiday). No noticeable change in the webstats!
    2. Write rubbish. It’s debatable as to whether that’s a continuation of the status quo.
    3. Drp ll th vwls s f wrtng txt mssgs.
    4. Optimise the site to reduce bandwidth usage, without a major rewrite. Yeah! That sounds like a challenge.

    So, option four sounded like the best course of action. There are two main elements to consider in this:

    1. Site performance (i.e. how fast pages load).
    2. Bandwidth usage.

    As far as I can tell, my site performance is not blindingly fast but it’s OK. I could use something like the WP-Cache plugin to cache content but, although that should reduce the load on the server, it won’t actually decrease my bandwidth usage. In fact it might increase it as I’d need to turn off HTTP compression.

    That led me to concentrate on the bandwidth issues. This is what I tried (based mostly on Jeff Atwood’s experience of reducing his site’s bandwidth usage):

    • Shut out the spammers. Akismet had blocked over 7000 spam messages in 15 days and each of these would have loaded pages and leeched some bandwidth in the process. Using the Bad Behaviour plugin started to reduce that, blocking IP known spammers based on their IP address. Hopefully it hasn’t blocked legitimate users too. Please let me know if it has blocked you (assuming you can read this!).
    • Compress the content. Check that HTTP compression is enabled for the site (it was). According to Port 80 Software’s real-time compression check, this both reduces my file size by about 77% and decreases download times by 410%. It’s also possible to compress (i.e. remove whitespace and comments) in CSS and JavaScript (as well as tools for HTML compression) but in my opinion, the benefits are slim (as these files are already compressed with HTTP compression) and code readability is more important to me (although at 12.7KB, my main stylesheet is a little on the bloated side of things – and it is one file that gets loaded frequently by clients).
    • Optimise the graphics. I already use Adobe Photoshop/ImageReady to save web optimised graphics but I used a Macintosh utility that Alex pointed me to called Ping to optimise the .PNG files that make up about half the graphics on this site (I still need to do something with the .JPGs and .GIFs) and that shaved just over 10% off their file size – not a huge reduction but it should help.
    • Outsource. Switching the main RSS feed to FeedBurner made me nervous. I’d rather have all my readers come to my domain than to one over which I have no control but then again FeedBurner gives me some great analysis tools. Then I found out about Feedburner’s MyBrand feature (previously a chargable option but free since Feedburner was acquired by Google) which lets me use feeds.markwilson.co.uk (i.e. a domain under my control) instead of feeds.feedburner.com. Combined with the FeedSmith plugin, this has let me keep control over all of my feeds. One more option is to use an external image provider (Jeff Atwood recommends Amazon S3 but I haven’t tried that yet).

    At the moment it’s still early days but I do have a feeling that I’m not eating up my bandwidth quite as quickly as I was. I’ll watch the webstats over the coming days and weeks and hope to see a downward trend.

  • Scrobbling audio at Last.fm

    I hate it when websites gather more information about me than is necessary and more than a few sites now have nonsensical entries in their marketing databases as a result; however I have found one site recently that I’m more than happy to give information too – because I get something in return. You see, as I write this, I’m listening to a mixture of laid back beats, chilled house and trance, recommended to me by Last.fm (incorporating audioscrobbler). It’s being streamed to me over my Internet connection, free of charge, based on my musical tastes. How did it find out what I like? Well, I have a client application on my computer, which hooks into iTunes and each time I synchronise my iPod, play a track in iTunes or listen via the Last.fm website it “scrobbles” my recently played tracks to my profile.

    I’ve been using the service for a few months now and still can’t get my head around just how useful (and varied) it’s many features are – so I’ll point you to this review by Steffie for a better idea of just what Last.fm can provide for your listening pleasure. For a review from a more mainstream media source, try CNET. Meanwhile, Steve Krause looks at the differences between Last.fm and Pandora – another popular music recommendation site that is often referenced alongside Last.fm but which, as Steve explains, is fundamentally different in the way it determines its recommendations.

    If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering how sites like Last.fm can stream music free of charge whilst others wrangle with the complications of DRM-protected content. Well, that’s because it’s not just a free online music library – whilst you can hear “radio stations” based on your preferences there is no choice in what is played next and if you do search for a particular track then only a 30 second sample is played. As for the viability of the site (a question that should be asked of many “web 2.0” sites) – it’s viable enough for CBS to buy it (for $280m – and hopefully not just to shut it down). The theory is, that if I like what I hear, then I’ll buy some more music and to some extent that’s feasible. If I enter the name of a well-established band then I’ll probably recognise the names of similar artists (those who like Kylie Minogue may also enjoy Madonna or Britney Spears – or, closer to my tastes, if I like Faithless then why not try Groove Armada and Moby, etc.) but for something more obscure (e.g. The Age of Love), then I’d never have known to try something by Kamaya Painters, The Thrillseekers or Nalin & Kane. As for CBS, they get access to a huge database of musical tastes (whilst others are relying on a combination of software and intuition to predict their next hit).

  • When standard Windows utilities are just not enough

    Lifehacker often features great articles – I should read it more (as should I read so many of the feeds in my reader but I just can’t keep up). Gina Trapani‘s Geek to Live column from last Friday is just one such example – power replacements for standard Windows utilities. I already use some of these, but others may soon be finding their way on my systems.

  • Find out how a site is built

    This may not be news as it’s pretty high on Digg right now but it may be a useful resource to remember. BuiltWith is a web page technology profiler – a site to find out which technologies have been used to create a website. I even learnt a few things about the underlying technologies for my own site!

  • Useful source for Microsoft resource kit utilities

    A couple of nights back, I needed to get hold of a Windows 2000 Server resource kit utility called cusrmgr.exe in an attempt to add a global security group from a domain to the local Administrators group on a Windows Server 2008 core server (following the advice in Microsoft knowledge base article 297307). Being many miles from home (and without a working remote access solution at present), I needed to download the utility from somewhere but, whilst Microsoft makes many resource kit utilities available for download from the web, this is not one of them. Luckily an Austrian firm called Dynawell web site services has provided various resource kits for download at their website. (If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please don’t shut them down – they do at least acknowledge that a license is required to use the utilities.)

    Unfortunately, cusrmgr.exe -m \\remotecomputername -alg localgroupname -u globalgroupname didn’t work out for me on Windows Server 2008 Server Core.

  • BBC iPlayer: seems to work well on Windows XP but what about the rest of us?

    A few weeks back, I started to listen to one of my favourite podcasts – BBC Radio 4’s The Now Show, only to be greeted with:

    “We’re sorry that The Now Show podcast isn’t available for this series. The podcast was part of a trial, which has now come to an end; however you can still listen to the programme for seven days after broadcast, via the Radio 4 website.”

    The clip then continued by advertising other BBC Radio 4 podcasts – obviously not “part of a trial which has now come to an end”. This annoys me tremendously – the BBC is a fine broadcaster but as as it dumbs down its main news programmes and airs more and more tabloid TV (leave that to ITV please), I’m not sure that my license fee is being well spent (that’s how the BBC is funded – from the sale of it’s programmes, and from a mandatory annual fee for all UK households and businesses with a device that’s capable of receiving a TV signal – even if it only receives subscription services like satellite or cable TV). You see, the BBC has spent millions developing a new service called iPlayer (it’s a pity they couldn’t have spent a few more pounds registering the iplayer.com domain) which will allow registered users (as long as they have a UK-registered IP address) to download programmes from the Internet. On the face of it, that sounds good, except that it’s been bogged down by DRM and that’s limited the availability of the service.

    A few months back, Microsoft UK’s James O’Neill and I were engaged in an online (and face-to-face) debate about the need (or not) for digital rights management (DRM). James’ argument is that content providers have a right to protect their copyrighted material, that Windows Media codecs are available or Mac users and that Linux users would never allow a Microsoft product (i.e. a Linux port of Windows Media Player) on their system. My argument is that piracy would be insignificant if an easy to use digital media system could be created which works regardless of the device and operating system and with media at a price for which people would be happy to pay without a moment’s thought – that Microsoft Windows Media, Apple FairPlay and competing technologies should be made to work together – just as Mark James proposes in his call for open standards in digital rights management. Instead, the BBC (following the path set by a rival broadcaster, Channel 4) have provided a service which will only work on a subset of Windows PCs.

    I recently saw a trailer for a BBC series called Mountain which was advertised as “coming soon” but I missed the first couple of episodes. Realising this, I thought that this would be an opportunity to try out the iPlayer service but if I’m going to give up the comfort of my living room to watch TV on the computer, I want to do it with my computer that’s hooked up to a decent display – that will be the Mac then. Not with iPlayer – it’s Windows only (so much for the accessibility which BBC services should maintain). Not to worry, I have a decent Windows PC too… oops, that runs Vista… iPlayer only works with Windows XP, Windows Media Player 10 and Internet Explorer 6 (or later) with JavaScript, ActiveX and cookies enabled. Now, looking at the statistics for this site, Windows XP users only account for about 60% of my visitors (even if they prefer to use another browser, they will have IE6 installed). Sure, my readers are highly technical (and hence more likely to try something other than the norm) but so will those who are interested in watching TV across the Internet – at least in 2007 (I expect things to change over the next couple of years) – so the BBC has instantly excluded 40% of it’s potential audience (even more if their IP addresses don’t appear to be served from the UK). Furthermore, for a service that was supposed to have launched a fortnight ago, it’s still carrying a beta label and signup is a painfully slow process. In fact a BBC representative wrote on an iPlayer support forum:

    “We have chosen initially not to market or publish widely the availability of the service as we wanted to see what the initial demand would be – and interest so far has been extremely strong.”

    Hmm… I read a press release announcing that the service would be launched on 27th July 2007 (which was subsequently picked up by many newspapers and websites) – I think that is both marketing and publishing the availability of the service. So what’s all this beta nonsense about then? It seems that the BBC’s Press Office is not talking to the BBC’s iPlayer people…

    Once I set up a Windows XP PC and got my login details for the iPlayer service (after a wait of several hours… suggesting a level of manual intervention in the process), I found that they didn’t do much for me. The BBC’s own advice is to save the iPlayer login on the computer (if I’ve saved my login details in a cookie, what’s the point in having a login?) and then before I could download any content I had to register for a separate bbc.co.uk account (which seems to require more personal details than I would like to give away). At least that was an immediate process (even if the first few usernames I tried were taken) and I was finally able to download my programme.

    BBC iPlayer - downloading

    Download speeds were good (in the region of 2Mbps), although the reference to the number of sources from which I was downloading alerted me to that fact that this is a peer-to-peer service (the BBC uses VeriSign’s Kontiki delivery management system) – in which case am I giving up some of my bandwidth for the BBC to distribute its content to others? (Oh the irony of a DRM-protected service using P2P for distribution!) More to the point, what effect will that have on my bandwidth usage if I’m limited by my ISP, or if they implement network controls to limit access to the service?

    The BBC website had given me the impression (obviously misguided) that programmes would be available for download up to 7 days after broadcast and then to view for a further 30 days. Apparently that’s not so, as the 30 day clock seems to start ticking at broadcast time (not download time), so my programme actually had 23 days left for me to watch it. BBC iPlayer - expiry Furthermore, it seems that once I start to watch a programme I only have 7 days to watch it before it expires. Those timescales seem pretty tight (there are no such limits with other time shifting technologies, whether I use a simple video cassette recorder or something more complex) and it’s this inflexibility that makes me so critical of DRM.

    The content itself is pretty good quality – at least the episode of Click that I used to test the service (not to be confused with the streamed version available from the BBC website) looked fine in full screen mode on a standard 1024×768 laptop display although, somewhat annoyingly, a BBC News 24 ticker was visible on the bottom of the screen throughout the programme (that shouldn’t be a problem for most programmes). Also, despite advertising itself as a 30-minute programme, this particular episode turned out to be the short (just under 12 minute) version. Actually, once you find a PC that meets the iPlayer specifications, the service is pretty good. I just think that the BBC should cast it’s net a little further and include Macintosh and Linux users in its online audience.

  • Word 2003 to 2007 command conversion

    The Office 2007 ribbon UI is fantastic but it’s also a right pain until you get used to where everything is (and I still rely on Office 2003 keyboard shortcuts). Now, help is at hand with the interactive Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide.