Tracking down music from TV adverts

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Have you ever heard a song on an advert and thought “I really like that – I wonder who it’s by and what it’s called”?

Well, I did exactly that tonight and a few minutes later a Google search for t mobile mates rates ad music turned up a fantastic link – the HMV music from TV page, which told me that the track I was looking for was “Ooh La La” by Goldfrapp.

Unfortunately for both HMV and T-Mobile neither of them made any money from this (I switched my mobile back from Orange to Vodafone today and I bought the Goldfrapp track at the Apple iTunes Music Store) but it’s definitely worth a look if you like the music you hear on a TV advert!

IT and the law

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Some time ago, I stumbled across the About Cookies site which contains a really interesting (and useful) description of what cookies (of the browser variety) are, how they are (and should be) used, and how web site designers need to act in order to comply with the law. AboutCookies.org was produced by a law firm – Pinsent Masons – and they have another site called OUT-LAW which they claim has “5,000 pages of free legal news and guidance, mostly on IT and e-commerce issues. These issues can affect any organisation, and OUT-LAW is as much for those in a software start-up as it is for the compliance team at a bank”.

It’s certainly true that the legal issues surrounding IT are becoming ever more complex (and are something I find interesting reading – itself a worrying observation!). I’m neither qualified to comment on the law, nor affiliated with any legal firms, but it seems to me that OUT-LAW is probably worth a read for anyone who wants to ensure that their site (and business IT) is compliant with all necessary legislation.

Get safe online

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I was at Microsoft’s UK campus last night where, since last week, lots of plastic cubes (just like the logo below) and even stickers on the mirrors in the washrooms have appeared displaying the message “Get Safe Online”.

Get Safe Online

No-one from Microsoft was allowed to say what it’s all about yet, but some quick googling turned up the National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU)’s Internet safety campaign – Get Safe Online (Project Endurance), which is a joint government and private sector initiative aimed at helping consumers and small businesses to use the Internet safely (due to be launched at the end of October) with partner organisations including the UK Government, BT, Dell, eBay, HSBC, LloydsTSB, MessageLabs, Microsoft UK, the NHTCU, Securetrading and Yell.

So far GetSafeOnline is just a single page, but I’m sure more will follow.

Other Internet safety sites include the United States GetNetWise initiative.

Go to… Citrix online

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week I had a product demonstrated to me from The Dot Net Factory (they have several products, all of which look interesting to me and I hope to blog some more about them soon) but as they are in Ohio (USA) and I am in the UK the demonstration was carried out across the Internet.

Apart from the products that were being demonstrated, one of the things that impressed me was how easy it was to join their web meeting – hosted by the guys at GoToMeeting – part of Citrix online. Citrix also have GoToAssist and GoToMyPC products but from the point of view of an end-user with limited time to spare, I was amazed at how easy it was to click on a link and (after installing a small ActiveX component) view the meeting host’s PC. We didn’t use the voice facilities as The Dot Net Factory called me on my mobile phone but GoToMeeting was definitely good from the point of view of seeing the system that the guys were talking to me about and I’d certainly recommend it for hosting meetings across the Internet.

Wikimedia

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I often link to Wikipedia as I think it’s one of the best “for further reading” information sources on the Internet; however today I stumbled across Wiktionary – a sister project which provides a online dictionary and thesaurus (although I must confess that at the time of writing the thesaurus category is currently slightly limited and I do tend to use Microsoft Word for that feature).

I think that the wiki paradigm has a tremendous potential for information sharing (one which many companies seem totally blind to at present) and it turns out that the Wikimedia Foundation has a whole load of similar open content projects.

I’ll end this post with something I picked up from Wikiquote:

“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones”.

[Linus Torvalds (at the 1991 launch of his Linux operating system)]

Practical advice for webmasters

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year I blogged some advice on spam-proofing a website from Thomas Brunt’s Outfront site. Although Outfront is billed as a “FrontPage learning community” (urgh!), it also includes some practical advice for web authoring techniques such as looking at writing pages which are compliant with web standards, advanced use of mailto links and preparing photos for publication on a website, as well as some topics I have covered in this blog like custom error pages and the use of .htaccess files.

The site also features a good description of RSS (although most people familiar with blogs will also know RSS!) and design tips for producing a good website.

Using e-mail properly

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Craig Murphy has a whole load of interesting advice filed under project management, and one which caught my eye tonight was his post on using e-mail properly. Speaking as someone who spent two hours yesterday filing the last month’s worth of business e-mail (after spending too much of his holiday time generally getting his files which were spread across several PCs and external hard disks into some kind of order), I think I might try to take some of this on board in my new job…

10 steps to help secure SQL Server 2000

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I just stumbled across this 10-step plan to help secure SQL Server 2000 and thought it might be useful to note…

A quick Internet security audit (and other Internet tools)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Audit your firewall online, check your privacy and remove spyware.Yesterday, I stumbled across AuditMyPC, which includes a number of tests (and tips) to help improve PC and network security. Most of the information is available elsewhere on the ‘net but it’s nice to find it all in one place. What worried me (and convinced me that the guy who runs this site knows what he is doing) is that the site was able to discover my NATted IP address. Luckily it was only on my PC with the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed (unfortunately I need the JVM to use my employer’s awful time-sheeting system and, being a consultancy, time-sheeting is pretty important to us!). I know that my public IP address is easily obtained, but the ease at which a bit of Java code discovered information which should only be available from inside my firewall was a bit of a worry, especially on a fully patched Windows Server 2003 (SP1) system!

Whilst on the subject of Internet tools, some of the others that I find useful are Demon’s Internet query tools as well as the tools at network-tools.com (which include a handy feature for converting base 10 addresses to dotted decimal IPv4 addresses), the subnetmask.info network tools and Gibson Research Corporation’s ShieldsUp! port scanner.

More operational advice buried deep in the Microsoft website

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last month I blogged about some useful operational advice on the Microsoft website and I’ve just found a load more in the MSDN library. Specifically, I was looking at the advice for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 operations but there is a whole load of guidance there for pretty much all of the Microsoft server products (although I should also point out that in true Microsoft style, each product group has structured its information differently).