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The long-awaited and much-delayed GDrive is likely to be released in the near future as more pieces of its integration are revealed. Cédric Vergé noticed a change in one of the CSS files for Google Apps: there's a class named "webdrive" and an icon for the new service.   When Google released Picasa for Mac, many people wondered what's the mystery behind a menu option titled "Google Web Drive":

Last week, Tony Ruscoe found some traces of an internal Google document which mentioned an update for Google Docs, which will slowly morph into GDrive. Apparently, Google Docs will be the web interface for GDrive, while a Windows/Mac client will integrate the service with the operating system and make it easy to synchronize files.

More information and the original story here

Talk of the ever-elusive GDrive first appeared in March 2006, when Google dropped a mention into a PowerPoint presentation intended for a gathering of industry analysts.   November of 2007 The Wall Street Journal reported Google was "a few months" away from releasing a hard-drive-meets-net service. The Journal said that Google planned to offer  storage for free, while charging for additional space.  But the latest rumors point to something a little more prosaic. According to blogs from Google watchers Tony Ruscoe and Alex Chitu, it looks like Google will roll GDrive into the  Google Docs and Spreadsheets, offering a means of syncing online files with those on the desktop.

As the latest rumors surfaced, The Guardian told the world that Google was planning to "make PCs history." This was promptly echoed by the likes of FoxNews.  "The Google Drive, or 'GDrive,' could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive, Instead a user's personal files and operating system could be stored on Google's own servers and accessed via the internet." They said.

Wanderjahre IT

Here's a great little media player with a bit more inside... VLC is a multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting a variety audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

It can stream over networks and transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. It's one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Solaris to name just a few.

VLC come with a great many codecs right out of the box and its this ability to simply play the video or the MP3 track which has endeared it to many users, who find its simplicity and ease of use a stark contrast to other media players. VLC can even play unfinished (downloading) and damaged videos. VLC also ignores DVD region coding.

The player also uses libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user's operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images. VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, mirror videos, create display walls, or add a logo overlay.

It can also produce video output as ASCII art. VLC can be installed and run directly from a flash or other external drive. On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can therefore make use of some third-party DLLs.

VLC is a fantastic and free piece of software that will happily do the work of your MP3 player, your DVD player and display any .avi video .iso and .mpeg files you may have in store. Its wizard will transcode a variety of video file into other types, useful for streaming videos to PS3 and the like and audio reproduction is not bad either. For more detailed information and to download, have a look at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ At the last count more than 35 million people had downloaded a copy, give it a try!

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Saw this is the Guardian today, think it says a lot about modern life and the internet. Apologies for now printing the article, but The Guardian get intense about that sort of thing and the emails fly, so here is the link

Luckily, Youtube is more mellow

Note to 40 plus readers, this could well be real!

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After a fairly hefty bill from those lovely people at British Telecom Internet for excess internet usage over Christmas I reluctantly concluded that I was going to have to move from my BT option 1 10gb allowance to their Unlimited option. Having just set up my own PC repair firm and with a tendency to have internet TV and Radio on the go while I am working, the decision to move to an unlimited tariff was something of a no-brainer compared to the excess charges. BT sweetened the deal with the offer of a free Home hub. 

For those unfamiliar with Home hub its essentially a proprietary wireless router for BT users; a rather stylish concave black affair minus the usual collection of aerials, four blue LED's show power, wireless, internet and telephone status. The router allows you to add a second phone via the router and VOIP and BT boast that international calls can be made for around 1p a minute. Calls to the UK at weekends and the evenings are free. Each hub is equipped with its own telephone number, mine starts with 05 a number which up to number I have associated with premium rate numbers which only goes to show what I know!  
I had heard some horror stories about installing Home hub on Windows machines and as a Linux user suspected that things would be difficult. As it turned out I could not have been more wrong. Once the router was plugged in and the Ethernet hooked up it was simply a matter of rebooting my PC and I was connected. For windows users there is a CD with a setup.exe although it looks like a standard Ethernet connection to me. 

The Home hub, aside from acting as a VOIP link also supports USB. I plugged an external hard drive and the hub recognised it as part of the network. To date I have not had time to check speeds or if it will stream media. If it does it could be a very useful feature indeed. 

As a router, speed have been good and the interface is fairly clear. I can't find any mention of NAT or Port forwarding but I may have missed something. But for now at least 8/10 and it could get better. 

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Internet speed test

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I was chatting, a couple of days ago, over a coffee with a friend of mine who in all fairness could not be called "computer literate" he uses a computer but aside from knowing where to click and how to generate the odd email message has not felt the desire to get involved further. I was trying to explain to him  the benefits of a blog,  but sadly his only experience of blogs was the few he had come across while browsing on the web. These consisted of the badly spelt musings of a collection of goths and emos whose collective aim seemed to be to ensure that their readership was as depressed and angry with the world as they were.

However for those of you who have more to do during each day than to bemoan the death of Kurt Cobain or list all the things in your immediate world which "suck", a well crafted blog can be a positive boon especially to the smaller business with an eye to costs and a desire to maintain a good working relationship with their customer base and this time of credit crunch and job cuts a good customer base is a positive boon.

First find your blog; there are plenty of site that will let you host your blog for either free or a small subscription. This blog as you will probably be aware in at www.blog.co.uk but there are others, Blogger owned by Google is highly recommended, as is Wordpress. Simply choose the one you like the look of, regsiter and get started.

Nearly all blog software will let you do more than simply write. Most will have the facility to upload pictures and video and links to picture and video hosting sites like Youtube and Flickr (see below) Controls are general easy to you and the only real chore is finding something to write about. Blogs support internet and email links. This means you can use the blog to direct customers to your own website.

Blogs score over mail outs for two reasons firstly because they are much quicker and more immediate - once the blog entry is written it is out in the wild and secondly because blogs are generally opt in and customers will already be interested in anything new. Customers are likely to feel much more involved in the company if they are kept regurlary update and a blog puts a human face to the process of selling which again wlll help sales.

A final point to remember is that blog have the facility to let people comment on what you have written, in that sense they are right there in the Web 2.0/Cloud computing pheomenon. Post a blog entry on a new subject and you could have your customer feedback in minutes. Provided your respondents are offering reasoned critism and support this could be a valuable resource. Generally customers who contribute will be keen to make positive entries but even critism can be beneficial.

If you are a small business consider a blog for your company, you may find its worth the effort and a little more.

For help and advice on how to make the best of your blog contact me

Wanderjahre IT  for more information and useful PC tips

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Windows 7 public beta:
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the public availability of the Windows 7 beta release on Thursday 8th January 2009. I have listed some of the impressions culled from reviewers and the net.

Interface enhancements
First thing you notice is that Windows 7,is even glassier than Vista. So if you're not a fan of Aero, you may feel disappointed right at the start.  The new glassy Taskbar uses an icon to represent each application up and running, which should be a boon to people who like to have a lot of stuff on their screens. The System Tray is as unhelpful as ever, unfortunately, but having the option to hide some icons and turn off notifications from apps and utilities does cut down the aggro factor to tolerable levels.
The Sidebar, widely criticised as a resource hog has gone and this may mean slightly better performance.

Paint and WordPad apps, both of now have a ribbon interface à la Office 2007, which may be clever or stupid depending on how fond you were of the thing in the first place.

Fully functional in the public beta, 'jump lists' add a submenu to many applications, so you can see items that you recently worked with in a given app, or look at further options for accessing often-used features.  Another improvement in Windows 7's interface compared to Vista's is the simplified Shutdown control on the Start menu you no longer have to reconfigure your Start menu to determine whether your PC will shut down entirely or merely go into hibernation when you click the button.

Action center
A new addition to Windows 7 is the Action. Though it's unlikely to wow many advanced users, the Action Center's clearly labeled options should make it easier for beginners and intermediate users to set their system security preferences with confidence, manage backups, and troubleshoot minor performance problems or return to a previous restore point if things go awry.

User Account Control
UAC is probably the feature that has most users up in arms and perhaps unsurprisingly this has been changed in the public beta. Windows 7 offers four levels of protection: always notify, notify only when programs try to make changes (this is the default), notify when programs try to make changes but don't dim the screen and never notify.

Networking improvements
Windows 7 adds HomeGroups, which give structure to the process of sharing devices and media files over a home network. Setting up a HomeGroup between two or more Windows 7 PCs automates the sharing of Libraries (collections of pictures, music files, movies, or documents), printers, and storage devices. Windows 7 also increases the number of SMB network connections that you can have in a single network. Windows generates a secure passkey that you must enter on every system that you add to the HomeGroup, which should help keep interlopers from reaching your shared files and devices, even if they manage to get onto your wireless network.

Performance
Its difficult to say if 7 will offer a performance boost but first signs are good. Startup 74 seconds from cold which is around 10 seconds ahead of Vista.

Conclusions
All the indicators suggest that Windows 7 will be an improvement on Vista and Microsoft seem to have moved to rectify some of the mistakes and bad publicity that the previous OS created. One of the areas they will have to take on board is the need to produce an OS that works on the sort of PC that you can find in PC World or Dixons rather than requiring a powerful rig and dedicated graphics card. They will also need to ensure that there is plenty of driver support since not being able to use your scanner or printer is the kiss of death for a new OS. If they can build it bigger, brighter and better than they could have a winner on their hands.

Stayed tune...

Lots of you may have heard of Linux, an alternative operating system to Windows and quite possibly rejected it. There are lots of reasons for this rejections but in this article I would like to look at some of them and explore how Linux could benefit you and you your business.

Linux is for geeks! I have to hold my hand up here and say that this was certainly the case when Linux was in its infancy, but in the last few years and especially the last 2-3 years things have changed. The days when a Linux OS could only be used by someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of command lines and the ability to compile programs has thankfully departed, leaving in its wake a core of users who have neither the time nor the skills to be more aware of the inner workings of say Ubuntu, than they would have on XP or Vista. Someone looking to move to Linux will find that modern versions are driven by graphic user interfaces (GUI) every bit as well designed as their Redmond equivalent. A new user will find themselves presented with a desktop which does not differ too radically from one generated by XP or Vista.

Linux can't be any good, its Free... You are literally spoiled for choice when it comes to which version of Linux to choose and the majority can be downloaded for only the cost of the time on the internet. But don't be fooled into thinking that because of this you are likely to get something a bit cheap and nasty. The latest version of Linux are sophisticated beasts capable of doing just about anything that Windows can do. Firefox will let you browse the internet, Thunderbird will handle your multiple POP3 email accounts. AMSN and Pidgin will let you instant message your friends and colleagues. Rhythmbox or Amorak will take care of your music and let you add to your MP3 collection on your Ipod or stick player. GIMP will handle images and Open Office is a fully fledged office productivity programme. A mature distribution will include all these and a lot more besides and additional applications are usually free!

Linux is not as good as Windows...Linux in its many forms is not the 'same' as Windows and it has to be said that some of the minor 'Distros' (Distributions) as they are known are inferior to XP and Vista in ease of use and features. But the major distros are a very different story indeed. Top of the pile at the moment is probably Ubuntu and its variants. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu for how this OS has developed. Ubuntu is released twice a year in April and October and the current version is 8.10. Compare this to the eight year life span of XP along with its service packs and the probable three year life span of Vista before it is retired in favour of Windows 7 most likely sometime in 2010 or 2011. Ubuntu can do anything XP/Vista can do and a lot more besides. Unlike Windows there are relatively few viruses for Linux whose operating architecture is significantly more difficult to compromise (although not impossible).

Perhaps the one area where Linux lags behind is gaming. For the hard core gamer Windows is still the way to go. That's not to say you cannot play games using Linux and a host of games exist for those who want to fight battles, defeat demons, shoot monsters, race cars or even practice their flight skills.

So what's the catch? The good news is that there is no catch as such, you can even simply add something like Ubuntu to your XP set up as a dual boot. But Linux does require just a 'little' commitment, and the little is the desire to learn the ways that it differs from Windows. On the forums you will often see posts to the effect that 'xxx' does not work properly and after a half-hearted attempt to solve the problem the poster will announce angrily that they are going back to XP/Vista. Linux needs a bit of time to learn and people who use this as a minus point are forgetting that the same held true when they first used Windows in whatever form they first encountered it, 95,98, NT (Cries of “Never heard of it!” ME (Cries of “I don't want to hear about it!”) W2K, XP, and Vista.

Pound for pound, Linux is less bloated than its Redmond cousin, it will run better on lower specified software, unlike Vista which needs a powerful machine to get the best out of it. Vista is some 15gb in size on the HDD, my version of Feather Linux is fully features with admittedly 'lite' applications but they all work and the size is a mere 120mb (that's not a typo, one hundred and twenty megabytes!). Ubuntu has its own cut down version called Xubuntu.

Small companies can benefit from the Linux community, aside from the Desktop operation systems, there are server versions of Linux to be had, with Fedora and SuSe leading the pack when I last looked. In fact there is a lot to be said for using Linux in the small office environment. Aside from the cost saving, the you will get better performance from Linux distros and basic internet browsing and email could be accomplished on some very basic machines – P3 machines with 128mb RAM and a hard drive of between 5 and 10gb would do fine. This sort of hardware can often be had cheaply or for free.

With the credit crunch and the need to make every penny count, 2009 could be a good year for Linux. Anyone interested in setting up their own Linux machines should give me a call. For a small cost I will install a fully featured version of Ubuntu, will fill DVD and MP3 support and all the software you could want. The package includes virtualisation software so that you can run another operating system from within Linux. I regularly run various version of Windows for troubleshooting purposes. Contact wanderjahre@wanderjahre.co.uk

Next time I'll be talking about VLC a media player and media transcoding application all in one. Want to convert your videos to another format then you'll want to read this.

Word on the forums is that the trial version of Windows 7, the new operating system from Microsoft has already landed on BitTorrent sites.

If you can keen to see the latest offering from the boys and girls in Redmond you can find it on several torrent sites including The Pirate Bay. The official release of the Windows 7 beta is expected in late January 2009 and MS are hoping that a successful new OS will help people forget the painful life to date of Vista. MS is asking partners to test the new system as soon as possible to avoid the problems with driver compatibility that plagued it predecessor.

Microsoft appears to have made no comment or complaint on the appearance of the torrents, unusual for a company which normally calls the lawyers at the slightest provocation.

Windows 7 is expected to get out to the shop at end of this year, Microsoft are presumably hopefully this will down down the Vista coffin for good.

Police to hack your PC

Police have been given the power to hack into personal computers without a court warrant and the Home Office faces the threat of a legal challenge after granting permission to allow Police to do this. Ministers are also drawing up plans to allow police across the EU to collect information from computers in Britain. The moves will further claims of a "Big Brother Society" where the often spurious accounts of combating terrorism and the recently promoted public enemy number, the paedophile, are used to allow police access to ever larger amounts of private information

Hacking – known as "remote searching" – has been quietly adopted by police across Britain following the development of technology to access computers' contents at a distance. Police say it is vital for tracking cyber-criminals and paedophiles and is used sparingly but civil liberties groups are worried that its usage will be expanded without any form of control.

Remote searching can be achieved by sending an email containing a virus to a suspect's computer which then transmits information about email contents and web-browsing habits to a distant surveillance team. Alternatively, "key-logging" devices can be inserted into a computer that relay details of each key hit by its owner. Detectives can also monitor the contents of a suspect's computer hard-drive via a wireless network. Users who are worried about this might want to check incoming emails and refuse any which look suspicious; set their email client to strip out HTML and receive only text (less pretty, but less prone to hacking) and to make sure their Network is encrypted. User may also want to think about using proxy servers as an additional layer of protection againts intrusion and access to your IP address.

The police say that computer hacking has to be approved by a chief constable, who must be satisfied the action is proportionate to the crime being investigated. But the recent record of the police in a propotionate reaction to a situation will not bring comfort to many users!

Dominic Grieve, shadow Home Secretary, asked how it would work in practice and what safeguards will be in place.

Police carried out 194 hacking operations in 2007-08 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including 133 in private homes, 37 in offices and 24 in hotel rooms. The spokesman said such surveillance was regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

The Government faces criticism over the erosion of civil liberties on a series of fronts. It is working on plans for a giant "big brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain's policy of retaining samples from people never convicted of a crime – including children – breaches human rights.

I wonder what Dixon of Dock Green would have said? "Evening all!"

Anyone who needs advice on how to protect themselves against hackers of any kind is welcome to contact me

A message on one of the internet forums a couple of days ago started me thinking. On the face of it the question was a simple one, the poster wanted to know whether to have Windows XP or Windows Vista on their computer. On the face of it this would not seem to be complicated. After all Vista is the new kid on the block, the latest offering from the boys and girls at Redmond and is therefore all singing, all dancing and a must have for anyone who wants to keep up with the techno-Jones next door, right?

Wrong. Vista's arrival has been greeted with all the appreciation of a Carol Singers' convention at the home of Ebeneezer Scrooge! On the technology internet forums it was savaged by posters who took delight in pointing out every flaw and Microsoft provided them with plenty to choose from! From the plethora of different versions to the security system capable of driving the most placid user to incoherent fury, Vista served up a diet of difficulty and frustration. Some two years after it first hit the shelves Vista has failed to inspire users to ditch their old operating systems and grab a copy of the shiny new contender to 'Best OS' title. Which begs the question, why?

In XP, Windows created a stable reliable system, some would add eventually to that sentence, but the fact is that XP has become the venerable old man of Windows and depending on your point of view is either much-loved or tolerated because of its stability and way it can be made to work with most software and peripherals. Vista on the other hand is a bit like the new guy who comes into the office with lots of letters after his name but no actual work experience. Microsoft doubtless had expectations that people would rush out and buy their new offering as they had done since the days of Windows 98, but in creating a stable OS with Windows XP they made a lot of people question why they should bother to invest in the new system. This questioning got louder when it became obvious that Vista would need a much more powerful machine to run than its predecessor. Have a look at the system requirements for Vista to be found on the Microsoft site.

Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate
1-gigahertz (GHz) 32-bit (x86) processor or 1-GHz 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
Windows Aero-capable graphics card
128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
40-GB hard disk that has 15 GB of free hard disk space (the 15GB of free space provides room for temporary file storage during the install or upgrade.)

For more information about the different editions of Windows Vista, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/default.mspx

Pay special attention to the system memory, although there is a version of Vista which needs less, if you want the 'Aero Glass' feature you need one of the resource heavy versions of the operating system. That means a gigabyte of RAM and either a dedicated graphics card or video off the motherboard and even more RAM plugged into the system. By comparison, its possible to get XP running on 256kb of RAM, albeit sluggishly, however 512kb will do the job perfectly well including any hived off for the video card.

One of the more irritating things for the ordinary user was the release of 'Vista Ready' laptops and desktops, a quick glance at the specifications for these rigs showed that they were ready for Vista in the same way that a morbidly obese 40 year old woman is ready for the London Marathon.

Microsoft don't seem to have much faith in their own product, witness their latest adverts and note which word is missing from the advert? Microsoft seem to be placing their faith in their new operating systems entitled Windows 7 but just how good the new system will be and whether it will see people transferring their allegiance remains to be seen. To make that happen they will need to offer something better than Aero Glass running on better than 1GB machines. Early rumours suggested a lightweight operating system which peaked the interest of myself and others, but since then information has been sketchy and what will come out of the labs at Redmond remains to be seen.

OK, I hear you say, then the choice is easy, we stay with XP, right? Nope, the Microsoft team are having none of that. The intention is to stop selling XP at the end of January. Copies will still be available through retail deals, but any new PC is likely to have Vista installed, whether the specification can handle it or not. To be fair, XP has had two stays of execution already, so a stop date was always in the pipeline but with demand for the OS still high and reports of people wanting to remove Vista and install XP, it remains to be seen whether XP might yet escape the axe and continue on its way as the old man of the OS at least until Windows 7 makes its triumphant arrival on the scene, whenever that might be...

Watch this space...

Links:
Windows 7 website http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/
Windows 7 appears on Pirate Bay http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/02/windows_7_beta_bittorrent/