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Twitter is one of those applications that seems to possess no middle ground. You either love it and want to sign up immediately and see how popular you can become with a horde of followers (add obligatory Stephen Fry reference here...) or you consider it to be yet another example of how normally sane people can be persuaded to spend long hours on the computer announcing that they are on the computer, drinking coffee or considering what to post on Twitter!  But for business, Twitter could be another useful tool to get information about your business out into the public domain and get the customers in.

Twitter is an information service for the time-poor web-savvy professional. Naturally, this is a very attractive demographic for many businesses. The format forces users to say what they want in 160 characters or less. Brevity is the unique selling point of the application.  Using a Twitter account brands you as web-literate, cutting edge and flags that for hundred of thousands of other user out there who are conditioned to small snippets of information in Twitter you are a source of accredited information. Consider this: you are looking for company, a piece of work you want to outsource, that work needs a knowledge of what the net can do. Which do you choose, Company A which boasts a website and nothing more or Company B which posts on Twitter and gives you a pretty good idea of who they are and what they do before you have either called or emailed them!

Twitter accounts give businesses an edge, a chance to make a connection with potential followers in a way that can't be done with emails, printed literature or information on the website. Twitter is part of the Web 2.0 ethos that breaks down the hierarchy between the provider and the consumer. While for some organisations this may be an uncomfortable transition, it is one that will reap benefits. Twitter is essentially a free advertising opportunity that brings customers direct to you, promotes brand loyalty in the form of Tweets being followed and brings company information direct to the user desktop. Any company with an eye to the future will want to get on the Twitter ladder, with a customised home page and regular output to the web.

Twitter, like so much of the Web 2.0 universe, is content intensive, so weekly updates are not an option. The way to get followers is to make frequent but useful posts to the web. Having an account, which can be accessed by a number of employees, is one way to ensure content, but the company needs to be very clear about what information finds its way into the wild. In the same way that a press statement would be a carefully considered document, all Twitter releases need to be centred around the values of the company. That is not to say that the tweets need to be formal or dull but posting every time the managing director has a cup of coffee is not likely to pull in the followers.

The application offers the chance to delete followers, so businesses need have no fear that they will be inundated with abusive comments, but the clever company will actually address these comments directly and out in the open often resulting in the would-be heckler slinking away with their tale between their legs or even being converted into an evangelist for the company.

Since Twitter can be used for a mobile device, the switched on company can effectively post impressions and information from conferences and events. Applications such as Twitpix exist to enable users to upload photos providing another link between users and the company.

Its easy to reject Twitter as another fad on the internet and another excuse for anal retentive users to post every passing thought that crosses their mind. But even if Twitter is a fad; its the fad of the moment and given its user base can businesses afford not to use it?

If you are like me you may think that the latest version of some browsers out there, far from being bigger and better have mastered the bigger bit at the expense of the better. Firefox is a case in point. While undoubtedly one of the better browsers out in the wild, its been getting larger and larger with each generation; ever more memory hungry and prone to problems. The fastest, most stable version of Firefox was arguably the last release of version 1.5. I installed it earlier today for an experiment and while not as pretty as its younger sibling, it is fast and it is small at around 5mb compared to 7mb for the latest incarnation. It was also the only version of the fox that I could reliably install the much used Freecycle addon. The only snag to this is that all the information on 1.5 suggests that its open to exploitation, so the choice is have the addon and be unsafe or play it safe and do without.

But all the above made me wonder if there were other cut down browsers out there that could be installing in their more venerable forms. Older versions of the Opera browser seem pretty much the same as their younger brother and the newer editions do seem to have more features and feel more up to date.

Running a fast lightweight Firefox-like browser means moving to the Seamonkey platform. Like the fox, this is based on the Netscape Navigator platform and for I tried it earlier today and it does indeed zip along speedily. You can install it with Firefox and they do seem to play nice together.

People who live on social networks should check out Flock which is Firefox customised for Facebook, Myspace, Gmail and the like.

There is no lightweight, older faster version of Internet Explorer, running earlier versions on a Windows XP/Vista platform is asking for trouble! IE is the single most targeted browser on the net, so while it may not sit well, if you have IE the best option is to keep it up to date no matter what.

Versions after IE 7 are considered safe and its worth bearing in mind that if you are running Windows 2000 you are running at best IE6 which is regarded as unsafe. Probably best to download Firefox, Opera or even Seamonkey pretty quickly unless you fancy contributing to the infected computer universe.

IE 8 is new and some people have been reluctant to upgrade for compatibility reasons. Its not much fun to find you suddenly cannot access your bank details, or credit card or some other secure site. With that in mind, its always worth having at least one other browser on your machine and again, the way forward here is Firefox. A copy of Firefox 3 sitting on your machine can be deployed with IE and a website decide they have never heard of one another.

For people who automatically assume that anything from Microsoft was even badly made or impossibly resource hungry (and I confess to being one of them during the early days of Vista) its worth noting that the old firm seems to be getting back on form. Windows 7 is getting a lot of positive reviews and Internet Explorer 8 is looking good with reports that it will toddle along happily on an XP rig with 512mb of RAM under the hood.

Its not really advisible to have the older browsers on your machine, upddates negate possible exploits and while they make the browser slower from time to time, slower is better than compromised with all the expense or hassle of the solution. My advice would be to have Firefox and possibly Seamonkey on tap to go with IE8. You can't really retro-load your browser, but with a couple of other browsers installed you can cover all eventualities.

In a blog post on Monday, Ben Galbraith, co-director of developer tools at Mozilla, explains that browsers are evolving from page rendering applications into application runtime environments. As that change occurs, browsers can provide many of the functions of operating systems. That, incidentally, is why Microsoft tried so hard to eliminate Netscape not so long ago.

Galbraith credits this shift partly to Google's "creation of boundary-pushing 'desktop-quality' applications" and its evangelization of its Chrome browser as an application runtime. That's generous praise given that Google's decision last year to introduce a browser of its own raised questions that still haven't been satisfactorily answered about the future of the relationship between Google and Mozilla.

One thing that might quiet worries about rising friction between the two organizations would be seeing Firefox back at the head of the browser technology race. If Firefox remains strong, it should continue to be able to collect revenue from Google, not to mention Microsoft or Yahoo, in exchange for searches sent through the browser's search box.

Over the past few years, Firefox set the pace of browser innovation. But it has been caught or passed by Chrome 2, Safari 4, and Internet Explorer 8. The competition has been getting faster and has added advanced features like pre-emptive threading and memory protection for tabs.

Firefox continues to rely on a monolithic architecture that can lead to instability and memory leaks, which have bedeviled Firefox's developers for years. It's a problem aggravated when Firefox plug-ins aren't coded well. Particularly in light of Chrome's responsiveness and low memory footprint, it's clear that Firefox needs some help, even it remains far more feature-rich than the competition.

Galbraith wants the Mozilla developer community to help solve Firefox's memory problems, and those of other applications, by creating an open source tool to make application memory garbage collection (GC) -- the process by which programs clear unneeded objects from memory -- easier to understand and manage.

"We plan on the initial implementation of this tool to be simple," he explains. "For memory usage, we want to introduce the ability to visualize the current set of non-collectible JavaScript objects at any point in time (i.e., the heap) and give you the ability to understand why those objects aren't collectible (i.e., trace any object to a GC root). For the cycle collector, we want to give you a way to understand when a collection starts and when it finishes and thus understand how long it took."

Firefox is still quite popular and its usage continues to grow. It captured a worldwide market share of 21.77% in February, according to Net Applications. It remains the most customizable browser, with a wide selection of plug-ins. Firefox developers are also working on technology like the Ubiquity command line interface that no other browser can yet match.

But without fundamentals like speed and efficient memory usage, Firefox could lose ground.

Mozilla has been slow to deliver Firefox 3.1, which was supposed to be available in December and is now scheduled for the second quarter of 2009, owning to technical issues with its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Firefox needs the speed that comes with TraceMonkey. And it needs the stability and efficiency that come with well-managed memory usage. It cannot afford to innovate at the edges while remaining bloated at the core.

The rise of social networking sites offers people new and varied ways to communicate via the internet, whether through their PC, mobile device or phone. They allow people to create their own online page or profile and to construct and display an online network of contacts, often called ‘friends’. Users of these sites can communicate via their profile both with their ‘friends’ and with people outside their list of contacts. This can be on a one-to-one basis (much like an email), or in a more public way such as a comment posted for all to see.

Outside communication can be observed and commented on by anyone who is part of network. This promotes additions nodes of communication and contact. Social networking sites also have some potential pitfalls to negotiate, such as the unintended consequences of publicly posting sensitive personal information, confusion over privacy settings, and contact with people one doesn’t know, but the evidence suggests that people quickly become adept at assimilating and using the necessary rules.

Adult social networkers use a variety of sites, with the main ones being , Facebook and MySpace, although there are a variety of other including Bebo, Ning, Linkedin and many more. It is common for adults to have a profile on more than one site - on average each adult with a social networking page or profile has profiles on 1.6 sites, and 39% of adults have profiles on two or more sites. Half of all current adult social networkers say that they access their profiles at least every other day. The site people choose to use varies depending on the user. Children are more likely to use Bebo (63% of those who use a social networking site), and the most popular site for adults is Facebook (62%). There is also a difference between socio-economic groups. ABC1s with a social networking profile were more likely to use Facebook. C2DEs, who were more likely to have a profile on MySpace. Social networkers fall into distinct groups and differ in their attitudes to social networking sites and in their behaviour while using them. Ofcom’s qualitative research indicates that site users tend to fall into five distinct groups based on their behaviours and attitudes.

These are as follows:
* Alpha Socialisers – people who used sites in intense short bursts to flirt, meet new people, and be entertained.
* Attention Seekers – people who craved attention and comments from others, often by posting photos and customising their profiles.
* Followers – people who joined sites to keep up with what their peers were doing.
* Faithfuls – people who typically used social networking sites to rekindle old friendships, often from school or university.
* Functionals – people who tended to be single-minded in using sites for a particular purpose.

Non-users of social networking sites also appear to fall into distinct groups:
* Concerned about safety – people concerned about safety online, in particular making personal details available online.
* Technically inexperienced – people who lack confidence in using the internet and computers.
* Intellectual rejecters – people who have no interest in social networking sites and see them as a waste of time.

The opportunities for community engagement using these platform are fairly clear: it allows a user to engage with a large number of people for little or no cost aside from the time use to create and publicise the information; accessibility is not limited by mobility; translation applications exist online so language is not necessarily an issue; BME and hard to reach groups respond positively to situations where they are in control and this platform provides an opportunity to respond from your own machine, at home; information is 'opt-in' and far more likely to be read than paper based literature.

Many people are technologically literate but find traditional websites difficult to navigate. Social networking offers the opportunity engage using content other than simple text and pictures, third party application including maps, photo streams, RSS feeds, and links to other resources are all possible and enhance the communication experience.

Social networks provide for a cornerstone of engagement namely giving the public the means to engage and the opportunity to engage in a time frame which suits them. There is a growing expectation that social networks will be part of the available resources, many public figures now boast a social network profile. Increasing home internet access facilitates the use of social networking sites, although potential users often have alternative points of access (for example at school or at work). Increased connection speeds and the wider availability of broadband enable richer use of the internet, including uploading as well as viewing content. The specific technology that has enabled this growth in the number and popularity of social networking sites is part of a wider online phenomenon, enabling self-expression, communication and user interaction online, known as Web 2.0.

Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.

The literature on social networks and political participation has generally focused on the role of social networks in mobilizing citizens to participate. Brian Adams in his paper on local democracy and social networks examined the question: once citizens decide to participate, how can they use social networks to help them achieve their political goals? Based on interviews with citizens in a mid-sized city, he argued that social networks are a political resource akin to time, money and civic skills, and that they can facilitate engagement by helping citizens achieve various political tasks.
The Local Government Information Unit (LGIU) is on record as saying "Social networking has the potential to revolutionise how councils engage with children and young people." It recently ran a course which "[explored] how local government can harness the potential of social networking sites to promote youth participation in the democratic process and in the delivery of children's services." (Jan 2009)

The speed of development in technology makes it susceptible to the stalling tactics of the intellectually disinterested who hold to the idea that social networking is actually a distraction from the business of democracy rather than an aid to it. Six months ago hardly anyone used Twitter, in six months time perhaps no-one will anymore. Right now it is the social networking tool of choice for many people, a wide cross section of society that includes MPs, councillors and professionals in a variety of fields, who find the ability to micro-blog information quickly to a group of "followers" an invaluable communication and engagement tool.

Social networking tools come and go quickly and users are becoming used to and adapting to the speed of change. This speed of change means that there’s no point waiting for the rise of a dominant form of communication. Its likely that as a society of users we will become increasingly skilled at picking and choosing those tools which best suit our needs, rejecting some in favour of others as more advanced options become available.

One interesting feature of social networks is that they tend to blur the boundaries between personal and professional life. Many people quite like knowing where their councillor is going on holiday or what their MP is watching on TV. It makes these relationships more human and that's important in a world that is increasingly post-hierarchical and more collaborative. But it also raises some difficult issues and will make a lot of people uncomfortable. The notion of boundaries is one often used by rejecters of social networks, voicing the fear that people will come to know too much about them.

Web based communications have a lot of advantages, low cost, quick, interactive, waste free. It has been pointed out that 35 % of households in the UK are still not online. However there are a plethora of internet sources: libraries, internet cafés and places that provide wireless access and so do much to overcome this difficulty.

Mobile phone using 3G technology offer access and the latest generation will often be pre-configured for Face, Myspace or other social network -further proof of its perceived importance. Young people in particular are comfortable with conducting their online affairs in public places or while on the move.

"Silver Surfers" a term applied to older members of the community for whom the internet is a relatively new experience are another developing demographic and as a group combine a high degree of civic responsibility with a desire to be kept informed, the use of social networks to facilitate this is clearly mandated.

While some local authority ITC managers may be concerned about opening their servers to social networks, there is little to be concerned about, normal monitoring for abuse should suffice.
interaction between users take place online and there is no need to download client software to individual machines. The only interaction likely to be required on for example Facebook, would be the loading of a picture of the user to their profile. It is not that long ago that councils were arguing that junior members of staff did not need email or external internet access and before that telephones, since these were likely to distract from work. Since then email then has become an accepted form of communication with staff at all levels and internet access is an important information gathering resource.

If cloud computing and browser based application become the norm there will be an increasing need to provide online access across the internet. The simplicity of the networks has promoted their popularity in a way which would have been hard to credit less than a decade ago. The general public have a growing expectation that people in the public eye will be available on social networks.

Social network level can improve communication and are not bounded by the normal hierarchies of local government. Given the number of button social networked and, some at least, of their related applications push, in terms of providing access to minority, BME, senior and other members of the community who historical have been hard to reach it is difficult to see any reason for not implementing access to social network immediately and make the general public aware that this is happening through the PR channels.
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Safari 4, Firefox 3.1, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 compared

Whats the best browser? Its not the easiest question to answer, but have a look at some of the notes below before you decide on your weapon of choice. for surfing the net. Each will act as your window on the web, with support Google Chrome is minimalistic. It aims for simplicity, and the interface is stripped down to bare essentials. A single text field (dubbed the “Omnibar”) acts as both address bar and search bar, and tabs protrude into the title bar to save space.

The middle ground is occupied by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.1. Outwardly, both browsers offer sober front-ends though IE8 does support some interesting new technologies. Safari 4, is a veritable orchestrate of whistles and bells.Safari has two distinctive features. The first is the “top sites” view. When you open top sites, you’ll see a shiny curved grid of clicka

Image via CrunchBase

ble thumbnails enabling you to jump straight to a particular website. Safari watches your browsing habits and populates the grid with your most commonly visited sites. Safari’s other feature is its history view Safari also gives you a visual thumbnail of each page, making it easy to spot the site you seek even if you don’t recall its title.

Firefox 3.1 seems almost austere. The newer version offers a new plug-in manager to make it easier to manage Firefox extensions. Firefox's approach has always been to keep the main browser relatively conservative and offer a versatile plug-in architecture to enable third parties to add extra features and visual themes - and there are hundreds of free extensions available ranging from simple file viewers to advanced networking tools and interface tweakers.

Image via CrunchBase

Google prefers to trickle out incremental updates, typically upgrading the software every few weeks without even alerting the user. But the main features that set Chrome apart are the Omnibar and the “most visited” view, though rendered more plainly and without the configuration options.

The last contender, Internet Explorer 8 introduces some interesting new ideas: web accelerators let you send text or a link from one page directly to another web service enabling you, for example, to search, define or translate a word at the click of a button. IE8 also features a new mode called InPrivate, which enables you to send out a minimum of personal information while browsing, and to cache a minimum of received content to your hard disk.

Chrome: at its launch, it was able to render pages with unprecedented speed. And, more importantly, its JavaScript engine (known as V8) was much faster than any other browser’s, enabling web applications to become more powerful. It remains a fast browser, but today it no longer enjoys pole position: Firefox 3.1 uses an updated rendering engine and an all-new JavaScript engine, the curiously-named TraceMonkey. IE8 is a long way behind the rest of the pack on speed, so feature-rich sites likely to feel less snappy and responsive.

RAM usage, especially if you’re choosing a browser for use on a low-powered system such as a netbook is a big consideration. Firefox used to be a notorious memory hog, but the current version is impressively efficient. Chrome and IE8 make much greater demands. Safari is not a browser for a lightweight PC and is very RAM heavy in use.

Safari : FOR: Combines superfast performance with head-turning visual effects. AGAINST: Heavy on memory, and some may find the graphics irritatingly showy.

Chrome : FOR: A lightweight, simple and stable browser that just keeps getting better. AGAINST: Neither the fastest nor the best-featured option.

Firefox : FOR: Hugely extensible, with a low RAM footprint and great performance. AGAINST: Rather light on features until you mess around with third-party plug-ins.

Internet Explorer 8 : FOR: Brings some genuinely promising new technologies to the table. AGAINST : The slowest browser for JavaScript by a large margin.

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Finding yourself as part of a botnet is no fun. Your computer becomes your worst enemy, watching everything you do which unless you use your rig for nothing more than a quick peep at the news once a week could be very bad news indeed! So what can you do about it!

The Associated Press, Internet security company Prevx has reported that it found a storage facility for data stolen from 160,000 computers. The storage was hosted in the Ukraine and the data included passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and other personal. The Aladdin's cave for identity theft According to the report, both government and bank sites had been compromised.

So what can you do about it? Macs seem to be safe from botnets, although not completely immune to all threats. But if you have a Windows based machine, Prevx suggests you stay on the lookout for a slow connection botnet infection is using your connection to send or receive data. If that happens do the following:

1. stop surfing, close your email software (e.g. Outlook)
2. open Task Manager by pressing the CTRL, ALT and Delete keys at the same time. When Task manager opens click on the Network tab and see if your PC is using the internet network connection, if it shows more than a few percent usage then this could be further evidence of something using your internet connection without your knowledge.
3 try another security product if your PC is compromised your existing security has already let you down."

Try something like RUBotted (Beta) from Trend Micro, BotHunter from SRI International, or try an online virus scan with the Windows Live OneCare safety scanner.

If you think you need more advice drop me an email.

If you are one of the growing band of Twitter users, you can find me at user name wanderjahre

Google yesterday announced that it is releasing its Jaiku code under the open source Apache license 2.0

Google acquired the Twitter-like application in 2007, but immediately closed it to the public. Last August it came back with unlimited invites, and now finally has been the JaikuEngine has been handed over to the open source community.

Jaikido blog last week, "JaikuEngine differs from Jaiku in a few key ways. Although core features like the website, SMS (in the US only) and IM bot still work, feed fetching and international SMS are no longer available." The new JaikuEngine will also include support for OAuth, the open standard authentication protocol that Twitter recently began experimenting with in an effort to give users more control

Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku and now a product manager at Google, said that it's time to break out of Twitter. "There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other. Jaiku doesn't do that yet, but now there's a decent chance that it soon will," he wrote on his blog.

Twitter has made rapidl progress in the last few months and is gaining market share, the real time information sharing has been finding favour with individuals and companies alike. It will be interesting to see how Jaiku fares with the competition.

Joshua Michele-Ross published an informed piece for Forbes Magazine called The Rise of the Social Nervous System. His essential arguement is that communication is the foundation of society, business and government. The internet scales up the capacity for this communication and at the same time renders services and coordinates action from humans input. He calls this the rise of the social nervous system.

Josh focuses on now familiar examples: the Mumbai terrorist attacks as reported real-time on twitter, the Obama campaign (and in particular, the Houdini project), and Google Flu Trends. But Josh weaves them into a powerful conclusion:

"Watch the news, and you will see daily evidence of how a system that connects billions of people is influencing the physical world- from recent protests in California against Proposition 8 organized by Facebook to the riots in my hometown of Oakland after several witnesses uploaded video taken from their mobile phones of a police shooting."

Josh explains that key to the Web 2.0 experience is the notion of harnessing collective intelligence; examples of this can be seen in the way that wikipedia allows user generated content, or the way in which Amazon stays ahead of its competitors with the plethora of ways that users can contribute to their website and how that data is then used. But these effect are no longer limited to cyberspace and have an impact on real world activity.

Josh points out that these effects are not limited to cyberspace, but are used to control and coordinate real-world activity. This is the new frontier, moving from "sensing" to "reacting," from "cognition" to "coordination" and group action.

Many of the most successful Web 2.0 system derived their success from implicit rather than explicit data, the contribution made by simply clicking a link from one site to another that is recorded and used by Google to affect page ranking. One of the questions which Web 2.0 writers are struggling to answer is how far does this interaction go. When buy by credit card, we don't think we are contributing, but software at the bank, the merchant, and our personal finance application is listening to that credit card reader.

Those applications will share and sense not just words passed from human to human across services like Twitter, or our search behavior but sounds, pictures, and increasingly, data from senses that unaided humans don't possess at all, or less precisely: a sense of precise location, or the rate of speed at which we move, the power we consume, the carbon we emit, the approaching weather, the state of the financial markets, the unique sequence of our genome, or even the way we smell.

The next great fortunes will be made by the people who discover how to build a system that reacts to one of the internet's new senses.

Google has released a mobile phone service called Google Voice that converts voicemails into emails, potentially stepping on the toes of companies such as Spinvox. The new service will enable a person to store transcripts of voicemail phone messages in their email inbox. These messages are fully searchable. This is another move by the internet giant to move away from its more traditional products and into related Web 2.0 fusion areas.

Google Voice is based on Grand Central Communications technology bought by Google in July 2007. The new version uses speech-recognition technology that automatically changes voicemails into text. The messages can then be forwarded as an email or SMS text message.

It is unclear how Google Voice will fit into Google's business model, which relies on advertisers to provide 97 per cent of the company's revenue, advertising placement would be difficult to say the least. Other than a feature that bills users when they make long-distance phone calls, the product has no immediate means of generating revenue. Google are saying the new application wil be available to existing Grand Central users on Thursday and to the general public in the following weeks and the smart money suggests that the long term aim is to keep people on the Google sites for longer.

I was in Bournemouth over the weekend, dual booting my daughters' rig. The plan was to have both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux hardy Heron 8.04 on a 250gig hard drive. Like most students, she was not the best when it comes to keeping her machine up to date and a recent remote session had lead to five hours of disk defragging, registry cleaning and general spring cleaning.

When it comes to partitioning, XP has very few built in tools and anyone planning to work on the drive would do well to get hold of a custom paritioning tool. I settled on Gparted Live, a useful utility on a Live CD. Insert the CD boot the rig and Gparted boots to RAM; offering a handy selection of partitioning tools. I hived off 50gigs for the new drive and then installed Ubuntu.

Hardy Heron is pretty good on dual instals and will recognise the existence of your Windows partition and offer to migrate your documents over to the new install. Earlier versions of Ubuntu don't have support for NTFS. (There is a later version 8.10 and Ubuntu release twice a year on a six month cycle but traditionally only the April (04) version is LTS - Long term support. The October (10) version will often have bugs and other problems which will be resolved by the Ubuntu community by the time of the next April release.)

XP does not play nice with other operating systems. It will expect itself to be installed at the beginning of the hard drive, when dual booting, you save yourself a lot of bother and editing if you install XP first.

Take some time to understand what you are doing - accepting all Ubuntu's defaults during an install will probably delete your Windows partition. Recently, in a well known computer magazine an angry reader complained that a dual install had trashed his windows install, it soon became obvious this person had read the dos and don'ts and focused entirely on the don'ts. In his desire to install Linux he had completely reformatted his hard drive including the hidden partition with restore files! Use Gparted to have a look at the hard drive before you start. Spend some time understanding what you are doing and you could have Ubuntu up and running in an hour, including partitioning time.

Hardy Heron includes support for NTFS, so once you have installed you'll be able to see your Windows partition and access your files ("Places" then look for Media) I find this a big plus since the migration tool may not pull in all the files depending on where they have been filed. It will also see your USB hard drives and network shares.

If you are running a standard Live CD, you'll need access to the internet and need to download updates and additional software for DVD playing, MP3s and any graphics card you may have. This can be time consuming and bad news if you are on a limited download allowance. I get round this by having a customised DVD version ready to install with everything you need to get you up and running including support for MP3, the social networking browser Flock other goodies.. These are available from me for £2.50 including post and packaging. Good luck with partitioning if you need advice  or the Linux DVD drop me an email Click here

Microsoft released three Security Bulletins addressing eight separate vulnerabilities on Tuesday. One critical and two important. MS09-006 ("critical") resolves a vulnerability in the Windows kernel. The flaw could allow remote code execution if a user views a maliciously crafted EMF or WMF image file.

MS09-006 resolves a vulnerability in the Windows kernel. The flaw could allow remote code execution if a user views a maliciously crafted EMF or WMF image file - critical

MS09-007 addresses a vulnerability in the Secure Channel (SChannel) security package in Windows. If exploited, it could allow spoofing, provided the attacker gains access to an end-user authentication certificate - important

MS09-008 fixes vulnerabilities in the Windows DNS server and Windows WINS server. If exploited, these vulnerabilities could allow network traffic hijacking - important.

Wanderjahre IT

It turns out it is not just Internet Explorer that users will be able to turn off in Windows 7. Microsoft have said that users will have the option of disabling a number of features of the operating system.

Microsoft say there will be number of things that user can turn off, these include: Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Search, the XPS Viewer and several others.

Microsoft are staying quiet on what role, if any, regulatory issues played in the decision to expand the number of turn-offs but, a number of the programs are things that have been criticised in the past, such as the browser and media player, as well as the XPS technology which has been seen as a rival to Adobe's PDF.

Microsoft has also stripped several programs out of the operating system compeletly! The photo gallery, e-mail, and movie-making programs will now only be available as downloads.

The general response to Win7 has been positive and it seems that Microsoft are keen to get rid of the bad taste in the mouth that is Vista. Win 7 is shaping into the OS that Microsoft probably should have shipped instead of Vista and could be the salvation of the Redmond boys and girls. They certainly hope so!

Many people come up with ideas for websites that they never get round to executing. Some never get as far as ordering a website hosting service others get their website up but abandon it, despite having spent both time and money on the project. If you are thinking about starting your own site, I've got a few ideas which will help.

1. Be clear about what you want! Before you shell out your hard earned money on a website and hosting look around. There are plenty of options out there for quickly put together web options, so have a look at blogs, social networks, Twitter, Flickr, Jalbum and all the other ways of getting online fast and at no cost (at least for the basic version of the service.)

2. Make sure you set a budget - and don't go above it. Cost in all the things that will be involved including the off-site expensives. If you are planning to link your site to say, Ebay, consider the costs of using their selling service, the cost of postage and packing and the costs associated with stationery. There may be other factors to be considered so make sure you sit down, work out the costs and do not end up spending more than you make. Something that happens more often then you might expect!

3. KISS (Keep it simple, stupid!)  A lot of people have ideas that tend to add in everything they can think of. This is usually a recipe for disaster. If your site is a rainbow of colour and a melange of style, take it down, do some research and do it again. I know one well meaning soul who regularly produces site of such eye-watering design and layout that visiting requires sunglasses and transquilisers! Keep your website design simple and make sure you have enough content to keep your website going. Avoid doing complex stuff right from the start like adding video features or twelve sub-categories of news items, doing too much too soon is one quick way down the road to have a site that is either abandoned as too complicated or become impossible to navigate. If the aim is to have people, makes sure they don't get lost.

4. Encourage criticism, Especially the useful stuff, bad coding, typographical errors and paragraphs which don't make sense. Avoid the naysayers and the it will never work crowd. Someone probably told the Facebook inventors they were wasting their time as well.

5. The content of your site needs to interest you. If its a boring subject you are unlikely to want to update it and your visitors will see that in the site.

6. Biggest is not best. In these cash conscious times, give some serious thought to what you actually need as a hosting plan. How much space do you really need, how many email addresses? Choose what you need, you can always expand later as the site takes off.

7. Design your site so you can update easily. If you are coding in HTML a simple site will be easier to update. It may sound stupid to professional, but make sure all your pages are based on a standard template; images come from one source and sizes are limited to 2 or 3 different fonts - which are supported by browsers. Remember your custom Harry Potter font will only work if the other person has it as well. Do your research and stick to web-safe fonts.

8. Feed me!  Websites are like the carnivous plant in "Little Shop of Horrors and they need constant feeding with new stuff. RSS feeds from news sites are one way to keep it fresh, but every now and then get in their do the website equivalent of weeding and planting some new flowers!

9. Best practice. In the business world best practice is about finding the things that other people are doing and copying them to your own business. If a site has something that could be adapted to your benefit use. But don't just rip off what the other guy is doing, take some time to customise it to your own needs.

10. Enjoy it! If you don't, if its a chore ask yourself do I really want to be doing this?  If you can't come up with a good answer, walk away.

If you need advice or help with setting up a site email me or contact me through my website www.wanderjahre.co.uk

If you are getting messages to the effort that adding someone to your list of friends will result in your computer being taken over like some badly made 1950's horror movie, you can relax it ain't going to happen! What you are being drawn into when you pass these messages on is what's known as 'cyberbullying’ (or what one geek has termed 'Social Network Abuse')

Here's one example of how Social Network Abuse can and often does work...Bill has a problem with Ted Bill and Ted share social networks and use many of the same on-line applications like MySpace and Facebook, including some chat rooms. Almost every social media application has some sort of ‘flagging’ option. Bill ‘flags’ every single one of Ted’s posts, and gets his friends to do the same, despite whether Ted’s posts are inappropriate or threatening violence. Bill is trying to get Ted automatically banned from the service which will be triggered by the flag count reaching a certain level whether Ted is guilty or not! This is a form of personal Denial of Service (DOS)

Another example of a personal DoS is email abuse. Bill can send out an anonymous email to everyone stating that Ted is a hacker and that he should be blocked on all services. This type of email plays on fears that media escalate about the supposed danger of the internet, so it can turn viral quickly. Its having the message passed to as many people as possible which is the aim of the cyberbully.

On Facebook and MySpace be on the look out for something reading a little like this: “If somebody called XXXXXXXX adds you to their facebook/myspace/bebo etc account/invites you to be their friend DON’T accept it because it’s a hacker. Tell everyone on your list because if somebody on yours adds them, you get them on your list and he’ll figure out your ID computer addesss. So copy and paste this message to everyone even if you don’t like them and fast..because if he hacks their mail, he hacks yours”

This then gets passed around sometimes for years eating up resources and generally worrying people who are not tech savvy. Its practically impossible to access your social network accounts with this way. I say practically because if you post sufficient information about yourself; invite lots of people to view that information; and use some of it as the basis for passwords etc then you could be in trouble. Anyone who uses their telephone or birthday as their password and posts that information to their account is looking for trouble! But of course you don't...?

Facebook is rife with these so called warnings and the wise user ignores. Don't forward them however much FB encourages you to do so. Its a waste of time and may one day result in a court case or two...

You have been warned, but don't tell everyone?

Rather pleased to get my Twitter site up and running with this rather nice front page.

http://videos.zdnet.co.uk/260632244.htm

Would have embedded the video, but for some reason the blog editor was not happy about that.