Category Archives: Tech

ZamZar – new online file conversion service

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A colleague told me today about a new web site at www.zamzar.com which provides an online file conversion service for document, image, audio and video file formats. It seems to cover a wide array of popular and not so popular file formats, and has particularly good  support for audio and video formats.

So, another new business in the web 2.0 world that’s causing a bit of a buzz on places like digg.

The difference with this one is that one of the two brothers who have set this up is a colleague, and football team-mate of mine, Chris Whyley. Chris is a lovely guy and seems to have hit on a nice sideline outside of the day job with this venture. The site looks great and I’ll definitely be trying it out. Coming as he does from one of our test teams, Chris’ colleagues have been having fun finding the odd little bug, as any new site will tend to have, but from the comments I’ve read out on the ‘net it seems to be going down very well.

There’s an interview with Chris and his brother/business partner over at Folksonomy, and they are keeping a blog as well. Good luck guys (but don’t get too successful Chris, we need you around for our assault on the Hursley 4-a-side football league!)

The search engine feedback loop

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Andy has written an entry I’ve been meaning to write for a while now about the information WordPress supplies on web searches through which people have visited his blog.

I find these searches a source of constant interest and check them daily. It’s always interesting to see what brings people to this blog. Naturally, entries I’ve written about currently “hot” topics provide the most search hits. For instance my most popular post so far is about the BT HomeHub and I get a number of search hits daily on this, mostly to do with how to configure it.

As Andy points out in relation to the hits he gets on WebSphere Message Broker, it is interesting to see what the searches are in relation to, and it gives a hint as to what experiences people have with products. As the recent release of data regarding Google searches made through AOL shows, the search engines are in possession of an huge source of information which can be pieced together to produce some amazing insight into people’s lives. Of course this is disturbing, but maybe with the right safeguards the search engines could sell their data on specific keywords within searches to the companies that would be keen to receive feedback on their products and services. The feedback that search engine data can yield on the experience people have with a particular product could be extremely useful in making that product better in the future, and would provide much more honest and representative data than the usual efforts of user experience testing.

Of course, as a company that doesn’t tend to miss many tricks, I’m sure Google have thought of this one already.

Wireless Woes

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wireless

I’m having increasing problems maintaining a decent wireless LAN connection in my flat. As the screenshot above shows, there are up to 13 access points found by the wireless adapter in my Thinkpad T42p. Finding a stable channel to set my Zyxel wireless router to is becoming increasingly difficult. A quick check using Netstumbler shows that pretty much every available channel is being used. Whilst the dropouts are annoying to me, they are doubly annoying to Lana who uses her iBook to Skype home a lot.

Interestingly, of the APs I can access, four are commercial hotspots (three run by the marina for boat owners, one by the nearby independent cinema) whilst the rest seem to be home ones. Of these three have no encryption on and I can join them and surf away happily!

Starting my SecondLife

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AidyBowie

Following in the footsteps of many other colleagues, especially Ian and the guys over at eightbar, I’ve taken my first steps into the virtual world of SecondLife. At the moment, all I’ve done is purchase an England top, as displayed above, and visit an online appearance by the US rapper Chamillionaire. Seems like a pretty cool place, and I look forward to playing around some more. It runs fine on my T42p Thinkpad with 2GB of RAM, but is a bit slow on my 12″ iBook G4 (1.33GHz, 1.5GB RAM)

Video conferencing

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In nearly eight years at IBM, I've never been involved in a videoconference. Until today.

One of our architects has taken on an advocacy role for a customer in Denmark, and as such the video conference was the most practical way of introducing himself without the relative anonymity of a straightforward phone call. I tagged along to help answer any questions they had about WS-Security.

I have to say that apart from the introductions at the start where it is obviously preferable to put a face to the name, the rest of the meeting would have been much better served by a teleconference and an e-meeting. The audio quality of the video conference was poor, whilst trying to view shared documents on a low resolution TV screen was laughable.

It was particularly annoying when they started to tuck into the cakes the Danish IBM host had provided for them :-)