Mark Roddis

Earlier this year I wrote about wide open networks which are really just networks without firewalls where the security is handled at a device level and where all traffic between all devices is encrypted.

Well it looks like a bunch of paranoid americans together with a whole bunch of software pirates might just take this one step closer to reality sooner rather than later.

Read the rest of this entry »

This should be filed under “why did I not know this before”.

Now as everybody knows, mobile phones constantly chatter to the network. So when you place your phone near some speakers, you can hear this happening.

Indeed this sort of interference can happen in all sorts of situations affecting televisions, speakers, wired phones and so on.

So in my home office I always had to be careful where I placed my phone because with 2 sets of speakers in the room, the interference was a problem. More often than not, during the day I would just turn my speakers off.

But then it happened. Purely by accident I found something that stopped my phone interfering with my speakers (and everything else in the room)

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember not so long ago I was trying to decide if Vista should stay or go?

Well it looks like it has made it’s own decisions and this evening rebooted itself into an irrecoverable state claiming upon reboot that the ATA driver was missing which means no hard disks!

But hang on. My recent backups have all been made using Vistas own backup feature so will not simply restore onto an XP machine. But not a problem because I can just access said backups from my desktop Vista machine.

Oh no.

It looks like even though Vista has been reporting successful backups each evening, they are actually corrupt.

So now we need to gain access to the drive that will not boot. But also remember that this drive is protected using BitLocker! Things are about to get interesting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to get organised at home and one thing that is really bugging me is the way that my data is just scattered everywhere.

So I have spent some time rebuilding my home server to run Windows Server 2008 and it now runs really well with about 1TB of available storage. The main purpose of this machine is as a place to backup all data from multiple machines.

My home was built 2 years ago and as such is very energy efficient which is great in the winter but in the hot weather, my home office can get very hot very quickly. Throw in a server with that amount of spinning disks and my office goes from cool and quiet to noisy and hot.

Turning the server off is far from ideal so I have been looking to give it a new home somewhere else in the house. Eventually we found a hidden corner in the dining room where it is out of site and to be fair, this room is not used daily the server will be well out of the way of day to day household traffic.

But the problem came when I needed to network my office to the server. My office is upstairs at one side of the house and the dining room is downstairs in the exact opposite corner. As such, getting more than about 6mbits from a wireless connection is a challenge and a non starter.

Running cable is also not really an option. Sure it would be fast and secure but it would involve me lifting the floor in at least 5 rooms and that would make an awful mess.

So what about PowerLine networking? I have read a lot about this over the years and the reviews of the latest 200mbits kit are positive so £70 later I have everything I need to connect my office to my dining room.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin over at jkOnTheRun is currently taking his web-only challenge. His goal to see how long he can go without using a full client application on his Mac or his UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC).

Now there have been a large number of UMPC devices launched in the last few months starting with the Asus EeePC. Of course these devices to date are quite limited in performance but this compromise is accepted as the pay back is the portability and low cost.

But we are now seeing the manufacturers trying to squeeze more and more power out of these devices but do we really need it?

Read the rest of this entry »

You may recall in my last post how I had had big problems with trying to get Vista onto my Dell D630 laptop. But over the 4 day bank holiday weekend I invested some serious one on one time to this with no distractions or real work to worry about.

In the end switching off Windows Search cleared up all the event log errors. As simple as that so I now have a laptop running Vista Enterprise at speed and with all the software I need.

So all is well.

Or is it?

Read the rest of this entry »

I have to admit that I love Microsoft Vista. I like the UI, I like the way that a lot more things are just so intuitive, I like the stability and I like the features such as Bitlocker, parental controls and so on.

Now at home this is sitting on my new desktop PC and when you look at the performance score, you would expect it to perform well.

So I decided a few weeks ago that perhaps it was time to roll out Vista onto my work PC. Since making that choice I have wasted hours and hours fighting with my laptop.

Read the rest of this entry »

The guys over at Mashable seem to have number to back up what I have suspected for a few weeks now.

The latest stats from Nielsen Online show a significant decline in month-over-month unique visitors to Facebook in the US. In April, traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March. Year-over-year traffic growth decelerated from 98% to a much more modest 56%. MySpace also saw a modest decline (from 60.3M to 58.7M), while LinkedIn continued its torrid growth from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April.

Check out their website for the full story but I really think this could be the beginning of the end where the whole 2.0 space starts to consolidate.

After all, there are only so many social web site profiles that a user can maintain and now we are even seeing social site aggregators from the likes of Google to try and help.

Of course the cynical amongst you will suggest that the whole Web 2.0 marketing machine is self fulfilling with no substance behind it. Certainly there is a lot of buzz about Web 2.0 and social networking.

So is this is a bad thing?

No and social networks will continue. They have introduced us to new ways of using the Internet and of communicating in general but the time has now arrived where this industry has to grow up in the same way as the Internet had to in the late 90s’. There will no doubt be some big casualties and heavy losses but with the US already heading towards a major depression, this will just help things down that downwards spiral.

This article in the Sunday Times today really caught my attention and made me sit up and think.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

And

The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation – measuring the phone’s distance from three receivers.

So geopositioning of cell phones is not new technology but this is different.

Read the rest of this entry »

So for a long time the whole idea of a personal cloud has excited me. Something that just exists and that does not care where I am or what machine I am using.

So for the last few weeks I have been playing with a few of the Microsoft based offerings in this field to see how they fair.

Read the rest of this entry »