Blogging in ICT Class

For several years now I have had my ICT students maintain a blog using Google's Blogger platform. From a technical perspective the process has worked well. There have been few issues and students have been able to integrate several other Google products or services. For the past couple of years students have been using Google Analytics to track blog traffic in a fairly complex manner. Last year a few students incorporated Google's AdSense service into their blogs, although any revenue for them is likely some time off!

From a teaching perspective there is the issue of how to best handle "errors", typically spelling and grammatical errors, that appear in student blogs. Should the teacher "rush" to have these corrected or should they be treated as part of the growth process? Alongside this is the issue of content itself. How would I handle inappropriate content posted by one of my students?

I like to think that I solved the content concern by giving my students a relatively narrow focus for their blog content. They had to make posts on any and all new software packages that formed part of the course content. In addition, once a week or so I would suggest a "breaking news" tech topic that would be suitable for a blog post. The issue of spelling and grammar is a work in progress. Generally I send students e-mails with suggested corrections but as the volume of blogging posts rises this becomes increasingly time-consuming.

Early on I discoverd that analytics could be very helpful as a motivational tool. I have various "bonus marks" awards that I allocate to students who can demonstrate that they are the first with say twenty unique visitors, the first with visits from three continents, the first with a visitor from Africa, the first with visitors from three greater Vancouver municipalities. You get the idea; this can be extended to greater and more complex challenges. Students quickly get the idea that they can apply marketing and promotional tools to their blogs.

This year I am considering alternate platforms for my student blogging work. I have been examing the EduBlogs platform for some time and have monitored numerous Twitter posts concerning that service.

Irrespective of the platform, I've come to the conclusion that student blogging is an excellent tool to incorporate into ICT classes.

This blog post was written after reading an EduBlogger post concerning that service. That post referenced five different issues concerning blogging in an education setting. I settled on "When you first started blogging what aspects of blogging worked well? What has caused problems? What would you change? — you can discuss this in terms of class, student or your own personal blogging!" as the topic I'd consider in my my post.

Writely

Is Writely, an online collaborative writing environment, part of the Internet's new frontier? Some say it represents a second generation of web-enabled technologies, the so-called Web 2.0 spectrum of products. Developer Upstartle released Writely in August 2005 and has since signed up several thousand users.

Mountainview, California based search company Google decided that the Writely product and its small team of developers were ideal candidates to become another brick in the Google corporate structure. In early March it bought the Writely Internet site and its underlying technology, its longer term goal to turn the still-in-beta product into a competitor for Microsoft Office.

Legal issues not withstanding on a variety of fronts (cooperation with the United States government on search data, click fraud with its AdSense program, censorship developments in China), Google seems hell bent on building a corporate juggernaut that can go toe to toe with Microsoft, the company that continues to generate profits on the order of US $1 billion per month, primarily from its server and Office products.

If you haven't yet experienced the Writely environment you may be in for a bit of wait. Google was badly stung when it released its Analytics product in December, after a similar corporate takeover. The search company simply couldn't handle the stampede for free Analytics accounts and some three months later is still unable to say when it will fulfill its initial promises of up to 50 free site statistics sets. Users who managed to get in the door before unfettered access was shut down are still limited to five such accounts as this column is written.

And speaking of writing, this text is being generated in a Writely session. The experience is surprisingly smooth, with only the barest of lag between keystroke and the appearance of text on the screen.

Writely is remarkably full-featured, with around 20 fonts, the usual word smithing tools of the trade (text appearance, alignment, bullets, cut, copy and paste, sub and super scripts, paragraph formatting, to name a few) and saving options for PDF, Word, RTF and OpenOffice. But don't go looking for a thesaurus, tables, a draw toolbar and a host of features you may be used to in your favourite commercial word processor. You won't find them. Find and replace is supported but it is quirky in that it only handles a "replace all."

No page layout view, no rulers, no tab stops either.

No, this is still a word processor alright, but a stripped down version of what you may presently be used to. Face it though, you probably only use a tiny fraction of the features in say Microsoft Word or Word Perfect and much of what you do use is probably in Writely's repertoire.

Its real strength though may not be in the features list but in its ability to support document collaboration. If you want to work with a colleague on a document, go ahead. Click on the collaborate button, enter an e-mail address and as soon as the recipient logs in he or she can begin editing the same document as the one you are working on. In short, two of you can work together on the same document.

In fact I'm writing this document while logged on under different names on two computers. Editing on one causes the other machine to update within seconds. An orange flag in the bottom right corner of the screen identifies any collaborators working on the document concurrent with the main author. Saving seems to occur between keyboard pauses and although not instant is seamless enough to not be a nuisance.

If collaborative writing is something of interest to you, do check out this most interesting product. Or use it instead of your regular word processor to see just how rapidly Internet-driven technologies have come in just the past year. Save your document online if you wish or save it to your local desktop. Print it directly to a blog if you want or turn it into a PDF that anyone can read.

Writely (www.writely.com) will make a fine addition to the Google galaxy. Whether it can scale up many times the present number of users remains to be seen.

If collaborative work in an online environment is of some interest to you, the list maintained by Chris Smith at http://tinyurl.com/8h8hh (URL reduced for this column) offers a wide variety of applications.

On-line Time Wasters

On-line Time Wasters

Bored at work? It is well known that the Internet can be a great tool for time wasting, be it at home or at work. You can always have an important-looking spreadsheet to maximize at a moment’s notice should the boss happen by while you are perusing that National Enquirer web site.

Here then, in no particular order, are some “time wasters” to add to your arsenal. Be sure to have that Excel spreadsheet at the ready.

Always wanted to be an air traffic controller? This isn’t quite what you’ve been after but it is captivating nonetheless. Watch the air traffic into and out of LAX, Los Angeles International Airport. Wait a minute you say? Wouldn’t the security people be a little unhappy to learn that Internet surfers worldwide can monitor such potentially sensitive information. A caveat on the site notes that flight tracks are slightly delayed and that planes appear closer together than they actually are.

Set your browser to http://www4.passur.com/lax.html and watch the screen come alive with airplane icons. Click on any individual icon to learn a little more about the flight. Follow the altitude as the aircraft climbs or descends. Icons are conveniently colour coded for arrivals, departures and in transit flights.

Zoom out to so the coastal view stretches from Oceanside to Santa Barbara and you begin to appreciate some of the complexities of air traffic control. Replay flight activity from up to three days back if you wish.

Still bored? “When you’ve got nothing better to do,” or at least so the masthead reads, check out bored.com at, where else, http://www.bored.com/. Here you will find links to hundreds of time wasters, conveniently rated in order of popularity.

Want to keep that favourite TV show of yours on the air? Check out the link to SaveMyShow.com. Check out the huge list of oxymorons. Be sure to try MonitorCamera.com. If you still have time to waste at bored.com, visit the Dialectizer. Try it out on this very document, in the Elmer Fudd dialect (you will find it somewhere at bcc.rcav.org). If you are still in control at this point, why not end your visit with the Densa Quiz?

By now you’ve probably wasted a lot more time than you want others to know, so save your visit to Joey Green’s Wacky Uses.com (http://www.wackyuses.com/ ) for another day. Did you know that you can remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers by rubbing the bumper with a crumpled-up piece of aluminium foil dipped in Coca-Cola? Or that Miracle Whip makes a fine hair conditioner (shampoo before heading outdoors!).

Remember that Rubik’s Cube from the early 80s? If yours is lost in some dark recess of the basement, fear not. The on-line version (http://www.eviltron.com/modules/esp/esp.html) is probably more enjoyable in any case. Expertly programmed in Flash as a demonstration for potential customers of a web design firm, this is no ordinary Rubik’s Cube. Have it scrambled, have it solved or work on it one level at a time. Your choice. Click on the astronauts for various options not available with a real Cube.

Feeling a little dejected about missing the high tech stocks boom of a few years ago? Could lightning strike twice in dot com land? Who knows? Even Nortel has bounced back from penny stock territory. DeletedDomains.com (http://www.deleteddomains.com/) might just be your Eldorado.

Every day thousands of dot com domains become available as owners forego renewals. Most are duds (examples: 247payroll.com, accesszero.com). In the past thirty days more than one million domain names had renewals lapse. In the same period about half a million new names have been placed on hold, the vast majority in the dot com category. Pick the next winner now, before someone else snaps it up! More than 1100 domains containing the word “canada” were deleted in the past two months alone.

To round out your batch of time wasters, and to put matters in some perspective, spend a little time exploring the world of microscopy and optics at http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/, a wonderful site operated by Florida State University. Most impressive is Powers of Ten, which uses the concepts of exponential notation to compare the size of objects in our world and in the universe. In 100 seconds you are taken on a journey that begins 10 million light years away from the Milky Way and that ends at the quark level for a single proton inside a leaf of a tree in Florida. Time well wasted indeed.

File Swapping/Downloading

File Swapping

Despite various legal challenges and the heavy-handed approach of industry groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on-line swapping of digital music resources continues unabated. In fact such trading is experiencing significant growth, not only in volume but also in the types of recorded materials being exchanged.

Some accounts would have the industry giving up the war on music swapping in favour of the bigger battle, on-line trading of movie and television programming, the latter driven in part by the move to fast Internet connections. Downloading of music tracks at dialup speeds is slow, just bordering on the intolerable. Downloading a feature-length movie at such speeds is impractical.

Napster, the company that ramped up the file swapping “industry” is all but dead. Its website carries little more than a May 2002 press release announcing the takeover of all Napster assets (essentially liabilities) by music publisher and distributor Bertelsmann AG. The release notes that “Creating new ways of doing business is never easy, but Napster will be at the forefront of finding business models that respect copyright, reward artists, and deliver entertainment value to consumers. Peer to peer is a transforming technology and we’re proud to have Shawn Fanning (Napster creator) continue to work on its development."

Press release and reality are two different things at present. Reality is that Internet users are not willing to give up the freedom of file swapping, legal or otherwise.

Yankee Group, a business specializing in technology industry market research, recently released a study of trends in music downloading. Not surprisingly the study suggests that consumers will continue to patronize “unlicensed file sharing such as KaZaa, Morpheus, and LimeWire because of their unlimited content and zero cost.”

Yankee’s study estimates that 5.16 billion audio files were downloaded through unlicensed sources in 2001 in the United States by computer users aged fourteen or older. Downloads are expected to increase to almost 7.5 billion in 2005 before beginning to decline as legitimate online music services make their presence felt.

"Efforts by the record labels to use the courts to quash music piracy have failed and legitimate online music services have had little impact," says Michael Goodman, Senior Analyst for the Yankee Group's Media & Entertainment Strategies research practice. "The future of music, however, resides on the Internet and its dramatically lower distribution costs."

Goodman’s report sets out guidelines for such licensed distribution services. To be successful, he notes, legitimate music services must meet the following criteria:

1. Availability: Music services must offer content from all five major labels as well as the majority of independent labels.


2. Ownership: Consumers do not want to rent music. If they pay for it, they want to be able to mix it, burn it, copy it, and retain ownership even if they choose to discontinue subscribing to a service.


3. Portability: Downloaded files must be playable on different devices in the home, at work, and when mobile.


4. Exclusivity: Legitimate music services must differentiate themselves from unlicensed services with unique content and services.


5. Digital Rights Management (DRM): Consumers want to share music, and they will find a way to do so, thereby defeating all realistic DRM capabilities.

Whether or not industry-driven distribution services take off remains to be seen. A key component may well be the success, or failure of prosecutions, if any, of file swappers in the United States.

Recently John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice, speaking at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s yearly technology and politics conference, announced that he was prepared to initiate such legal action, possibly under that country’s NET (No Electronic Theft) Act. He noted that the Internet has become "the world's largest copy machine" and that criminal prosecutions of copyright offenders are needed to protect America's content industries. "There does have to be some kind of a public message that stealing is stealing."

“Most parents would be horrified” he observed “if they walked into a child's room and found 100 stolen CDs. However, these same parents think nothing of having their children spend time online downloading hundreds of songs without paying a dime."

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Lawful Access to Your Communications

Lawful Access to Your Communications

Lest you believe that Internet communications in this country are beyond the long arm of the law, consider the following paragraph that forms the lead-in to a 21-page report prepared for the government by Industry Canada and the department of the Solicitor-General. The “consultation document” was posted to the Department of Justice web site August 25.

“Lawful Access is an important and well-established technique used by law enforcement and national security agencies to conduct investigations. In the context of telecommunications in Canada, it consists of the interception of communications and search and seizure of information carried out pursuant to legal authority as provided in the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, and other Acts of Parliament such as the Competition Act. These Acts provide law enforcement and national security agencies with powers to intercept communications and search and seize information in a manner consistent with the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, particularly the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure.”

In the post September 11 2001 world, we might not question this need for “lawful access” but there are organizations that suggest governments are taking advantage of a situation that caused mass confusion and fear. In essence, the Canadian proposals will, if enabling legislation is passed, require Internet Service Providers to provide access points for surveillance by law enforcement agencies, including, presumably, CSIS.

“One year after the tragic events in New York and Washington, the Internet can be added to the list of “collateral damage” caused by the general spate of security measures. As a result, basic cyber-freedoms have been cut back.” notes Reporters Without Borders (RWB) in a special report released August 31. The Paris-based organization, established in 1985, intervenes throughout the world to provide practical help for journalists and news outlets working in difficult conditions.
As might be expected, the report notes that countries usually criticized for not permitting freedom of speech have been eager to clamp down on Internet use. China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia are singled out as nations that have a two-sided approach to the Internet: they promote its use as a tool for state propaganda while clamping down on criticism, argument and hopes for democracy expressed online.

RWB’s report suggests that “enemies” of the Internet, such as these nations, have taken advantage of the international drive against terrorism to strengthen the police and legal machinery they have installed to put the Internet under surveillance. They are also using it to step up pressure on cyber-dissidents.

Much more controversial is RWB’s suggestion that such surveillance is not limited to countries known to be hostile to freedom of expression. Western telephone companies and ISPs, RWB claims, are being turned into an arm of police agencies and creating an environment where all citizens are theoretically under suspicion.

Noted in the report are several measures passed within the last twelve months. Among them, Resolution 1373 on fighting terrorism, approved by the United Nations Security Council, the USA Patriot Act, the amendment of the European Directive on Protection of Telecommunications Data and Information approved by the European Parliament, the recommendations of the G8 nations summit and of the European police body, Europol.

Each of the G8 nations receives special attention in the report. While much of the criticism for abuse is heaped on the United States for its unofficial role as the planet’s “Internet cop,” Canada is certainly not forgotten.

“Close surveillance of the Internet and e-mail is the core of Canada’s C-36 anti-terrorist law, passed in mid-December last year, which makes it easier for the police to get permission to install telephone and computer listening devices. The Communications Security Establishment, a department of the defence ministry, can also for the first time in its history, listen in to both Canadian and foreign citizens. The confidentiality of e-mail correspondence has clearly been destroyed.”

The report goes on to note that Information commissioner John Reid, an independent official who investigates complaints from people who believe they have been denied rights under the Access to Information Act, protested indignantly in a letter to the chairman of the federal senate’s justice committee, Joyce Fairburn, that the new law struck “a crippling blow” at his independence and his ability to protect a citizen’s right to confidentiality.”

It is interesting to note that comments on the new Canadian Internet security proposals are sought. Readers may wish to view the entire document at http://www.canada.justice.gc.ca/en/cons/la_al/. Responses to la-al@justice.gc.ca must be received no later than November 15. “The Internet on Probation,” the Reporters Without Borders document, is available at http://www.rsf.fr/IMG/pdf/doc-1259.pdf.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Access to Technology

Access to Technology

Recently a colleague sent me a note about a discussion he had had with a parent about the placement of a computer and fast Internet connection in the home of a student of his. In particular the parent noted that the child wanted to have the new computer system installed in the bedroom. My colleague’s advice was straightforward: computers, and in particular Internet-equipped computers, belong in common, high-visibility areas of the home. They do not belong in bedrooms.

Parents are eager to support their children with educational opportunities and many see computer technology as a key component of such support. Evaluating the effectiveness of these opportunities is another matter all together, one that I may consider in a future column.

However not all parents are able to offer their children the latest computer gear and a broadband connection to the Internet. In my own courses I have always taken the position that whether or not students have a computer at home should be immaterial to their chances for success. This year I began one of these courses with an assignment that required students to read an online article for homework. The following day one of these students dropped the course, noting that she did not have a computer, let alone an Internet connection at home.

Now it may be that there were other factors at play here but it did give me pause to reflect. Had I stepped over an invisible boundary by requiring something that was difficult to fulfill? Surely the student could have made use of the school facilities at lunchtime, or after school. But in this instance I had put an obstacle in front of one of the things students are particularly good at: completing a task at the last minute.

The broader issue here is, of course, one of equity. How do we, as parents, as educators, as a community, ensure that students have equal access to facilities? In my own school community, the student who dropped the course, ostensibly over a lack of computer facilities, was distinctly in the minority. The community is generally well to do. Of the 150 or students I will see this year, only a handful do not have computer access at home. A larger number, to be sure, do not have Internet access, but in percentage terms it is less than 15%. And for those with Internet access the broadband access numbers have grown exponentially these past three years to the point where cable or ADSL connections form a large majority.

A couple of blocks away, at the public elementary school, I wonder if the numbers are different. I suspect that they are. Furthermore, I imagine that they vary dramatically across the lower mainland. Presumably the differences in the schools themselves should, in principle, not be that great. But it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to realize that a bake sale or discount coupon book drive to fund computer facilities is going to have far greater success in an affluent community than in one where subsistence is much more of a day-to-day nature.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for Internet and American Life found that college students are particularly heavy users of the Internet compared to the general population. One fifth of those polled began using computer technology between the ages of five and eight and the great majority of them (87%) own their own computer. More than a quarter use instant messaging services on a typical day, versus a little over ten percent for the population at large.

Eighty percent of the students agree or strongly agree that Internet use has had a positive impact on their college academic experience through such activities as e-mail contact with their professors on a regular basis. In fact nine out of ten students reported being contacted by professors and only four percent of the sample reported never having communicated with an instructor via the Internet.

Some educators and librarians are concerned that Internet-based research for class projects may be creating poor research habits. The Pew survey found that almost three-quarters of college students view the Internet rather than the campus library as the primary source of their information searches whereas less than ten percent used the library more than the Internet.

Interestingly, the survey found that college students appear to rely on information seeking habits formed prior to arriving at college, in other words habits formed at home and at school. All the more reason to put that computer in the family room rather than in the bedroom.

The full Pew report, The Internet Goes to College: How Students are Living in the Future with Today's Technology, is available at http://www.pewinternet.org/reports.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Handling E-waste

Based on statistics from the environmental lobbyist group Californians Against Waste (CAW) and if similar consumption patterns hold true for Canada, then about 10 000 computer monitors and television sets become obsolete every day in this country.

Many of these obsolete units eventually find their way to landfills, over time leaching out a rather nasty toxic brew laden with heavy metals. Some remain stored in attics and garages to be thrown out a later date.

Some of you may be using the first computer you bought. Others may be onto the tenth or even more if they got into the game in 1977 or thereabouts when the first personal computers were released in Canada. Anyone still using a Commodore PET or a Radio Shack TRS-80 with its upgraded 16 k (yes, “k”) RAM and save to tape capability?

Issues surrounding the safe disposal of obsolete electronic gear have become a major issue in California. That such disposal in landfills is unsatisfactory seems beyond argument. How to pay for safe disposal is unfortunately not. There have been proposals for a disposal fee but such a concept is not generally supported by the public. A point-of-purchase tax has been suggested but California-based manufacturers see this as placing them at a competitive disadvantage.

CAW (www.cawrecycles.org) has spearheaded the issue of so-called e-waste in the public policy arena. Two weeks ago the group was successful in having the California legislature pass landmark bills addressing the problem. Specifically, intent language stating the problem of electronic waste, and the intent to establish an advanced recovery fee on CRTs (computer screens and television picture tubes) was adopted, along with labelling provisions and recycling and recovery goals for CRTs

In a special section on its web site devoted to e-waste concerns CAW clearly outlines the concerns over landfill disposal of CRTs. “Computer or television displays (CRTs) contain an average of 4 to 8 pounds of lead each. Monitor glass contains about 20% lead by weight. When these components are illegally disposed and crushed in landfills, the lead is released into the environment, posing a hazardous legacy for current and future generations. Consumer electronics already constitute 40% of lead found in landfills. About 70% of the heavy metals (including mercury and cadmium) found in landfills comes from electronic equipment discards. These heavy metals and other hazardous substances found in electronics can contaminate groundwater and pose other environmental and public health risks.”

Retailing and manufacturing giant IBM has operated a recycling program for computer systems for the past couple of years but the $30 fee seems to have kept away all but a few consumers. According to the company it has recycled or refurbished and donated 5 000 systems, a far cry from the 3 million units CAW estimates IBM sold in 2000.

European legislators have adopted a slightly different approach to the e-waste problem. Electronics manufacturers are required to take full responsibility for the recovery and recycling of their products. Furthermore, manufacturers are on notice that they must begin phasing out the use of hazardous materials, some of which are particularly dangerous for workers in the recycling industry.

CAW notes that back-end or end-of-life disposal fee methods of controlling e-waste are doomed to failure. The group strongly believes that waste management fees must be built in to the purchase price of electronics goods. It points to California’s tire disposal levy as an example of a back-end system that actually reduces recycling and contributes to illegal and improper disposal of materials that later, perhaps decades down the road, leaves taxpayers on the hook.

On the local side, the GVRD recently carried out an audit of its waste stream and projected the following: 1463 t of computers, 5754 t of CRTs and 1245 t of printers per year. In aggregate, electronics products represented about 1.7 % of the entire waste stream. Call 437-GVRD for a current list of local recycling programs and companies accepting obsolete computer equipment.

Web-based Election Results

November 2002

Internet-based reporting of municipal election results was ubiquitous November 16, municipal elections day across BC. In fact, so in-demand were web-based results that servers run by the City of Vancouver, for example, crashed as early returns were posted. Even after the results were pretty much definite, the City was still unable to deliver the numbers.

News outlet CKNW, contractually obligated to cover the Canucks-Rangers game, devoted its intermissions to reports from a host of news staffers but was unable to deliver on its promise to keep interested listeners up to date on election results through the station’s Internet site, www.cknw.com.

Throughout the game the station site remained inoperative, coming back on-line about two hours after the polls closed, and certainly after the makeup of council, school board and parks board for Vancouver had already been announced by other news outlets. Talk show host Jon McComb offered a mild apology around 10:10 p.m., attributing the loss of service to “excessive hits.”

Even then, the CKNW site, while technically operative, offered no results. Clicking on any of the links in the impressive list of cities did nothing more than return the impressive list, except for those regions that had reported final totals. On air, once the hockey game was over, the former “Top Dog” offered a much better performance.

Competing news outlet, News1130, aka CKWX, wasn’t much better on election night. No web-based results were to be found. Even the news clips featured on the web site appeared rather out of date.

CBC radio, using several former ‘NW staffers, did a much better job at delivering timely results than did the private broadcasters. In addition, their Sunday morning summary package was better than that offered by any other radio outlet, running almost fifteen minutes in length.

Canada.com, the common web site for three major news outlets in the lower mainland, The Vancouver Sun, The Province and GlobalTV, managed to keep up a semblance of breaking news coverage for the Vancouver election returns by offering anecdotal “returns” until the city’s web servers once again began delivering poll numbers.

In keeping with the special issues that the Vancouver Sun had run in the weeks leading up to the election, the Canada.com election results’ coverage was broken down on a regional basis. In most cases the site offered no results of its own but instead linked directly to municipal web sites. Once again, it was apparent from some of these links that there was tremendous demand for live data. Some city web servers were very slow and others timed out for short periods as demand overwhelmed capacity.

Most cities and municipalities across the lower mainland managed to deliver full results to their web sites within an hour or so of the close of polls. Among the few still tallying ballots by hand was Port Coquitlam, where final results didn’t materialize until almost 11 p.m. Nevertheless, the city web site carried updates within no more than a few minutes of their being received from the various poll sites.

Interestingly, each region had its own format for web-based results. Some chose a simple spreadsheet format with candidates listed in ballot order, a contrasting colour being used to identify winners. Others, such as Surrey, separated the various contests and presented results in finish order.

On television, Shaw’s Cable 4 offered continuous updates across the coverage region, keeping apace with results as they appeared on municipal web sites. The audio quality of the interspersed commentary left much to be desired and there were complaints that the scrolling text screens ran too quickly. These problems aside, Shaw’s coverage was superior to that of any other television outlet. Another plus, for those who chose not to stay up for final results, was that the data remained available through much of the next day.

None of the major television outlets interrupted regular programming to carry election updates, with most waiting until their late evening news package to offer a regional summary.

On the print front, the Vancouver Sun certainly deserves kudos for its special Sunday elections run. Minor errors and omissions not withstanding, the layout and detail offered were superb. And even though the Sun’s editorial board had endorsed the NPA’s Jennifer Clark for Vancouver’s top elected position, there was no evidence of sour grapes to be found at the two-to-one showing of victor Larry Campbell.

MS AntiSpyware

For the past several months I have been testing Microsoft’s beta release of its AntiSpyware tool. The approximately six megabyte download from the company’s web site was straightforward enough. Once installed, the spyware definitions file was updated to release 5691, time stamped a few hours prior to the install time.

The package gives users the opportunity to stay protected automatically, by downloading and applying spyware signature updates without user intervention, and it also notifies the user when updates, patches or new versions of the package are available.

In a test scan on the machine where these columns are written, the AntiSpyware package detected four threats, rated from moderate to severe. None of these were detected by SpyBot or Webroot Spy Sweeper scans. SpyBot is a widely used, well-regarded freeware anti-spyware utility program. Webroot markets a commercially available anti-spyware package that is carried locally by some electronics retailers.

Both SpyBot and Webroot have been reviewed in this space previously.

AntiSpyware rated as a significant threat a media player download from Rosoft Engineering, a product that apparently uses some targeted advertising.

A typical “hit” from AntiSpyware is shown below:

NCase
Type: Browser Modifier
Threat Level: Severe

Description: NCase is adware that looks for known URLs and keywords in URLs, and displays pop-up advertisements targeted at related Web sites. nCase also periodically opens non-targeted pop-up advertisements while you are using Internet Explorer.

Advice: Severe-risk items have an extreme potential for adverse effect, such as a security exploit, and should be removed.

About Browser Modifier: Software that changes browser settings, such as the homepage, without adequate consent.

While taking action on the identified threats, AntiSpyware turns off any active browser sessions.

I’m not sure I completely believed the MS AntiSpyware findings for my test machine, or at least the level of supposed threat posed by the products in question. And this on a machine that is regularly scanned by Ad-aware and SpyBot. Then again, it has become apparent in recent years that there is no one product that “does it all.”

For now the program is free and Microsoft hasn’t made it clear how that might change down the road. Bill Gates suggested that personal use of the software will remain free. Speaking at a major security conference he noted that "Just as spyware is something that we have to nip down today, we have decided that all licensed Windows users should have that protection at no charge."

For a beta release the download certainly has the look of a product with significant work behind it. Hardly a surprise when you realize that Microsoft “bought the company” on this one, a technique that Gates et al have used on numerous prior occasions. Giant Company Software (www.giantcompany.com), the acquired entity in this case, was already marketing its product at the time of purchase.

Early in the beta test Microsoft was forced to apologize to a Dutch company when scans identified its home page as potentially dangerous content. Compounding the subsequent animosity between the two companies was that the Dutch site was a major competitor for Microsoft’s own Dutch presence, MSN.nl.

As this is written, in early June, the spyware definitions file number is 5723, suggesting that updates are occurring at least a few times a week. My beta release also indicates that it will expire July 31 and that I should “contact Microsoft for an updated version.” The “Check for Updates” option in my release doesn’t seem to do the trick.

At this point it seems likely that Microsoft will release a second beta version of the product, at least for the home market, and possibly release a so-called enterprise or commercial version shortly thereafter.

For general information on computer security, admittedly from the Microsoft perspective, or to download the MS Antispyware package visit www.microsoft.com/athome/security.

You might also want to sign up for the monthly security newsletter at www.microsoft.com/athome/security/secnews.

To use MS Antispyware, the minimum requirements are a 300 MHz or faster processor, Internet Explorer 6.0 and either the Windows 2000 or XP operating system.

Watch For It Product of the Week
Microsoft has announced that within a matter of weeks it will be releasing its free RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP, allowing consumers to view thumbnails and preview and print Canon and Nikon raw image files from Windows Explorer in Windows XP.

Photography aficionados liken raw files to a negative, containing information that can subsequently be teased out at printing time. Traditional file formats such as jpeg are a product of significant processing, which by design removes some of the underlying data.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Digital Photography: May 2005

Digital Photography, Identity Theft: May 2005  

Each year in May I have the opportunity to test new digital photography software and, if I’m fortunate, a new camera.

“What’s the occasion?” I hear you asking.

Since 1997, when the school acquired its first digital camera, an Epson PhotoPC 500, I have been photographing graduation events for my school.

That first camera, not even qualifying for a 1 megapixel rating, consumed a case of 24 double-A batteries in a night of shooting.  Although the shots left a lot to be desired by today’s standards, they were adequate for Internet posting, e-mailing and for a basic CD-ROM yearbook.

A year later we had a second Epson, same model, same limitations. At least this time the formal entrance of graduates didn’t have to be halted as batteries were changed.

Two years later the original Epsons were retired from active duty. One still works while the other has a defective shutter button.

It is worth noting that those cameras did not come with built-in LCD screens. We acquired an add-on screen that extended from the side of the camera but its drain on the battery was prohibitive, reducing battery lifetime to a few tens of minutes at most.

By the close of the millennium I was employing a used Epson PhotoPC 800. Its nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries were excellent and would last several hours. The 2.2 megapixel rating made for a better end product all around.

The 800 and its batteries were still good until about a year ago. The camera is still functional but it is time for a new set of batteries as the originals now hold only a few minutes of charge.

Three years ago I switched over to the Canon line, first with an S30 and then with an S50. These units have been superb, used as they are on almost a daily basis. Students appreciated the wide variety of features they could put to use in the digital photography portion of their computer classes.

For this year’s graduation ceremonies I decided to return to my roots in photography by using a digital SLR camera, the Canon Rebel XT (marketed in the rest of the world as the 350D), released in February of this year.

Canon’s first semi-pro DSLR, the Digital Rebel, received rave reviews and the same seems to be holding true for the newer unit.

Having now shot well over a thousand images with the XT, I’m finding it difficult to go back to the consumer-level cameras. No more shutter time lag, responsive and accurate focussing coupled with a wide range of automatic and manual features make for an enjoyable experience with a very low level of rejected shots.

To be sure, DSLR cameras are not cheap. But in relative terms, they are about the same price as that sub-1 megapixel camera I first used eight years back.

At our various graduation events not only are photos taken but they are also displayed, either on large projection screens, on television screens around the school and on small hand-held multimedia devices.

This year, Google’s free Picasa photo management software featured in most of the displays. It’s collage feature was used to generate random photo arrangements of groups of students, it’s timeline feature was used to organize five years’ worth of digital images for the graduating class and its slide show component was used to run automated displays.

At the commencement ceremony for the past few years we have projected a photograph of each student as he or she crosses the stage. This year I decided to go with the highly recommended (and free) IrfanView graphics software package from Europe.

Both the Picasa and Irfan packages are worthwhile additions to your home computer system. Get Picasa at www.picasa.com and IrfanView from www.download.com.
………

Identity theft
Hardly a week goes by without some form of identity theft story. A month or so back there was the case of consumer data being compromised at one of Canada’s credit bureaus.

Still in its early stages is the potentially much bigger problem that could result from up to 40 million credit card records, some Canadian, stolen from Atlanta-based CardSystems Solutions. Although just coming to public light a week back the data may have been compromised a month earlier.

Strictly speaking the latest incident is not one of identity theft. In this case, account numbers and the corresponding security codes for numerous credit card types, primarily Visa and Mastercard, but also including Discover and American Express, were copied from networked computer facilities at a Tucson branch by hackers.

Should you become a victim of identity theft, be it the online variety or through loss of a wallet or purse, you will want to report the incident through at least one of the three major Canadian credit bureaus.

Equifax Canada
www.equifax.com/EFX_Canada

NCB Inc.
www.creditbureau.ca

Transunion Canada
www.tuc.ca/TUCorp

Only Transunion’s web site offers a comprehensive set of instructions, in question-answer format, to help victims of identity theft and fraud. The Fraud Victim Assistance Department operates a toll free reporting line (1-877-525-3823). The Transunion site helpfully provides the equivalent number for Equifax (1 800 465 7166).

The other two agency sites seem geared for commercial customers, probably not unexpected given that their raison d’etre is to provide credit information to businesses.

For additional background on identity theft, try the Identity Theft Resource Center (“helping people prevent and recover from identity theft, www.idtheftcenter.org). Another interesting site, Javelin Strategy and Research (www.javelinstrategy.com/media), maintains a clearing house for mainstream media articles about identity theft and online consumer scams.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

43things.com

43things.com… a place to share up to 43 of your goals in life, based on the theory that if you write down a goal then you are well on the way to achieving it. Why “43?” Well, why not? The number seems to have been pulled out of a hat, perhaps to set an upper limit on frivolous postings.

At first you’d think a site such as this wouldn’t last five minutes but it quickly proves to be irresistible… until you realize that most other people want to stop procrastinating as much as you do. After all, if you are examining the minutiae of 43things you are probably avoiding a more important, substantial task somewhere around the house or the office.

How about making it one of your goals to cut back on web surfing? It might be tricky if you get hooked on this site.

During one recent visit the following formed a “top-ten” discussions list:

Try out 43 Things: 893 people
stop procrastinating: 563 people
Take more pictures: 428 people
Read more books: 405 people
Fall in love: 336 people
Visit Japan: 313 people
be happy: 311 people
Learn Ruby: 307 people
write a book: 302 people
Be a better blogger: 302 people

What might “Ruby” be you ask? It turns out to be a programming language that is growing quickly in popularity, perhaps because it is free but perhaps also because it is considered easy to learn.

For additional insight into current happenings at “43” go to www.43things.com/zeitgeist. You will see postings that are just minutes old. You might even want to join a session in progress.

From a quick snapshot of site activity you quickly realize that the goals listed here come from an eclectic bunch: live without TV for a month, buy an electric guitar, stop wasting time, help complete "We The Media" Chinese translation project, travel to Iceland, live in Japan, take more photographs.

Go ahead, post your own ‘to do’ list and see what the rest of the visitors make of it. From time to time you might want to update your list, letting the world know of your progress, or lack thereof. Naturally, 43 will link you to anyone else who shares one or more of your goals.

Consider the popular goal, “live in Vancouver.” A couple of postings offer some insight.

From “cpg:” (expat but not too far):
I am really attracted to living in Canada, because I think the people are slightly more socially minded than most Americans. I have lived a long time in Europe and would like to be closer to my American family without being subject to the police state that the US has become. Also, Vancouver is not as cold as Montreal (my second choice)

From “degan:”
I’ve lived here almost all my life and I would like to move away so I can come back and appreciate it, but there is really nothing like the ocean and the mountains and the people and …all of it really.

From “starkicker10:”
It has always been my goal to live in Vancouver, BC. Its beautiful scenery, healthy lifestyle and mild winters are where I will be in the next 3 yrs!!! Fingers crossed!

How does the site generate revenue? Well, the “Vancouver” entry prompted two low-key advertisements, one for potential immigrants, the other a typical pointer to hotel listings and the like. You know the type, fairly generic, with a “junk mail” tone. “Relocating to Canada? Save over $5000, guaranteed.”

It also appears that at least one “heavy-hitter” in Internet e-commerce sees financial potential in 43things.com. Amazon.com is rumored to have taken a minority stake in the business, perhaps seeing a means of driving some of the blog traffic at 43things to its online storefronts.
Questionable site of the week
Bourque Newswatch (www.bourque.com) likes to portray itself as Canada’s answer to the Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) and at the same time as major player in the so-called new media.  In mid-April the site began carrying prominent sponsor advertisements for the BC Liberal Party. Simultaneously Bourque began serving up supposed news links with headlines portraying the rival BC NDP in a negative light.

“BC NDP PLATFORM HAS LOTS OF HOLES, NO PLAN” ran one such link. The problem is that the link wasn't a news link at all but rather a pointer to a page on the Liberal Party’s web site. Hardly objective journalism.

Hardly a surprise though. A check of Bourque’s advertising policies shows that an “$850 Gold Sponsorship…gets you the right to 2 press releases headlined in normal "news" rotation.” In other words “news” headlines are for sale.

Site operator Pierre Bourque has a history of running tasteless or questionable headlines. A few days after the Asian tsunami struck he offered up “DEAR POPE: WHERE WAS GOD?” (www.ndrs.org/iol/bd.doc) and more recently he has referred disparagingly to John Paul II’s successor as “Benny.”

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Soople et al

All Googled out? How about trying one of the many alternatives to the world’s most-used search engine?

Of course, you might say “Why bother?” After all, if Google is the world’s most used search engine, doesn’t it stand to reason that it must be the best at its job?

There’s no denying the fact that the software experts at Google are riding a massive popularity wave, a wave that is sweeping up much more than search technology as it rolls towards an elusive shoreline that might be representative of the Internet say five years down the road.

For starters, and to recognize that Google is so good at its core business, why not try out Soople, the nifty little web site from Belgium that helps to unlock Google capabilities you may not previously have considered?

Soople (www.soople.com) has been extensively reviewed in this space more than a year ago so I won’t bother with all of the details but an experience I had a week ago suggests it is at least time to issue a small reminder.

I was at a physics institute in Waterloo, Ont. recently when during a session each participant offered a teaching strategy, a lesson plan, a resource of some kind that could be quickly put to use.

Being somewhat unprepared when my turn rolled around, I asked the coordinator to enter the Soople URL on the floor-to-ceiling computer display and then to type in “Relativity.” With a few more clicks and drop-down menu choices I then pointed to the screen and announced “There you have the entire complement of the world’s shared PowerPoint relativity presentations.”

Given the excellent material that had already been presented I expected a collective “uh huh” instead of the spontaneous whoops and applause that followed.

You see, these were all people who use the term “Google” as a verb but who in most cases have never done much more than key in a word or two, perhaps a sentence, and assumed that the material returned by the engine was as good as it could be.

It is doubtful that any had ever used Google’s advanced search options.

That’s where Soople comes in. It actually simplifies use of those advanced options in most cases and in others makes available features that aren’t well documented.

For my little demo I had the presenter select the “Filter search for filetype” option, key in the term “relativity” and then choose “PowerPoint” from the five filetype options (recently the RSS option has been added for users looking for web site content distribution feeds).

Teachers are always looking for clipart and photographs so it seemed useful to demonstrate Soople’s simplification of Google’s image search facility. Operating much like the filetype filter, image search requires a keyword or words, an image type (jpg, gif or png) and, most useful of all, an image size that can range from icon-sized all the way up to wallpaper (computer screen) size. Needless to say this was another big hit with my physics teacher colleagues.

Enough about Google for the moment. After all, this was supposed to be a column about alternatives to the ubiquitous search engine.

New search engines continue to surface at the rate of around one a month. Even Bill Clinton was tapped to promote a recent release, Acoona, a Chinese-backed engine that has quickly fallen from the radar.

More promising are ventures such as Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com), a Carnegie-Mellon project that organizes returned data into meaningful folders that may guide the user to higher quality results than typically surfaces in a Google lookup.

Recently, the Vivisimo researchers have released a modified version of the Vivisimo concept under the name “clusty” (www.clusty.com) to denote the clustering of search results in user-specified ways.

Clusty and Vivisimo are both well worth a test drive. Clusty also offers a sophisticated search capability of the popular Wikipedia online reference, something not directly offered by other engines.

Also worthy of mention is the rather quirkily named Mr. Sapo meta search engine (www.mrsapo.com). Somewhat reminiscent of Dogpile, a facility that returns search results from several engines and directories at once, although sometimes at a glacial pace, Mr. Sapo takes the meta engine concept in a different direction.

In fact Mr. Sapo might best be described as “more than 50 search engines in one.” Through one interface, and more importantly with just one entry of your search term, you can compare results across search engines that you choose.

If you’ve never used another search engine besides Google you might find this an interesting and useful exercise. You might even find yourself switching to Exalead, A9 or IceRocket.

As this column goes to press, Mr Sapo is being rebranded as “SearchScanner” (www.searchscanner.com).

The bottom line is that there is more to search than Google and innovation and research in the field remain in high gear.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Piracy, IE7, Cheap Wireless Security

Why the fuss over television and movie downloading, is Microsoft’s interim toolbar upgrade for Internet Explorer worth the trouble, can I really buy some wireless security for $30 or less?

Start your summer computer reading with the answers to these timely questions.

Media downloading
Music downloading may be old hat to many readers of this column. Legal or not? Good fodder for a future column, perhaps after new copyright legislation is passed in Canada, possibly as soon as this fall.

As effective bandwidth speeds have increased so has the temptation to download more demanding media such as television shows and feature-length movies.

In some parts of the world the demand for North American produced media content is at the heart of much of the trafficking in just-broadcast television shows.

Particularly interesting is that Britain, according to Internet monitoring company Envisional, is now the world leader in video piracy, to a point where British broadcasters might even have to begin worrying about possible effects on their advertising revenue.

The top 10 pirated TV shows worldwide are:1. 242. Stargate Atlantis3. The Simpsons4. Enterprise5. Stargate SG-16. The O.C. 7. Smallville8. Desperate Housewives9. Battlestar Galactica10. Lost

It is worth noting that several of these programs are produced in the Vancouver area.

Commercial video downloading might seem to be a “victimless” action, but one presumes that at some point the hit on advertising revenue will reach back to the producers in the form of a demand for lower prices. These in turn will lead to a demand for lower production costs or increased tax benefits, each of which will impact BC residents to some extent.

Tabbed Browsing
Shortly after announcing that tabbed browsing would be made available in its upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft made the feature a part of an upgraded MSN Search Toolbar.

Released without fanfare June 8, the new toolbar may help stem the flow of disaffected users of the almost three year old IE6 to alternatives such as Firefox.

Tabbed browsing gives users the option of having multiple web documents open in a single window, each selectable through use of a small tab above the window.

The approximately 7-meg download file for the browser add-on is available at toolbar.msn.com.

Among the advertised features:

1. Browse smarter with tabs - Switch between Web sites within the same Internet Explorer window


2. Find anything - Search the Web any time, anywhere, and easily locate documents, e-mail messages, and more on your PC


3. Shop faster - Fill out online forms with one click


4. Access MSN services - Get one-click access to Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and MSN Spaces

Microsoft’s first attempt at tabbed browsing isn’t entirely problem-free. In this writer’s testing, the desktop search feature simply wouldn’t work and in fact had to be disabled, as it became a drag on computer performance. Furthermore, the online forms completion component was detected by MS AntiSpyware as a “major threat.”

Wireless Security
Running a wireless network at home? If your network is representative of many, it probably has no security settings activated, or, if it does, they are likely at a very minimal level.

Like most, you probably keep that home network running around the clock, right?

How about a very low-tech solution that will at least keep your neighbours or “war drivers” off your network at times you are likely away or asleep?

A $20-30 solution at that. An electronic timer, preferably programmable, that cuts power to your wireless access point, is just what you want.

Very simple, but 100% effective. No hacker will gain access to your network through an unpowered device.

Consider the Daily Digital Timer (Canadian Tire, $20, eight on-off settings), the Garrison Digital Seven Day Timer (Canadian Tire, $25, six on-off settings, plus weekend/weekday settings), Globe Heavy Duty Timer (London Drugs, $30), or the Woods Electronic Timer (Rona, $30, battery backup and manual override).

All of these timers have the capability of handling heavy-draw appliances but you won’t be needing that feature. Your wireless access point is a very low current draw device.

Plug your wireless access point or router into the timer, program the time intervals you want the device powered and presto, you have a low-tech security solution, one that is active for at least a portion of the day.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Search Engines Update: Jan 2006

In its monthly analysis of competitive search engine activity for November 2005, comScore Media Metrix (http://www.comscore.com/) announced that Google and Yahoo! have maintained their lead in the US marketplace.

However, the survey also showed surprising strength for latecomer MSN-Microsoft which, although not yet in the same range as the top two, had growth figures that suggest a possible strong three-way race in the search space is a possibility.

Over the past several years this column has featured a number of alternative search engines, alternatives that is to the established and most well known products that comprise the bulk of the field.

This latest survey suggests that these other engines and directories face a tough battle. The top three account for around 85% of all searches conducted in the United States in November, and the top five accounted for a whopping 99%.

Year over year figures (see table) show that the top three positions remain unchanged and that chart topper Google may in fact be increasing its dominance over the other two.

Such figures suggest that search is increasingly difficult as a segment in which a newcomer might carve a niche of any significance and may underscore the actions of, for example, IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com)/, which is presently trying to establish a beachhead as a search tool for bloggers.

In top spot, no surprise there, was Google, accounting for almost 40% of American searches in November, comprising some 2.05 billion measured searches. Some distance back and even showing a decline at just under 30% was Yahoo! (1.52 billion searches).

Although quite a way back at just 14%, MSN-Microsoft might yet prove to be a sleeper in these surveys. With year over year growth through July 2005 of more than 30%, MSN accounted for 744 million US searches that month.

It would seem that the Redmond, Washington company’s late foray into search may be paying dividends and that the last chapter in the field is still some way from being written. And with so much cash on hand it is conceivable that Microsoft could buy up either the second or fourth place properties.

Mind you, the year over year search figures through November are not quite as upbeat. Search pundits are fond of pointing out how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer trumped the then ubiquitous Netscape Navigator, implying that the same could still happen in search technology.

Also of interest in the most recent comScore search survey is data on the use of dedicated search toolbars. Yahoo! toolbars accounted for 49% of all such searches, slightly ahead of Google’s 46%. However, such toolbars accounted for just 12% of all United States searches in November.

Search remains a very active field. New engines spring up every week, each trying to grab a piece of the overall search pie, if not attempting to knock one of the big boys out of a top-five spot.

As the field matures have you noticed a reduction in “hype” from the search engine companies? Remember when each tried to trump the other in terms of pages indexed? I’ll bet you haven’t even noticed that Google no longer carries that “More than X billion pages indexed” message.

Some other search engines worth a test drive:

• Vivisimo: http://www.vivisimo.com/


• Picsearch: http://www.picsearch.com/


• A9: http://www.a9.com/


• MrSapo: http://www.mrsapo.com/

***
Site of the Week
Over the next several weeks you might want to play “keeping up with the Joneses” as you check out property values along your street. For the past couple of years, BC Assessment, the provincial crown agency charged with producing annual property assessments, has made such data available through a free online service.

Ostensibly the service is provided to permit property owners to compare their assessments to the values of neighbouring properties for possible appeal purposes. The service, available from January 3 to March 15, 2006, may be found at http://www.bcassessment.bc.ca/.

Product of the Week
From Israeli company Walletex comes Wallet Flash, a USB storage device about the size of and only slightly thicker than a credit card. Keep your data where it belongs: in your wallet. Check it out at http://www.walletex.com/.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Digital Cameras-Christmas 2005

As we have for the past several years at this time we devote some attention to the ever-changing digital camera marketplace.

First mentioned in this space in 1996, digital photography has become one of the most embraced of all technologies, racing from relative obscurity when the equipment was bulky, flaky and unpredictable to the point where the sheer amount of choice has become overwhelming.

In that ten year period, digital photography, along with the Internet, has matured in such a way that most photographs taken nowadays exist only electronically, shared as they are through e-mail, blogs and online services such as Flickr, the one-time Vancouver company snapped up a few months back by Yahoo!

While digital photography has matured to mainstream acceptance, enterprises such as DJIA cornerstone Kodak have had to re-invent themselves for the electronic age.

This year’s lower mainland digital cameras survey, available online at www.ndrs.org/iol/cameras.htm, shows just how rapidly the technology has changed in just the past three years. Almost vanished from the marketplace are cameras with less than four megapixel resolution, and coming on strong are those at eight and higher.

Megapixel rating still remains a key criterion for rating digital cameras but savvy customers this year are demanding faster response, better battery life, bigger LCD screens and brand-name optics. No more plastic lenses and fuzzy optics (except in “free” digital cameras given away by car dealerships!).

Maturation of the market has meant a consolidation in manufacturers. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see that consolidation continue and to see some of the smaller players such as Casio, HP and Samsung withdrawing from the field. Epson, the manufacturer of the first digital camera reviewed in this column, almost ten years ago, has just one camera left in its product line.

This year’s market sweet spot, where price and available features are optimum, is without a doubt five megapixels, and the field beyond is expanding rapidly right through to twelve. Almost thirty of eighty spots on the list belong to five MP cameras, the big three, Canon, Kodak and Sony taking half of those listings.

Kodak continues to impress with its wide range of releases, from the very inexpensive point and shoot with no optical zoom capability right up to the higher resolutions and double-digit zoom factors.

Nikon, long king of the film camera, appears to have abandoned its quirky line of twist and rotate digitals for solid performers in standard bodies, including a model with built-in wireless downloading capability.

Sony continues to innovate, particularly at the high end with its hybrid R1 that marries some of the better attributes of point-and-shoot units with those of a professional camera. At 10 MP this unit takes superb photographs and its combined wide angle and five times zoom lens will likely curry favour with those who can never get family shots to quite fit.

Mind you, at $1300 this is no consumer product. And that takes us to the technology where the field is growing most rapidly, the digital single lens reflex (DSLR) market. DSLRs are today’s equivalent of the ca. $300 print cameras we toted around from the 70s through the 90s. They are pricey, typically $900 and up (the sky’s the limit) but they take superb shots, all without the annoying delay typically associated with other digital cameras.

Six DSLRs appear on this year’s survey, three from Canon, two from Nikon and one from Pentax. In this segment Canon appears to be aiming at the 8 MP and above level. Although there are just seven listings in our 8 MP category it could well be that this will be next year’s market sweet spot, for both DSLRs and point-and-shoots.

For now, Canon’s Rebel XT (known elsewhere as the 350D, and the camera used by BCC photographers) seems to be the market leader in DSLRs at the 8 MP level. The unit is typically offered with a reasonably good 18-55mm lens for around $1100, but the real plus for serious photographers is its ability to accept existing lenses from film cameras.

Image sensors and processors, the heart of the digital photography process, have improved dramatically over the past couple of years, the net effect being big improvements in speed, as measured by the time between successive shots, low-light shooting and action shooting.

Digital photography is an exciting field, with entry points for beginner and professional alike. Prints from digital images are cheaper and of higher quality than ever before. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for the best deal possible, now is the time to jump in, even if there will be a better product available tomorrow.

Be sure to check out our list with its links to detailed specifications for cameras at prices from $150 to well over $4000, all conveniently grouped by resolution and with prices from up to three local vendors.

Products of the week

Writely: a terrific example of the Internet’s ability to deliver web-based software applications. Go ahead, start a collaborative writing project with your cousin overseas. You’ll be amazed at the capabilities of this on-line word processor. At www.writely.com.

Local.live.com: not “live” but nevertheless stunning aerial photography, currently only for a handful of American cities, presented in a most interesting way by the software engineers at Microsoft. As the name suggests, at local.live.com (no “www”). To whet your appetite, check out several examples at www.ndrs.org/physicsonline/locallivecom.htm.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Ten Must Have Computer Products

Ten Must-have Computer Products and Web Sites

Some weeks I will download and test out a dozen or more software products. Most never see much use beyond an initial test run but others become staples and an ongoing part of my technology world. Here’s a rundown on nine products I use on a daily or frequent basis along with a set of four news sites I visit first thing each morning.

MailWasher Pro… recently upgraded, initially recommended to me by RCAV webmaster Paul Marquis and a product I’ve used for a number of years now, it has become the defacto mail reader for me at home. It keeps all nasty, unwanted content on the remote mail server, unless I expressly choose to let it in. To be sure, I don’t get to read messages in “glorious” HTML format, but then I’m only interested in content, not appearance. About once a week I’ll actually push content down to my mail reader (see next entry). If I need to read an important attachment then this timeframe may be pushed up. For product information, www.firetrust.com.

Eudora… for almost a decade now I’ve been using this package as my home mail client. Mind you, with MailWasher as a front end, I’m primarily using Eudora to create and send messages rather than to read e-mail. The package has never failed me, and yes, I use the free, ad-supported version, although I couldn’t tell you the name of a single company or product that has appeared in those ads. Qualcomm, Eudora’s owners, offer three versions of the popular product, paid, sponsored and light (no advertising but reduced functionality). For more, www.eudora.com.

Outlook… at school I’m a confirmed Outlook user for my e-mail… actually I use OWA 2003, Outlook’s web-based client. I consider it only fair to use this application as it is the one we give to our teachers, for both in school and from home use. Our admin staff use the full-blown Outlook application. During the course of this year we can look forward to Microsoft rolling out an ad-supported version of Outlook Web Access. Keep an eye out for it and related products at www.live.com.

Oubliette… a fine little freeware application to manage account access codes and passwords, along with URLs and memos. A general rule in the security business is to not store access information on your computer but Oubliette lets you break that rule and not lose sleep over it. You see it stores all that sensitive information in an encrypted password-protected file. Don’t bother putting the password in the file: you need to remember it to unlock Oubliette! Unfortunately no longer maintained by its owner but still among the best in the field. To download, www.tranglos.com/free.  

Microsoft Office… well Word and to a lesser extent Excel, Access and PowerPoint. Sure, there are other packages available, even some that are free, but it would take a lot to get me to switch. MS Office remains the de facto standard in productivity software and the company hopes to keep it that way. New versions are seldom more than a year or two away and 2006 will usher in a dramatically different interface for the company’s flagship product. www.microsoft.com/office.  

USB backup hard drive… no more backups to CD or, thank goodness, floppy disk. Today’s USB drives are relatively hardy, they’re fast and they’re inexpensive, on the order of a dollar per gigabyte. For truly effective backups of crucial data such as documents and photographs, why not have two such drives. Lock one away and update it every month or so.

USB Camera Card Reader… forget the cable running from camera to computer. Wireless downloads from digital cameras aren’t quite ready for prime time. Do yourself a favour: purchase an inexpensive multi-format card reader. Mine is from Lin Haw on Main Street in Vancouver: $20. Reads 16 different camera data cards.

A great search engine… for now it remains Google, in either the .ca or .com incarnations, but I also find myself using other services. For instance, the quirky mrsapo.com (www.mrsapo.com) with its ability to let me redirect a search to another engine, has become a bit of a favourite. Soople (www.soople.com), reviewed in this column a couple of years back, is a staple whenever I need to locate files of a certain type. True, Soople is nothing more than a front-end to simplify and unlock some of Google’s power, but it means I don’t have to remember all those extra constructs nor do I need to open the somewhat intimidating Google advanced search window.

Reliable PDF writer... I’ve used many, from free products such as PDF995 to full-fledged (and expensive) products such as Adobe’s Acrobat Writer but I’ve settled on deskPDF, a $30 or so product that produces terrific output. Download a trial at www.docudesk.com.

Four news web sites…

• DrudgeReport… still the best for breaking stories but fading as Google’s news aggregator becomes harder to beat. www.drudgereport.com.

• Bourque Newswatch… frequent errors and somewhat arrogant nature of the site manager are drawbacks, but the only one of its kind featuring Canadian news. Content sometimes sits unchanged for a day or two so it’s problematic to call it a breaking news site on a 24x7 basis. www.bourque.com.

• CKNW… good for local news but sometimes a day or two behind, particularly on weekends. Numerous spelling errors and typos make for a frustrating read at times. www.cknw.com.

• News.com… this recently revamped portal remains one of the best sites for high quality tech news covering a wide spectrum of topics, including hardware, software, security, patching and industry labour trends. www.news.com.

Caveat emptor: although in the top-ten most popular downloads at download.com, do not at this time test out the just released version of privacy and anti-pop-up application All-in-One Secretmaker. In a note to the BCC, the product developers say they are investigating reports that the product randomly renames numerous folders, in some cases rendering machines unusable.

Repeat: stay away from version 4.2.4 (released Christmas Day) of All-in-One Secretmaker until the folder renaming issue is resolved.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Phoney Software Sales Sites

Question from reader:

My wife is interested in purchasing a product from the following site. I am wondering if there is any way to find out if the site is legitimate or not, or what their reputation is?

<strange-looking site name follows>

Answer:

I don’t even have to check out the site. It’s pretty much a given that your wife has stumbled across, or more likely been targeted by, the unscrupulous operators of fly-by-night software distribution sites.

Such sites usually have a fairly professional look to them but there are characteristic indicators of their nature.

Spelling and grammatical mistakes for one, although current sites are much better in this area than those of just a few months back. More telling, besides the nonsensical prices, is that the actual web site address is often "cloaked" or hidden and is almost surely operating offshore.

In the case of the site you ask about the redirect is occurring through an Edmonton-based company. Without the assistance of that company it isn’t possible to learn much more about the culprit.

Typically, a site such as this has a shelf life measured in single-digit days. Use at your peril. If product is delivered, a highly unlikely prospect, it comes on a copied CD or is downloaded with an illegal, hacked unlock code.

Of course the professional look coupled with the almost irresistible pricing, usually around 10 cents on the retail dollar product price, makes for a terrific lure.

Some of these sites even offer so-called customer testimonials.

The interesting point about these testimonials is that a quick check of the domain registry will prove that they cannot be legitimate.

How can you check that, I hear you asking?

Well, try the Network Solutions domain registry lookup service (http://www.networksolutions.com/whois) and enter the domain name of the site professing to offer these fantastical prices.

For example, for the site www.softwareliar.net , enter the last two portions (softwareliar.net) into the search term box. Click on “Search” and wait for the data to be returned. The key bit of information is the “date created” field. With these software sites this is often just a day or two before you receive the unsolicited come on.

Of course the testimonials are fake. The company didn’t even exist two days ago.

You know, the old adage applies to Internet commerce: if something seems too good to be true it almost surely is. I mean, what are you thinking? That a company such as Adobe, Microsoft or Macromedia is going to be selling their software at ten cents on the dollar through an offshore outfit registered yesterday? Not a chance.

And don’t think about writing these people unless you plan to do it from a throwaway e-mail address. You’ll definitely be moved to the “warm body” list if you do. Your name (and address) suddenly become more valuable when the spam mailers realize they have a “live one.”

No, the phony software come on is just the latest in a long line of scam offerings. You might as well rent a banner aircraft from Pitt Meadows and flash your credit card and pin numbers across the lower mainland.

Stay away. Stay awake!

Everything about these promotions is suspect. You might be tempted to find some solace in the FAQ or support services  these sites offer. Don’t be.

Here’s what item 11 of an FAQ I recently looked at had to say:

“Isn't this considered software piracy?”
“Absolutely NOT. We are providing a service protected under US Copyright law Section 117. This is completely legal and in no way are we breaking any Copyright laws.”

Well, there is a Section 117 but it clearly does not apply to this merchandising racket. 117 says that US citizens may make a backup or archival copy of software for maintenance purposes. There’s nothing in there about selling a thousand copies to customers overseas!

If that isn’t enough, go ahead and begin the purchase process. I’ll bet the operators don’t even have a secure page (oh, it will be labelled “Secure Page” alright but it isn’t) for the credit card transaction. What do they care? All they want is that credit card number and the security PIN.

Here’s the “About Us” for the company I used as the basis for this article:

“Our company has been in business for over 3 years. We have sold the best software in the world for the cheapest prices on the net. Since most all internet businesses are not legitimate we ask that you just buy one of our cheapest products to start out with, because then once you find out how great we actually are we know you will come back to us for all your software needs. Our site can not offer refunds however we will do everything we can to make sure that your purchase is working properly for you if not we can issue a full refund.”

What on earth does that last sentence mean?

Again, stay away!

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Chinese Search Engines

You may recall mention in this space a while back of a Chinese search engine to which former American president Bill Clinton was lending his name. Accoona (www.accoona.com and also www.acoona.com)  made a splash at its rollout and then seemed to disappear from the radar.

Mind you, negative press reaction at the time didn’t help, Clinton’s marketing forte notwithstanding. Various test searches by technical writers turned up incongruous results. It seems to me however that the real issue was that Accoona did nothing to define a new space in the search engine marketplace.

In early August another Chinese search engine put in an even splashier appearance, if stock price is to be taken as an indicator of substance.

Unlike Accoona, which returns results in English (a parallel site, www.accoona.cn returned Chinese results), the newcomer, BaiDu (www.baidu.com) is strictly for the Chinese marketplace.

Baidu (the name means “hundreds of times”) is considered the top search engine in China. China itself is the world’s second largest Internet market with around 100 million users online, and that’s a penetration of perhaps just 10% of the potential market in the country.

Little wonder that Google, even though it has long maintained a Chinese portal site (www.google.cn), chose to invest in Baidu more than a year ago. Mind you, it would seem that the developers are keeping the Google troops at arms length as the investment is little more than a percent or two.

That small investment though catapulted Baidu’s initial public offering to percentage gains not even seen by Google. Shares were issued at US$23 but opened on the Nasdaq at $66 and then shot up to close at almost $123.

A gain of around 350% in a day’s trading is significant to be sure but then again let’s put this in some perspective: Baidu is small compared to Google both in terms of market capitalization and in terms of revenue.

However, in terms of potential Baidu could well be another Google. Then again, the uncertainties of Chinese law could come into play. In fact, the company warns in its prospectus that Internet law in China is new and evolving. The rerouting of Internet traffic through government computers in mainland China poses a significant threat to growth prospects. In fact, some of Baidu’s growth came at Google’s expense when the California company’s engine was blocked by government censors.

In true Google fashion the Baidu site operators dressed up their bear paw print corporate logo with a Nasdaq “price tag” looped through one of the bear claws.

North American corporate involvement in Chinese search engine companies may be a bit of a double-edged sword. Government controls over electronic data flow have seen not only China-based but also western sites blocked when the leadership perceives a threat to its security measures.

Unfortunately, corporate greed occasionally means that common business standards are thrown by the wayside. So potentially large is the Chinese marketplace that an “anything it takes” mentality wins out.

In an embarrassing development, Yahoo! has been accused of complicity with the Chinese government over the jailing of a Hong Kong-based reporter who had forwarded a supposedly top-secret e-mail, through a Yahoo! account,  from state officials expressing concerns over mention in the media of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy crackdown.

A release from media monitoring agency Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org), notes “We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well.”

The release goes on to note that “For years Yahoo! has allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be censored. In 2002, Yahoo! voluntarily signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry", agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. Searches deemed sensitive by the Chinese authorities such as “Taiwan independence” in Chinese in the Yahoo! China search engine, retrieve only a limited and approved set of results.”

A couple of days later RWB called for Internet companies to be open on where they stand with respect to their human rights obligations, referencing directly not only Yahoo! but also Google and Microsoft, noting that all three have “adapted their services in China in ways that have restricted access to information.”

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Google Advances

Internet search giant Google has continued its juggernaut-like advance across the digital landscape in recent weeks, trotting out new services and products along with an announcement of an additional 14 million or so shares to be released into the marketplace.

Complacent the Google management team is not. No one can accuse it of resting on its laurels. You might think that pure search as a product would be enough to keep the company going.

Then again, this management team has surely seen the demise of other market segment leaders: Netscape and AOL spring to mind.

This summer The Mountain View, California company released a revamped desktop product, Sidebar, that offers highly personalized information features. Sidebar is essentially Google’s Desktop Search tool repackaged with several innovative features while addressing privacy concerns raised by users of the earlier product.

Also over summer Google upgraded the capabilities of its “Earth” tool (earth.google.com), building on the technology acquired in the takeover of satellite imagery company Keyhole. Be prepared for some effort if you plan to test out this product: a 200 meg download to get going and you’ll need a 3D-capable video card.

A day after releasing Desktop 2/Sidebar, Google trotted out its attempt to win over a portion of the Instant Messaging (IM) market. Google Talk (www.google.com/talk/) has some promising elements but it is questionable at this point whether it can compete effectively with MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. These two, when combined with AOL, represent on the order of 75 million users.

"At Google, we're continually investing in areas where we can make technological change, and we recognize the importance of efficient instant communications and information exchange," said Georges Harik, director, Product Management, Google Inc. "Google Talk further enriches our users' communications experience, whether they choose to communicate via email, IM, or a call."

Google has two tricks up its sleeves that may help in the conversion battle. Number one is the large number of users of its free Gmail service. In fact, you will need a Gmail account in order to use Google Talk. If even a small percentage of those Gmail users adopt the “Talk” product then a serious assault on the top three may take place.

Number two is the voice or audio messaging aspect of “Talk.” Although not VoIP (Internet Telephony) per se, the service may well evolve into that sort of technology. For now, by all accounts, the quality of the voice service is superb.

Just to reiterate, in its present form, Google Talk’s voice component is strictly for computer to computer calling. No calls to a standard telephone at present.

Google Talk’s minimalist approach to IM could win new converts to the field but keeping them aboard, not to mention attracting users from other platforms will be key to the product’s long-term survival.

Immediately obvious in the spartan interface is that this is no bells and whistles product. Straightforward messaging. That’s it. No emoticons. No group chat feature either. That surely is an oversight that needs to be corrected almost immediately.

The need for a Gmail account seems hokey. It’s not as if the technology depends on it. Taking a long term strategy, though, Google is offering a Gmail account to anyone in the United States with a text-capable cell phone. Some observers see this as a means of winning over the Skype telephony crowd once Google Talk evolves into a platform that can call out to standard telephones.

Canadian readers without a Gmail account will have to nuzzle up to a friend with one: most Gmail users have around fifty “invitations” to distribute as they see fit.

For now Google Talk is a Windows-only product. Given that restriction however, this is one easy installation. Older machines shouldn’t present a problem: for this column it was tested successfully on various machines ranging from an old Pentium-II box running at 500 MHz under Windows 2000, right up to a recent laptop running XPPro.

For more information and downloads:

Sidebar/Desktop2: desktop.google.com
Google Earth: earth.google.com
Gmail: mail.google.com
Google Talk: talk.google.com
Skype: www.skype.com

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.

Phony Software Sales Sites

Question from reader:

My wife is interested in purchasing a product from the following site. I am wondering if there is any way to find out if the site is legitimate or not, or what their reputation is?

<strange-looking site name follows>

Answer:

I don’t even have to check out the site. It’s pretty much a given that your wife has stumbled across, or more likely been targeted by, the unscrupulous operators of fly-by-night software distribution sites.

Such sites usually have a fairly professional look to them but there are characteristic indicators of their nature.

Spelling and grammatical mistakes for one, although current sites are much better in this area than those of just a few months back. More telling, besides the nonsensical prices, is that the actual web site address is often "cloaked" or hidden and is almost surely operating offshore.

In the case of the site you ask about the redirect is occurring through an Edmonton-based company. Without the assistance of that company it isn’t possible to learn much more about the culprit.

Typically, a site such as this has a shelf life measured in single-digit days. Use at your peril. If product is delivered, a highly unlikely prospect, it comes on a copied CD or is downloaded with an illegal, hacked unlock code.

Of course the professional look coupled with the almost irresistible pricing, usually around 10 cents on the retail dollar product price, makes for a terrific lure.

Some of these sites even offer so-called customer testimonials.

The interesting point about these testimonials is that a quick check of the domain registry will prove that they cannot be legitimate.

How can you check that, I hear you asking?

Well, try the Network Solutions domain registry lookup service (http://www.networksolutions.com/whois) and enter the domain name of the site professing to offer these fantastical prices.

For example, for the site www.softwareliar.net , enter the last two portions (softwareliar.net) into the search term box. Click on “Search” and wait for the data to be returned. The key bit of information is the “date created” field. With these software sites this is often just a day or two before you receive the unsolicited come on.

Of course the testimonials are fake. The company didn’t even exist two days ago.

You know, the old adage applies to Internet commerce: if something seems too good to be true it almost surely is. I mean, what are you thinking? That a company such as Adobe, Microsoft or Macromedia is going to be selling their software at ten cents on the dollar through an offshore outfit registered yesterday? Not a chance.

And don’t think about writing these people unless you plan to do it from a throwaway e-mail address. You’ll definitely be moved to the “warm body” list if you do. Your name (and address) suddenly become more valuable when the spam mailers realize they have a “live one.”

No, the phony software come on is just the latest in a long line of scam offerings. You might as well rent a banner aircraft from Pitt Meadows and flash your credit card and pin numbers across the lower mainland.

Stay away. Stay awake!

Everything about these promotions is suspect. You might be tempted to find some solace in the FAQ or support services  these sites offer. Don’t be.

Here’s what item 11 of an FAQ I recently looked at had to say:

“Isn't this considered software piracy?”
“Absolutely NOT. We are providing a service protected under US Copyright law Section 117. This is completely legal and in no way are we breaking any Copyright laws.”

Well, there is a Section 117 but it clearly does not apply to this merchandising racket. 117 says that US citizens may make a backup or archival copy of software for maintenance purposes. There’s nothing in there about selling a thousand copies to customers overseas!

If that isn’t enough, go ahead and begin the purchase process. I’ll bet the operators don’t even have a secure page (oh, it will be labelled “Secure Page” alright but it isn’t) for the credit card transaction. What do they care? All they want is that credit card number and the security PIN.

Here’s the “About Us” for the company I used as the basis for this article:

“Our company has been in business for over 3 years. We have sold the best software in the world for the cheapest prices on the net. Since most all internet businesses are not legitimate we ask that you just buy one of our cheapest products to start out with, because then once you find out how great we actually are we know you will come back to us for all your software needs. Our site can not offer refunds however we will do everything we can to make sure that your purchase is working properly for you if not we can issue a full refund.”

What on earth does that last sentence mean?

Again, stay away!

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.