A Mind Lost

Since starting A Mind Lost, it was my intention to allow comments from anyone without being a registered user. Unfortunately, the level of spam comments in the moderation queue every day has risen to a point where I could easily miss useful comments and mistakenly mark them as spam.

So, for the time being at least, I have changed the comments policy so that only registered users can post comments. Registration is straight forward so it should not be much of a problem and I am investigating the available anti-spam plugins for Word Press so the restriction may be short-lived.

Comment away people!

According to a BBC article today, the corporation’s online education service for 5 to 16 year olds, BBC Jam, has been suspended. Apparently commercial education software companies have complained to the European commission about the £150m project because it acts as a state subsidy and is hurting their businesses.

I say tough! The BBC is funded through taxation, just like our education system and part of our government’s obligations is to educate our population. Whether this is acheived through the classroom or online makes no difference. The companies involved in this complaint only exist because gaps in the education system leave children requiring additional learning materials. The tax-paying population complains that these gaps should not exist and that our education services should be constantly improved. Then when the BBC, with our funding, attempts to fill these gaps, it is effectively shut down because such a service is “anti-competitive”!

What next? Will the publishers of text books get teachers to stop supplying their own notes and insist that all education is done directly from their books because teachers are being anti-competitive!

I for one hope that this EU complaint is squashed and the BBC can resume normal service.

I was watching Silent Hill last night at it occurred to me that so many films now are being made with endings that do not complete the story, but which are left open for the production of a sequel. I do appreciate that this has always happened but now it seems to be the norm rather than a rarity.  It’s as though writers and film companies can’t bear the thought that there is no more money to be made from this story so they have to leave the ending open so that if the film does well, they can run off a sequel or two to milk the cash cow a little more, almost always with diminishing returns.  Of course if a sequel never gets made, the original is stuck with its tainted ending which could have been far superior if the story had been concluded properly.

This is not restricted to films, but can now be found in TV series as well, nowhere greater than in Lost.  The story is an excellent concept but it quickly became apparent that the writers had no clue how or when to conclude the story.  The TV company is only in it for the money that the series can raise so instead of the writers saying “We have this great story and we can tell it in 24 episodes”, they literally start writing it as they go along because they want to squeeze as many seasons out of it as they can.  The greed ends up killing the story because the plotline gets sacrificed, sometimes desperately, in order to extend the run.  They raise hundreds of questions and then drip-feed answers to some of them, always giving a glimmer of hope that the big answers are on their way when really they have no idea what the big answers will be.  For me, Lost became the most frustrating and annoying programme on television and I couldn’t bear to watch it any more.

It’s about time we allowed writers in film and TV to tell a story without greed getting in the way.

I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2000 since it was released and refrained from upgrading all the way through versions 2002, 2003 and XP since I saw no point in paying all that money just for feature-creep, particlularly when I have a network of machines to upgrade, it’s just too expensive for too little gain. I decided a few weeks ago to try an install of Office 2007 since the presentation of the documents seems to have taken a more significant jump and the ribbon bars were intriguing.

Of all the applications, Access 2007 is by far the most buggy. I’ve had numerous crashes and lock-ups from simply editing a field of data and have have hit a brick wall with one particular project I’m working on. I’d go so far as to say that Access 2007 is still beta and should not yet be released.

Continue reading ‘Access 2007 Troubles.’

One of the longest-running debates in the Linux world is which Distribution is best. All distros have their supporters and most have their zealot fanboys who will shoot you down in flames if you dare to insult their worshipped creation. Many will simply not accept that the choice of Linux distribution depends on what you’re using it for! Since I mainly use Linux for servers I have settled on Debian simply because of its unrivalled stability. For desktop Linux you would be far better with a more cutting-edge distribution such as Ubuntu or Suse.

Jethro Carr has posted a beginners introduction called “Choosing the Right Linux distribution” over on reallylinux.com which is well worth a look.

Our office broadband connection went down yesterday afternoon. We’ve had occasional loss of DNS recently which has fixed itself within the hour so since it was pretty much the end of the working day I thought I’d leave it and it would probably be sorted by BT in an hour or two. The fact that the problem wasn’t DNS-related this time should really have sounded alarm bells in my head.

This fault was with the login section of the connection procedure. Our ADSL modem synced ok so we had ADSL, the modem would just not connect to the WAN. Of course I realized my error when I still couldn’t connect to our office from home at 8:00pm last night, or 10:00pm or when I arrived at work this morning.

I contacted our ADSL provider who insisted that I should power down the modem for at least 15 minutes to “clear the static off the line”. I hate these support procedures which require you to do something which you have already tried in one form or another or which you just know is not going to make any difference to the problem other than to waste a bit more of your valuable time. Having jumped through this hoop and called them back they escalated me to the next support tier who decided that it did actually look like there was something wrong at BT’s end.

As I draft this post at 10:00am, our internet is still down and it leaves me thinking about how broadband has grown fairly un-noticed to become an important, if not vital, cog in the machine we use to do business and indeed to run our lives. I’ve already had complaints this morning because our Sales Manager could not check his emails from home last night, no-one has had any emails since yesterday afternoon (although these will be waiting at our host’s backup mail server for delivery), our Purchasing Manager cannot talk via MSN this morning to our primary supplier in China and I cannot do any banking since the commercial banking software has recently moved online instead of dedicated dial-up.

The internet, enabled by broadband connections, has worked its way into almost everything we do and because it is reliable for most of the time, business becomes a little more difficult when it does let us down. Only large organizations get any kind of priority support or guaranteed uptime commitments as small and mid-sized organizations simply don’t have the buying power.

I was thinking of using the fallback capability of our VPN firewall box to switch to an alternative ADSL connection, but that requires that we maintain and pay for redundant ADSL connections and if, as it seems, the problem in this case is due to a BT network issue, chances are both connections would fail to logon and we’d still have no connection.

For the time being, the office has lost a connection to the outside world and it is surprising how much the staff are missing it even after only a short time without it. Has broadband joined electricity and the telephone as fundamental requirements of a modern business?

Update: Following a diagnostics call from our ADSL provider who could see no attempt by the modem to login, he suggested I swap out the modem. Fortunately, having lost a modem recently after a power cut, I have a spare. However, I decided to start by changing the micro-filter before ripping the modem out and entering the settings into a new one. I swapped the filter, hit the connect button and hey presto, we had internet connectivity again! I reported the resolution back to our provider and neither of us can quite understand why I had a synced ADSL connection if the micro-filter was faulty. At least it’s fixed and I can put an end to those withdrawal symptoms!