Color Pencils Reviewed is an excellent review of a technology that is little used these days: colour (or color for US spelling) pencils. You can tell I am getting bored stuck in my hotel room!

This story, found on Silicon.com, really appeals to the geekishnes in me. Hector, High-End Computing Terascale Resource [what happened to the 'o'?] , can handle 63 trillion calculations per second, which is the equivalent processing power of 12,000 desktop systems. The supercomputer is based at the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computer Facility and operated by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC). The sort of work that Hector will do includes forecasting the impact of climate change, projecting the spread of disease epidemics and developing new medicines. For those of us who are self-employed, though, the name Hector brings to mind the bowler hatted cartoon character that the UK Inland Revenue used in their adverts to exhort us to get our self-assessment tax forms and payments in on time.

Now for the serious techie stuff: Hector uses a Cray XT4 system with software and application support provided by NAG; Hector has a peak capability of 63 Teraflops but this is due to increase to 250 Teraflops in October 2009, with a further upgrade due two years later. Now you know:-)

On a global scale, though, Hector comes in at number 17. The TOP500 Supercomputing Sites lists the … erm … top 500 supercomputing sites. The November 2007 list is at http://www.top500.org/list/2007/11/100.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has made over 3000 ITU-T recommendations available free of charge following a trial of the new service. The standards are used by equipment manufacturers, telecommunication network operators and service providers throughout the world.

According to the ITU press release:

Mr Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), presented the results of the trial to the 2007 meeting of ITU’s Council. He said that not only had the experiment been a success in raising awareness of ITU-T, it would also attract new members. Most importantly, he noted, it had helped efforts to bridge the “standardization gap” between countries with resources to pursue standardization issues and those without. “There has been very positive feedback from developing countries,” said Johnson. “Last year exactly 500 ITU-T Recommendations had been sold to developing countries; this year, after allowing free access, they have downloaded some 300 000.”

Hat tip to Gary Price who posted the story on his Resource Shelf blog.

I finally did it - over the weekend I moved my blog from Blogger! Although the old blog was hosted on my own web site, as is the new version, I disliked having to use the Blogger software on Google’s own servers. For the majority of the time access was no problem but there have been days when availability has been zero and response times very slow. My own web hosting service is not perfect - none are - but it is more reliable and predictable than Blogger. But the deciding factor was that I wanted to play around with more gizmos, widgets and layouts. I was able to experiment with third party plugins using Blogger, in fact one had to in the early days because it lacked so many of the standard blog features such as tagging, but you have to mess around with the template code. If you want to switch to another layout/template, you lose most of your customisation.

I contemplated Typepad and have even invested in an account but I am leaving that for experimental purposes. As I would still have to use the software and hosting on their system I would again be at the mercy of their ‘down times’, and there have been many of those judging from the number of ‘no access’ problems I see with Typepad based blogs in my RSS reader. It was Brian Kelly’s new(ish) blog that encouraged me to look at WordPress. I was not too keen on hosting on WordPress.com so I decided to be brave and load the software onto my own server. Feedback from other users suggested that it would be relatively painless but I was prepared for problems right from the start. There weren’t any.

The sequence of events was as follows:

1. Check that my hosting service has the required version of PHP and MySQL. It did.
2. Activate and set up a MySQL database. That took about 30 seconds using my hosting service’s control panel.
3. Download the WordPress software and install on my web server. There are two sets of instructions on installation: a 5 minute quick start for experienced users and more detailed instructions if you are new to this. Being a complete novice I, of course, decided to go for the Quick Start It worked!
4. Decide on a layout and colour. I rather like Brian’s three column layout so I opted for Andreas09.
5. Play around with the sidebar content and layout, and install Sidebar widgets. Look at a few other plugins.

That all took about 30 minutes and I was ready to start blogging in WordPress.

Then I had to decide whether to import my Blogger content into WordPress or leave it archived in the old files. As an experiment I decided to try out the import option. The support documents and discussion forums suggested that there might be a few problems and that it might not work 100%. The only step that caused me a few difficulties was republishing my old blog onto Blogspot, a pre-requisite for the script to work. It took me a while to remember how to do it and then Blogger/Blogspot decided to go into slow motion right in the middle of the transfer. After that, the script did its job and everything, excluding the plug-in content, was transferred in about 10 minutes.

There are only two problems with my transferred content. The first is that Blogger lets you associate a URL with the title of a posting: this is not carried over in any form and could annoy users if that is the only reference to the address of the product or service you are blogging. The second is that any links in the body of the content to previous postings in Blogger are retained. The latter is not surprising and I can live with that.

I now have to embark on an advertising campaign to alert people to the new address, check links on my web site and in presentations. The old Blog will be left on my web site for a while and it will be interesting to see how long it takes for people to switch to the new one. It looks as though the winner for the prize for being the first to spot and link to it goes to Chris Armstrong and his info NeoGnostic blog. As I am in his home town of Aberystwyth next week, it looks as though I owe him a drink or two, or even three.

We are four days into the New Year and I have already had two enquiries from people asking if I know of a site that lists all the different emoticons. In particular, one person wanted to know what the emoticon for a hangover was - obviously still suffering from the effects of the Christmas and New Year celebrations. High-Tech Dictionary Emoticons seems to have the most comprehensive list and has many more than the one I printed off in 2000. I particularly like the Homer emoticon ( 8(|)

If you have bought a new laptop, and are wondering if yours is affected by the latest series of battery recalls, this posting on Tech Talk gives links to the relevant pages on manufacturers’ web sites. My particular model of Toshiba seems unaffected but I shall be monitoring the Toshiba page in case that changes. For the Tosh machines the batteries do not burst into flames - they just stop working.

Tech Talk also has information on Dell’s free recycling programme, an inititiative that Dell have completely forgotten to tell me about in the numerous emails and newsletters that they send me. The link in Tech Talk takes you to the US site but a quick check on the UK Dell pages revealed that it is available over on this side of The Pond as well. You can use the service to recycle defunct Dell equipment, or if you have just bought a Dell you can recycle your old equipment regardless of manufacturer. Looks promising. In my location one has to pay for computers to be collected for recycling so I have filled in the form and am awaiting further instructions.

Apologies if you have already seen this on the LIS discussion lists or on the UKeiG blog.

Some of you will have noticed from the auto-replies to private messages sent to me that I have been on hols for about 2 weeks. I am now back. That’s the good news - OK, I know that’s debatable

The bad news is that a couple of hours after I had downloaded two weeks worth of email my PC’s hard disk crashed in spectacular fashion. Of course Sod’s Law was in operation and I had also deleted the downloaded email from my ISP’s server. Deleting everything from the ISP mail server was a I habit I developed in the early days of the Internet when ISPs charged an arm, a leg and several pints of blood to store more than a few kb of messages for more than a few days. A practice that I have today abandoned!

Everything that I received up until midday 29th July was backed up but anything between then and midday August 15th has gone. So if you have sent me any emails during that period could you please re-send them? Especially those of you who sent me emails requesting user names and passwords for access to the members area of the UKeiG web site.

Many thanks

Karen Blakeman

Expect to start seeing sites in the .eu domain within the next few days. The new top-level domain goes live on December 7th but only trademark holders and public bodies will be able to register during the so-called “sunrise period”. Registrations for the domain, which will be handled by Eurid, will be open to the rest of us on 7 April 2006.

ProcessLibrary.com - The online resource for process information!

If you have ever wondered what on earth all those “processes” that appear in Windows Task Manager after you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del are doing, this is the site for you. Type in the full name of the process, for example dragdiag.exe, and ProcessLibrary will tell you what it does and whether it is legit, spyware, a virus or a trojan.

The database is free and maintained by a company called UniBlue. They sell a program called WinTasks Pro which helps deal with any nasty processes that you may have on your computer so they have a vested interest in providing the database. If, though, you are not sure how to remove the bad guys from your system or they just keep popping back up, it may be worth investing USD 49.95 in the program. In any case, the ProcessLibrary is still a very useful resource.

Cellular Networking Perspectives: Irreverent Acronyms

I came across this little gem while checking up on some telecoms related sites. My favourite “alternative” definitions of acronyms are:

AOL - Acronym Overload Land

Internet- In no time everyone’s raiding nearly everyone’s trash

WAP - What! Another Protocol?