The Surgery

But wait! There’s more!

In order for Action Item Man to own this challenge, he needs to be goal-oriented and results driven.

Gold, Jerry, absolute gold:

Weasel Words is a website dedicated to those “who have silently wept into a crumpled copy of their company’s mission statement, for teachers who want to work in classrooms and not customer service points, and for all those who have been underpinned by an innovative, value adding, creative, sustainable, diverse and optimised framework.”

Crikey… maybe even I’m guilty of some of these.  Ouch!

At last, at last, my WordPress blog is running on a real computer; not something held together by pieces of twine, electrical tape and garden stakes.

I have updated the page on My WordPress Installation, for those interested.

Do you notice the speed improvements with pages loading in your browser? It was definitely worth the hard work… and not too much hard work involved actually.

Many thanks to Graeme Callaghan for all his assistance.

Okay okay … I’m revisiting Twitter, under some duress.

Follow me, if you’re into that sort of thing:

• Go here;
• Search for rk5075 ; and
  
• Click the Follow button.

Interesting, intellectual and entertaining “twits” are not guaranteed.

I hate it when that happens.

Most people think their data is safe if it’s backed-up. Even better if a copy is stored off-site in a secure location.

This is a good short-term solution, but what about medium-to-long term? When you burned all your family photos to CD-ROM a few years ago, did you really expect that CD to still be readable today? What if you used a file format that’s not recognised by your computer in ten years?

The problem we have with backup longevity is two-fold: it all comes back to hardware and software.

Recently I was asked by Tech Talk Radio panelist Graeme Callaghan to dig-out some old audio files, from a radio project we both worked on many years ago. YJ Radio was a community radio station that we set up every Easter for the St John Ambulance cadet group, in Yarra Junction. We did this from about 1993 to 2002. The project slowly developed from a small mixing desk with two CD players, and a 10-watt transmitter loaned to us by NEC Broadcast, until its final year which involved mini-disc players, DAT-machine recorders, computers, a computer network, a TTL microphone switch, PABX and radio tower with side-mounted dipole.

All this was a great deal of fun and we used to backup all our data to CD-ROM, and all our audio to CD-DA, DAT cartridges, VHS tape, mini-discs and reel-to-reel tape. Remember this was before the age of writeable DVDs, memory sticks and on-line storage.

When Graeme asked me to find some files last week, I went straight to the Wardrobe of Organised Chaos in my home office. I knew exactly where the YJ Radio discs were stored. But imagine my dismay when I pulled-out a handful of these little suckers:

LS-120 disks seemed like a great idea at the time. Just when we started realising that a single MP3 file was never going to fit on a 1.44 MB disc, Imation came up with a great idea. This was to make 3½” floppy drives, which could read/write conventional 1.44MB floppies, but could also read/write super-high-capacity 120MB floppies. I seem to remember at the time they were competing directly with those external Iomega “ZIP” drives.

I also found some audio and data CDs in the YJ Radio collection: Kodak media with a 1997 production date. Could I still read these, I wondered? What if the physical surface of the discs had deteriorated over time, and ten years of project work had simply been lost?

Fortunately, my Media Centre PC could read each and every one of the CDs without any problem. It was like peeking inside a musical time capsule, and we found at least one of the files that Graeme had been looking for. Also very fortunately, we had been using file formats which were still in use today: wave and MP3 (even if the bit rates were at a blisteringly-high 128 kb/s). So our hardware passed the test of time (the ten-year-old CDs), as did our software (the audio file formats and the file-system on the CD).

Next for the LS-120s. Believe it or not, I actually found a working LS-120 drive in the junk box. It was looking pretty sad and lonely, and it buzzed to life when I plugged it in.

It could actually read some of the discs I fed into it, and I copied everything possible to hard disk straight away. Unfortunately there were some discs that wouldn’t read at all, and some which appeared to have a valid directory structure, but did this when I tried to copy the contents:

So the LS-120 hardware didn’t pass the test of time. Not 100%, anyway, like the Kodak CDs. And if I hadn’t found a drive, I would have had 600MB of unreadable media. The data would have been wholly lost forever.

Now in terms of software and file formats, I was lucky that everything was written in formats we still use today. But what if the discs contained WordPerfect 4.2 files, or photographs in an early version of Kodak’s “KDC” format… then what? Again, data which can’t be accessed or converted to a usable format is as good as lost forever.

Many people today are in the same situation, when they find that they can’t get a replacement globe for their 30-year-old Super-8 projector. They have hours and hours of childhood memories on a storage medium (in this case, film) which can no longer be viewed, accessed, converted or used in any way. The same goes for beta video tapes, audio cassettes, and the same will happen to millions with VHS tapes over the next few years.

Graeme made a similar comment re. his Ampex mastering tapes, which we used in the early years of YJ Radio before the sound cards in our computers could do anything other than play MIDI files. How do we get audio off these old tapes? The answer is, we don’t, if we can’t find a functional tape deck.

But the problem is not just limited to old-fashioned or “retro” technologies. Consider the high-definition format war which has just been won by BluRay. Since the announcement by Toshiba in February this year that it would stop manufacturing HD-DVD media, anyone with even a small investment in HD-DVD must decide the best way forward.

So what’s the moral of the story? Maintain an active interest in your backup and storage regime. If the worst ever happens and you need to restore data from backups, make sure you can actually read the backups. Make sure the storage media is still in common use. Make sure the file formats you’re using are in common use.

Otherwise, when it comes to crunch time, you might be left stranded.

Via email:

Two British traffic patrol officers from North Berwick, east of Edinburgh, were involved in an unusual incident, while checking for speeding motorists on the A1 Great North Road.

One of the officers used a hand-held radar device to check the speed of a vehicle approaching over the crest of a hill, and was surprised when the speed was recorded at over 300mph.  The machine then stopped working and the officers were not able to reset it.

The radar had in fact locked on to a NATO Tornado fighter over the North Sea, which was engaged in a low-flying exercise over the Borders District. 
Back at Police Headquarters, the Chief Constable fired off a stiff complaint to the RAF liaison office.

Back came the reply in true laconic RAF style:

Thankyou for your message, which allows us to complete the file on this incident.

You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Tornado had automatically locked on to your “hostile  radar equipment” and sent a jamming signal back to it.

Furthermore, the Sidewinder air-to-ground missiles aboard the fully-armed aircraft had also locked on to the target.

Fortunately the Dutch pilot flying the Tornado responded to the missile status alert intelligently, and was able to  override the automatic protection system before the missile was launched.

Makes for a good story anyway.

I recently created a website, for a customer who wanted a shiny new blog on a WordPress server.  I took the opportunity to use WordPress.com to do the hosting.

I set up the blog, registered the domain name, and then used a new feature (new for me, anyway) which lets WordPress.com use your domain name.

What this means, is that instead of “my_wordpress_account_name.wordpress.com” as your web address, you can have WordPress.com host “my_domain_name.com.au” which appears in the title bar of people’s web browsers when they’re viewing the blog.  This costs US$10/year per domain, which I think is pretty good value.

How to do this

• If you have an existing domain, log on to the domain’s registrar.  Change the delegation to WordPress.com DNS servers: “ns1.wordpress.com” through “ns3.wordpress.com”;

• From your blog’s dashboard in WordPress.com, go to “Upgrades / Domains”;

• Enter the domain you would like to appear as the address for your blog. This can be pre-existing or WordPress.com will register it for you (if the domain is available) for $5/year;

• Click “Add domain to blog”;

• If you don’t have any “WordPress.com credits”, you will be prompted to login to PayPal and purchase 10 credits (this will cost about AU$11.00);

• Return to the “Dashboard / Upgrades / Domains” screen.  In the domain table you will still see the original “wordpress.com” address for your blog, with the function set as “your blog URL”. You will also see a new entry, which is the domain name you just paid WordPress.com to host. Click on the link that says “Put blog here”. Otherwise if you type the new domain name, it will just redirect to the WordPress.com address.

That’s it! Now if you type your new domain name, or your old “wordpress.com” address, you will see your shiny new blog. Most importantly, the address in the title bar will be your new domain name.

Happy blogging!

More reading; WordPress.com Support Forum on Domain Hosting.