Okay okay … I’m revisiting Twitter, under some duress.
Follow me, if you’re into that sort of thing:
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
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.
Web-hosts are Internet Service Providers which specialise in the provision of large amounts of disk space, and large amounts of bandwidth. This is useful for websites which host large amounts of data, and/or attract a large number of hits or downloads. The providers usually achieve this with RAID technology for redundancy, big pipes to the internet and load-balanced servers.
Tech Talk Radio has been using the American company POWWEB for some time. All of the publicly available podcasts, as well as syndication versions of the show and some production audio used behind-the-scenes, were stored and hosted by POWWEB.
imagine our surprise when, one day, POWWEB just deleted everything (or moved it, or marked it “hidden”) and disabled the account. Ouch. Was it something we said?
Apparently the traffic generated by the Tech Talk Radio podcast caused a massive, unprecedented meltdown in the POWWEB server farm. Power supplies tripped out, disk arrays fell over and circuit breakers blew apart. Dramatic stuff.
Tech Talk Radio hadn’t actually exceeded the terms of its contract, and was still well within its pre-paid bandwidth for the month. So rather than open a line of communication to Andrew McColm, TTR’s Executive Producer and POWWEB account holder, the powers-that-be thought it would be more customer-focussed just to disable the account.
Sometimes in this job you can personally recommend products because you use them yourself, they work well and they give you value-for-money service. Unfortunately POWWEB web hosting is not one such product.
Steer clear.
To read more, keep clicking:
Full email dialogue between Andrew and POWWEB.
Andrew’s thoughts on POWWEB, and Customer Service 101.
Tune-in to your local ABC Radio National on Friday 11/04/08 at 5:55 P.M. to hear me rant about the use and abuse of the apostrophe.
Apostrophes do two things, that’s all: they make contractions, and they make possessives.
ABC Melbourne: 621 kHz AM. Follow this link for other ABC stations in your area. Many thanks to ABC producer Sue Clark for the opportunity to rant on Perspective, and thanks to Brett de Hoedt, Mayor of Hootville, for giving me a prod now and again.
In the last episode of Tech Talk Radio, Silicon Valley reporter/cyber-goddess Lidija Davis was extolling the virtues of Twitter. This is a social networking site which, probably like many other people, I’d heard about but never used.
My first impressions are that it seems to be a “cutdown” version of Facebook, in that you can see status updates from friends and family and follow updates which other people post. You can also access Twitter from your mobile which is cool.
The thing that Twitter does well for Australian users is incorporate an SMS gateway. You can receive notifications to your phone and also update your status with text messages. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think Facebook does this in Australia. Facebook’s carrier pre-selection screen says that “Facebook Mobile Texts are currently available only in US/Canada/UK on the listed carrier networks”. Bugger. You’d think with all that advertising that Facebook would be able to offer fraction-of-a-cent text messages to its valued customers.
I didn’t test the Twitter SMS features personally but Graeme Callaghan did on the show last week and it seemed to work well.
The thing I don’t like about Twitter is that you use obscure codes to send personal messages and such things. You have to type “@username” to reply to a message, and then something with a bracket to send personal messages… too hard I’m afraid. I want to just click a button that says “personal message” but I can’t.
Also, status updates are limited to 140 characters. Huh!?!?! Maybe this is to ensure compatibility with SMS messaging (which is limited to 160 characters), I’m not sure. But if you want to type a longer message to someone (not just a status update) you have to send three, four, five or more mesages. Bleh.
The exciting thing with Twitter is that status updates and personal messages correspond directly with status updates, public messages and private messages in other social networking systems: Facebook, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger and MySpace to name a few.
If I’m logged in to Facebook, there’s no reason why a friend on MSN shouldn’t be able to send me a message. If a friend posts a funny photo in a MySpace account, why can’t I view it from within my Facebook account? And why can’t I see it from my HSDPA-enabled mobile phone or PDA?
What we need now is a gateway and a common language which works between (currently unconnected) messaging systems. And throw-in a legacy email connector for good measure, if you must.
Some people have already had the same idea and written their own Facebook/Twitter interface, like Stuart Robertson over at Design Meme. This is great to see, and uses existing technologies like RSS and PHP. You can see the way that social networking is headed with these types of projects.
The connection of social networking sites and instant messaging systems will certainly spell the end of email. Thank goodness.
Why do I hate email so much? Well, apart from the fact that 95%+ of all email traffic is unsolicited, it spreads viruses, and the protocol can’t innately transfer binary information? Maybe this is best left for another rant.
My conclusion? If you like Twitter, use Twitter. I won’t be using Twitter, because it doesn’t do everything I need it to. But it does do some things better than Facebook. Most importantly, I like Twitter because it encourages people to use social networking and modern communications systems to keep in touch. And keeping in touch is what it’s all about.
Jodee Berry of Panama City, Fla., sits with her toy Yoda at her lawyer’s office Wednesday.
Berry, a former Hooters waitress, has sued the restaurant where she worked saying she was promised a new Toyota for winning a beer sales contest in April.
Berry, 26, believed that she had won a new car, but she was blindfolded, led to the parking lot and presented a toy Yoda, the little green guy from Star Wars.
Source: Associated Press
