Sunday 14 January 2007 at 6:38 pm
I discovered that Sooz Nooz had vanished on 26th December 2006. All entry files and templates had disappeared from my web folders.
I still haven't had any reply from the web host intimating how this might have happened. I think it may be time to consider moving my domain hosting elsewhere.
There's a strong possibility that the site was hacked. Or it could have been a security issue. Following discussions with the web host, I did try installing a .htaccess file using a different FTP client called SmartFTP, which turns off an unsafe php setting, and that does seem to have worked.
Meanwhile, Pivot has released an updated version of its software. One of the reasons it's taken me this long to get back up and running is that I had to compare old files with new. The template layout and CSS values had changed very significantly.
I'm reasonably satisfied with my efforts to restore the look and feel of Sooz Nooz. I still have problems with CSS values for container width in IE 6 and earlier, but that is comparably a minor irritation.
By great good fortune, Google had spidered the website just three days before I discovered it had gone. As a result, I have been able to restore all the entries from Google's cached versions of the blog. I would have been quite devastated if I had lost everything.
So now, all entries are being copied into files on my PC as well as into the blog, and backups of the database and configuration files are being rigorously applied.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 6:21 pm
This item was first published on 8th December 2006.
I refurbished the Buckles - classic shoes for ladies with small feet website in October and November, launching the new look in the second week of November.
Buckles, the shop in Loughborough, closed finally in October. With access to Biggin Street closed by pedestrian access and council works that seemed to go on for months, the customer base had dropped. The proprietor also had family reasons for closing.
The problem was what to do with the outstanding stock.
Firstly, the company decided that it would sell only its smallest sizes online, since this was a niche market. That means British shoe sizes from 13 to 3, or Continental sizes 32 to 35.
I was instructed to use PayPal as the purchase mechanism. There were several reasons for this.
- The company already had a PayPal merchant account, and did not want to make the commitment of subscribing to another payment system. PayPal takes a percentage of a sale, and does not require subscription.
- It's relatively easy to set up payment options on a website using PayPal, providing there aren't too many items. Otherwise, it becomes very time-consuming to list the items and obtain the code.
- It's now possible for anyone to make a payment using PayPal using a credit or debit card. Customers don't need to have a PayPal account.
My reservations are that PayPal, partly, at least, from being owned and used by eBay, has a mixed reputation. Personally, I have never had any problems with paying via PayPal, but some people have. You only need to hear of one or two bad experiences to begin to distrust an agency or organisation.
The problems probably come from tales of 'phishing', and from the vast anonymity of using the mechanism.
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Sunday 14 January 2007 at 6:10 pm
This item was first published on 4th December 2006.
The $100 laptop computer has been launched in Brazil. Read more about this at Global Voices Online.
Global Voices Online summarises the reactions to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative in Brazil, from various bloggers in the country, and provides translations into English from the Portuguese.
Naturally, reactions vary from those who think it's WOW, to those who, understandably in my view, suggest that more investment in teachers might better meet the objective of improving educational attainment, to those who believe the money might have been better spent in combating poverty and providing food and water.
And then of course, who will the laptops go to? One blogger queried this after supposing that the launch machines would be given to President Lula's grandsons.
The $100 laptop uses a different hardware configuration from that which we are used to, and also a different browser, called OLPC, after the name of the initiative. Watch the YouTube demo of OLPC in action.
Also see this article entitled Clever kit to benefit the poor in London's Financial Times.
Update on January 5th 2008: An article in
The Economist reveals that the OLPC laptop is clumsy, cumbersome to use, and crashes frequently. It's more likely to deter kids than encourage them. The Economist says that this has been largely due to "the hubris, arrogance and occasional self-righteousness of OLPC workers. They treated all criticism as enemy fire to be deflected and quashed rather than considered and possibly taken on board. Overcoming this will be essential if the project is to succeed past its first release."
All is not doom and gloom however. Laptops are getting cheaper and there are other options. At least the OLPC initiative has pioneered a trail.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 6:03 pm
This item was first published on 4th December 2006.
I've just come across the Foreign Direct Investment Promotion Center, which has been developed by the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), an arm of the World Bank Group.
The website is available in English, Russian, Arabic and Serbian, (yes, Serbian), offering toolkits, research resources, e-learning and opportunities to promote oneself.
It has an impressive list of members, and the service is currently free. You have to register to access the resources for market research for prospective investors. 571 are listed currently. Short movies of testimonials from users suggest that the toolkits have been very useful to government agencies in setting up investment promotion agencies.
Registration was a bit awkward when it came to choosing an organisation. The process would have lost marks in a usability test, but I did succeed.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 5:58 pm
This item was first published on 29th November 2006.
I've just released my first album. Here are details and edited sound files of four of the tracks.
I'm sending the profits to the British Lung Foundation which created a 'Breath of Life' campaign in memory of my father, Percy Akehurst, who died of asbestosis in 2004.
After singing my recital last year, I was able to add £55 to the donations sent for his funeral.
The money will be used for asthma care and research.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 5:26 pm
This item was first published on 29th November 2006.
I was approached by a husband and wife company earlier this year for permission to use some of my photos of Oman at Oman Vistas in a presentation to passengers on a Saga voyage. The MV Spirit of Adventure was cruising to Sri Lanka from Muscat via Mumbai and Goa.
It seems that my photos were particularly useful for revealing to ladies how they should, and should NOT, dress to visit the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, or Jama'a in Al Ghubrah, Muscat. I had turned up at the mosque dressed inappropriately, as shown, and been told to leave.
How ladies should dress to visit the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, Muscat.
How ladies should NOT dress to visit the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, Muscat.
Female passengers have been turned away from the mosque on previous occasions because the length of their blouse sleeves did not cover the wrists appropriately. In fact, I was even admonished for showing just the slightest trace of my hair beneath the front of my hijab. To be honest, I felt humiliated. But there you are. When in Muscat, do what the Muscatians tell you to do.
Petunias at the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, Muscat
However, the gardens are lovely. From November to March, Muscat's roadside gardens revel in 'zillions of petunias', as a friend of mine once put it. Presumably, the target audience on the cruise also enjoy gardens, since this photo was used too.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 3:52 pm
This item was first published on 15th October 2006.
I've had significant response from my Flickr photo account, with people contacting me to use photos for publication or as part of projects.
Today, I've heard from Schmap dynamic travel guides. Several of my photos, uploaded to Flickr and published under a Creative Commons licence, are being used in their guides to Paris and Florence.
I've downloaded the player and find that it's a well-integrated online map guide to hotels, restaurants, attractions, bars, museums, gardens etc to all sorts of places all over the world. Try it out in the travel guide picker that I have included in the right hand column.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 3:28 pm
This item was first published on 14th October 2006.
I took a four-day course in PHP programming in Leeds in September. The company, GBdirect, used the Innovation Centre at Leeds University Business School, to host the training.
I've been looking at PHP books for the last 3 years and have started, slowly, to use this server-side technology in the websites that I build. My ultimate aim is to build my own simple shopping cart and content management sites. I can already configure open source systems, and adapt them to client needs.
I had just two colleagues on the course, both of whom came from a company that specialises in the computer administration and maintenance of payroll systems. Both were lifelong programmers.
Whereas I was familiar with much of the PHP terminology of the course, my companions, who had no background in PHP itself, were able to pick up the syntax more easily and apply their own real life solutions, whereas I was struggling with how to implement an appropriate programming solution. Four days of PHP did make me more comfortable understanding and writing the syntax.
We came away with a thick course book with lots of exercises, a free gift of an O'Reilly textbook on PHP and MySQL, and a promise of lifelong support.
I queried the notion of lifelong support and received a long answer from the MD of the training company which can be summarised as, lifelong support does not amount to consultancy.
I, of course, came from a background of website design. I was intrigued that the course tutor spoke disparagingly of CSS, because he didn't understand it. I use CSS extensively in my designs.
While I enjoy intensive courses, which can help bring me up to speed, there is always the difficulty subsequently that if you don't use what you have learnt or don't have time immediately afterwards to follow up the material, you might just as well have not bothered.
Which renders the cost-effectiveness of the course problematic. I paid out approximately £1500. This may be very reasonable to companies who are usually charged such prices for training, particularly when their candidates have appropriate background, but to a sole trader like me, it was extraordinarily high.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 3:20 pm
This item was first published on 9th October 2006.
Legislation has been in force for several years now which requires website owners to ensure that their websites are accessible to the disabled, more particularly those with visual difficulties.
Most people think in terms of increasing text sizes or using browser colour settings to increase contrast between text and background, but there's rather more to it than that. Underlying code tags must be properly referenced so that a screen reader can differentiate between what is code and what is content.
When the Publicly Available Specification PAS 78 Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites was published in March 2006, many web designers were annoyed that it cost £30 or more to buy it.
However, PAS 78 is now available for free download as a pdf file at the Disability Rights Commission website.
Only one copy can be downloaded per computer, and the terms and conditions stipulate that the file may not be shared on intranets or extranets, or sold on, or made available for download on other websites.
But making the publication freely available should hopefully ensure that it will now be far more widely read.
Sunday 14 January 2007 at 2:41 pm
This item was first published on 18th September 2006.
I was inspired by the hype surrounding the release of an affordable digital SLR camera to go out and buy a Canon EOS 300D model early in 2004. I'd used Canon film cameras in Oman, which had come highly recommended, and decided to advance with technology.
I took the camera with me on a trip to Oman in March 2004. See the photos of Musandam, Iranian smugglers and Dubai at Oman Vistas. I was very pleased with the quality and the resolution although it seemed to me that the camera tended to underexpose shots.
It was only when I was actually in Musandam trying to take a photo of a kingfisher with my Sigma telephoto lens, which had worked perfectly well with my Canon EOS film camera, that I realised that there could be compatibility issues. The lens proved to be temperamental and although I managed to use it to take close-ups of the family at cricket in the 2005 season, I could not rely on it.
This year, I've had requests to use several of my photos on various of my websites, taken variously with a Pentax Optio 430 - see the Muscat, Grand Mosque and Nakhl folders at Oman Vistas, and a Nikon Coolpix 7900 - see my photos at Flickr - as well as the Canon EOS 300D. Although the Nikon claims to have a higher resolution than the Canon, at something like 7.3 megapixels per inch, plus it's small, compact and very handy, I couldn't get over the image quality produced by the Canon.
I felt it was time to develop my photography skills. After all, there's no point in having an expensive camera if you don't know how to use its full potential. Besides, I could see a market in selling my best photos on the web.
Canon outsources its training and information services in the UK respectively to Experience-Seminars and EOS magazine. I booked three courses held over three days last week on 'Making the Most of Your EOS' held at the Huntingdon training centre.
I took the camera with me on a trip to Oman in March 2004. See the photos of Musandam, Iranian smugglers and Dubai at Oman Vistas. I was very pleased with the quality and the resolution although it seemed to me that the camera tended to underexpose shots.
It was only when I was actually in Musandam trying to take a photo of a kingfisher with my Sigma telephoto lens, which had worked perfectly well with my Canon EOS film camera, that I realised that there could be compatibility issues. The lens proved to be temperamental and although I managed to use it to take close-ups of the family at cricket in the 2005 season, I could not rely on it.
This year, I've had requests to use several of my photos on various of my websites, taken variously with a Pentax Optio 430 - see the Muscat, Grand Mosque and Nakhl folders at Oman Vistas, and a Nikon Coolpix 7900 - see my photos at Flickr - as well as the Canon EOS 300D. Although the Nikon claims to have a higher resolution than the Canon, at something like 7.3 megapixels per inch, plus it's small, compact and very handy, I couldn't get over the image quality produced by the Canon.
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Sunday 14 January 2007 at 04:37 am
This item was first published on 12th August 2006.
Robert Macleod, MD of Assessment Northeast, a partner with the Centre for Assessment and Recognition Northwest, in The International Quality Centre or IQC, contacted me recently, to tell me that things have changed since I wrote an article about Investors in People (IiP) on behalf of Oman Economic Review in 2003.
The projected transfer of the international division from IiP to Exemplas to undertake international work on behalf of IiP, that I wrote about in my article, was revoked in 2004. Mr Macleod said he would be grateful if I could update the record.
Investors in People awarded the International Quality Centre a licence to grant the IiP quality standard for eleven years in 2004. The IiP Standard was itself revised and re-published in November 2004.
Having been granted the remit to manage IiP assessment services internationally, IQC's main role is to help develop the IiP infrastructure in overseas countries, including the design of key systems and training of key staff within the partner organisation such as Quality Manager and Practitioner Developer roles.
Through Assessment Northeast and the Centre for Assessment Northwest, the company also runs its own training courses on understanding, implementing and assessing the IiP standard.
Most of the international work currently is in multinational companies overseas. At the time that I originally wrote in 2003, the IiP standard was to be launched in the Sultanate of Oman. Since then, the IiP coordinator at the British Council has left. The latest Omani institution to implement IiP has been BankMuscat, which is bringing in the standard on a branch-by-branch basis, but as a whole, the concept of adopting the standard within the country has languished.
An assessment of the impact of the IiP standard was undertaken by Databuild, a company specialising in mobile data capture, and subsequently taken over by ROCC Uniclass Enterprise Solutions.
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Sunday 14 January 2007 at 04:25 am
This entry was first published on 6th August 2006.
Welcome to Sooz Nooz, the blog accompaniment to Sue Hutton, which enables me to share information with you more speedily, to update articles from the past, and to present new articles relevant to my professional interests.
The tool that I'm using for the blog is an open-source (free!) program called Pivot , which I have been able to configure to echo the layout of my main site.
It requires PHP to be installed on your web server, but unlike other software, does not require MySQL, which saves you having to set up a database in which to store the entries. The postings are stored in a flat file.
It's appropriate, I suppose, for relatively light use. The developers believe that the maximum number of postings can be 6,000 to 8,000 increasing on a fast server to around 12,000 postings.
However, you can create different user profiles which facilitate searching for individual contributions, and also several blogs in the same account, each stored in its own flat file, which will increase the maximum number of postings accordingly.
I've seen a query on the forum about using the software for 800 different users on an intranet.
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