Keith Shirley

I keep promising to write some tips on the tools that I use day to day. I won’t say they are all the best in their category – but they certainly work well enough for me. I don’t plan to go into big reviews and screenshots etc – I just want to bring them to your attention as I hope you might find them useful.

My first tip is for a tool that I’ve been using for so many years now I can’t remember when I first bought it.

Fineprint has tons of features to do with printing – and like most things I only use half of them. Some of the features are now contained in printer drivers but I remain loyal because it allows me to move between different kinds of printers and keep the same settings.

Fineprint installs so that it looks like a normal printer to all the software on your PC. If you can print normally then you can print via Fineprint.

I originally bought Fineprint for 2 reasons

• To save paper: It allows you to print multiple pages per sheet of paper or even booklets. Unlike most printer drivers you can see what  the multiple page layout will look like in advance of printing. I remember doing booklets for my wedding with it – so I’ve been using it for at least 7 years 5 months 3 days………..
• To get around Internet Explorer 6’s terrible print mechanism – IE6 was a nightmare for printing pages – the text would often be cut off or you’d end up with loads of pages with junk on them. The current IE7 is better but not perfect.

Some other things I like about Fineprint

•  You can print from numerous different programs to Fineprint - and it keeps them in a queue. You can then arrange the layout or delete individual pages before doing the real printing.
• You can prepare a template background. I’ve done one with Shercoms’ logo so that I can print from anywhere with any program and get it branded with the correct logo. I don’t always have proper headed paper with me.
• It’s intelligent with printing double sided documents. The first time you use a printer for double sided printing it runs a wizard.
• You can turn off graphics – sometimes I only need the text – switching off the graphics can save a lot of wasted toner/ink
• It’s easy to change the margins. Training documents for folders etc often need an extra wide margin or gutter. I find it easy to do them all at once in Fineprint.

As you may have guessed – I like it. I don’t sell it – so if you want it you need to go to their website. As far as I know the test version is limited in how many pages it can print in one go and will stamp “Printed with Fineprint” on them.

If you do end up using it then I’d appreciate it if you let me know. It’s nice to know when I can pass on useful tips.

Also – If you have any suggestions for tools or even gadgets that you use regularly then please let me know.

Google have released a new feature for their Google Talk tool called chatback. The idea is similar to the live chat functionality that a lot of sites (including Shercom for the online backup support) provide. The difference is that

• It’s free
• It’s from Google – so people will be more inclined to trust it
• It’s designed for blogs

I don’t personally plan to use it on this blog as I already have the MSN Messenger setup (on the bottom of the bar at the side if you have not seen it). The MSN messenger opens when my PC starts and I don’t have to keep another window open. I also have different GMail identities which I use for various charity activities and I am seldom signed into one for long enough to provide a reliable chat function.

If you don’t have something in place already then it’s certainly worth having a look.

I often get asked for recommendations on suitable software for parents to be able to control what it is that their kids are doing on the Internet. To be fair – the questions are usually more how to protect the children rather than “control”. As I’m more involved in the commercial area’s of technology (and gadgets) it’s not something I knew a lot about.

I’m glad to see that the Department of Justice, Equality and Law reform has been working with the Internet Advisory board to release some new guides.

The first is a parents’ guide to social-networking websites and is about understanding social networking sites to help protect your child online.

The second is a parents’ guide to filtering technologies and is about understanding filtering technologies to help protect your child online. (It’s a little embarassing however that both the IAB and the depertment of justice spell filter as Fitler in the link)

The third one is a parents’ guide to new media technologies and is about understanding and sharing the new media technologies with your children.

The guides are published under the group titles of Get With IT.

The documents are actually quite large so you may find them difficult to read online. I’m expecting to get my hands on some printed copies soon  – please let me know if you would like some.

Amazons S3 system suffered a serious failure yesterday and the details are now becoming clearer. Basically they had an issue where the level of requests being made for authentication outstripped their capacity. There are a couple of things that I find interesting about this case.

The S3 service is basically a storage service that Amazon rents out – and at quite good rates. Everything is stored in their data systems and they provide a software interface (API) that allows you to store your files on there. You pay for the space and the bandwidth used accessing that file.

I had reviewed it a long time ago with regards to potential backup solutions but found it unsuitable for Shercom’s needs. There are a number of companies that use it to provide download services for their products or for storing catalogue systems. It allows you the get access to major infrastructure but to only pay for what you use.

Placing all your data in someone else’s hands can feel like a major leap of faith – we have it all the time for Shercom’s Online Backups. I have no doubt that this will hurt Amazon’s image but I do encourage people to review their needs carefully and not to dismiss the service purely because of this issue.

Amazon have done a good job in a number of areas with this incident:

- They had the monitoring system in place to at least notice the issues before they became critical.
- They reacted quickly to add extra capacity but were unable to complete it in time.
- They accepted responsibility for the issue.

I raise the last point because so many companies seem to try and bluff their way through incidents and not keep the customer informed. Skype had a similar outage a while back. I didn’t investigate it in detail but I do remember it took quite a while to get some clear answers as to what had happened  -and what was being done to ensure it didn’t happen again.

The Amazon S3 incident was fixed in less than 2.5 hours – which is an eternity when you are trying to run a business critical application but it could have been much worse.

I just came back from another weeks consultancy work in Germany. On the way back I decided to sign up for the new passport control system in Frankfurt airport. The process only took a few minutes and on the plus side it means I’m able to bypass the long passport check queues. On the down side….well that’s the point isn’t it.

While I was getting my iris scanned and filling out the paperwork I couldn’t help feeling that there was really a positive and negative side to the process. The system was introduced after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks and one part of me says that it really is necessary to increase the security in these ways – and even more that the police services should be allowed to share data across borders. Another part of me wonders who will guard the guards. How do we know that we won’t slip backwards and end up living in a police state. Even without thinking too Orwellian – what happens if the data somehow gets hacked into or lost. There is an article in Tech-central this week that basically claims that 59% of businesses expect a major loss of data within a 5 year cycle. It’s a very scary idea – especially as the report already the report used the word inevitable.

I do sometimes wonder if I’ll look back on these days and think we were naive.