I have always been a big fan of Microsoft's SkyDrive and the Windows Live Mesh Service that bolts onto it for syncing all of your folders in "the cloud". One of the things I like about SkyDrive is the ability to map it as a network drive on your machine with relatively little trouble at all. If I am out and about I can access my SkyDrive documents from any web browser I can also edit my office documents online using the Web version of Office. Although I must point out that the web versions of office do have a few limitations when it comes to editing documents with shapes and images I have discovered.

If I install the Live Mesh client on my computer I can also access my computer from a web browser anywhere in the world, Live Mesh will also sync my browser favourites and my Office Templates for me and it will do all of the above mentioned for free!

I believe that Microsoft are great at releasing brilliant services although I don't feel they get quite the cult following they deserve as a service that would have been released by Google or Apple. Microsoft's approach always appears to be an "on going thing", when Google, Facebook or Apple launch something new it usually ends up on some major news websites not just the usual technical news services.

One thing Microsoft could make a bit more clear are some tutorials on some of Sky Drives features . By this I am referring to the features I mentioned at the top of this article. I am surprised that few people realise you can map a drive on your machine to SkyDrive and there is no little app that offers to do this or tutorial on the SkyDrive site (that I could find) that brings this into view. While the more tech savvy users don't mind "hacking" about for this information the less technically astute would probably be lost. Mapping a drive makes things so much easier when uploading pictures and files to SkyDrive in bulk it also make working on Office documents a lot easier.

I believe Microsoft should charge for even greater amounts of space on SkyDrive which is something they don't currently do. SkyDrive is currently capped at 25gigs.  I as a user of the service feel that for such a great service, how on earth are Microsoft paying for it? What's the catch? It can't be cheap maintaining the software and infrastructure for such a service and I really can't see how advertising can cover the service. I feel that because its a free service Microsoft could pull it when ever they wanted to if they don't feel its adding value. While I doubt they would, I feel that paying for the service enters me into a contract with them and some type of a guarantee?

Microsoft appear to be very good at "changing" and reinventing everything every few years or changing how services work which can be difficult for users who get used to having things working in a set way. If I wanted to use SkyDrive as my primary storage options for "everything" I'd pretty much want some assurances that it will always be there and that I can access it the same way in the future i.e. a virtual drive on any machine I use in future. If you look at the service agreement on Microsoft's website the following from point number 5 regarding "Your content" has the following paragraph in bold.

"You're responsible for backing up the data that you store on the service. If your service is suspended or canceled, we may permanently delete your data from our servers. We have no obligation to return data to you after the service is suspended or canceled. If data is stored with an expiration date, we may also delete the data as of that date. Data that is deleted may be irretrievable."

The above paragraph is just about the only thing that stops me from using SkyDrive in a serious capacity and makes me feel that the service is seen more as a convenient virtual pen drive that you can access from anywhere or share parts of it with friends than an actual long term storage solution or backup. Its aim appears to just make your data available "everywhere" through syncing maybe with Live Mesh (only 5gigs though) with the machines you use, but at the end of the day you still need to invest in a good old fashioned hard backup solution for "your stuff".

I received an invite to join the Google Plus Field Test from a friend of mine who works at Google. My first impressions of the sign up process for Google+ (or g+ as people now refer to it) was "this is rather simple" simple is good!

I suppose the beauty of Google+ is that most people have a Google Account, well lets put it this way most people in the IT industry have a Google Account and therefore a lot of the people I associate with have Google Accounts.

All Google+ asked me when I signed up was if I wanted to link my Google+ account to my PicasaWeb Albums, it automatically picked up that I had a Google Buzz account (which I seldom use). 

Logging into Google+ for the first time, you are presented with the following screen

The first thing I noted about the interface in Google+ is its pretty clean, they've done a bit of work making sure its not cluttered. Facebook has that cluttered feel to it which has probably come about by Facebook bolting on new features throughout the years as its grown organically while Google has had the chance to think about this from the ground up.

The Circles
One of Google+'s selling points is its "Circles" concept, basically a human being has many circles, they can be a circle of friends, circle of associates a family circle.you get the picture.

Google+ suggests people I have corresponded with in the past be they from Google Talk, Buzz or my GMAIL contact list.

I can also import contacts from Yahoo and Hotmail.

I can then choose to add these people to my network by dragging them into the circle I think they fit into best.

Later when I want to share content I can choose which of these circles I'd like to share my content with or just make the content public. Google appears to have carefully noted peoples annoyances with Facebook and appear to be making sure Google+ does not fall into the same security trap Facebook did in the past. (hopefully I didn't speak too soon!)

The Streams
When posting updates, Google has a concept called "Streams", the circles you placed your friends into earlier each have their own corresponding stream where anything posted by these users appear in the corresponding stream.

As on a Facebook wall you can post different kinds of content into a stream such as photos, video's, your location and links.

Trying it out for a while I quite like the Stream concept I think its very cleverly done. I also like how easy it is to see who I am sharing my content/updates with by selecting a Circle from the drop down list (see the picture).

Hangouts
Another feature I didn't get to test out (not many of my friends are online early in the morning!) is a video conferencing feature called Hangouts. You can basically open a Hangout to which you can choose which friends or Circles of friends can join at their leisure. In a Hangout you can watch YouTube videos together and video chat or text chat to each other. The video conferencing with more than one person at a time seems to be a direct competitor with Skype's premium conferencing service. I can see the potential for Google to Launch a commercial version of this tool with their business offerings.

Security
So far Google have made the security simple to understand. You can access these settings from the top right hand side of the screen.

Google carefully explains to you what can and cannot be seen, how the various features work and how to change these settings if you wish.

You are also able to see how other people might see your profile by typing in their username.

Conclusion
I have only used Google+ briefly but from what I have seen I am pretty impressed and I would love it to succeed. I know there have been a lot of anti-Facebook groups lately who are unhappy with the security in Facebook, I believe they now have a suitable alternative to choose from (albeit no one finds a gaping security hole). Will people leave Facebook in droves to join Google+ ? I am not so sure they would I believe people may sign up for both because its pretty easy to do so. Which one they may end up using the most may depend on several factors such as ease of use and where their friends hang out the most. As Google is just about everyone's search engine of choice these days the integration with their flagship search engine will probably appear seamless and easy for users to switch between.

I can foresee further integrations between Google+ and search which will help Google monetise plus. For example a friend finds a jacket they like on Google Shopping and hits a button on Google Shopping which says share with my Circle. The friends in that circle then get to see a nicely displayed update in their stream so they can click on the product and see more details. Every click in theory would earn Google AdSense revenue.

What I have found in the past is that Google often focuses on launching a product or service that at the time doesn't really make much sense until later when you see the bigger picture. If Google gets this right they could crack a large revenue stream if they get it wrong it could be yet another Wave.

Note: Please don't ask me for a Google+ invite. People in the field trial have not been given the ability to issue invites as yet.

I have just upgraded to BT Infinity and am getting a good 37meg download and about 5.28megs upload (not that happy with the upload but its better than what I used to get).

After the BT engineer installed the new modem I asked him if the BT Infinity Modem (the kit that connects you to the new socket) supports PPoE. The engineer told me it did and I asked if I could plug in my trusty FritzBox instead of using the BT Home Hub (which I was less keen on) he was quite keen to see it work as he hadn't seen one before. I plugged the FritzBox I had setup previously for PPoE WAN over LAN port 1 into the modem and within seconds everything worked! The speed at first was dreadful as I was only picking up 5meg downloads and less than a 1 meg upload. The engineer tested the line and told me he was getting 40meg down and 10meg up. I knew then it had to be the FritzBox, I took a look at the settings and discovered my upstream was set to 5megs and my downstream was around 1meg. Ah ha! I set the Upstream to 5760 kBit and the Downstream to 6400 kBits. I know these values are a bit higher than what is supported on Infinity but it seems to have done the trick in giving me 37meg down and 5.28 meg up.

There is a little guide below for those of you who have a FritzBox. Mine is a 7170 but the FritzBox's are very similar. For those that do not have a FritzBox, you just need to check if your old ADSL router supports PPoE over one of its LAN ports or sometimes referred to as a WAN port. Note this is not replacing the BT Infinity modem which supports VDSL it is just connecting another device to it, other than the BT Home Hub using a standard network cable.

How its done on the FritzBox 7170

1. Log into the admin interface on your FritzBox and click on Settings
2. Go to Advanced Settings > Internet > Account Information from the left hand menu (your router may need to be in advanced mode to see these)
3. Ensure you have the settings as illustrated in the diagram below. The important part is "Internet connection via LAN 1" and the other options should appear for you to select.Note the username is broadbanduser@btinternet.com you do not need a password.
   
   
   
4. IMPORTANT: Scrolling down the page, I set my Upstream and Downstream to the following values (below). You may need to experiment to see what gives you the better speed. Some FritzBox's may not have this setting as they may automatically configure these settings for you.
   
5. The next step is to plug LAN port 1 on the FritzBox into the BT Infinity Modem sometimes referred to as the BT OpenReach Modem. There should be some cables that came with your install to do this, otherwise a normal network cable should suffice.

That's really all there is to it, you are basically no longer using the DSL part of your FritzBox/ADSL Router you are just making use of its WAN feature, almost as if you were connecting to a cable provider.

I've been meaning to do a quick blog article about this for some time so I don't forget. I found setting up DasBlog on Windows Server 2008 pretty difficult. I currently run DasBlog on a Windows Server 2008 server with the following app pool ".Net Framework v2.0 Application pool in Integrated Mode"

One of the issues I discovered was setting up the permissions so that DasBlog could read and write the to the content folders. To do this follow the steps you find here http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/624/application-pool-identities/ 

Basically you need to give the Application Pool that DasBlog is running under, permission to these folders. So for example setting permission on the content folder to allow the following user IIS AppPool\[your app pool name] read and write access.

I read the following news article with interest about the European Unions new laws that basically state you have to ask the users consent to place a cookie on their machine.  Reading through the new legislation I found the paragraph below, which appears to be the only paragraph that refers to cookies.

"Third parties may wish to store information on the equip­ment  of a user, or gain  access to information  already stored, for a number of purposes, ranging from the legiti­mate (such as certain types of cookies) to those involving unwarranted intrusion into the private sphere (such as spy­ware or  viruses). It is therefore of paramount importance that users be provided with clear and comprehensive infor­mation when engaging in any  activity which could result in such storage or gaining of access. The methods of pro­viding information and offering the right to refuse should be as user-friendly as possible. Exceptions to the obligation to provide information and offer the right to refuse should be limited to those situations where the technical  storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of
enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user. Where it is technically possible and effective,  in accordance  with the relevant  provisions  of Directive 95/46/EC, the user's consent to processing may be expressed by using the appropriate settings of a browser or other application. The enforcement of these require­ments should be made more effective by way of enhanced powers granted to the relevant national authorities.."

If you look at the second section of highlighted text it appears an exception to this rule is when placing a cookie onto the users machine is to do with the explicit working of the service the user was expecting. So for example if you log into your banks website with a username and password the placing of a cookie onto the users machine without their consent is legitimate as the service would not work without it as the user expected. This is basically how I understood this paragraph.

What I do think will be an issue are people that use analytics packages on their websites (it is unclear if this is covered), paid for advertising and  affiliate tracking programs. I can already think of several organisations such as Google, Yahoo and even MSN/Bing that may be affected by this. I don't feel much thought has gone into this legislation and I am not too sure how this legislation will be enforced. It will not stop affiliate or tracking sites that are not hosted in the EU. It could end up with companies hosting these services or making use of services from countries outside of the EU zone to get around this issue.

One thing that is incredibly difficult to do, and that is to govern how sites work on the Internet. It is not the job of governments but of International bodies how this should work.  What the legislation cannot protect against are spyware and illegal sites making use of this information or tracking users in this way. I also feel that not much thought has gone into how this legislation would be interpreted or if it could possibly destroy how some businesses work.

A rather funny take on this new legislation can be found here

I've been reading articles about Google TV, Microsoft, Sony, BT, Sky and (now) Apple with interest regarding their push to your living room to put content on your TV.  There's a hell of a lot of content on the web and the age old issue of watching this content conveniently on your TV instead of having to fire up browsers on your PC is a problem none of the big companies appear to have really solved.

Sure you can watch some of Sky's content on your Xbox 360 now. But you won't get all of Sky's content because of content restrictions enforced by content distributors. You also won't get 4OD, BBC iPlayer or the ITV Player on this service. In addition to that you won't get YouTube, Hulu or Joost. Basically there is not one set top box that will give you all of these services through your TV without having to switch or unplug some box out of the VGA, SCART or HDMI slot on your TV. My guess is that Google are trying to address this with their new set-top box idea. Weather it will work remains to be seen, because at the end of the day it doesn't matter how fancy your platform is, content is still king.

Content distributors also hold a lot of sway, they dictate how their content can be distributed. If a channel is distributed via the Internet and over encrypted satellite in the eyes of the content provider they are separate mediums which require separate content rights. Hence Sky's problem of only being able to broadcast some of their Sky 1 shows via SkyPlayer and blocking the channels for the duration of that show for SkyPlayer customers while satellite customers get to view it.

Likewise content providers may give the writes to distribute a show over a streaming Internet Service with the caveat that it cannot be streamed to a service that connects to a TV as this right could have been solved to a terrestrial provider. This arrangement makes things incredibly difficult while all the user wants to do is watch their TV shows in the most convenient way possible.

I wish Google TV every bit of success although I am struggling to see how they will be able to offer the content we want all through one set top box. In addition to this problem when watching a series on TV sometimes people would like to start from the beginning of a series people are all raving on about. Content providers don't make it easy to get to this content and their appears to be a high amount of people using illegal downloads via services such as Bit Torrent to get to this content. The video/TV entertainment industry appears to be out of touch with how people would like to consume their content. The same thing happened in the music industry which saw a huge shift in how music was distributed which lead to services such as Spotify.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a service that held just about every movie, TV series, documentary that had ever been made, made available on demand? You could pay for the content per item or for a monthly fee have access to all of it?

Its quite interesting how Western countries have accused China of hacking into their systems. What I really can't understand is if these systems are so critical to the country and there are so many secrets on them, why put those machines on the Internet to begin with?

Its not rocket science just pull the cable that connects the server to the Internet. Have your own private network not connected in any way to the Internet.

Every now and again I hear friends talking about how popular web sites such as Facebook, My Space, Google Mail, You Tube and Bebo are blocked by their work. CatPass.info is a site that acts as a proxy to sites that have been blocked. In return  (nothing is free in this world!) you get some adverts thrown in at the top of your browser. Not a big price to pay to enable you to see these once blocked sites?

Okay after rebooting my machine twice I finally got the BBC iPlayer to work. Wehoo!

What can I say it actually works! The picture however is very "letterbox" style and not really 100% optimised for computer screens. Oh well will download some more now and see what I get. 

The BT Home Hub I have installed in place of my Conexant Hasbani router has recently started being a real pain in the ar*e. For no reason at all it will drop the Internet Connection and commence downloading updates from BT to update the firmware. It does this without disconnecting the BT Home Hub phone (one of the reasons I went for the hub) but it drops every other Internet connection.

I use the Internet a hell of a lot for work and dropping a VPN connection or a remote Citrix connection is not fun when you are in the middle of some important work. Yes I understand that BT wants to update the firmware but not when I'm using the hub and definitely not when I'm working on the damn thing! If this continues I am going to rip the damn thing out and go back to the Conexant. The Conexant is a simple bit of equipment but it works and is reliable. BT obviously weren't thinking straight when they decided to run updates on the Home Hub, and I suggest if they want this piece of equipment to be key to their new strategic idea of bringing TV, Phones and other services into the home that they had better think good and hard about standard of service. If you are going to update a piece of software you ask first you don't just disconnect people and let them lose their work.