What is collaborate|2009?
A one day event for third sector organisations and their partners. An opportunity to explore ways of working more effectively together, with a focus this year on the help availalable to secure stability in the face of the economic downturn.
Sessions include:
Initiatives from Office of the Third Sector
Support from Charity Bank
Use of social media
Collaborating for funding
The work of the Regional ICT Champions

this is the third/fourth of these I have attended and they are well worth it, interesting presentations and people
http://collaborate2009.ruralnet.org.uk/

A little snow (well the most in 18 years) stops the UK in its tracks

Broadband is the saving grace with many working from home, but the network is taking a pounding as never before.

My car this morning

I must be getting old, Windows 1.0 was released on 20th November 1985 hence it’s twenty three years old today!

It’s nearly as old as my youngest daughter! Have I really been playing with GUI interfaces for that long!

See Steve Lamb’s blog here, he references a Register article with this picture:

After a two month wait (negotiating with phone companies) I have now got my Samsung Omnia, lovely phone but so far two things wrong:

1. Screen goes blank and phone appears dead, but is still alive! Seems others have the same problem, my research obviously wasn’t good enough.
   Modaco blank-screen-of-death
   With  this fault it might have to go back as I can’t tell who is calling when it has gone off, stopping me prioritizing client work.
2. Microsoft have made the remote desktop client optional for phone vendors, guess what Samsung have missed it out as well. There are downloads so this is not a show stopper.
   Downloaded an MS version from PDAPhone that works, thanks

My heartfelt congratulations to Lewis Hamilton and McLaren on winning the 2008 Formula One World Drivers Championship , although not sure my nerves really with stood the last few laps!

(picture clipped from excellent www.itv-f1.com website coverage, long may it continue, the BBC will have to work very hard to meet the challenge in 2009).

Full story on the excellent blog http://blogf1.co.uk/ or hear all about it at http://sidepodcast.com

Commiserations to Felipe Massa, I shudder to think what he went through after celebrating for 15 seconds!

Congratulations to Ferrari on winning the Constructors title.

In a post on Business Blog Consulting Krishna De of BizGrowthNews has written a very good article about why you should put a blog within your site, like this, rather than having the blog hosted on one of the many hosting platforms.

Graham Jones of http://www.grahamjones.co.uk slightly disagreed with Krishna and pointed to two videos he had made on www.changingblogger.com which showed you can make a blogger site look like part of your main website. This argument was shot to pieces by clicking the first comment on Graham’s site in that you went to the Blogger commenting platform well away from the hosting pages.

Platforms such as WordPress hosted on your own website with your own domain can be used to make a very presentable branded professional website, and with all the plugins available let you include a blog with comments, podcasts, videos and slideshows.

Paul M Tate

Organisations have to be careful of how they dispose of any IT equipment, not just their PC’s and hard disks, anything with writeable flash memory that can store settings can be a security threat.

In this ITPro article, “Second-hand VPN leads to security breach at council” Kirklees Council were caught out by their disposal policy and a Cisco VPN device was bought on EBay for £1 which when turned on it logged into the council’s servers, giving access to the network as though they had plugged in a cable inside the data centre.

Kirklees council commented that there were “multiple layers of security” needed to access data, but this is a big first step of taking those layers down.

That factory reset switch is your friend.

As a member of the Institute’s member communications working group I would welcome your views on the revamped icaew.com website

I believe it looks crisper and fresher, but can you use it better than before?

The problem used to be that there was so much information on there that you couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

Another criticism was about needing to know your ICAEW membership number and password for some pages and not others, has this changed for what you need?

I wasn’t sure whether to comment on the horrendous decision in Spa exacerbated by the non argument in Paris. If I argued in favour of Lewis/McLaren then I would be a partisan Englishman, if I spoke up for Ferrari then the same.

BUT I felt I had to put something down about the way the FIA wastes our time, if they knew at Spa that the appeal was inadmissible why oh why did they have to go through the farce of taking everybody to Paris argue their case for dismissal and then say sorry we can’t accept/reject your arguments as the appeal is inadmissible in the first place. Surely the FIA lawyers could have said that before convening the appeal hearing.

I can understand a drive through penalty being final, there is some debate before the penalty has to be applied, but once it has happened then fine, you can’t undo it. But the last five laps rule needs to be changed especially if the judgement on the infringement is made in the stewards room hours after the presentations.

If the FIA felt that the arguments for admissibility had to be made, why was the Tonio Liuzzi case not taken as a precedent? The fact that the Japanese GP case was heard at all and this one not will come back and bite the FIA at some time in the future

From Autosport.com

27. The Court, in a judgment of 12 October 2007 rendered in the Toro Rosso case concerning the 2007 Japanese Grand Prix (driver Vitantonio Liuzzi), concluded, in similar circumstances, that the appeal against a decision to impose a 25- second penalty was admissible. However, none of the parties concerned had raised the inadmissibility of the appeal in that case, the FIA for its part leaving the matter to the sovereign appreciation of the Court. Therefore, the Court was able, in the conclusion of its decision, to declare the appeal admissible, but it did not give reasons for its decision on the issue, as the question was not debated. Consequently that judgment does not present itself as settled law with respect to this question and does not bind the Court in the present case.

Obviously the FIA can decide whether to argue against something or not, ie they can ignore their own rules when they want to! The higher profile the case and the more the FIA looks to find a way to win, whereas if its lower down the grid they ignore their own rules!

The fact that the FIA said there Chief Steward at Japan had made, and admitted to, making a mistake seems very odd as well.

From timesonline:

In a surprise submission to the court, which will only fuel the belief among Hamilton’s supporters that the sport’s governing body is biased against him, McLaren revealed that FIA officials misrepresented the views of Tony Scott Andrews, the chief steward at last year’s Japanese Grand Prix, in correspondence sent only three days before yesterday’s hearing.

In an e-mail sent to McLaren’s lawyers on Friday, the FIA claimed that Scott Andrews had admitted that he had been wrong to impose a time penalty on Tonio Liuzzi, the Italian driver, in Japan and that Scott Andrews had confirmed as much in a phone conversation with Charlie Whiting, the Formula One race director, that day.

….

The court heard that McLaren were not content to take the FIA’s word on this critical matter and sent officials to Brands Hatch race track in Kent on Sunday, when Scott Andrews was officiating at a touring car meeting, to check if he had agreed that he had made a mistake. Scott Andrews was adamant that he had not and offered to put his views in writing to the court.

In a submission that makes embarrassing reading for the FIA, which has come under fire for its perceived bias against McLaren and Hamilton, Scott Andrews said that he was “extremely surprised by the content” of the FIA’s e-mail, which he described as “grossly inaccurate and misleading”. He also said that at no time during his conversation with Whiting had he been asked if he had made a mistake in imposing a time penalty on Liuzzi. “Had he [Whiting] done so, the answer would have been ‘no’,” Scott Andrews wrote.

In his closing speech to the court, Mark Phillips, QC, representing McLaren, described the matter as an “unfortunate exchange”. Clearly not wishing to rub the FIA’s nose in it, he added: “I ask you to reflect on that when you come to consider the way in which certain members of the FIA conducted themselves. I won’t say any more than that.”

I, personally, think McLaren should “rub the FIA’s nose!

Well on to Singapore where there isn’t any precedent.

Why oh why do mobile phone contracts have to be so difficult to evaluate.

My contract is up for renewal, so far my provider has admitted to making several mistakes in the history he has pulled up making each quote he has given me next to useless. I make an enquiry about using a Blackberry and lo the cost is 5 times that given on a major providers website.

Is it so difficult to quote for five phones and a 3G broadband package, where I only want to replace 3 phones and have mobile email for two.

Now I need to do the call evaluations that I thought my supplier was doing, to ensure he has done it properly.

Phones I have been looking at range from my Nokia E61 replacement the E71, the Samsung Omnia, Blackberry Curve and a Nokia E66/6220.