The question arises, if we are trying to get a clear picture, how do we get a clear view? With various bodies spinning the figures this way and that, what is the actual forecast for economic growth taking current indicators into account?
The CBI have a vested interest in an accurate picture, it's much easier to make a profit if you are going with the grain, just before an economy goes into expansion is the optimum time to invest.

CBI Economic forcast pdf document

The current public view of banks is that they are good at skimming profits when times are good, but not prudent with other people's money. Never the less, if we want to know where we might be going, a good idea of where we have been helps. With that in mind then the following freely available reports may shed some light:

lloyds bank business barometer quarterly report

lloyds bank economic research latest-reports

Actually dear old Aunty comes up with the most graphically impactful digests:
BBC news economy tracker pages
If you just want to an idea of the current level of padding vs real news then:
BBC general buisness stories

Where are we going?

Well the temporary employment sector is a good barometer. Either we have done a much better job of search engine optimisation (SEO) recently or people are at least giving full consideration using our technology to do better in the future temp staffing market.

• Its here...

Their offering of 5GB (as opposed to the 2GB available elsewhere) is designed to be attractive when you cross the 2GB barrier and otherwise have to use a paid service. Some may argue this is unfair competition: that is not the issue to be discussed here, more are you giving away the family jewels?

We have trialled and abandoned a number of these services. Our main issue is their ability, every now and again to start duplicating files, overwriting later versions, or simply hanging on to a file rendering it unusable until the machine is rebooted. Maybe it's because we evaluated them earlier in their development cycle, maybe it's an inherent flaw.  Maybe we are dubious about the security of our data.

So when master of taking large "free" data and making a profit from it comes along and offers a "free" service its perhaps worth looking more closely at what you will be signing up for.

The Google T's and C's give then them the following rights:

"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones" [services].

Now these are pretty large doors that are opening on what was previously your closely guarded intellectual property. Moreover storage of your intellectual property (aka IP) will be bound by the Data Protection Act in the UK. You may well be breaking the act if you use Google's services with these wordings.

These words and attempts at copyright acquisition are not necessary. Compare Google's "do no wrong" wording with big bad Microsoft's:

"Except for material that we license to you, we don't claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don't control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service. You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service."

It seems to me that MS with their army of lawyers are taking a far fairer, tighter and more responsible approach to their terms of service than Google with their army of lawyers.

In either respect, when you use a cloud service, the servers may be outside the EU in which case the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidance and rulings will apply.

Information Commissioners Office guidance and ruling

Put simply, you may be hazarding your licence as a data bureau by using a cloud service (especially Google's with their current T's & C's) for data storage and therefore putting your company at risk.

Ava use both Microsoft's and Google's services, although not necessarily the ones referred to in this article.

Other related links

• Free tools to help you run your company
• Search engine guidance for improving the effectiveness of your web site.

Let me take a short while to explain. In general the amount of data we have "at our fingertips" is increasing at the same rate as the power of the computers which generate this data. There has been a "law" associated with this phenomenon. It's called Moore's Law. It's usually and simply associated with the ever increasing power of computer chips.

What has this go to do with T-shirts? Well these days you can make your own. But if you do, IMHO a stunning image is always helpful.

I've always been interested in Astronomy: after all, the origin of our universe is quite an important question (as questions go). And the images that come from modern telescopes are ever more stunning.

Why?

Seems a bit obvious once its pointed out. Moore's law is associated with the amount of data that we can gather about everything. These days Astronomy is powered by the same technology as computers: chips that detect light, processors that control the huge (sometimes multiple) mirrors that focus ever more accurately on the most distant objects the human race will ever see.

Lunchtime saw me browsing the article "How big data is changing Astronomy again". Now it is a bit stodgy in some ways. But one of the links led me to the good old NASA site and The Majestic Sombrero Galaxy (M104), and also the Hubble space telescope site Much as I trust NASA to understate their achievements: in this case, a few biilion stars do nicely for the word "Majestic".

For your information, there is also the index page. Just take a few minutes to browse through literally hundreds of images selected for their impact. They are available in various sizes, sometimes it takes a couple of clicks to find the right one for the T-shirt. What is really nice (to me) is that the images are largely public domain, so you can go to a "design your own T-shirt" site and legally upload a galaxy or two to display on your chest, back or indeed anywhere else the t-shirt company will print the picture!

And if you think you'd like it as your desk top wall paper then just click on the picture to go to the various resolutions available.

Changes in sick leave benefits when an employee is ill or injured

Sick leave

Changes in Maternity benefits

Maternity benefits

There have also been a reduction in red tape for accident reporting requirements (possibly no change in accidents though)

Health and safety

The condition to go to tribunal for unfair dismissal have been amended, and this is considered by most as of benefit to employers.

Employment tribunals

The actual act is here:

Employment tribunals: the Act

and lastly, reforms in work place pension law

Workplace pension reforms

Happy reading.

KPMG Report on Jobs

Privacy contexts and Girls around Me

By the way, my first programme was written using cards which required me to punch holes in them. Actually while I remember, Dad made a tool for puching the "chads" from a very small nail and a dead ball point pen by removing the empty ink holder, warming the business end of the plastic over the gas hob and pushing the nail into the soft plastic. I then had to complete the next 20 orders for the tool from the Maths teacher for the rest of the class!

• Contacting blocks of archive staff by date last worked.

Inner Temple library Blogg on Woodcock v Cumbria Primary Care Trust

A more turgid fuller account is here:

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting on Woodcock v Cumbria Primary Care Trust [2012] EWCA Civ 330; [2012] WLR (D) 97

May be useful one day...

About the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting

One of the nicest ways of putting this in context verbally is: they now hold both number 4 and number ten spots on the scale of the largest data breaches of all time. They have achieved this in the space of a few months. Indeed there have been, by reputed accounts, at least five breaches in the past 3 months.

The following site displays this graphically
http://flowingdata.com/2011/06/13/largest-data-breaches-of-all-time/
The subject can be dry, but perhaps not as dry your bank account after such a breach!

The following article is for the technically minded who are curious about how password cracking of compromised security information can be carried out.
http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/06/owasp-top-10-for-net-developers-part-7.html

It means the phrase "the data was encrypted" so often trotted out by the "Communications Director" may mean very little. Of course Sony could not even offer such a crumb of comfort, because the data was reportedly not even encrypted.

Many of our customers are NHS Trusts and we ensure that on occasion, as needed, when we are transferring data we use a secure link or path to all our customers. Simply there will be a customer employee at one end who actively permits us to access the appropriate data, and then we transfer the minimum needed number of files to our network behind our firewalls.

One other point of reference: from time to time we have computers that fail. The chassis are disposed of but we always retain the physical disks which are locked away.

To keep up with whom what and where in data breaches then there is:
http://datalossdb.org/

We are of course a registered data warehouse with the UK governement.

Added value applications Ltd
Chiltern House
45 Station Road
Henley on Thames.
RG9 1AT

The move has actually been relatively painless, thanks in part to O2 and some good work by Max in getting the network back up in a new environment.

Everybody immediately appreciated the quiet and serene atmosphere of our new surroundings.

By investing in better offices, we took the decision to continue all product development and support in house in the UK for the foreseeable future. Ava is a UK company, UK owned, UK developers and a UK based help line. As our product is core to our customers' sucess, we believe a totally UK based and UK controlled company is by far the best way to support UK customers.

All our current customers are welcome to visit (but please let us know first!). Parking in the station car park across the green (200yds) is a modest £1 for 3 hours.

Chiltern House, 45 Station Road, Henley on Thames. RG9 1AT

The details: employer's NIC, limit of £5,000 per qualifying employee, limited to 10 employees.

To apply, and to find further details: follow this link to the hmrc.gov.uk site

For a site to be successful in a commercial sense, it needs to be credible. The basics: spelling and grammar need to be correct. The aesthetics: pages need to have a standard consistent layout that is pleasing to the eye. There needs to be a solid feel about the site. Remember up till now your visitors probably have not even heard of you. There needs to be information that makes your company look like the bona fide reputable merchant it is or is trying to be. Actually there is a legal requirement for certain information. Postal address, company registration, even a privacy statement if your site has a contact page (and it should).

The web robots also know as spiders that "crawl" your site to decide on its ranking need to find what they want too.

Many SEO companies will "guarantee page 1 ranking".  Please understand this may be an empty promise. Page rank is not everything. For example, we have a page: which contains "agf kjj bk lkj" (without the spaces). There are no inbound links to it, no SEO for it. (That is why I have not printed the URL in plain text here.)  It's just an unusual collection of letters. So type or copy the letters in to your browser search (less the spaces) and you will find our single page. It may be the only page that Google finds.  Simply, page 1 ranking is not everything. It has to be page 1 for a term people are likely to search for. On the other hand, page 1 ranking for a term the people search on regularly when they want your product is gold dust.

So how do we get Page rank? It takes work, time and effort, then more time and effort. It may be your own work. It may be an SEO company's work, working for you. Whichever route you take, you need to measure your or their performance. Here are some FREE SEO tools to get you started in measuring what you or your SEO company achieve.  It typically takes a week or two on an active site to ensure new content is indexed (searchable). You should see results within a month from analytics. Once it starts moving, a little PPC campaign may help.

If you found this interesting, then this will probably interest you more:

• Free SEO tools to get you started

The back story is that Mirco had apparently noticed that someone appeared to be "stealing" his photos i.e. copying them and using them without his permission. He was understandably upset at this. So he complained to Flickr over such copyright infringements in manner designated by Flickr. If Marco was upset before, it's true to say he became incandescent at the subsequent actions of Flickr. Marco's colourful (possibly offensive to some) blog (link at the end of this blog) covers the details.

So what is the small print when using the cloud e.g. Flickr, Google Mail, Google apps, Facebook etc as far as them protecting your cherished (in some cases vital) work, data, pictures etc?

Clearly the actual wording and specific rights for storing and maintaining data may and does vary across cloud hosts, cloud applications and cloud applications account types. It's not very far from the truth to say that it always boils down to the word "sorry".

Put simply your free service does not include a free backup service. Even your low cost "Pro" account does not include a free backup service.  If your data goes missing through hardware failure in the cloud or (as it appears in this case) operator error, your comeback is nothing, rien, nichts, ziltch, niente, nada, whichever language you choose.

Why is this? Well storage is cheap and becoming cheaper, however backing up may double (at least) the cost, eating into profit margins. Even the storage costs of a recycle bin will increase operating costs at a time when margins may be pushed and buyer's decisions (for paid for services) are heavily driven by the lowest cost offering.

So let us be clear, in these situations, the term "Pro" is just part of the marketing men's way of swinging a paid premium. "Pro" does not mean a "professional" approach.  Even though "Pro" may in your mind, the mind of the paying customer, be associated with a "proper" approach. In many ways it is similar to "comprehensive" in insurance where there are five pages of exclusions for act of God etc....

So if you are looking at basing you business on a cloud offering then it is essential that you factor in backup costs of that cloud data (if possible). Even in a small commercial environment: it may be preferable to have your company data on your own computers in your own offices and backups at your own home.

Related links

Marco's colourful (possibly offensive to some) blog here.

Another take on the story here.

Mirco Wilhelm photo bloghere.

Flickr's efforts ironically in amongst the thankfully restored photoshere.

Clearly on the express edition as each edition is freely downloadable, the answer was trivial - no cost. Previously a subsequent release was also a free upgrade if the "version" or "year number" was the same. Well MS marketing have clearly got their hot sticky little hands on this because (unless you have SLA) there is an upgrade cost. The pdf details are downloadable here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/7/0/270B6380-8B38-4268-8AD0-F480A139AB19/SQL2008R2_LicensingQuickReference-updated.pdf

Normally we would answer incoming calls as Ava. However for some reason we did not. The caller said in a broken accent "Hello Mr Peetman" (sic) and began to tell me my PC was running slow and was infected with a virus and his companies' technicians could help me out. Now it is true to say that my PC was running slow: however this was because it was finishing doing its antivirus check (which as usual returned zero infections).

I decided to string this guy along. A sort of good deed for the day: whist he was talking to me he was not calling some poor sole who would be taken in by his spiel.

The patter included:

We know that in the area of Henley on Thames there are "huge amount of infections" (possibly true but doesn't mean my computers are infected).

"Your ip address is blinking in red" (If so where and under what circumstances?)

"On the main server" (Ok what main server? No answer here, so he reverted to his script- to be honest I did not hear him actually turning the pages, but there was a long pause and a change of gears.)

"We are the people who look after all the computers in USA and Canada and UK" (Well there is simply no such organisation.)

"We are authorised multinational company" (Presumably means that the boss told him (authorised) him to do the scam and is boss is one nationality and he is another?)

"This infection the red errors are boneaires, yellow warnings are virus infections" (Oh well try as i might there is no such word "boneaires" he spelt it out.) It is in the same category as "contrafibularities" from Black Adder 3 - simply made up to annoy Samuel Johnson when he delivered his first dictionary to the Prince Regent.

I was guided to a thing called the application log: this is (if you don't know) a diary that the computer keeps. If there is a real problem, then a well written program will report issues either back to the developers, record them in the transaction log, or both. On the other had Viruses work by stealth and will not usually record anything in this log if they can avoid it.

We often use information and warning entries when developing service applications to note the status of the application under test.

"Yellow warning are viruses" in the transaction log (just not true, nether are the red.)

(when in application log viewer) "don't click on any of the information entries: it will cause your machine to crash" (news to me and every other developer)
(when in performance monitor) "tell me what CPU usage is reading over the next 30 seconds: what was the last reading? That's the important one." (news to me and every other developer.)

The company said they were "ClickToFix" and gave their phone number as 02088199744 more here

Happy New Year

• An overview of the texting and bulk texting is available here.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=26435597-b28e-4568-9d16-017bdf47abdc&displaylang=en