Announcement

I have done a post on Google+ at http://scratbagroberts.livejournal.com
You're all welcome to have a look.

Parallel Worlds

The book I read to research this post was Do Parallel Worlds Really Exist? by Shan Gao which is a good book but a bit complex and which I bought from kindle. This book contains many complex equations, but the gihist of the book is that there must be an infinite number of parallel worlds which means there is an infinite number of you and me's. This also means there is an infinite number of dimensions and types of matter. We already know of matter and antimatter. There is a story that if someone jumped in a time machine and went in time to when his grandfather was a boy and shot him dead. You might wonder how that could happen and for many years almost everyone thought time travel must be impossible for that very reason. Nowadays they think time travel will eventually be acheived but that you will travel into a parallel world. Also it would be impossible to travel to a time prior to the date the time machine was built. Which is why we don't see too many time travellers in the 21st century. I'll also tell you a theory that a psychic called Bernard had which was that when a star has a nova or supernova, that the pressure and heat are so great that a new universe is formed in another dimension. I think he's probably right. When you think of it time is influenced by gravity and the velocity of something. It's worth thinking about.

Announcement

I have done a post on Online Advertising at http://scratbagroberts.blog.com
You're all welcome to have a look.

Announcement

I have done a post on The London Underground & some of the problems it faces at http://melissaball86.com
You're all welcome to have a look.

The 80/20 Principle

The book I read to research this post was The 80/20 Principal by Richard Koch which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. Even though this book has been out for a while I noticed it was no1 on the Business & Finance Book Chart on Kindle a couple of weeks ago. What this book is about is that if you are a business typically 80% of what you sell will be bought by 20% of your customers. Sometimes it will be closer to a 70/30 principal but we see it over and over again in statistics. This is called Pareto's Principle and was first discovered in Mussolini's Italy where in the wake of the war it was forgotten. Then in the 50's an american rediscovered it but no one in american industry was interested. He then found a receptive audience in Japan and he spent a long time there doing lectures. When everyone was starting to ask why was Japanese industry doing so well he finally found a receptive audience in the west.
Basically what this means for business is you should make sure you please the 20% who buy most of your product. You should try and identify this 20% and maybe send them special offers to try and entice them to buy more. A lot of companies use a loyalty scheme where maybe they credit your account with points when you buy something and let you redeem that at a later stage. You should also tailor new products and services to and make sure they satisfy this 20%. Also a good idea is to check they are happy with your company. Something a lot of companies is why aren't the majority of customers buying more and then work on this. This is certainly an interesting book.

Amazon Storage Gateway

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Storage Gateway User Guide which is an excellent book which I downloaded for free from kindle. Storage Gateway has 2 main uses, one is if your server is down you can use it as a virtual server and run your applications from it, the other is as an archive for putting your business data on. It works in conjunction with Simple Storage Service S3 & Elastic Compute Cloud EC2. You need either Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Red Hat Linux 5 on your network computers. In addition you need VMware ESXi Hypervisor on your server and vSphere client on each workstation. You need a fast online connection & normally your servers will need iSCSI storage. A lot of companies use storage to tape like travan cartridge in addition to storage on the cloud. Normally you will use one of the software development kit in a language like java to make Storage Gateway do what you want. This book has loads of explanations of things like the error messages you may encounter. Far too many to write about here. If you have a 100GB of data but only 10GB changes that is all that is uploaded which makes things quite efficient. I have done posts on Amazon Simple Storage Service & Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud at http://scratbag.me 

Announcement

I have done a post on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud at http://scratbagroberts.net
You're all welcome to have a look.

Rail 300

The book I read to research this post was Rail 300 by Murray Hughes which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book was written in 1988 so is a bit dated but quite interesting. It is about the fastest train in the world race and how trains have reached 300 kph. The City of Truro was the first train to reach 100 mph in 1904 and at that time they thought trains wouldn't get any faster. The fastest steam train was of course the Mallard which was restored in 1986. For a long time Britain led the world in high speed trains, there was of course Deltics introduced in 1962. That changed when Japan introduced the Bullet Train in 1964. The cost was so huge they needed help from the IMF to cover the cost. It instantly set a new standard for train travel. They built 5 railway lines initially including the Tokyo - Osaka & Tokyo - Sapporo. This was the first railway to introduce double decker carriages. The TGV in France is even faster  and much of Germany, Switzerland and other places are connected by this service. In Italy Fiat has developed Pendolino trains which are used on the InterCity routes in Britain among other things. In Britain the InterCity 125 is the fastest diesel train in the world. In Spain their high speed train tilts allowing it to go faster around corners. In Australia their high speed train looks just like the APT & is called the XTR. In America the amtrak isn't as fast as some of its rivals.

iMacs

The book I read to research this post was iMacs: Portable Genius 3rd edition by Guy Hart-Davis which is a very good book which I borrowed from the library. This book mostly looks at OSX Lion the operating system for iMacs. Apparently the latest ones sport a 27 inch monitor. Apple has its own proprietary system for external hard drives called thunderbolt which typically runs at 1.5 GB/Sec. It's also compatible with firewire and USB 2.0 although they are slower. The operating system features a display of a desk onto which are icons of various apps or mini programs. Extra apps can be downloaded from the internet especially itunes. You can have a dual booting imac with Microsoft Windows as well. No one has found a way of making OSX work with a PC. Intel make the processors for imacs and most PCs. If you run an imac with windows it's much more resistant to viruses. Most viruses are specifically designed to infect a PC running windows because that's the most common type of computer. You can make video calls with facetime to things like iphones and ipads and mail is used for email. Many people set up accounts with mobileme and icloud which are free. If you use itunes one account is limited to 5 computers but a way around it if you have a bigger network is to make one of them computers a server which you can access from any computer on your network. Like windows you can have individual accounts for members of your family and if you download things like ebooks and music you can import them into each account so everyone has access.

Announcement

I have done a post on Amazon Elastic MapReduce at http://scratbagroberts.xanga.com
You're all welcome to have a look.

Amazon Cloudwatch

The book I read to research this post was Cloudwatch A Getting Started Guide which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. To use Cloudwatch you need an Amazon Web Services account which you can get at http://aws.amazon.com and you have to fill in your details and then you get an automated phone call which gives you a pin number which you must enter on your phone. You have to install the java plugin, at least v1.5 which you can get at http://java.com
You have to install a program which lets you use Cloudwatch on your workstation and the procedure varies according on whether you run windows or linux. If you need to do that I recommend that you read this guide as it's quite complicated. Cloudwatch basically works with Elastic Compute Cloud which will be your virtual server, and Simple Notification Service, if you choose to be notified by email. It also works with Auto Scaling in that you can define what you want it to do under circumstances. For example say if the processor reaches 90% output, you might tell it to open another instance of EC2 & notify you via SNS. Don't forget if you're using EC2 you need to supply an operating system. I saw a windows server 2008 dvdrom for £23.99 on http://amazon.co.uk which I thought is quite cheap.

Announcement

I have done a post on The Elements - A Short Introduction by Phillip Ball at http://scratbagroberts.com
You're all welcome to have a look.

Rapid Transit Railways

The book I read to research this post was The Rapid Transit Railways of the World by Henry F Howson which is an excellent book which I bought from a secondhand bookshop. This book was written in 1971 so maybe rather out of date but I like the fact that it examines this type of railway on a city by city basis. This type of railway is typically underground and electric although in many cities they have some routes that are either overground or cuttings made into the rock. London had the first underground railway which happened to be steam in 1863. The first electric underground railway was also built in London in 1890. Having an electric system didn't require extensive ventilation and also enabled them to build it deeper under the ground. The London system was also the first to be predominantly underground. It's interesting to note most of the London Underground was built by 1906. They would need an eleven lane highway to bring in the amount of people per hour into London on 1 route assuming there's an average of 2 per car that the Underground Train brings in on 1 route per hour. Toronto had the first Underground Railway in America. I think New York has the most extensive Underground Network in the world although much of it isn't underground. China of course is rapidly catching up & Tokyo has a very extensive network. An interesting fact is when Berlin was divided both parts had an underground system but in East Berlin many of the stations were disused and the trains wouldn't stop at them. That's probably been remedied since it was unified.

Announcement

I have done a brand new post on Windows 8 at http://scratbag.me
You're all welcome to have a look.

Announcement

I've only just noticed the last blog I did should have been Auto Scaling not MapReduce the rest of it's accurate though. I apologize about that.

Amazon MapReduce

The book I read to research this post was Amazon MapReduce Developer Guide which is an excellent guide and which was a free download from kindle. The idea behind this service from Amazon is it works primarily with Elastic Compute Cloud and say if you run a website and it gets a lot of traffic at the weekend you can configure how many instances and other things like total memory are used. Say if you are a company you might have instances open that you aren't using ie a database at weekends and you can set rules for how this is managed. Often if it has to shut down instances it will either shut down the ones that have been open the longest or ones that haven't been configured within MapReduce. A frequent setting is to set that when the processor reaches 90% output a new instances is opened. Another frequent setting is it will try and keep your total down by trying not to have any extra instances open for more than an hour. You can use it with Cloudwatch and/or SNS or Simple Notification Service that let you know what is happening. Also if you are repairing it and don't want instances going off continously you can suspend it. You have to install java before you can use it which has to be at least version 5 which you can get from http://sun.com
Alternatively you can use the Amazon Java Development Kit. You will often use a command line and there is an API command line tool you can install on your computer. Also don't forget if you are using Elastic Compute Cloud you need to provide a Windows Server 2008 operating system.

Announcement

I have done a post on Business Intelligence at http://scratbagroberts.livejournal.com
You're all welcome to have a look.

Bad Pharma

The book I read to research this post was Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Ben is a doctor in England so a lot of this book is from an english perspective. This book is about that when a new drug is approved it often has no advantages over existing drugs and many have horrendous side effects the logic of the powers that be being that they should give doctors plenty of choice. Many of these so called drug trials are suppressed if they give bad results for a drug. Many drug trial results are never published and if they give bad results and are published the data is often skewed. An example of this is maybe a drug is ineffective but found a good result for chinese people between 55-75 years old even though it's ridiculous. It may be there was only a small number in the group that match that criteria but all the same it's published. Interestingly the drug companies spend more money advertising drugs than they do on research. Many doctors were trained 20 years ago when the medical treatment system was completely different and they turn to journals often owned by the drug companies for the latest information. Also if they receive training it's often provided by the drug companies by people who promote their products. Most people in the medication industry mean well but it does need policing more stringently. Drug companies often test drugs on homeless people who are desperate for the payment or people in third world countries who often aren't informed they are guinea pigs. Some doctors take payments off the drug companies and in Britain they don't need to declare it to anyone. As you can probably see there is a lack of impartial drug data. This book is a pretty interesting read.

Announcement

I have done a post on Flying High which is a biography of David Neeleman the founder of JetBlue at http://scratbagroberts.blog.com
You're all welcome to have a look.

Announcement

I have done a post on Online Marketing at http://scratbagroberts.net
You're all welcome to have a look.

The Blog Business

The book I read to research this post was The Blog Business Book by Tom Corson-Knowles which is one of the best books I have read about blogging and which I downloaded for free from kindle. I think anyone with a blog should download this book. Tom uses wordpress on his own server for his blogging platform but there's so much information about promoting your blog. First of all you should get the alexa plugin for your browser which gives you a ranking for any site you visit. If you want to monetize your blog try http://cj.com or http://clickbank.com or http://glam.com
He recommends that you do guest blogging on other sites to promote your blog and also advertise on craigslist for some guest bloggers but only pay them $10 per 500-1,000 words. You should get a product page on facebook, and pages on twitter & pinterest. Assuming you are running wordpress you should get the facebook comments plugin which allows people on their to comment on your blog. Get the shareaholic plugin which works with social bookmarking sites. You should sign up to tweetadder which simplifies doing tweets  on twitter. You should post at least 3 updates per day on facebook and 20 on twitter. Get the pinterest plugin. Get the all in one seo pack for wordpress which helps search engines find your site. You need the facebook plugin. You need the fast secure contact form which enables people to contact you. You need the akismet plugin. You need google xml sitemaps which helps google index your site. You need jetpack lite which gives you site statistics. You need post layout which is a HTML editor for wordpress. You need bookmark share which works with social bookmarking sites. You need tweet meme retweet which retweets your posts. You need aweber which lets people sign up to an email list and finally if you intend doing video you need easy webinar plugin. Finally you also need to update your blog on a regular basis.

Technology

I read the latest edition of New Scientist magazine because I'm going to do a post on some of the articles in it. Incidently it's a great magazine. First of all there's much mineral mining going on in the arctic and potentially there could be a lot more. Both the arctic and antarctic are mineral rich. At kiruna in arctic sweden is the worlds largest underground iron ore mine. Much of this town has had to be relocated nearer the mine disrupting wildlife even more. Svalbard & Cambridge Bay are now tourist attractions. In fact now the arctic ice has diminished to such an extent which is partly due to a major storm breaking up some of the ice and not just global warming, but now they are doing cruises around the arctic and not just with an icebreaker leading the way like in the olden days. As the earth has warmed up there has been a noticeable migration of many fish northwards and no one has jurisdiction over these seas so they're liable to be fished to death. In the far north of canada they are mining gold, diamonds, platinum & lithium. In fact a lot of governments think the arctic is the answer to our prayers as far as natural gas & crude oil are concerned. Another issue is the british government is cutting funding to research in antarctica so obviously if a large ice sheet breaks off and melts, thus causing a rise in the sea level, we won't know until it's too late.
Apparently there's a form of salmonella that can be spread from person to person. Salmonella isn't much of a problem for people who are normally healthy but in africa which is where this type of salmonella is spreading, many people have AIDS and are dying from this. Apparently more logging is going on than official figures state and much of it is connected to organised crime. The amount of logging worldwide is increasing not decreasing. NASA are experimenting with technology with microbes that can produce things like plastics and fuel. These microbes could be carried quite easily by a spaceship maybe to mars and would save having to carry a load of fuel. Scientists are trying to synthesize a pain killer from black mamba venom which would be stronger than morphine but not be addictive or cause trouble breathing. Finally scientists in new zealand are developing a cow that can produce milk that is suitable for infants who are allergic to milk. Health and safety protocols prevent them from tasting it at this stage. Apparently the cow has no tail and no one understands why.

Adobe Muse

The book I read to research this post was Brilliant Muse by Ted LoCascio which I borrowed from the library and is an excellent book. Believe me these Brilliant books are pretty good they just show you the steps you need to perform a task and they show you lots of screenshots. As you probably know Adobe do Dreamweaver which is the best web page creation software bar none even if it was originally Macromedia who first created it. To use Dreamweaver requires quite a bit of knowledge of HTML which is somewhat complex and if somebody is primarily a designer they might care much for that. With Muse it is less dependent on HTML and so you can do your site with a few button clicks and visually. I haven't checked the Adobe.com site to check the pricing but in this book it is $14.95 a month if you have it on a yearly basis or $49.95 if you have it on a month by month basis. In addition I think you can try it out for a month free to see if you like it. It's cloud computing but you download and they keep updating it. I think it works out better value than Dreamweaver which I think works out at about £350.00 . I'm going to write a little bit about how you install it. You go to Adobe.com, click buy under the relevant article, you select whether you are buying it on a monthly or yearly basis, click Add to cart, then click checkout twice followed by sign in then fill in the fields, click review order and finally place order. That sets up a Muse subscription. Then you want to install Muse, you click download, click join the creative cloud, click start for free, which gives you a free month to see if you like it. You enter a password and ID, click sign in, accept, Muse, download, click ok to download the Adobe Application Manager, click save file, double click the file icon, double click the installer. Enter your ID & password, click sign in, accept and then click the Adobe Muse Install button. It should then install it on your system and then to start it simply click on the relevant program on the program menu of your computer.

Amazon Glacier

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Glacier Service Developer Guide which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. Glacier is an Amazon cloud service that lets you store large amounts of data that you rarely use cheaply. As a result the download and upload process is slow. This type of storage is called cold storage. If you require frequent or fast access use S3 or Simple Storage Service. You store the data in 4gb parts and there can be upto 10,000 of these per account. You have a choice of which server farm you wish to use. The default is Virginia, USA. You can use the visual studio, .net or java software data kits with it and if you are storing anything like photos will have to do some programming to make it work. A job or uploading 4gb of data will typically take 4 hours. The blocks of files are called vaults and you can delete a vault. If someone tries to access a vault that is in the process of being deleted as long as their request is processed before the vault is deleted they will be able to use it. There is a console in Glacier but a lot of your work is done in Request API. Glacier will typically be used with Simple Notification Service ie it will tell you when an upload is complete, and Simple Queque Service  which will queque the upload or download up with what other people are doing. 

Technology

I have just been looking at New Scientist magazine trying to find something to do a blog on. Apparently on british television they're doing an experiment where people are given MDMA and their brains are scanned. They know all about the long term effects of MDMA use but this experiment has never been done before. Some of the participants will be celebrities who will be interviewed about their experiences. There will be commercial rocket launches from Virginia to the International Space Station soon presumably delivering cargo and supplies. The launchpad is trying to get NASA verification & have developed a rocket called Antares & will be the first commercial one in the world. It has been proven that the least efficient shape to pack in a square box is a 3d sphere. No other shape is less efficient. The police probably in a few years will be able to construct a photo-fit from a persons DNA. This technology is still in its infancy but looks promising. In Switzerland scientists have photographed atomic bonds using an atomic force microscope that was modified. They photographed carbon molecules. A comet went through the suns corona and amazingly passed through it but 2 hours later had melted in the extreme heat. At the Technical University of Munich they have been developing a biometric application that can recognise someone by how they walk or their gait. They have achieved 80% accuracy. In 20-30 years there may be floating offshore cities far out at sea. The first ones will probably just be converted passenger liners. They think the optimal population at which they can become self sustaining is 20,000-100,000. The first ones may be built off brazil, west africa and the galapagos. 

Deleting Personal Information About You On The Internet

The book I read to research this post was Deleting Personal Information About You On The Internet by Jim McNab which is an excellent book which I think I downloaded for free from kindle. Jim has worked as a private investigator and knows a heck of a lot about tracing people online. This book is intended to help you protect your privacy on the internet and also avoid misinformation being spread about you. There is a free site called zanosearch where you can check things like someones current & previous addresses. They make their money from advertising. Several civil liberties groups are trying to have it shut down but that could take years. You can opt out of their searches by clicking privacy at the bottom of their page but you also have to prove who you are, which means scanning documents and sending them a copy. A company called intelious will do a detailed search for $39.95 which will even tell you the area of their dwelling in square metres. Their is probably a lot of information about you on social networks and it's quite likely your friends have given mentions about you. Obviously if you no longer use a social network you should delete your account. You should try googling your name and any variations of your name. Try putting your name in speech marks, use the add symbol and also put your location in speech marks and do a search. A trick among criminals who change their identity is to pick a common name so as to make the investigators job more difficult. You can also search for any email addresses you have in google. Another option is google alerts which alerts you about a specified subject each time anything appears on the web about it. The specified subject can be your name or email address.

Organisation's Don't Tweet People Do

The book I read to research this post was Organisations don't Tweet People do by Euan Semple which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I'll tell you a story a friend of mine works for the Health Service in Britain and his job is mainly taking handicapped people shopping, if their house or flat needs cleaning he does it or if they need to see a doctor he takes them. His job title is community support worker. Anyway every morning he has to see his boss at their head office 8 miles from where he lives and then he has to see his patients. The politically correct term is clients. That visit takes up a lot of his time and of course sometimes he has to visit his head office during the day which takes up even more of his time. He has a mobile phone supplied with his job but any detailed discussion has to be done face to face. Now another problem is he doesn't like technology so he wouldn't be keen on having to learn new software although he does have to enter notes into a computer at their head office. I suggested to him that his organisation ought to subscribe to salesforce.com which is contact management software and they ought to each have their own blog on wordpress obviously password protected but which each member of staff could access. They could have wordpress on their own server and give each employee a laptop and smartphone. I reckon they'd be much more efficient and save time not to mention fuel. His reply was it's a good idea and I can see where you're coming from but if it's not broke I ain't fixing it. Obviously he's got concerns about having to learn wordpress and salesforce.com but I think it's a shame. I thought I'd share that with you. Of course if he was in a business they'd have to stay competitive.
Now we'll get back to the book this is about social media in a general way with little about the intricacies of technology. A lot of it is about how businesses are benefiting from social networking. Euan worked for the BBC and while he was there they started a forum which was a similiar kind of thing to google groups. They were one of the early forerunners of this technology and at the beginning the features were a bit limited. This forum grew to 25,000 members. In his job at the BBC it was important to cultivate lots of contacts. They encountered lots of problems in his work and because he was heavily involved in social media he always knew someone who could solve a problem or someone who knew someone who knew someone who could solve the problem. He gives the example of they were trying to use a television camera they were unfamiliar and he did a tweet to his 5,000 followers for help, within half an hour they had 3 replies that told them what settings they needed. Also especially with social networking that lets you stay in touch with friends and family, it increases your quality of life. Many jobs have an uncertain future. Many trades become obsolete every year. I know someone who was telling he did an apprenticeship in creating carpet dyes. Nowadays the carpet fiber is sent to the carpet manufacturer already dyed. So the job he trained for is obsolete and he had to train for another career. 

Announcement

I have done a post on Good to Great by Jim Collins which is a book on proactive employees and companies. It's at http://scratbagroberts.xanga.com