Nominet 4th Annual Conference 2010 Morning Session.
One of the things that I am immensley proud of is that the company I work for is a nominet registrar. That is I act as an agent for clients to register a domain with nominet. When you register a .uk domain regardless of who it is they will be a nominet registrar.
So last November my MD and myself went down for the 4th annual conference which was hosted in the Science Museum. The moderator for the day was Sarah Montague from the Today programme on the radio.
We started with the introduction and a celebration of 25 years of the .uk register. It boggles my mind that in 1985 a couple of individuals registered the first .uk domains. I mean I was still in junior school. Nominet itself was started in 1996 after the register has grown to 26000 domain names. This register had been maintained by a handful of volunteers who vetted and checked each registration.
But we are in the age that looks to the future, so the morning keynote was from Johnathon Margolis, who is a technical journalist for the Financial Times and an author. He started speaking about 4G mobile internet and the fact that you can get 100mbps when years ago the very idea of mobile tech being able to do this (at a time of 9.6kbps speeds on modems ) was laughable. 4G will be due out in 2012, current testing in a pub got 70mbps. Nice.
Of course the general point of Johnathon’s talk was that Technology experts get it wrong, but people who are generalists with imagination will get it nearly right. Jules Verne made a prediction that was very much pointing towards the current delivery of MP3, except Verne described it as music will get pumped via a main pipe into a house from a music factory. (Hmm, bit XFactor really).
There is also now a hydrogen powered motorbike out, however clean and nice the technology is, the infrastructure is not there for it to be taken up by the masses. There is only one filling station in South London and it takes 15 minutes to fill up a motorcycle tank. Hmmm, as Johnathon points out you can see how this would cause a huge time sync with a car, 30 minutes to fill a tank. You can also see why oil forecourts will not stock it yet either really. Johnathon pointed out that as electric vehicals are quiet pedestrians could get knocked over and as electric cars will be required to have a sound he made his prediction: Car Ringtones, it makes sense, people will want their own sounds to make their cars sound unique. Makes me shudder really, although to be fair, car modders with their stereos already have their own ringtones so to speak.
I wonder that with all the doom mongering about flood planes and global warming that perhaps there will be a product that lifts your house up and down on hydraulic lifts to be like stilt houses.
Johnathon also explored the idea of the fact that facebook now has to deal with familys wishing to leave their facebook page online as a memorial. It reminds me of one of Anne McCaffery’s short stories about Students proccessing dead peoples online storage and data with the moral implications. Of course the fact that you leave a digital footprint online whenever you use your smartphone, online services or a credit card you leave something of yourself. The opinions of people online are already surviving their death, in greater numbers. It also reminds me of the current premise for Scify channels Caprica, where one of the characters is an avatar created from information including, school, medical records, bank statements etc.
The slightly sci-fi imaginings continued with the possibilities of conscious machine intelligence and what rights they have. Whats more some professors are already pondering this issue.
The panel afterwards was rather thought provoking as well. Phillip Sheldrake of 6UK was of the opinion that the internet is about due for a midlife crisis and that in 10 years Facebook will be on it’s way out. The next stage of the internet is the semantic web, which is understanding the data on the internet. Internet Nomads are less worried about computers than they are about the connection to websites and other people. IPV4 is running out of address space only 4 billion addresses available and there are currently 7 billion people on the planet. IPV6 can handle way more than that. Any device in the future like your fridge (if you want it to order stuff for you or tell you what’s in it) will need a human readable address, that will use a domain name.
There are also some rather interesting issues for writers that use some online services when doing their writing planning. Who owns it, the online company that owns the tool that collates your notes or the writer/writers estate when they pass away. Of course the workforce of tomorrow are teenagers today, one of the Facebook executives have postulated that every 5 years that those people will want a wipe clean button to delete their past. Not truly possible, and if it was then I can think of a rather nasty possibility that someone will take that data now, store it and then offer it as a checking service to employers. If I suspect this then I also think that there is a pretty good chance that there is a start-up somewhere preparing to do just that.
My apologies Pandora, however the box is open.
Sam Leith of the Evening Standard and Wall St New was up next. He reminded me of Hugh Grants foppish acting in Notting Hill and the like. But Sam soon won me over by talking about the future of online privacy. It’s a fairly new concept when you think about the whole of human history. We were used to bringing up our children in large family groups publicly, that’s changed quite a bit.
The concept of privacy can be dated to the Protestant reformation, by the idea that worshiping and your relationship with God should be private. There is a pressure on Privacy on the Outer/Inner-self. It’s all starting to become public again. This pressure happens because the goal is to make life easier, and people trade privacy for this and other benefits like power and influence. The state applies “systematic pressure” to make it easier for civil servants to do their job. People are willing to use Oyster cards as there is a reward in reduced fares, but the data from the journey’s you take are stored somewhere.
The trouble is that people have a trust in the database that they should not. Errors creep in. The DNA database alone has half a million errors, imagine the implications for miscarriages of justice because of this false trust. In addition to this databases can walk, people carry copies on memory sticks and laptops and loose them. That data can be sold on elsewhere. People use supermarket loyalty cards, which is a real boon for the supermarkets as they can get marketing data for free. They are also quite free to sell that on. Even if you have indicated that you do not wish them to.
The panel continued on much the same subject so In addition I learned from the information commission office that you don’t own your medical records for example, the Secretary of State does. The public has no control over what data is stored and what any government does with it. No recourse. Frightening isn’t it?
The Dangers of Easy Electronic Communication
I have just created another twitter account so that I can post to LinkedIn using Twitter. There are a few reasons for this. But it’s mainly to enable me to update my network status for LinkedIn from Tweetdeck.
I like Tweetdeck. Admittedly Tweetdeck is not Open Source. I got introduced to it at Social Innovation Camp Scotland 2009. I run multiple Twitter accounts from it, some personal, some organizational. It’s an extremely powerful tool enabling you to follow mentions of a subject or users. Plus I can be logged in to multiple accounts at once. It’s running nicely on my upgraded Karmic Koala Kubuntu Laptop as it runs on Adobe Air so it’s not a tool dependent on the operating system, you just have to make sure that you can run Adobe applications on your chosen system.
The trouble is that so many social networks are actually trying to connect to each other now. Since I am trying to be more accessible to groups that I am professionally socializing with I want to connect up with them in anyway that I can. Although then there is the worry of posting the wrong thing, at the wrong time, to the wrong audience. Admittedly this could still happen on Tweetdeck, I’ve added in my Facebook and Myspace accounts as well. You trade off on a higher risk for more convenience.
I have a net-name that I have been using for years. For the non business socializing, it was used at first for all of my on-line interactions. It’s easy enough for someone to google that and know that it’s me. Which is not always a good thing. I’ve been using the onepict blog to post about Open Source and how it affects my and my dealings with other people. I’m very easy to find on-line now. I don’t however want to pollute my on-line CV (which LinkedIn effectively is) with my social tweets. Especially the ones from down the pub.
So I have created a new twitter account @onepict. My LinkedIn profile points at this website and I have a LinkedIn button on here. People will still know who I am and will connect my other on-line identity to me. In-terms of what people can find on the Internet, a mildly net-savvy person will find you. They will be able to join the dots. I don’t however have to put a great big light bulb flashing sign on my CV about my past net history though. They need to work a bit harder than that.
Once I have some more tweets that are appropriate I will change the Twitter feed from my @shandydann one. I’m planning a more personal website that’s for the non Open Source part of my life anyway so the @shandydann Twitterfeed will sit on my shandydann.com site anyway.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve gone too far with the on-line mullarkey.
Using the Internet Classifieds to Rent out a flat.
I’d recently finished doing up the flat so that I could rent it out. I had considered using a factoring agency to fix the flat and rent it out for me. But in the end I ended up getting the flat upt o spec and arranging for it to be rented.
I managed to get the flat rewired up to standards which included a mains wired smoke alarm and the carbon monoxide detector. I also got my gas fire looked at as I had been informed when the kitchen was put in, that it needed to be fixed or replaced. As it turns out the person who had condemned the fire was wrong to as I got another qualified gas guy to look at it and he did not understand how it was condemned in the first place. Brett also did up the bathroom by tiling it and replacing the shower head and rail.
With this done we put up an advert in gumtree and waited. At first we did an advert without pictures. We managed to get some responses. However we re-posted the advert with pictures, which got some more attention.
The advert was roughly worded like this:
Bright Spacious 1 Bedroom Flat with Dining Kitchen.
10 minutes minutes walk to the city centre and 5 minutes walk from the beach. Close to two supermarkets, two cinemas and 3 gyms. 5 minutes walk to King Street for easy access to Bridge of Don and Altens. Also handy for Buses to Garthdee. Easy distance for Aberdeen University and The Robert Gordon University City Centre Campus.
Rent £amount per month short Assured tenancy with option to renew, 1 month deposit, plus 1 month in advance. Bills and council tax not included.
I also included a few of these pictures:
In the end we ended up filming a walk through of of the flat.
Gumtree has an option to embed you-tube videos. I would advise anyone thinking of renting out their flat to do a video walk through. It gives a good impression of the layout of your property. Keep yourself out of it, otherwise it may look a bit cheesy.
It does look really cool with a video option in the advert.
It also sorts out who is seriously interested.
We got a phonecall from a tenant who is currently in Austria. They haven’t set foot in the flat, but on the basis of that video the flat has been secured by deposit. Ironically on the same day someone else was interested in renting the flat out as well. However the Austrian tennant got in there first.
So to summarise:
To rent out the flat using gumtree
- Clean your flat from top to bottom. Get the most unsightly jobs fixed.
- Take pictures of your flat, ideally on a bright sunny day, but failing that with some light.
- Take a video of your flat and do a walk through
- Upload the video to youtube, take a note of the embed link details
- Create an advert on gumtree, choose 3 pictures and include your video.
- For the text tell people about the flat and the advantages of your location. (E.g Close to the shops and leisure facilities. )
- Include useful details like council tax bands.
Extras to remember:
- Register as a private landlord at http://www.landlordregistrationscotland.gov.uk/. This is not optional. You are required to do this by law. Even if your flat is not multiple occupancy. You will get fined heavily if you are not registered.
- Get the electrical wiring checked and certified, arrange for this yearly.
- Get a Gas Safety Certificate. Arrange a check yearly.
- Take a copy of all of the manuals for the appliances. Give the tenants a copy.
- You can get copy of legal forms and advice from the city councils. Edinburgh Council has a fairly helpful website and some form templates for the legalities.
Protecting your Online Presence
It’s no longer a question of whether you should go on-line, but how, and as with anything else, there is a range of products and service levels that vary in price and quality. Sometimes a cheap service wih occasional downtime for web pages or email is fine - for example, a site for a hobby or a local pub band. For business purposes, being online is more than just advertising, it is also a vital means of communication. So companies need to be careful how they buy!
The term ‘online presence’ simply means that a company has agreed to display your web pages and accept mail on your behalf. These companies are called ‘hosting providers’, and they have computers in air-conditioned data centres who do this job for many companies at once.
If you’re shopping around for a hosting provider, ask them what happens when:
- The Hosting Provider’s machines stop working (do they have spares?)
- Lines to the Hosting Provider’s data-centres are cut (Do they have alternatives)
- The Hosting Provider goes out of business (Will you lose your email?)
Then there is your domain, the words after the @ sign in your email address, and after the “www.” in your web address. For example, http://www.bbc.co.uk. Do you own your domain? If you do not own your domain then you can’t control what happens to it, and if you’re not happy with your current website or email provider (or they go out of business) then you can’t easily move that domain to be hosted by a new provider.
If you search the web for ‘whois’, you will find websites that run the whois tool on their website for you to list information about a domain. You put in the name of a domain e.g. ‘bbc.co.uk’ and can find out who it is registered to and who has the rights to administer it.
If you find that you do not own your domain then follow these steps.
- Contact who set up your website and ask them to arrange to put the registrant information for your domain in your or your companies name.
- Ask them to change the contact email for the registrant in your email address.
- If you have no joy with this, then you can contact the registrar directly. Different registrars have different procedures so you may have to contact the, directly to find your position
- Contact the registry for the domain (for .co.uk domains the registry is nominet)
- Consider asking help from another Hosting Provider.
Unfortunately it’s often not until a website owner would like to change providers that they find out that their movements are restricted. It can take longer to move a website to another provider if your last website provider has entered in the wrong details in the domain owners (registrants) area in the domain listing.
You can prevent that just by checking if you own domain. This can help to remove a possible issue or threat to your business.
Originally Published in Kirknewton Konnect Directory as Esther Payne, Operations Manager, Gladserv Limited.
Domain hosting pain
A friend of mine registered a domain with a large on-line provider. Then she asked for help from her friends for advice on hosting her website. She’s not a technical web expert, so this is perfectly reasonable.
I responded with what I did and that fact that I work for a hosted services company and we were a nominet registrar like the large online provider. She didn’t know that the work I did involved that.
I also gave her some advice regarding the fact that the large provider would probably provide web-hosting as part of the deal or for a bit extra per month. Of course I did also tell my friend that we could host the web site and email, although it would be easier for us to administer the hosting and any backend changes (like moving a server or changing to a shiny new one) if we were the registrar for the domain and could look after the DNS records directly. Otherwise there there would always be an additional delay in any domain changes. Either way it was up to her.
My friend decided that she would prefer my company hosting it as at least she can trust me. Meanwhile she had a rather frustrating afternoon trying to get the password to access her current hosted providers cpanel as they had not sent the password yet. She is also trying to get them to change the tag to us. The provider should do this for free, but not everyone does. A domain owner can change the tag through nominet itself (if the domain is a uk top level domain). However this can cost 11.50 per domain. This I suspect is because an ordinary domain owner is not a member of nominet so there is a charge.
The help desk for this company also charged 50p for phoning their support. Their online pages were also running rather slowly (during office hours). Needless to say my friend is less than impressed with their service so far. My friend still doesn’t have her control panel password.
What annoys me is that if I thought to actually let people know what I do and socialise more both online and offline, I could find out what my friends need and either help them directly or point them at the appropriate resources.
So for a start I’m posting an article that I wrote for a local magazine. It’s a basic article and not very technical.
At somepoint I will also put the link here to my personal blog. I’ve been under a rock for a bit too long, and it’s caused some pain points for others who did not necessarily have to go through the frustration.
Some useful Resources for Ubuntu beginners
Those of you who decide to take the plunge to try Ubuntu might be wondering where to start to get advice and to get the most out of your system. To this end I thought that I would give you a few links to some on-line resources and some books that I’m reading and using as any issues come up.
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