Gordon Woolf's Blog

Change the clock, change the passwords

I can't understand how people use birthdates, pet names, children's names and so on as passwords on accounts which matter. Sure, I use a pet's name on some anonymous technical forums I've had to sign in for where I don't use my real name ayway but such passwords can be broken in minutes on email and web access. And how many of you are still using the initial password given by a financial advisor, share broker etc and which could have even been sent to you originally in an open email. And then there are people who'd get a shock if they opened their security dialog in a common web browser to discover that a couple of clicks away are all their passwords in plain view if they've chosen to let the computer remember it -- and therefore in plain view to anyone who ever has access to your computer. We have a common promotion here that when you change the daylight savings time settings on your clocks is the time to change the battery in your smoke alarms. I'd add that twice a year, when the clocks change, is also the time to change all your passwords.

Simple and free invoicing

I download and try a lot of programs, most of which are quickly discarded, but one I came across the other day is a simple invoicing program that keeps records of invoices and payments, can output statements and keep records of clients simply by extracting their details from the invoice you type. There's nothing that is not in Quickbooks or MYOB (and a lot that they have that is not here) but for most people who run a small business from home, those are probably overkill, and this has the advantage of being free, though you do have to register it. It seems to come from New Zealand which is probably why it picks up the country settings for dates, currency symbols and even the tax format (GST for Australia with 10% as a default). You can also set up items which can be goods or services and even multiple levels of pricing. The program is called XS Invoicing and it is effectively a free sample of what can be achieved with a general business program (available for several hundred dollars) that could provide a full set of customised business management and record keeping tools. Find it at http://www.development-x.com/ Now for the one criticism: if you are running your display at 96dpi you'll see nothing wrong but if, as I do, you run it at 120dpi to give better general Windows menu text sizes on a widescreen, you'll see some of the displays in XS Invoicing with text which overflows their surrounding frames. I sent an email to Development-X Ltd and next day had the answer -- change the dpi setting: Their reply: "Go into Start>Settings>Control Panel and select 'Display'. On the displayed panel click on the 'Settings' tab and then the 'Advanced' button. The DPI Settings should be 96. I suspect yours will be 120." The only problem with doing that is that my menu settings in most Windows programs became tiny as did the listings of folders and accounts in Thunderbird. Overall I've decided that I do not need XS Invoicing to the extent that it is worth a day spent readjusting Windows advanced display settings, but if you do not have Quickbooks or MYOB this could be all you need.

What font should I use?

Someone asked the other day: "What font should I use to be sure that it will be easy to read?" There has been one piece of publicly available research carried out in the English-speaking world into what fonts and styling in text makes it easiest to understand the content. This was by Colin Wheildon in Sydney in the 1980s and was republished three years ago as Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes. It was carried out by printing sample articles of the kind intended for magazine or newspaper use and measuring the comprehension by asking questions to show whether the participants understood the content. There's a downloadable extract of the book at http://worsleypress.com/type/ and the book is available from Amazon as well as elsewhere. A couple of comments: This is based on whether the font choice and styling actually work, not whether they look good, and it is a book not only unpopular but campaigned against by some graphic artists. It also applies only to English speaking countries -- the very limited tests in European countries infer that sans may do relatively better than serif in that region. It was also mainly conducted with narrow columns -- newspaper and magazine style rather than books. I'd also better declare my interest -- I played a role in returning the book to print though I no longer have any ownership in the business which does publish it. It is sad that this is the only work which is based on research rather than opinion. Some work has been done privately on behalf of major publishing groups and associations but is not publicly available.

Paying for less than no hosting

Why would a business pay out good money for a web domain address and then have nothing at the other end? I came across a hotel the other day where the link just produces the generic "unable to find a server of that name" response and decided that as it is one where we intended to go to eat, I'd check a little further. Yes, the domain is registered, and to a company which obviously owns the hotel. However, this was not just a temporrary glitch. Yet the web site of the hotel is included in all their advertisements, in local newspapers, in regional tourist magazines and even on some general web sites of where to eat. So I asked. I was told by the manager that their designer was working on a new site and that their web site would be back in "a month or so". When I suggested that they were paying for the name anyway and that most registrars or site hosts would charge no extra to put up a "site under construction" page with, at least, their address and phone numbers, I got a blank stare and a kind of grunt which I took to mean "we'll find out about that". Most of the clients I host are in touch if their site is offline for even a few minutes. How can I find ones like this who don't mind if it is off line for months? As I write this another month has gone by and the site is still offline, and still being advertised.

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Welcome to Gordon Woolf's Blog. It will contain new posts and some former posts from The Worsley Blog.