Gordon Woolf's Blog

Keeping updated on updates

Quite often I seem to come across references to an updated version of a program I use, and occasionally with some rather scary references to security holes which have been patched by the newer version. I'm never quite convinced that the dangers are as dire as the news stories imply but I do wonder why I was not aware of the updates. The older version of AdAware is one program which will not even tell you that there is a new version, even when you tell it to check updates -- even to the extent that one version just stopped advising of updates to the old version without telling you that there were no updates because there was a new version of the entire program. So how can you keep updated on updates. One suggestion is a program called Securia, described as a "Personal Software Inspector". It certainly gives you a warning if a new version of a very wide range of programs you are likely to have installed. Not only that, it can be used to go directly to the program site, download the update and install it, all at the press of one button. That's great, but the one program it did not tell me had been updated was itself. In order to write this, which was supposed to be an item of praise for the way it worked, I clicked on the link to go to their website and found that I was 2 minor versions behind! All I can say is that at least it is free, for single personal use. (I did subsequently notice that the updates are for minor bug fixes, and an upgrade is said to be not necessary if it is running without problems). If you are interested, it can be downloaded from http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/Personal/ but I'd suggest it may be most useful as a one-off check, You may be surprised just how many of your programs have had updates because of security issues... updates about which you knew nothing.

Your face on the top of a latte?

How about seeing your face on the top of a latte? A young engineer in Massachusetts converted a printer to put images on top of a coffee just to prove a point for a talk he planned for a systems programming conference. To do so, he had to devise the right mix of caramelised sugar to load into an inkjet cartridge. He's quoted as saying: "I ordered a book about inkjet cartridges with a serial printer kit, and a plotter on eBay, and with some experimentation I was able to create various vector images on coffee using off-the-shelf professional caramel coloring and a modified cartridge. A friend of mine took a short video of the machine in action and uploaded it on YouTube." His video has been getting several thousand views daily, his paper was accepted for the conference and he got enough serious enquiries coffee shops, event planners etc, to go into production.

There is a future for magazines

So again we get used to every pundit forecasting that whatever direction we are currently heading, we will go even further. Remember those who said that petrol would reach $2 a litre. Now that the US version of PC Magazine has announced that it will soon go entirely digital, we are having the "experts" say that the printed magazine is doomed. I don't think so. Things will get harder, but magazines in the computer world are a special case with their readership of computer aware readers, who know what a PDF file is and know how to handle one. PC Magazine had steadily built up an online version that is already absorbing most of the costs, particularly wages costs so the planned staff cuts are just seven print production staff while 140 remain. In 10 years the circulation had halved from a peak of 1.2 million to 600,000. That is still a lot of copies. Consider that when I worked on TV Week and New Idea, those magazines were just under and just over the million copies a week; since then they've gone to less than half that, but they are still doing well for their publishers in that they sell for higher prices and have just as many ads and smaller staff numbers. Most magazines will be facing a decline in ad revenues and will be thinking about the future. But I'd suggest that most of those without a connection to the electronics and computer fields will either fold or, more likely, cut their spending to suit their revenue and continue in printed form. There have been new print publications: consider The Week which started an Australian edition late last year. It is thin, and comprises summaries of what is being written in newspapers and magazines here and around the world, plus just a couple of what are called "good reads", comparatively longer articles of a page or two pages. Almost everything in The Week is available on line if you like to search for it, but it sells at the pocket money price of five cents under $5 (half that if you take out a subscription to receive it by mail). It seems to be doing quite well here after making a success of itself in the UK and USA.