I will discuss general IT issues here as well as those that effect indigenous people.
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Friday, October 03, 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Backing up your web site
I am a staunch practioner of planning any in advance of any IT change over and for it to be in a methological manner to ensure there are no issues to the day to day functionality of the organisation. I am also a practioner of back ups.
On Tuesday night at about 11.30pm (NZST) i noticed my email was down. After a little investigation i noticed that the leased server was not responding to my domain requests. After a few phone calls it was revealed that the company i use in NZ who lease thier servers from overseas had not paid the bill to renew thier lease. The reason being that they were shifting all of thier accounts to an inhouse NZ server.
This is great if you inform your customers prior to any moves and also at least if the comapny can do the backup and transfer for you so it all occurs in a seemless manner without thew customer knowing.
For 17 hours i had no emails and am still trying to address the lack of correspondence.
After changing name servers, A and MX records, email configurtions etc for all of my domains thinking that the ad hoc solutions were finally over, i noticed that i had not reconfigured by blog which involes changing server details and re loading all the blogs. So today i hope that everything is copleted.
I am continually meeting new professionals and associating with new groups. Although this is my personal web space, it is also the place that professional coleauges current and potential and associates become aquainted with me and contact me. Many check my crudentials and visit my LinkedIn and FaceBook pages from this site. But till this week, i had never thought of this site as an essential business tool for my career and work.
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Labels: backups, disaster recovery
Monday, September 29, 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Domain name registration oversights
According to this
article Slingshot let a business critical domain name expire causing phone issues for their
iTalk service.
How on earth did a large and respectful company such as SlingShot miss a renewal on a domain name which resulted in critical business services being lost?. A former staff member registered the domain name using his own email address.
This high profile case brings the issue into public attention and hopefully makes every domain name holder re evaluate thier domain name registrations. Anyone who has a domain name can easily fall foul of the tight .nz plocy. More often than not by an oversigght as opposed to any malicious intent.
Key facts:
1. For about $100 anyone can set up as a domain name reseller in .nz and all the major domains. More often than not these resellers dissapear as quickly as they appeared.
2. Often web designer companies put thier own details in the domain name ownership so they can bill thier clients and make a profit. While this is technially against the .nz policy there are companies who sucessfully get around this and do.
3. Often organisations use the email address of the current IT person, web designer, consultant or as in the case of Slingshot, the staff member inputed thier email directly into the form as opposed to a more generic email e.g. dns@company.co.nz .
Considering it is a common practice for large organsiations to employ domain name specialists who ensure the many issues of organisation branding of domain names does are protected, i am especially suprised that a national Internet company needed a mistake to iccur in the mission critical service before it noticed anything wrong.
I could just imagine the mammoth issues if someone registered the expired domain before Slingshot re registered it. Effectively there would be a delay during the disputes process which has a cost associated with it. It would have possibly been cheaper to pay the new owner $5,000 for a qucik solution..
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Labels: .nz, domain names., domain portfolio
Monday, September 15, 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Regional allocations
As the recently appointed Chairman of the ICANN
APRALO i have the opportunity to lead an organisation during a time of much public consultation and change.
One of the exciting consultations is the geographic regions policy. It seems to me that for years we have debated about having the AP region and its value. Two of the more popular suggestions have been to propose - South Asia/East Asia/Pacific/Oceania or Asia and Pacific
The Pacific Islands for example have young Internet infrastructure if any at all in some places, while Japan has the worlds fastest Internet and many global partners that utilise their Internet infrastructure. Yet they are both in the regional allocation for resources with ICANN and many other Internet organisations.
Contemplating regional issues raises another long time issue of the UN country codes and the way that countries are assigned TLD's. There is currently no consideration for countries that may be bi cultural and bilingual.
Which ever culture/language speakers are more technically and economically advanced will more than likely govern the Internet in their country. Then depending on the situation the minority or the other culture/language speakers have little or no consideration.
IDN implementation will give a solution to address TLD issues as will the new process of obtaining new GTLD's next year.
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Labels: Asia Pacific, gtld, tld
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Google have released thier own web browser. It is called
Google Chrome.
I am writing this blog using Google chrome as my browser. For the last few days the interntional media have been busy discussing Google Chrome and reviewing it. So i will just make a quick observation that i find it visually appealing with its modern looks. In good old Google style there is little clutter and it has the essentials and looks good.
Konrad is already looking at localising the interface into Māori, as i would imagine many other groups around the world are who are not automatically included in the default 48 languages.
There are copious articles on the web describing the possible strategic direction that Google is taking to become a dominant player in that area and even possibly seriously compete with Microsoft. As an observer, this has been obvious for many years with all of Googles web apps and initiatives.
In light of the internatioanl requirements to have localisation of software and the highly difficult task to localise, i see Google Chrome will quickly become the dominant web browser for non English speaking cultures.
Google Chrome is currently still in Beta, so it will not be too long before Google intergrates the translation pools into localised versions of Chrome thus offering a fully browser, search engine and a myriad of web apps all available in localised languages. Considering the following statistics Microsoft should be worried.
There are over 6,911 non English languages spoken in the world. In ASia Pacific alone, more than half of the worlds languages 3579 are spoken.
One just needs to consider the top 14 languages spoken in the world.
Mandarin 873 million
Hindi 450 million
English 341 million
Spanish 320 million
Arabic 250 million
Portuguese 177.5 million
Bengali 171 million
Japanese 122 million
German 100 million
Punjabi 88 million
French 79,572,000
Javanese 75. 5 million
Korean 74 million
Vietnamese 67.4 million
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Labels: browsers, google chrome, language stats, localisation
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Future of Email
How long is email going to be a valid form of communication. Sure, we know that statistically Gen M prefer to use IM, SMS and social networks to keep in contact but increasingly my professional colleagues are choosing to use IM as opposed to email.
At a recent meeting I was exchanging my contact details with a colleague who looked at my card and said, “No not email, what are your IM details. It soon emerged that this was a common theme of the 30 or so people I spoke with at the meeting, IM details and cell numbers were exchanged as opposed to email addresses.
The pattern that emerged was to use all of the main IM applications, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk and Skype with the same username. Also if you would use the same username for all of the popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook, Hi5 etc. This removes the need for business cards and various forms of communication such as email, SMS, etc.
During the past two weeks I have solely used IM to stay in contact with all of my contacts with few minor exceptions due to time differences and sending official documentation. I have noticed my day is much more productive and decisions are completed almost immediately.
Again I contemplate the future relevance of private web sites and now email.
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Labels: email archive, instant messaging, social networking
Friday, August 22, 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------- .cym TLD for the Welsh
Earlier this week i read this article from
Computer Weekly regarding the proposal to create a TLD .cym for the Welsh people.
To summarise, the Welsh government have voted to support the creation of a new TLD .cym to identify the Welsh population and to create further financial pathways and a safer Internet for its Internet users.
As most of you will know, i am a staunch advocate for the introduction of representative/cultural TLD's for culture and language based groups. But i am unsure of .cym based on the article.
The issue which occurs when politicians become involved is that they have to do 2 things; 1. Represent the issue and 2. Gain more votes.
In doing the second option, the Welsh parliament have have ignored the fundamental rights and structure of the Internet and are proposing to moderate their TLD so that it is a safe zone for children and for e consumers. While this is great in terms of Internet safety, at what cost to the Internet will this be and will this be the beginning of other countries moderating their TLD's ?.
My concern is who decides what is morally right or not, or will it be based on what is in legal and what is not ?. Common sense for one person is a crime to another based on religion, culture and up bringing. Moreover, so i would favor a legislation based moderation policy.
A scenario, a group decides that selling adult sex toys or perhaps abortion medicine (both legal but immoral to some) in the .cym TLD is wrong, therefore banned, will result in discrimination against those consumers who want to support Welsh online stores.
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Labels: .cym, tld
Thursday, August 21, 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------- web 3.0
Whilst at the
APNG conference in Thailand, i had an opportunity to read a presentation from a local fellow "Patcha Kunakulsawat" on Web 3.0. I had never realised that the term Web 3.0 existed till then.
My understanding of Web 2.0 is that the term originated from marketing hype and then became the catch phrase to describe 2 way communication web applications.
In my investigation of what web 3.0 is, i still have no definitive answer but it resembles a web that the author Frank Feather describes in his book "Future Consumer.com" ISBN: 978-1894622189.
What i do know to date though, is thatt web 3.0 is a term for Artificial Intelligence, structured meta data (Patcha Kunakulsawat), Web every where and always on, an essential part of our life as it controls everything (Ramon Ray), a semantic web (Tim Berners-Lee).
Perhaps Web 4.0 will be the name given to the web when available in space or perhaps Internet 2.0.
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Labels: APNG, futureconsumer.com, Patcha Kunakulsawat, tim berners-lee, web 3.0, web 4.0
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