Electronic life after death–a matter of sheer will

The article Ghosts in the machine at the Australian website Fairfax Digital contains much food for thought.

“What happens when you die? In cyberspace not much” it starts off with, “unless you make the appropriate arrangements.”

Many people don’t make out a will and so die intestate, with lots of negative ramifications. But even if you have a will, it’s fairly likely that it doesn’t take account of your digital assets.

When you depart from this earthly vale of tears, what can and should be done with all your passwords, files, web domains, and other things that exist on your computers and other electronic devices as well as all over the place in the World WIDE Web.

I encourage you to read the article and think hard about what you should do about these assets of yours, if they have any significant meaning and value to you and your dear ones.

I’ll do it in a minute (or two, or three)

Professor David Suzuki has some wise words for us all, watch and listen to his Test Tube story as he shares a common scientific observation.

TIP: enter just a single word when prompted in the opening screen.

Mad and Gay Music?

By pure coincidence, the other day two websites came to my attention. Both are concerned with music but in markedly different and, to me -- by their very juxtaposition in my stream of awareness – rather amusing ways.

Firstly, there’s Captain Wayne’s MadMusic.com (originally called The Doctor Demento Show) which is a huge archive of tunes going back to the first show in 1972. It’s rather zany yet rewarding, you’ve really got to visit the site to comprehend and appreciate it.

In stark contrast, there’s Love God’s Way Ministries who say they “specialize in Christian topics other so-called Churches do not want to deal with. Recently, we’ve started work on the Homosexual problem.  We believe they can be fixed and we have created a means of fixing them.”

Being an old square I happen to listen almost exclusively to orchestral (“classical”) music, jazz, the Big Bands, and other mainly instrumental music.

So I have only the slightest experience of most of today's “popular” music, the supposedly-dangerous Gay Bands that they list:

“One of the most dangerous ways Homosexuality invades family life is through popular music.  Parents, please keep careful watch over your children’s listening habits. … We Strongly recommend that you burn the CDs” they say.

Nor do I have more than the slightest experience listening to the Safe Bands that they  have cataloged.

Perhaps you’d be interested in reviewing their two lists, the devilish versus heavenly bands, giving your opinions and explaining it all to an out-of-touch old timer?

NotesConnect (Nping) wherefore art thou?

Does anybody know where to download a copy of that old faithful, Notes Ping (nping.exe), more recently renamed to NotesConnect.

I haven’t managed to find a downloadable copy anywhere.

Since the Lotus Sandbox is no longer extant. Stupid decision, IBM.  Why decommit a very handy tool like this (and all the others in the Lotus Sandbox)?

Surely you could have left the sandbox open as a “no longer supported but we hope you might still get some value from it” archive.

Are there any newer, alternative and/or better free Notes connectivity tester tools?

Clean, non-polluting wind power in action

 

Click on the images to view them enlarged…

The programmer/developer/coder role is not dead – and long live the project manager!

It’s no problem being a geek, it would seem, according to Jason Hiner in his ZDNet blog posting The future of IT jobs? It's in three types of roles

You may or may not agree, but it makes interesting reading.

Will code XPages for food?

There’s a LinkedIn discussion group named Gurus of Lotus – Worldwide with one discussion thread that I’ve been following from a distance: What can we do to promote the technology that we all love?

This is, in turn, an extension of an older thread What do you think? Is Notes fading away? – a more recent variation of the “Is Lotus Notes dead?” theme.

It makes me wonder if we need a version of the following image for Lotus Notes:
[tongue in cheek]

Will code HTML for food

The Cloud Changes What IT Pros Do, but how?

Here’s an interesting view on how “The Cloud” can change what IT professionals have to do, according to Chris Murphy, interviewing Brady Corp's CIO Bentley Curran (in the Global CIO column of InformationWeek, 23 April 2011).

Go read the entire interview, which starts off:

As companies move more of their software to the cloud, there are some indispensible skills IT pros need to hone or acquire, and they’re not technical skills.

and further on:

Now those staffers are doing things like working with the company's R&D to ensure that employees in its Asian and U.S. design centers can do the kind of collaboration they need to, using Google apps. For example, IT employees have helped colleagues use Google Sites to set up their own project pages, so they can post content rather than emailing it around.

Cloud software can bring its compromises--fewer features, less ability to customize. Google Apps doesn't have all the features and functions of Microsoft Exchange, Curran says, and IT leaders need to make that fact clear to their colleagues.

But people are using more features than they were in Lotus because Apps is easy to use, Curran says. And, it's has lowered costs, let IT focus more on strategy than implementation, and met Brady's global collaboration needs. The only real hiccup has been for its employees in China using Google Apps. "One day it'll be working, the next day a certain group of people will just be denied access to certain functionality, and you can't predict it," Curran says.

Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange are being kept on their toes, it seems.

The Hungry Beast lurking Down Under goes into retreat

The final episode of Season Three of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s excellent HUNGRY BEAST techno show aired this week [on Wednesday 8th June 2011]. Read more about Hungry Beast here.

Hurry if you would like to view this latest episode, because for some strange reason (unlike other series, such as the Catalyst science show) the ABC takes each episode offline after a week or two.

The 2011 final episode’s lead story is Stuxnet: the first computer virus specifically designed to be a weapon (taking offline for a while Iran’s nuclear facilities, for example) …

Alert - Java applet failure in Firefox 3.6.14, update to 3.6.15 already released

Eternal vigilance and remorseless focus on testing are required for any software development, and unfortunately the Mozilla team let a significant Java applet problem slip into Firefox Browser 3.6.14, but have already released a fix in version 3.6.15.

Reports of the issue appeared the Mozilla Firefox forum such as Latest Mozilla update: 3.6.14 breaks my web graphics.

The Mozilla developers obviously regarded this as a serious enough problem to come out quickly with a  fix, in the form of Firefox version 3.6.15 which you can read about at Pogo.com and other Java pages don't work which (in case you were unsure) explains how you go about installing the update to Firefox 3.6.15.

In an admirably rapid response the Mozilla developers have, within a day or so, already released a new version to address this Java applet support issue, see Pogo.com and other Java pages don't work (which shows how to update Firefox, in case you were unaware).

Let’s hope that version 3.6.15 does fix the problem (and not cause any others, as sometimes happens with bug fixes).

TIP – TESTING WHETHER JAVA IS ENABLED IN YOUR BROWSER
Last weekend I attempted to install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), a day or two after it came out. Instead of the smooth ride that I anticipated it turned into an unmitigated disaster. The SP1 update crashed part way through, my Windows system became unbootable, and none of my desperate attempts to recover Windows to a usable state led to success. I’ve described it more thoroughly in my blog, see Windows 7 SP1 upgrade went horribly wrong.

I decided to do a complete “scratch” re-installation of Windows 7, as described in the blog. One of the many things I had to install (after I got Windows with SP1 successfully up and running) was Java.

I don’t know if you agree, but installing Java on a Windows platform still has a few rough edges, in terms of finding out just where to get the JVM from for example.

And particularly, even though I’ve done it many times since Java was released in the mid-1990s, I still find that getting Java applets to run inside a browser can still be rather tricky. Particularly if that browser happens to be Internet Explorer!

Even knowing if Java (the JVM, or JRE as it is now commonly known) happens already to be installed and operational on your system is not always obvious.

So here’s a tip. If you want to determine whether or not Java is installed and enabled inside Internet Explorer or Firefox (or whatever browser turns you on), you could do far worse than opening Michael Horowitz’s Java Tester page:

Read Michael's comments and advice, then just follow your nose.