david.steadson.com

For the past year I’ve been involved in developing a social networking type website where we wanted the ability to do a “radius search”, ie you could for example ask for a list of all site members who live within 10km of you, or all health food stores etc etc. The site is being built on the Joomla framework using Community Builder. One of the reasons we went with this combination rather than dedicated social networking software, or  a dedicated social networking Joomla component like JomSocial was because of the availability of a “Community Builder Zip Code Radius Search Component” (for searching members) and a “Mosets Tree Radius Search Component” (for searching a directory of businesses) from a company called ZipCodeShop.

Alas, our experience with ZipCodeShop (ZCS), despite starting well, has not been a good one. I contacted them and told them I was looking at buying both components, and they were more than helpful. I purchased the ZCS Community Builder component, for US$99, and started trying to implement it in my site. I sort of got it working, and for 2 days ZCS support via email were extremely fast, and extremely helpful - though they did continue to ignore requests to be given access to their support forums. The component itself was encoded and hardcoded with a licence linked to my domain name. This concerned me as we had plans to change the domain name, but they assured me it would be no problem to do so. After a couple of days I was still having a few problems, and they informed me a new version was coming the following week, and that prices would be increasing - so I should buy the Moset’s tree version straight away. I elected not to do so.

That was in February. Since then I have lodged more than a dozen support ticket requests and followups through their online ticketing system. I have sent numerous emails directly. I have left messages with their Live Online Support. I’ve even tried several international phone calls. Nothing. I would be concerned they had gone of business, or the principles had some serious health issues or similar, but at the end of April a message appeared on their site stating they were upgrading their site and the new one would be up at the end of the week. At the end of the week, the message disappeared but nothing else changed. Thus, I’m left with an encoded component who’s bugs I cannot fix, and which I cannot easily customised for my purposes, as I was assured I could.

Sadly, posts on Joomlapolis indicate my experience is not unique. I left further messages last week advising ZipCodeShop I would be doing this blog post, but there has been no response.

In the meantime I’ve developed a replacement component to the ZipCodeShop radius search component using the excellent Fabrik development framework, available at www.fabrikar.com. For those who have been left wanting by ZCS I’ll try to blog about my solution in the next week.

A new tool in the search engine arena has today been opened to the public - Wolfram|Alpha. Unlike search sites such as Yahoo or Google, which attempt to catalogue the entire internet and provide links to anything you can think of, Wolfram|Alpha does something different - it focuses on the numbers, it’s a “computational knowledge engine” or as it says on the About Page -

We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

For example, I asked WolframAlpha “how far from Stockholm to Moscow?” Instead of providing me with a list of pages where I might get the answer, I was given the distance in kilometres, the approximate flight time, a map, plus some other potentially useful information like the current time in both cities and their populations.

I’m about to have lunch, so I asked WA - how many calories in a pancake? This time I was given the average calories, some other energy measurements, and an interesting graph of where pancakes like in a distribution ranking of different food and the caloric content.

It’s going to take a while to learn when’s the best time to use WA over google, but I think this is going to be a great tool!

I just launched my new blog focusing on health issues, particularly nutrition. Only a couple of posts up so far, but there’ll be many more to come! www.optimal-health.info

This photo was taken back on January 20, 2009 - the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States of America. I only encountered recently on the front page of the White House Correspondents’ Association website and simply had to repost it. How beautiful it is! A healthy young couple in the prime of their lives, enjoying a day that can be barely believed - and being so obviously, and publicly, in love. Fantastic.

Newspapers and online communities have been awash the past week with the news that a Swedish court found four men connected with The Pirate Bay website guilty of aiding copyright infringement. They were sentenced to a year in prison and substantial fines. The verdict itself wasn’t a surprise to most, since similar websites had lost similar cases in the past. Interestingly, there were reports before the verdict that Sweden had recently seen a 100% increase in legal online music sales - most likely as a result of the introduction of the new IPRED law which makes it easier to track down the end users of copyright infringed works.

One Swedish company - Spotify - has been ready for these developments for a while, and yesterday I finally signed up with them myself. Why I took so long I don’t know - my broadband provider, Bredbandsbolaget, provides free access! So what does Spotify do? Well, they don’t sell you songs for download like iTunes or provide links to “torrents” like The Pirate Bay does. Instead they take advantage of the superb broadband infrastructure available in Sweden (I have 100mb fibre connection) to stream music on demand, all backed with agreements with record labels and bands. There are thousands and thousands of tracks available, you can listen to a whole album, or select individual tracks, or even select the genres you like and let Spotify create a playlist for you.

So far I’m impressed. The range available is extraordinary, the quality is fantastic, and the software is fairly easy and straightforward. What’s more - it’s all 100% legal! Spotify is still in beta and requires an invite if you want to join the free offer and aren’t using a current partner like Bredbandsbolaget. I have 10 invites to use, so anyone who wants to give it a try - drop me a note! All it needs is 256k connection and Mac or Windows.

Superb job Spotify - well done!

I’ve been saying for many years that if you want to make a lot of money from an investment, find the company that develops the next big breakhrough in battery technology and give them your money. Today’s modern electronic society is dependent on batteries, but a lot of further advances has been stymied by them - they tend to be heavy and bulky and need recharging often. Check your phone or your laptop - most of the weight (especially sans screen) is the battery. Most of the “size” of the device is the battery. Everything else is essentially built around that restriction.

The Tesla Roadster Electric Car

Finally it looks like one battery technology barrier may have been broken down by a team at MIT, and a surprisingly simple breakthrough it is. It had been assumed that the speed lithium ions could move through a lithium battery was greatly limited by some impenetrable factor. It seems that assumption was wrong. The researchers studied more closely how the ions were moving through the material and discovered it was essentially a design flaw that was causing the problem. Imagine you had 3 lanes heading into a tunnel that had only one lane. When engineers design roads, they take these kind of bottlenecks into account and actively set things up so vehicular traffic can merge using a “zipper principle”. Now imagine we didn’t do that, and just suddenly ended two of the lanes with no real way for vehicles to get into the lane that went through the tunnel.

It seems that’s essentially what is happening right now in the battery in your phone or computer, or for that matter, hybrid car. The MIT researchers have discovered a relatively simple and cost effective way to build lithium ion batteries so that they “guide” the ions into these tunnels. The result? Dramatic increases in speed and efficiency. Batteries will be able to be charged in minutes instead of hours. They’ll also be able to discharge faster, providing the kind of bursts of power needed in electric motor vehicles like the Tesla, and since manufacturer’s will no longer have to provide “extra” battery to cover up the inefficiencies, they’ll be smaller and lighter too.

The best news? The new manufacturing process is relatively easy to implement, and scientists believe the new batteries will be on the market in two to three years.

Yesterday I came across a blog entry on the website of a Swedish TV company by one of their “personalities” in which he essentially stated that one of the world’s largest and most succesful direct selling companies was an illegal enterprise. (Headline translated to english: Quatro, Amway, and other pyramid scams). I don’t watch a lot of TV so I had to go read up on who the blogger, Edward Blom was. It seems that apart from being a TV presenter he’s also somewhat of an authority on Swedish business history. He’s even written books on the topic.

I thought perhaps that despite these credentials he perhaps didn’t actually realise that “pyramidspel” (literally “pyramid game”) are illegal and he was doing the all-to-common mistake of using the word to describe companies that use multi-level marketing. Alas, he wasn’t, as was evidenced in the rest of his post where he claimed “only the people who get in early make money” and that you “make money by recruiting people” - two other myths about multi-level marketing.

So here we have a (supposed) business historian and TV personality publicly stating that a 50 yr old global company operating in 90+ countries in territories was an illegal business! I wonder what his lawyer would think about that?

I should have known better but I couldn’t help but to try to set him straight with a rather lengthy comment (in english) complete with links to numerous sources talking about Amway and the various awards and recognitions Amway had received around the world.

To his credit he posted a response withdrawing the claim against Amway, but he then continued with the myth-building, complete with linking to a 10yr old swedish anonymous anti-amway site that does little more than report other myths - including doing price comparisons that are completely wrong! (he for example compares the price of a concentrate that when mixed with water make 4 bottles of cleaner to the price of one bottle of a competitor).

That post of course answered the question of why he got his first post so wrong in the first place - he’s getting his education about Amway from the Internet. Once upon a time research involved reading reports and studies by respected authors in the field, in particular peer-reviewed research and reports. Even newspapers had editors who would fact check articles before they were published, a form of peer-review. Today however the lazy journalist and researcher does little more than hop onto google to see what they’ll find. I suspect Edward Blom linked to the article he did for little more reason than it appeared highly in a google.se search for Amway. A decade old, anonymous site, published on a free web hosting service - and Edward Blom, a published author in the field of business decided that was a good enough place for him to learn about Amway.

How sad. In the “old” days he might have had to go to a library. Then he would have found and read books like The Direct Selling Revolution: Understanding the Growth of the Amway Corporation by Professor Dominique Xardel. Professor Xardel is a former head of ESSEC, one of the most prestigous business schools in Europe, and a former editor of the Harvard Business Review. He spent 2 years researching Amway. Who do you think has the most accurate opinion? Some anonymous blogger who went to one meeting then surfed the net, or a respected business academic who spent 2 years researching the topic?

Alas, today it doesn’t matter. For the google generation, PR (google Page Rank) is more important than PR (Peer Review) when it comes to PR (Public Relations) on the Internet. What Edward Blom did is all too common, not just for journalists and supposed professionals, but also the public at large.

Is this the final death throes of professional journalism? Are amateur blogs of dubious quality going to rule the information highway?

It’s well known in the IT/Computer field that pretty much every task or project takes at least 2-3 times longer than you will think. If you estimate something will take 3 hours, it will actually take 6-9 hours. If you think it will take 3 months, it will actually take 6-9 months etc etc.

The odd thing about this is that even being aware of this Law of Tripled Time*, computer folk (including myself) still can’t seem to accurately estimate how long a job will take. Now I think I know why! It’s because of the Inverse Law of Tripled Time*.

It’s well known in the IT/Computer field that pretty much every task or project takes at least 2-3 times more time than you think it is taking while you’re actually doing it. You start some task, an after about an hour or so, you look up at the clock and discover that 3 hours or so have actually passed. You start some project, and after a month or so working it, you suddenly realise you’ve been working at it for 3 months.

So our estimates of how long a project will take are actually fully in sync with how long it feels like it’s taking - it’s just none of it matches what’s happening on the clock and calendar!

* I just made these up, if you see them again, remember you read them here first!

I’ve been hearing good reports about Microsoft’s Windows Home Server so I thought I’d download the free 120 day evaluation and set it up on one of my spare PCs. Home Server is designed to be a simple setup easy for the average user to install and configure and connect their home PCs to. It then automatically backs them up and you can also share your documents, pictures etc via the Home Server.

Installation went pretty smoothly and everything looked fine - until I went to open the shared folders from my main PC -

Cannot Connect. The Network Path Was Not Found.

Interestingly the supplied “console” software would quite happily list the folders being shared, but connecting to them failed. It appears that MS is using newer web technologies to provide the information about what’s available, but use older local area network technologies to actually connect to the shared resources. This is fair enough - if it works!

I checked and discovered that Microsoft had supplied a connection troubleshooter with their Home Server Toolkit. I installed and ran that and it advised me -

No DHCP server, or DHCP server is not reachable

A DHCP server was not detected, or the test cannot communicate with the DHCP server.

By default, Windows Home Server gets its IP address configuration from a DHCP server that is on your home network. Normally, the DHCP server is located on your broadband router. Without the DHCP service, your computers cannot get their IP address configuration and cannot communicate with each other.

To fix this problem, ensure that your broadband router is powered on and is connected to the network. Also, ensure that your broadband router is configured as a DHCP server.

Alternatively, you can assign static IP addresses to all computers that are on your network, including your home server. You need advanced networking knowledge to do this. If you assigned static IP addresses to the computers that are on your home network, you can safely ignore this issue. Look for other others issues, particularly name-resolution issues.

For more information about Windows name resolution, NetBIOS, HOSTS files, and other name-resolution possibilities, see “Host Name Resolution” at the Microsoft Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=98161)

Okkayy … I understand that. I’ve been involved with TCPIP network for almost 20 years. I also know that their assumption “Normally, the DHCP server is located on your broadband router” is often false in this part of the world. I have a direct 100Mb ethernet connection to the ISP, as do many folk in the major cities of Sweden. The ISP, Bredbandsbolaget, supplied me with a wireless bridge to provide WiFi access and additional ports for my various PCs - but all of them get their IP addresses from the ISP’s DHCP server - not from the bridge or a router.

I understand all of this. But how many “normal” people do? So what would be the next step? Click on the link supplied for further help I guess. Go on, click on it - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=98161

Now seriously, how many “average” home users, the target group for Home Server, are going to understand even a few sentences of that? And even if they did, it doesn’t provide an answer! You need to be a network engineer to solve it.

Or if you’re lucky and googling “Windows Home Server” and “network path not found” you might find this post!

The solution is actually quite simple. When your PC connects to a DHCP server to get it’s internet address, it also gets some other settings. It’s more than possible those settings will not be appropriate for Windows Home Server. In particular, my error was caused because NetBios over TCP/IP was not enabled. This is a way for computers, usually on a local area network, to talk to each other over an “internet” based network. It’s set either via DHCP or in the “advanced” settings of network connections. In Windows Home Server you can reach it by clicking Start then going to Control Panel/Network Connections/Local Area Connection. Click Properties, then select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) then click Properties and then Advanced. Once there, click on the tab labelled WINS. At the bottom you’ll find NetBIOS setting. The default is to get the setting from a DHCP server. If that’s not working, change it to Enabled and click OK.

You may need to make the same changes on your Client PCs, it will be in much the same place.

Hopefully that helps someone.

UPDATE: After a while the above “fix” stopped working for me. It appears, though I’m still not 10=% sure, that my Vista PC was deciding whenever it rebooted to be the Domain Master Browser and not doing the job properly - stopping itself and other PCs being able to connect to the Home Server. Setting the IsDomainMaster parameter in the registry to false seems to have solved it.

Social networking has really increased the interest in the power of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing and it’s starting to get the attention of some real smart people. I came across a blog, Science for SEO a couple of weeks ago by a PhD student studying search engine optimization techniques. On Friday she posted a review of a paper in the related WOM area. Her review of Heat Diffusion for Social Networking is a nice summary of highly technical paper by some mathematicians out of Hong Kong. You can get the original paper here.

The work has some interesting implications, and applications, for the world of marketing and particular network marketing pioneered by companies such as Amway. It’s going to take a little while to grasp it properly, I’ll keep studying it!