Digital Wave with Dan Damon

Browser World War 2

Suddenly some dramatic things are happening again in the world of Internet browsers.

You might remember that Netscape, ahead of the game in the mid-90s, lost out to the power and integration of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and became a kind of preserve of nerds and Microsoft-haters.

By 2001, with senior staff being laid off, it seemed that Microsoft might have won the war.

But it turns out that was only a battle and the war is not over.

Now two

Backup 3

Things are not going well with the first 'online backup' test programme.

The software refuses to execute and an email to the support desk of the software company didn't raise any response for four days.

They have now responded, so I will reinstall and run the test until the end of tomorrow, Friday.

BBC Breaking Barriers

Some interesting things happening in the techy parts of the BBC.

This is just the kind of thing the BBC is about, using its stable funding stream to explore and experiment in technologies that the commercial world might not be able to use yet but which could one day be widespread and culturally significant.

The BBC News website is one of the most obvious examples. The material was there, the will was there, but would anyone have begun such a comprehensive site if they had to make a profit out of i?

The people behind News Online are always thinking of new ways of using the vast resources of BBC News. One idea I've heard discussed, although I can't say it's being developed yet, is a kind of automatic playlist of news video, audio and text based on your surfing patterns.

If you read a lot of stories about the environment, Iraq and Manchester United, software should be able to compile a list of appropriate stories into a kind of personal news bulletin.

You wouldn't always want to get your news that way - you might like a smooth news anchor to explain it all. But sometimes you might not.

Check out the backstage.bbc area where some of the more advanced thinking is being done.

Some of these ideas are great. Some are just geeky. But providing space for such imaginative development work is something the BBC should be good at.

Backupdate 2

First thing I learned was not to try to back up the whole of your hard drive at one go!

When I got back to the computer roughly twenty-four hours after starting the first 'save' only 19% had transferred.

I think this was partly because I had not set the programme so that it would go on saving when the computer logged me out automatically after a few minutes of keyboard inactivity.

With help from the company providing the trial, I set that right. And I chose more carefully the files to save.

That amounted to slightly more than 2Gb. I did not save pictures and music.

I'll try to build up the amount of material backed up over the next few days.

It would be a pity, after all, to have to reload all your music in a world where more and more of what we listen to, and watch, is stored on hard drives.

Online TiVo backup, anyone?

Backupdate 1

First take on the first stage of the first test of the first online backup:

I am using the service recommended by a big computer store. (I'll give you names once we have the final results)

I started the first "save" at 8pm last night. The software told me there is about 4.5 Gb in my 'My Documents' file. When I checked at 5am this morning, around 18% had been saved.

The software warns that the first time this will take a few hours. My concern is that something will glitch on the home network and stop the save.

Back Up

My hard drive fell over and died recently.

Needless to say, I hadn't backed anything up to CD-Rom for months.

So great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Fortunately, I could remember enough of the recent material to get back in business after a couple of days. And the computer store managed to recover most of the older material.

Now, after repair, my computer is showing some of the same symptoms it did before.

The boot record is taking several minutes to run through. I think it's dying again.

The problem with copying to CD-Rom (and the reason I didn't do it for so long) is that with so much material on the drive it takes quite a long time to back things up.

So I'm going to try out some online backup systems. I'll keep you posted.

IT Sweets

I've been putting together a radio feature on where computers in schools are taking education.

It's hard for somebody like me, taught in neat rows at a wooden desk with a lid, to understand the way modern school pupils think about computers.

They filled rooms and used punched cards when I was at school.

And one of the problems I've discovered during my research for the report is that many teachers, even rather young ones, find they too have to stretch themselves to use IT and the Internet in ways that enhance rather than replace earlier teaching tools.

It's not really valuable if a teacher uses computers to gather lots of pictures and text. That's just a 'scrapbook' approach, as one of my interviewees says.

Using the non-linear processes that computers make possible is the real challenge.

If you have children in elementary or primary school you probably know that they don't sit in rows and lessons involved a lot of sound and movement these days. In Britain, you can't teach maths without 'carpet time'!

Now the next development being sought after is to give children IT tools that free them up even more. They can learn anywhere and anytime, without thinking they are in a formal lesson.

The hope is that will free up their minds, too. But they have to take more responsibility for their time.

Can they do that? Or will they just fall into lazy habits and play games?

I'd like to get your views.

Age Appropriate

I was shocked to see on the LiveJournal site that the vast majority of bloggers on that free-to-use, open source system are between the ages of 15 and 23.

The number of bloggers aged over 50 is tiny.

That can't be down to technical incompetence. People of 50 grew up with cassette recorders and VCRs. The have probably been using computers for 20 years or more.

They've almost certainly had a mobile phone of increasing complexity for ten years.

And it can't be that they have nothing to say!

The over 40s must have persuaded themselves that there is something complicated or nerdy about blogging.

The statistics on the LiveJournal site show that the geographic distribution of bloggers is wide. So it's not cultural, either.

Why do you think? Why aren't people who with luck will have another thirty years of life in the digital age, during which all the books, movies and music in the world will be stored and often made online, finding it easy?

Paper Photos

Despite the rapid spread of digital cameras and mobile phones that take pictures, we still  want to hold a paper print and show it to our friends and families.

You can buy a printer that can produce reasonable photos for a few hundred dollars.

But you can also send your digital images to an online company that will print them out much better and send them in the post the next day, for a few pennies.

This kind of development (pun not intended) is coming to a world wide web near you in all sorts of ways.

Microsoft has reacted by launching Windows Live, a test site that plans to integrate the things we  do on our personal computers with the web.

Microsoft knows that in the future a lot of the software packages they have turned into big profits will be accessible online instead of loaded on our hard drives.

Already there is an online word processor in beta testing that offers a lot of the features of packages that come in a box.

That's software. But the photo story tells us that hardware sales could be affected too.

Why would you want a fax that keeps jamming when you can get a virtual fax machine online?

(I'm not going to link to any of those, because a search engine will show you how many there are.)

Or what about a video recorder? No tape jams or disc failures online.

I'm already planning to replace the TiVo hard disc recorder we've had for a few years with a PC with a big hard drive to record the TV programmes we want to watch (or more accurately the Australian soap operas my daughter watches).

But maybe I should wait until there is an online video recording service that I can programme and download online.

Or wait until every programme is available for download on demand.

If this trend continues, this might not be the time to invest in companies making hardware peripherals.

Sounds of the Underground

There's a plan to allow mobile phone use on the London underground.

But not everyone is happy about the idea.

Apart from security worries (bombs can be triggered by remote control, of course) there is the fear that people will be driven to phone rage by the sound of "I'm on the train..." and the subsequent tedious personal conversations.

I have a solution. Just allow data calls.

Then people can blog away happily and we'll really see where this technology is going!