Recently in Business Category

Interesting, I just tried to report spam to a company who I assume ran the campaign in good faith. The report got an unexpected response:

: host lonvs07.kinexus.net[212.113.24.167] said: 554

    Service unavailable; Client host [89.234.3.158] blocked using

    relays.ordb.org; ordb.org was shut down on December 18, 2006. Please remove

    from your mailserver. (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Panic! One of our server IP's got blacklisted as a spam source!..... phew, not the case (thank you slashdot), emailiq are filtering their email for spam using a blacklist database that shut down over a year ago. The blacklist have decided they gave enough notice to people filtering against their list, so from now on they are reporting every email checked as being spam. If you're not getting email today, better check with your mail provider.

This company may not have meant to send spam, but because of spam they now have no email until the reconfigure their servers. Events like this show just how much spam is really costing everyone.

I've got a backlog of things I want to post, delayed by a backlog of things I need spend time on at work first, but this one jumps all the queues. Our family business (Roots Kitchens Bedrooms Bathrooms) was featured on ITN news as a small business case study. The wonders of modern technology mean you can see it on their web site. The story that began it all is the CBI warning of 'prolonged economic misery'. ITN asked if we'd give our view of the economy, both as a business and as individuals. They sent the reporter, cameraman and Satellite broadcast truck to us for the afternoon to film, edit and dispatch back in time for the evening news. They phoned to arrange it this around 11am, and it was broadcast across the nation during the 18:30 news programme. If only we could turn around kitchens that quick....

Does podcast start with a capital P? It's not something I've though of before, the whole podcast thing passing by me until today - when I stared in one!*

Podcast's are like radio shows that you listen to offline. If you have the right software, the show will download when you are on the Internet and copy itself to your music player. Then you can listen to it when you are out and about. Although I am a fan of audio (be it music, documentaries, comedies and so on) as much as the next person, I've never got round to playing with podcasts and finding ones I want to listen to regularly.

The biggest reason for that is the difference between iTunes and Windows Media. Having just played with the iTunes podcast setup instructions as directed on this page, I had the system setup in less than a minute so I should automatically receive the future shows as they are released. Unfortunately, I don't use iTunes for all my music. My new phone syncronises through Windows "ActiveSync" which talks to Windows Media Player. I dare say I could change that to sync with iTunes, or figure out how to make podcasts work with Windows Media player but I simply haven't spent any time to figure that out. I used iTunes when I won an iPod Shuffle, but I don't use the device that often. I've been using my new phone to listen to music (it synchronises with Windows Media Player) but that too may be a passing fad.

Now, that's my excuse for not listening to podcasts out the way, what made me start listening today I hear you ask.

Well, my experiences with taking a spammer to court have garnered a little media interest, to which point I was interviewed at the beginning of the week by "Out-law" magazine. They are a magazine that focuses on legal issues of technology. I've been reading it myself for a few years too. They have a weekly podcast but I've never listened to it. I have read the transcripts though, just never downloaded to listen. The interview with me has been included in this weeks podcast. The whole show is 10 minutes long and if you've ever wondered what I sound like now is your time to find out. (If you don't figure it out during listening the spam story is in the last half and the harmonious Scot's accent isn't me, it's the journalist).

Happy listening folks.

*star is probably a bit strong, featured may be a more accurate word.

For the last few years I've had a phone that made people gawk in awe... In awe of why on earth I dragged it around mostly, not because it was a thing of beauty. It was an O2 XDA Exec, or HTC Universal.

The universal ran Windows Mobile 5, had a huge touch screen (640 x 480 - even iPhones don't have screens that big), covered all my PDA needs (synchronising via Outlook to our office diary system), covered my mobile internet needs (running a cut down version of Internet Explorer that mostly worked well enough on most web sites) and of course worked as a phone. It did all those things but it was never a pleasure to use. It was a jack of all trades, master of none. It meant I could check my email at home over Wi-Fi but would be forever trying to get it to connect to my bluetooth car kit. It meant I would always have my phone and diary with me, rather than leaving one of them in the office (my palm was a better PDA, my nokia was a better phone, but the Universal was better simply by combining those devices - albeit with quite a few compromises).

Those days of aggravation and compromise have disappeared. For the last 2 weeks I've been playing with a new "HTC Touch Cruise", also known as the "Polaris" for a while while they developed it. My computer still thinks it's called a HTC P3650 when it synchronises.

Let's run through some of the differences;

• How about the size! The touch cruise is smaller, lighter and a lot more pocket friendly.


• It has Windows Mobile 6. I'm pretty sure this is one of it's biggest improvements over the Universal. Bluetooth now connects seamlessly to my car kit.... well almost, occasionally it connects to the car kit thinking it is in mid phone call. At least I don't have to get the phone to recognise the car kit each time. I'm guessing that WM6 improved the bluetooth functionality.


• The screen is SMALLER, I think this is a good thing. At least because it fits better into the pocket but also because I think the phone processor has less work to do. The universal had a rotating screen and if you opened it to see who was calling the phone would 'hang' for a few seconds and not answer the call when you pressed the button. I'm thinking that a smaller screen = less processor work = faster phone reaction time. The slow response was one of the biggest drawbacks of the Universal for me, though something I preferred over not having the flexibility


• It has a better camera. I've joined the world of 3 Megapixels on a phone. My 'proper' camera is still an Olympus 2.1 Megapixel. First impressions are the photos aren't quite as sharp as that camera produces and it doesn't have an optical zoom, so perhaps the old camera will be saved from the scrap heap for a while yet. This photo (you can click on the picture to enlarge it) was taken at the weekend at the Kent and East Sussex Railway's Thomas the Tank Engine Day. If you look at it full size you'll notice the graininess of the picture. I printed it via our laser printer at work (not known for it's photo print abilities) and I'm more than happy with the output. I didn't buy this phone for the camera afterall


• It has GPS built in! This wasn't a key feature for me buying the phone. Nice to have, but far from essential. It came with TomTom Navigator and my choice of free 'city map'. City Map really means 'Area Map', so I've been testing it over an area half the size of Kent. It's been working surprisingly well. I expected the phone to not have enough processing power for it to be effective but it chatters directions away as well as any specific GPS unit I've tried. The maps move on screen just like the TomToms we have in the office. The only downside is that it takes a few minute to find any satellites (the GPS only turns itself on when requested to save battery power I guess). Oh, and I'll need to buy a cradle for it in the car if I decide to use it. Actually, the only thing that I think will stop me using it as a GPS is the cost of maps - £80 or so if I remember correctly and I just don't do enough travelling to make it worthwhile. The few times a GPS has been useful I've taken the one we share in the office.


• It has the "Touch Flo" interface and some other software improvements. For the universal I ended up buying SPB Mobile Shell to make the windows interface slightly more practical and faster for me to use. The Touch Cruise has a similar interface built in - but much improved. The Touch Flo interface comes into play when you wipe your finger from the bottom to the top of the screen. It brings up a special screen of big buttons with your chosen 9 phone numbers and some shortcut keys. Drag your finger to the side and you get other shortcut menus. I'm not sure if HTC have added to Windows Mobile, or Windows Mobile has improved a lot, but the interface for the Music player is more fluid and responsive than it used to be and the photos in the "Camera Album" can be 'dragged' off to display the next one in a way I would associate with an iPhone more than a Windows Phone. I've only played with an iPhone for two minutes though, so I'm not best qualified to compare between the two.


• The phone also came with SPB GPRS Monitor and the Opera web browser. The Opera browser is something I always considered buying for my Universal - It's a lot better than Internet Explorer Mobile. In fact, I'm surprised IE Mobile didn't improve more in WM6. Opera allows you to open different tabs so you can have more than one web page open at a time which I find most useful. Other differences are relatively minor, both struggle with some web sites, neither cope with the Web 2.0 Ajaxiness so I can't post to this blog from my mobile at the moment. Anyway, Opera was a nice addition


• Both have a stylus (necessary for writing lots into my diary, on a word document and so on) and I made the decision I'm happy not to have a small keyboard (there is another similar HTC device that has a slide out keyboard) having gained the advantage of a smaller device. The Touch Cruise has gained a 'wheel' on top of the Universals 4 way direction pad. The wheel works really well allowing you to scroll through contacts list then click to activate (or click to one side to expand, click the middle button to do something else). I don't have a big iPod but I'm told the iPod 'wheel' is actually a sensor that detects you making a circular movement, whereas on the touch cruise it is really a moving wheel on the surface. I'm told the iPod wheel is more effective and I bow to that persons knowledge of having played with both devices. Having not experienced the difference first hand I'm finding the Touch Cruise wheel great to use. Perhaps if I get an iPod i'll return to being less satisfied!


• Finally, the choice of ring tones is better. I was never quite happy with the "ring" of the Universal but it appears WM6 has introduced a few more normal phone like rings. A small detail I know, but there nevertheless

There was another phone that compared on specifications and would have been available to me 1 month sooner, the E-Ten X800 glofiish. Actually, it has a 640 x 480 screen so in some respects would have been better. I think the camera was 2Mpixels (not that I was worried about the camera). The key reason I chose to wait was that the user forums on the E-Ten web site are only accessible if you own an E-Ten product. The few reports I could find on similar E-Ten phones elsewhere suggested problems with a lack of support from E-Ten in the UK. The problems all looked manageable (the first phones shipped with an out of date software ROM which could be patched by downloading from the E-Ten website) but without seeing what the problems were it gave me a bit of a confidence problem. At least with the HTC I had already had one of their products and had found plenty of information on their web site and other places which allowed me to fix or work around things which cause me problems - even if most other users were happy with it.

That brings me neatly onto the problems with the Touch Cruise. So far they are all superficial.

1. The slide button on the top left that controls sound volume appears a bit cheap, plasticy and likely to break. I hope it's just an impression and the phone will comfortably last the 3 years I'm hoping for, but it does make me nervous.


2. The button above the slider - used to activate voice dialing, and the camera button on the opposite lower side, are hard to activate. They have to be pushed just the right way in the right position to activate them. Perhaps that means it's me pushing them weirdly in the first place and everyone else is using them without trouble. They certainly feel solid and durable enough.

In summary, this is the best phone I've ever had, doing everything I need it to do well, and lots of other things well I really didn't need it for.

Backups are important. This tenet will be learned the first time you lose important files. Knowledge in itself is useless, it's the application knowledge that reaps rewards.

Having learnt many years ago the cost of losing data from a computer, I've become a dab hand at setting up backup routines for my laptop, desktops and servers. In the past I used a windows shell script to copy files from my laptop to a space on my office server. That server backs up again to an off site server just to make sure the data is kept. Unfortunately this script has been somewhat unreliable of late. At some point, on a never quite identified file, the copy action would fail and backup would stop. I needed a new solution, one that would be reliable, simple to set up and cost nothing but setup time. I found it in the shape of some linux software called rsync and a windows client to rsync called DeltaCopy. Actually, DeltaCopy is more than just an rsync client, it can be an rsync server for windows machines but I didn't need that. That would be very useful though if you are using an old windows PC as your file server though.

What's rsync?
From their web site: rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer. rsync is freely available under the GNU General Public License.

I've known of rsync for years, but never used it until now. Essentially the programme will compare files in two directories, if a file has been updated it will copy the updated parts and not the whole file. My script solution copied everything whether or not it needed to be. As I'm on the same network as my backup server bandwidth really isn't a problem. However, the rsync solution means I will be able to succesfully backup from home over the VPN.

Setup was really easy.
First set up our linux server to run rsync as a daemon. That means it runs all the time waiting for other rsync programs to connect to it. That's the same way a web server like apache works, sits there waiting until it has something to do, does it, then waits again. How to do that will depend on your server software but for my Trustix powered server it was simply "swup --install rysnc-server" and it was downloaded and installed automatically. Trustix has reached end of life now, so if you are looking for a new operating system you'll find rsync on most ready to go, including redhat and ubuntu.
Second set up my laptop to use an rsync client. That includes choosing which folders I want to synchronise with the server
Third, enable the rsync client to run as a scheduled task on my laptop.

This is where the DeltaCopy program is so useful. It's a windows point and click graphical interface. Installation was a breeze and I confess I didn't read the instructions to see how it worked it was so simple. You create a "profile" for each synchronisation task you want. For me there's only one, I called it "laptop backup". Then add all the folders (or specific files) you want backed up followed by the server details. At the bottom of the profile is a section called "schedule". DeltaCopy links seamlessly to the windows scheduler, so I set my backup to occur every day at 11am. Later I found settings that let me get an email on whether the backup worked and how well it went. If it works, the email includes the rsync result information too.

Today the first success email arrived at 11.07. In 7 minutes the folders had been synchronised and my backup completed. It's so fast because only changed files have been copied across the network. The full backup is a huge 21Gb.... perhaps that explains why the script would fail, 21Gb over a wireless network would take.... a long time.

The final step of any backup: Test it worked and test regularly. Testing is easy using this method, just open the file from the server over the network. To think of all those hours I used to spend waiting for a file to be recovered from my TR1 tape backups.

Wednesday night was hospitality night for me. First, I went to Ashford to see my friend Annie Browne's opening of her new training centre. Apple juice, nibbles, some words from the mayor and meeting people I haven't seen in a while. All good fun! It's a smart training setup in more ways than one; it's a nice new professional training area, it's also the first time I've seen a smartboard in use in business.

Smartboards are like great big computer screens that you can draw on. Gone are the days of looking for a piece of chalk, you can write things using just your finger. You can write things in different colours, save your notes and email them to people later. You can use it to show a PowerPoint presentation, watch a move or surf the Internet.

This may be new to me in business, but my 10 year old daughter would know exactly how to operate a smartboard. Her school started installing them 5 years ago and now every classroom has one. My 5 year old son arrives in class to move his name tag into whether he is pack lunch or school dinners. It used to be a set of cards in pockets on the wall, now he drags his named hot air balloon image on the smartboard from the ground into the cloud that equates to pack lunch or dinners. As someone who remembers the transition from chalk board to white board at school I can't help but be impressed at the speed technology is moving on.

In my recent course at Canterbury Christchurch University, almost all the tutors used projectors and PowerPoint presentations. Smartboards haven't quite reached them yet. Wednesday night was also the award ceremony where I and many of the others collected our certificates. More apple juice, more nibbles, some words from the Vice Chancellor and meeting people I haven't seen in a while. More good fun! So here you have it, a photo of my "Certificate in Business", a whole 40 credits at level 1. I confess, I'm vain enough to want a degree just to prove I could do it. In reality, I don't need one (it wont help my career prospects!). That said, I love learning new things. The trouble is knowing what I need to learn. This course did nothing for my business knowledge but lots for my French. Perhaps I should do a course on how to operate a smart board...

Every time we get a new member of staff I have to teach them how to work out margins and mark ups. This page is here so I don't have to explain it from scratch for the next new person.

What’s a “mark up” & what’s a margin?

They are terms given to the way a business works out how much money it will make or has made on a product. It’s the difference between the buying price and the selling price as a percentage.

Mark ups and margins are all about percentages. Despite learning percentages at school everyone seems to have forgotten them by the time they get to work, so let’s start at the beginning:

What is a percentage?

Percentages are away of comparing different values using a ratio. I think it comes from the French phrase ''Per Cent'' meaning "per hundred"
Example time
It you have a 100ml jar that is full (100ml) it is at 100% capacity and 100% of it’s volume. If it is only half full (50ml) it is at 50% capacity and 50% of it’s volume. Easy so far.
You choose where your 100% begins and that’s where many people start to get confused. Lets say I wanted to put a chemical in my jar and the safe maximum level was 50ml. It I fill the jar to 50ml it is now at 100% capacity. It l over fill it to 75ml it is now at 150% of its safe capacity yet at the same time only 75% of its volume.

How do we work that out?

1. throw away your Calculators % button. It is only there to confuse you!
2. Start with 100 and divide it by your unit of measure that is 100%.In the above chemical jar example 100% safe capacity was 50ml So 100 / 50 = 2
3. Multiply by the actual unit of measure you have. In the example above, our overfilled jar held 75ml so 75 * 2 = 150, which is your answer as a percentage, the chemical jar was at 150% of it’s safe capacity.

Now we know about percentages, let's apply that to mark-ups and margins

To do this I first want to tell you percentages best kept secret!
100% of 1 is 1.
50% of 1 is 0.5.
So to turn a % into a decimal just move the point two places to the left
75% becomes 0.75,
62.5% becomes 0.625
(or if you get very scared by not using the calculator, just divide by 100. 100 / 1 =1 , 50 / 100 = 0.5, 75 / 100 = 0.75)

Mark ups and margins are all based around percentages.
Let’s start with a mark up calculation.
You are given a buying price (€50) and told to ‘mark up’ by 50%

€50 * 0.5 = €25 euros
Add them together €50 + €25 = €75

Lets try that with Britain’s most popular mark up, VAT (Value Added Tax for my friendly non British readers). VAT is (at the time of writing) 17.5% added to the selling price of many products and handed to the government to pay for part of running the country.

17.5% as a decimal is 0.175
€50 * 0.175 = €8.75
Add them together €50 + €8.75 = €58.75

It gets better though, if you want to know only the total including vat you can take a shortcut. 100% = 1, 17.5% = 0.175, added together 1.175, so
€50 * 1.175 = €58.75
In other words, our total including the VAT mark up is 117.5% of our starting point. Our starting point is the price without the vat (100%).

One more example then, €66 + a 50% markup in one go:
€66 * 1.50 = €99.

What about taking off a markup? Lets say you've been given a book of retail prices including VAT and you have to load them onto a computer without VAT. It's simple when you remember the VAT total is 117.5% because division ( key: / )is the opposite of multiplication ( key: * ). Note, on your calculator it looks like .

€58.75/1.175 = €50

Remove our 50% mark up
€99/1.5 = €66

Be careful! This only works when you have more than 100% to begin with. Eg, you cannot do €99/.5 to find out what the 50% was, €99/.5 = 198!

So, with a mark up our starting figure (eg cost) is 100%. You can have a markup of any value, eg 300%

Now for margins

With a margin our ENDING figure is 100%. You can never have a margin equal or greater than 100%

Sometimes you'll be given a selling price (eg recommended retail price, RRP) if you have 33% margin, what price do you put on your purchase order? (in this case, margin is our profit).

€50x0.33= €16.50
Which is our profit, so €50 - €16.50 = €33.50 Our buyingprice

Again we can shortcut this to find our cost price. If we know that if 33% is our margin then 67% must be our buying price, so €50x0.67 = €33.50

What about when we have a buying price. A margin of 33% and we need to knew the selling price?
We know that if our margin is 33%, our cost must be 67% (our selling price with a margin calculation must always be 100% so 100% - 33% profit margin = 67% for the cost).
We can divide our cost price by the cost percentage to return to 100% selling price, eg:
€33.50 is 67% of our 100% total, so
€33.50 / 0.67 = €50

Still with me on this?

Let’s try comparing some mark ups and margins and see what happens.
A sales rep once said to me “You’ll make more selling my product because the price list I give you has a 50% profit; everyone else is using 40%”.
The trouble is he was talking about profit as a mark up calculation in his book and everyone else was talking in margins.
A €75 product in his book had a profit of €25

(Using mark up: selling price = 150% of cost price, cost price = 100%, so €75 / 1.50 = €50 cost, therefore €25 profit).

A €75 product in everyone else’s book had a margin of €30

(Using margin: selling price = 100%, margin = 40%, therefore €75 * 0.4 = €30 profit)

So, a 40% margin is better than a 50% mark up.

Here’s one for people who aren’t in business.

Have you ever been tempted by the banners proclaiming “Sale prices - We’ll pay the 17.5% VAT”? Great! A 17.5% discount…. right?
That’s what the marketing department want you to think, but as you now know, VAT is a markup calculation so to arrive at the excluding VAT price you DO NOT deduct 17.5%. Let’s work out what the real discount is, assuming our 2 fictitious bargains are €100 for the “Kanga” and €117.50 for the “Roo” respectively, including VAT. Let’s remove the VAT the right and wrong way.

A VAT inclusive price is 117.5% of our original price, so:
Kanga: €100 / 1.175 = €85.11
Roo: €117.50 / 1.175 = €100.00
are the correct after VAT removed prices.

Let’s assume the marketing department sent the wrong poster to be printed:
“Save 17.5%, buy our Kanga and Roo today” it proclaimed.
17.5% as a decimal is 0.175 (simply move the decimal two places like we said earlier)
Kanga: €100 * 0.175 = €17.50 discount = €82.50 left to pay
Roo: €117.50 * 0.175 = €20.56 discount = €96.94 left to pay

That’s right, if the sign proclaims you save 17.5% - it’s wrong, you actually save…
(working this out using the same process as above so you see how it works again):

1. throw away your calculators % button. It is only there to confuse you!


2. Start with 100 and divide it by your unit of measure that is 100%. In the above, 100% of the VAT inclusive price was €100 for Kanga So 100 / €100 = 1


3. Multiply by the actual unit of measure you have. In the example above, our after VAT price is €85.11 so €85.11 * 1 = 85.11

We know 85.11% is our before VAT price, so VAT content was 100% - 85.11% = 14.89%

I guess “Save 14.89%, buy our Kanga and Roo today” just doesn’t have the same ring on a poster.

By the way, if you're wondering why i used € instead of £, I wrote most of this entry on a Coach travelling through france and it was simply quicker to write € on my PDA :-)

So far my experiments with sipgate VoIP have been good. The next step has been to buy an adapter that will convert our home phone into a VoIP phone. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the sipgate softphone is fine for me when I'm using my laptop but it doesn't have the same convenience of picking up a phone and dialing. Secondly, we make quite a few calls between the family (my house, mums house and the office) and all those calls soon add up. If VoIP works, we should be able to call each other for free (or at least no more than the one off hardware costs).

Just making and receiving VoIP calls isn't the whole objective though, I need our home phone to continue to ring on our home phone number. We're still keeping the line (it's our broadband connection too) and many of our friends know to reach us on this number. So, I wanted to use VoIP when it works for us, and our traditional line if ever it doesn't.

This is where choosing the right adapter comes in. I had to find an adapter that had an FXS port, and FXO port and an ethernet port. What do all these acronyms mean?

• Your normal analog phone plugs into an FXO port (eg the BT Plug on the wall) You could think of the O meaning 'office phone system' if you like, or perhaps 'O'h what a big phone company.


• The BT Plug on the wall can only be connected to FXS equipment, that is your regular phone. You could think of FX'S' as 'S'imply my desk phone or 'S'ubscriber/customer to the networks plug on the wall


• I didn't mention it earlier, VoIP = Voice over Internet Protocol if you didn't already know


• and SIP = Session Interaction Protocol, which is one method for VoIP to work, much the same as you can send a letter in a white envelope or a brown envelope and it's still a letter, you can SIP or you can Skype and it's still a VoIP call

I needed an adapter that had both an FXO port (so I could plug our regular phone into it) as well as an FXS port (so the adapter could be plugged into the wall like a normal phone).
Via the Ethernet cable it gets plugged into our home network (and onto broadband internet via our home router). The adapter has to log into the SIP service (sipgate in my case) so that it can receive calls over VoIP. You'll notice that from my earlier post I now appear to be online( ) all the time. That's because our home phone is logged into sipgate ready for the next call.

Anyway, onto which adapter I chose.
I found a linksys SPA3102 which had all the required features. It's the latest incarnation of devices from a company once called Sipura who specialise in Voice of IP products. Sipura were bought by Cisco (Cisco are big in business networks, Linksys is their lower end home/small office brand of networking equipment) and are now a part of Linksys. Most importantly I could find users with some experience of the linksys/sipura devices amongst various forums. Although lots were having problems and there seemed to be a fair few needing to do or waiting for firmware updates, many of the replies were giving solutions. I am always more worried when there is a a lack of forum/troubleshooting activity than I am to see it, I don't like being at the leading edge of technology any more than I have to and forum activity shows a product is being well used. It was also within my budget (free wasn't an option, but the £50 price tag was close enough for me to give it a whirl). Being part of the huge Cisco corporation probably isn't a bad thing either, at least I can have an expectation that the device will be around and supported for a while.

I consider myself a pretty network savvy person but this little grey box (photo at the top) had me confused for several hours.

• Step 1: open the box, gasp in awe at the simple instructions.
• Step 2: plug the provided wire from SPA3102 into phone, plug original phone wire from SPA3102 into BT wall outlet (well, actually, the broadband filter but let's not get picky).
• Step 3: wonder why there is no dial tone and nothing happens.
• Step 4: decide it must need to be enabled from within the web interface. The next problem was entirely of my own making. I departed from the instructions. The device has TWO ethernet ports. one for "internet" one for "computer". Now, if I had a cable modem that presented an ethernet port as it's connection to the world I could probably follow this part, but I, along with many others have ADSL and a wireless router. I plugged the "internet" part into my router and didn't bother moving my PC's ethernet wire from the router to go via the SPA3102. I couldn't connect to the web interface, I couldn't hear any dial tone on the phone (the instruction said I could configure things through a voice menu). I could see the unit had collected it's IP address from my router but I just couldn't connect.
• Step 5: Decide to read the instructions and do it the strange way. Web configuration now working! Realisation now dawns, it's not strange at all, the device has a firewall and can only be configured from it's LAN side, not the Internet WAN side. It doesn't know that it is already behind a firewall router so the creators took the sensible approach of making it be configured only from it's own Ethernet side. It looks like
• Step 6: Lesson learnt, now how to configure it so i get a dial tone...
• Step 7: Realisation dawns that it is already configured to give the regular phone a dial tone. I don't hear a dial tone.... "Houston, I have a problem". Is the unit faulty? Not likely, electronics are pretty good in my experience, it's normally something obvious... like the wire. Unplug everything and look very closely... yes, it's the wire! The wire they provided is an RJ11 plug. It's a small squareish plug with 4 wires, or at least 4 slots where wires can connect. Except telephones only use 2 wires. My old cordless dect phone (a couple of years old BT Freelance XD 500 as it happens) uses the outside two slots of the connector. The SPA3102 uses the inner two slots. Ho hum, off to the web to order £9 worth of wire adapters, most of the cost made up from carriage (BT to RJ11 so the phone can use it's own wire to plug into the SPA3102, and an RJ11 to BT so I could plug the SPA3102's supplied wire into phone line).
• Step 8: The instructions at this point became very vague. Well, actually, they didn't exist (note to self, never again gasp in awe when technical instructions look simple). I had to log on to the Linksys web site to find answers of how to do things. As the device needs broadband to work, that's not so big a deal but it would have been nice to have a PDF manual or at least where to go for a PDF manual.

On the plus side, the device is cleverer than I thought. It let's me:

1. Receive a POTS (Plain old Telephone system) call - and ring my regular phone.


2. Receive a VoIP call - and ring my regular phone


3. Make a VoIP call - once configured


4. Make a POTS call - once configured (I made it so we have to dial #9 to get the regular phone line for calling, VoIP is cheaper but POTS has tried and tested reliability)


5. Receive a POTS call - forward it to another VoIP destination


6. Receive a VoIP call - forward it to another POTS destination

There are hundreds of settings on this thing, but very little documentation. Without the Linksys web site I would have never been able to guess how to configure the dial string (so we dial #9 then phone number for POTS call).

So, was it worth the £50 (+ wire adapters!)? Yes. I just wish they'd made the instructions more available.

Next stage of my VoIP experiments, finish making our new Avaya IP Office 500 phone system work as a SIP endpoint

Was it 12 months ago already since last Christmas? Sure is, so Sunday was the day for the Roots Christmas party. As Root's has grown our parties have gone from a small gathering at mum and dad's house to international travel and superstars for the entertainment.

Last year we hired a 70 seater coach and took everyone (at least, everyone who had a valid passport!) to Bruges for the day. Every year we like to do something a little special so this year we hired the upstairs restaurant of one of our favourite local pubs (The Red Lion, Hernhill) for Christmas dinner.

Musical entertainment provided by the talented "Gez"... I have no idea what his surname is, but I do know he has a superb repertoire of music. He played at a big party we had this year to celebrate by Dad's 60th (even his friends from Australia booked flights to join in) and he played a song I'd never heard before called "Roots" as well as one of my favourites "The JCB Song". I was really pleased when Mum said she'd booked him for the Christmas party as well. I made sure I got a good view of how he plays. (I keep dreaming I can play guitar like he does one day... but I know I wont put the effort in to learn it!). Anyway, if you're organising an event and are looking for a musician, Gez should be high on your list, just don't book him for a day we want him please!

We often book two entertainers and a few years ago Mum managed to get a Magician named Etienne. As you may have guessed from the name, he's French. He's also talented, performed regularly to members of the Royal Family, won lots of awards for his magic across Europe and he's booked a long way in advance. When Mum said she'd asked if he was available I didn't think he'd be coming.

A few years ago he did a trick which left a playing card on the ceiling of my parents oast house (the part inside the cowl, that's an apex roof about two stories high) with my dad's signature on it. I've no idea how he did it, but my dad signed the card, put it in a pack that was shuffled and at the end of the trick the whole pack was thrown into the air and the one card stuck to the ceiling (think 6 metre high ceiling!) was the one Dad signed. 51 other cards floated down. The card is still stuck to the ceiling.

(In the picture, Etienne makes coins appear and disappear much to Nicola's delight) His magic is impressive, but so is his personality. He arrives and quietly starts mingling with people and showing his magic, captivating everyone around him. My judgement on his impressive personality was what happened when we started to get everyone upstairs to the restaurant. Bear in mind this was a Sunday night in a pub that doesn't normally open on Sunday nights. Almost everyone there was there with us but there was one family who just happened to stop by and be having a drink. Their children were amazed by Etienne and while all the Rooties went upstairs, Etienne spent a few minutes with them showing them some more magic. He didn't have to, he could have had a few minutes break (I'm pretty sure he came to us having been doing his magic somewhere else), but instead he took a few minutes to entertain the children. A superstar in every way.

I've been playing with VoIP for a while now. VoIP = "Voice over Internet Protocol" and it's essentially using computer networks as your phone network. Skype is a form of VoIP. The one thing I have against Skype is it's closed protocol that means only Skype things will work with Skype. The more open standard is called SIP, and lots of companies make software and devices that will work with each other through SIP. Our new office telephone system can connect to SIP in the same way it connects to our BT phone lines (actually, there's no physical connection as the SIP calls would come in via our internet connection rather than a physical BT line plug).

One of the downsides with learning anything new is the time it takes to learn. The downside with any communication network is that it's only as good as the number of people that are already using it (I have only a half dozen contacts on my Skype account and my MSN Messenger account).

My recent VoIP experiments brought me to the www.sipgate.co.uk website. They've really made the set up easy. I signed up for an account in less than 3 minutes. I downloaded their version of the X-Ten softphone. They've made it so that it downloads including your account settings. All I had to do was install, no settings to change, it worked immediately! Superb! Anyway, less than 5 minutes after discovering sipgate, I called myself from the office to my new sipgate phone. I picked up one of their free local numbers, so you can call me too on 01227 808060 from your real phone(s). If you already use a SIP service, you can call that number free by using whatever prefix you need to connect from your service to sipgate.

That means you can call me on one local number wherever I happen to have my laptop set up. At the office, at home, In a hotel while visiting suppliers around the UK or even if I'm working abroad. Therein lies the one problem, I need to have the laptop turned on for the phone to be working and available. The good thing is that SIP doesn't require a specific computer, there are devices that will connect SIP to your normal house telephone (and even let you use both networks together), as I said our office phone system already works with SIP (or will when I figure out how), my mobile phone has software that allows it be used as a SIP phone, our ADSL router will also let us connect a regular phone to the SIP services. You can also buy dedicated SIP phones from around £50 (and DECT cordless SIP phones are around £100).

I've still lots to learn about SIP and making it work. One little gadget I just found on the sipgate site is a snippet of code that may* tell you if I've got my SIP device connected to the internet..... may, or may not.

Break out the champagne everyone, Paul O'Brien, from Intellimailer has told the Information Commissioner's Office that they will be sending no more spam. The ICO is happy that intellimailer have been educated in the correct meaning and interpretation of the law and will send no more spam, ever.

Fantastic!

If you receive any spam from intellimailer, report them to the ICO (I have a contact there who has the case history, email me if you'd like the information) and please let me (and any readers) know how you get on.

By the way, the full list of domain names they used to send spam to me has grown a bit, so here it is in full:

intrer11.co.uk
intrer12.co.uk
intrer14.co.uk
intrer15.co.uk
(and checking whois, they're continuing to buy domains starting intrer for some reason. Note they haven't registered intrer13 yet, guess they're superstitious!)
intellimailer.org.uk
int-mailer.org.uk
emaileronline.co.uk
int-mailer-uk.co.uk
ukmailing-co.co.uk
uk-mailing-co.co.uk
emailer-online.co.uk
the-intelligentmailer.co.uk
kt8.com
mailing-software-uk.co.uk

I bet you're all wondering what's happening about the intellimailer spam? Well, having ignored my requests that they stop spamming me, they are now ignoring the requests of the Information Commissioner. They did at least respond to the ICO to say they would remove my from the database, except they didnt remove me and continue to send the spam.

The ICO has all the evidence, I'm waiting to hear from them what their next step will be - I'll post here when I've heard and have time.

I confess I've not been doing a lot on the spam wars front. There are far more interesting things to be doing in life than fighting spam, like earning a living (plug!). However, there are two companies that have been REALLY annoying me lately, so much so I had to do something about it.

I complained about one of them to the Information Commissioners Office. They are responsible for ensuring people and companies comply with the telecommunications regulations. In my view, they are an INTELLIGENT government department, they don't wade in taking everyone through the courts for the genuine oversight or misunderstanding of the regulations, they first ensure the company/people are educated to know the law. Only then, if the company persists in breaking the law will they take action. So I understand they haven't taken action in court against anyone for sending spam. I'd like to think this is because the companies they have 'educated' have stopped sending spam.

Anyway, I filed a complaint about kt8.com and their various trading names. I've just received the following response from the ICO:

So there we have it. I am right to say that I should not be sent spam by these companies. What do you think the chances are they will stop now? I've asked the ICO by email what the response of kt8.com was when they were contacted. Particularly why kt8.com ignored my requests they stop sending me email yet will apparently stop now the ICO has asked (I'm not sure if this is a standard response letter and kt8.com haven't actually responded).

So, if you have received spam from any of the following domains and they have ignored your unsubscribe request (not that you subscribed in the first place, they took my email addresses from a number of places) complain to the ICO as well and lets see what happens.

intellimailer.org.uk
int-mailer.org.uk
emaileronline.co.uk
int-mailer-uk.co.uk
ukmailing-co.co.uk
uk-mailing-co.co.uk
emailer-online.co.uk
the-intelligentmailer.co.uk
kt8.com
mailing-software-uk.co.uk

You may also like to know these domains are registered both as companies and as individuals.
The company mentioned on one is: "Domain Host Ltd", who are the same address on the domain registration as "Domainhost Ltd", companies house have them as company number 05632256 so (giving the benefit of the doubt) they made a typo on the domain registration. Perhaps it was "Paul O'Brien" who made the typo, he appears as the private individual that owns several of the domains as well as being the admin contact for kt8.com. KT8.com happens to haves the same PO Box address in Whitstable as Domainhost Ltd. As I said, benefit of the doubt, it could be a whole collection of typing errors when registering the domain names.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you all what product they were trying to sell in their spam..... Server based software to send large amounts of marketing emails. As they say on their site:
"With Intelligent Mailer your mailings are faster and more likely to get through ‘spam’ filters"
I couldn't make it any more ironic if I tried.

I've been talking to a nice lady in America about a sink and her email was signed of "DBA.....". I never knew that in America DBA is a common abbreviation for "Doing Business As...", I guess the same as we use "T/A" for Trading As where the business is legally one name but uses a different trading name.

I've been investigating ways of improving our business systems to keep up with our growth.

One system I've been investigating is the open source "Web ERP" which is a system using PHP and MySQL. It looks good and I'm now at the stage of deeply investigating how it works and how moving onto it would affect our processes. In order to do this I needed to install it on a server. I really don't like installing things on our production server so VMWare comes to the rescue once more. VMWare is a piece of software that lets you have a virtual computer running on top of your regular operating system (Windows XP for my laptop). So, to test weberp I installed my favourite Trustix Linux operating system.

As Web ERP is open source, I've shared my Virtual Machine to save others the time of creating their own server to test on.

If you're here to get the Virtual Machine, here is the current link:
weberp.zip (84Mb)
The zip file includes some important instructions you should read before you virtually power on the server. Remember, you'll need VMWare player or equivalent from http://www.vmware.com (about 30Mb) in order to run the machine.

Let me know any feedback or questions. If demand is high I'll set up the FTP server, otherwise I expect the http service will suffice.

I should also warn you that the normal free software caveats apply (use at your own risk, no warranty etc).