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When we travel to far away locations 800 numbers are meaningless and time differences can cause confusion. No doubt some software issue with our pc will develop sooner or later. We all know what a hassle it is dealing with the support desks of the PC manufacturers. In Thailand, the Bangkok Post prints a feature called Database that we have we found to be both informative and is explained so that the common person can understand it. We have personally written to Wanda Sloan a couple of times for pc issues and she has always replied promptly and with solid information. We thank her for allowing us to post her expertise here for all of our benefit.
 Billy & Akaisha Kaderli

published with permission from the Bangkok Post

Database   A weekly feature from the Bangkok Post for the latest computer products, information and fixes.

COMPUTER Currents

Bing enters search engine competition
By: JAMES HEIN

It's new and it has many names, the latest of which is Bing. Older names include Kumo, Hook and Kiev. It is Microsoft's latest version of their search engine and it came in with all the usual MS Marketing support.

Microsoft’s Bing Beta. Bing is basically a rebranding of Live Search.
The real question is just how afraid are other search engine providers like Google and Yahoo!? The industry pundits have guessed that Bing will take more from Yahoo! than Google.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Search Strategy had some comments on the subject. First off natural language technology for searches is a bit old hat. The big boys are using statistical semantic processing. Bing will help you find something but not necessarily go the next step and help you get one. MS has gone with the table of contents style presentation but what if the users don't like that and want something else, will Microsoft provide it? Bing is basically a rebranding of Live Search.

Microsoft does have a $100 million advertising budget and they do have a Bing for Mobile planned. The choice of the name is also telling - they wanted a one word name that pops.

Yahoo! also has other technologies like SearchMonkey and BOSS or Build your Own Search Service. The former is about getting Web publishers to provide Yahoo with data for search listings to replace metatags. The latter is Yahoo's program aimed at getting developers to build custom search engines using Yahoo's technology underneath. BOSS already has about 30 million queries per day that do not count towards Yahoo's numbers. Live Search currently has about 40 million per day, not 133 million per day as they like to claim. As usual we will have to wait and see just how successful Bing will be.

Google has released an Android scripting environment that lets you code stuff for the Googlephone on the Googlephone. The toolkit sits on your Android handset allowing coders to write and run scripts in Python, Lua, and BeanShell - without help from a PC. For the full experience you will, of course, use you're your own apps on a PC.

This approach is, of course, the anthesis of the Apple approach. You can code and write phone apps without needing to get them approved or being sold through a single outlet.

You can run scripts interactively in a terminal, launch them as long-running background services, or run them via Locale, a third-party Android app and developer platform that changes the Googlephone's behaviour depending on where it's, yes, located. With BeanShell, you can access Android's Java API directly. With Lua and Python, you tap the API via JSON RPC calls to a proxy. At some point, Google will also offer scripting with Ruby and Javascript as well.

This is how development is supposed to be. Not tied up by some over bearing controlling mechanism but freely available to all to produce apps for all.

Industry news

China wants control over every PC in their country. To this end it has ordered all computer makers to include a version of parental control software with every machine sold within China. The software, "Green Dam-Youth Escort," is supposed to be aimed at porn. The software will point to a single site for updates opening it up for hackers to use to create a huge bot network. I also suspect that the product will do more than just block porn sites. I also suggest that workarounds will be almost immediately available.

The last Microsoft security patch contained 31 fixes breaking their previous record set last December. Of the 10 bulletins 5 were rated as critical. Of the 31 MS declared that 15 were likely to be exploited with 30 days. Probably worth applying this if you haven't already.

Redmond is also preparing their free antivirus software to compete with Symantec and McAfee. Code named Morro, the service is currently being tested in-house and will compete at the lower end of the antivirus market. The product is due out by the end of this year and so far the big players are not commenting. With echoes of Netscape it is hard to compete when your competitor is giving away products for free.

In other patch news Adobe has a new quarterly patch out. You will be prompted to upgrade the next time you use Reader or Acrobat. Since the current vulnerabilities could allow someone to take over your computer it's probably worth doing applying the update.

There are now over a million words in the English language and the millionth was Web 2.0. There are debates over just how many words are in English and over there being 1M. According to Global Language Monitor it happened on June 10, 2009 at 10:22am GMT. Cloud computing came in at 999,996. Web 2.0 was defined as "a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services." You can see more here http://www.languagemonitor.com/no-of-words. 

Legal PSP always has the ring of an oxymoron to it but apparently a large number of students in the US have signed up for it. Choruss LLC is a replacement for older versions like Rhapsody and comes with the backing of Warner, the EEF and, by extension, the RIAA. The scheme works by having universities pay from the student's fees to be able to grab tracks during their school year. Royalties get processed and every one is happy.

Initially the students were to have no choice in the matter but after some intense negative feedback that model has been changed to a voluntary one. The service may be offered outside of classrooms in the near future.

In other news illegal music download figures continue to rise around the globe.

Future tech

I'm guessing that most people saw the announcement that there was a "4-D" storage technology for DVDs that would revolutionise data storage on optical media. It involved nanotubes being built up from the surface and another set perpendicular to these adding the "4-D" aspect. Now some other researchers have demonstrated a form of nanotube archival memory that can store a memory bit for a billion years, and has a theoretical trillion bits/square inch density.

The memory technology uses a tiny particle of iron that can move along a carbon nanotube. The really cool part of this technology is that the nanostructures themselves can be created in a single step by "pyrolysis of ferrocene in argon at 1,000 degrees C." There are a couple more steps in the process that are then "compatible with common semiconductor manufacturing techniques."

I admittedly love new technology but like this and similar announcements they are either theoretical or lab demos. When it comes to mass producing the technology in a reliable cost-effective manner many of these inventions are either a long way off in time or never appear in the commercial realm.

Yes I would love to see a multi terabyte DVD system that I can use to store and retrieve my data but I also want it to be about the same cost my DVD blanks are now. While I am certain my children will see this kind of technology I am not yet convinced that I will.

Email: jclhein@gmail.com

POPPYCOCK & GOBBLEDEGOOK

An office suite alternative
By: GOTFRIED K
I was visiting the Software602 website recently, looking for an updated copy of their office suite - but it wasn't there. I figured they must have discontinued it.

There are many office suites, not just the Microsoft one. Corel has one, the Corel Office X4, which you can download (and pay for) at their website. There's the Ability Office. Softmaker. All the various flavours of the OpenOffice.org project, including Symphony from IBM and Sun's Star Office 9, plus OpenOffice itself. There are online office suites, such as ThinkFree, Google Docs and ZohoWriter. Most of these products are free or reasonably priced so there's no reason to feel trapped into going the Microsoft route, not unless you want to.

The ThinkFree office, for example, is on the Internet, so you can work on your documents wherever you find an Internet connection. You can store your documents online as well and need never worry about losing them. For some purposes and some people, this may be ideal. Same story for Google Docs (although there are some size limitations to your files). With Google Docs you can "share" your document with others, who will be able to view it, read it, even edit it.

But I was talking about Software602, which used to have a respectable office suite.

They've discontinued their own office suite and are now promoting the Kingsoft Office instead. Being the curious fellow that I am, I downloaded the Kingsoft Office to give it a whirl.

All of these office suite products claim to be compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. So the first thing I did was open several Microsoft documents and I must admit I had varying degrees of success. It would be a bit of a stretch to say there was complete Microsoft compatibility. Still, the Kingsoft Writer did a better job than most. (I must point out that if people would stick to the RTF format or Rich Text Format, there wouldn't be these compatibility problems! I've been preaching that for years like a fellow out in the desert.)

Speaking of document formats, the Kingsoft Writer will only save your documents in Word format, RTF or text (and/or HTML). There's no support for the increasingly popular Open Document Format (*.ODT).

That aside, the Kingsoft Writer is nice word processor. It does what it says it will do and it has many features so you needn't feel like you're missing anything. It even has some features of its own, like a Google search box. It can also export to *.PDF, if that's important to you. It has a tabbed interface so you can open many documents and get to them with just a click of the mouse. The toolbars are well-designed and nice; there's even a couple of icons for superscript and subscript, making easy work of that chore.

The Kingsoft Office also includes Kingsoft Spreadsheet and Kingsoft Presentation.

From the Help file, "Kingsoft Writer provides you with more printing choices. You can choose to print on one or both sides of the paper, or merge several pages into one when printing. By printing on both sides of the paper, Kingsoft Writer prints the odd pages first. After finishing printing all of the odd pages, you don't need to turn the stack over because the default printing order for the rest even pages is descending. By choosing to merge several pages into one, you can adjust the order of the printing plates and draw the printing separator line as you like."

Concerning document security, it says, "Protecting your document from unauthorised reading or modification provides an excellent way of ensuring your documents can be secured against a number of risks. Choose from a whole host of document security options providing you with complete control over the way your information can be used."

And in general, it says, "Kingsoft Writer helps you create high quality letters, stylish reports and other professional documents more easily than ever before. It's simple to use and contains all the functions you have come to know and depend on a high quality document system making it one of the most popular document processing applications within China. There are many other great features that will boost the quality and efficiency of your creativity or workload allowing you more time to do the things you like."

If you're looking for a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office, this might be your choice. For more about Kingsoft Office, visit their website at http://www.kingsoftresearch.com/. 

Interesting people may write to Gotfried K. at gotfriedk@yahoo.com.

SLOAN Ranger

Noteworthy programs
A program that's configurable far beyond the entire range of paper notepads
By: WANDA SLOAN
A recent emailer to Post Database noted (haha, that's going to be a pun before the end of this sentence) that I hadn't done any recent reviews of sticky-notes programs. He wondered if there was anything new in that category.

Pnotes is arguably the ultimate sticky-note program, capable of showing, hiding or popping up as an alarm with reminders and bits of information that you used to put on bits of paper and then promptly lost.
Pnotes would be my recommendation.

It's not so much that it's new, but that it is a current, well-maintained program that's incredibly small for what it does, and configurable far beyond the entire range of paper notepads you can buy in the big department stores.

The program is another run-all-the-time one, with a tiny icon in the tray down by the clock in Windows.

Even if you're not currently harried, it's always nice to be able to work a little faster, save a little time, who knows? - maybe bank just a few minutes and be able to take off for a bit, when the editor's not there riding your back.

PolyEdit Lite doesn't look like anything special, but that is its strong point. Because it is familiar, there is no real learning curve.

Inserting graphics and tables is even easier than in Microsoft Word, and it's an extremely fast program that leaves the much wimpier WordPad in the dust.

Yes, it does not have all the features of a full, 12,000-baht Microsoft Word. If you only use a word processor as a high-grade desktop publisher, there is no way PolyEdit Lite will suffice for your font-kerning, on-deadline photo editing or headline layovers.

But a lot of people, not just me, have to write notes, letters, briefings, document drafts and so on. A very fast, very configurable program that can help with this is something of a godsend.

PolyEdit Lite is a spinoff from a mother program, without the "Lite" part, that is a full-fledged word processor. The Lite edition is all about speed, and leaves off some features.

Lite can load and read many documents from other programs, including Microsoft Word but not including Word 2007 (the .Dotx documents) and sometimes not including documents which are super-heavy with photos or graphics.

Unlike WordPad (and many other light word processors) PolyEdit Lite can quickly insert and rough-edit its own photos, however.

Unlike WordPad, this smaller and faster program handles tables, headers and footers for each page, and does mathematical equations. You can add a spell checkers, do super- and sub-script.

The speed, as mentioned, is no competition, but the best way PolyEdit Lite is better than the terribly 20th century WordPad is that it starts, reads and/or edits multiple files, just like a real program, with each document on its own named and clickable tab.

You can save documents in the universal rich-text format (RTF) style, Word 95 (.doc) and standard Unicode, meaning Thai. Or you can export them directly to PDF, a terrific-value feature for many.

Have a look at the program and see how it sounds at (polyedit.com/free.html).

PNotes is an open-source project

and has a well-designed, very

informative website starting at (pnotes.sourceforge.net).

Email: wandasloan@gmail.com

DIGITIZING Management

A browser that boots or an OS that browses
By: PING NA THALANG
With the launch of Windows 7 just around the corner, the focus is now back on the significance of what else the operating system (OS) can do for end-users.

There's no doubt that the OS is the most critical software component in a computer. Without it, the computer simply wouldn't start. However, when you look at how one uses a computer, we notice the OS for just a few seconds until we launch into whatever we use for the rest of the day. The OS is merely a short bridge to the applications that we want to run.

The main functions of an OS consist of booting up the system, interfacing the application codes to CPU, buses, various processors, peripherals, and so on.

The web browser, on the other hand, is a small application that resides on the OS that allows users to access websites. However, if you look closely, there are similarities between the web browser and the OS, as they behave in a similar fashion of bridging website users, as the OS bridges the user with the applications.

When the Internet was in its infancy, the majority of the business core systems resided in servers connected by LAN or proprietary WAN links. Early PCs gave us the power of applications access directly from local drives.

Now, with the enormous growth of Internet-based systems, it's imperative that all business PCs be online. Yet, we have these two bridges that we use all the time living separately.

The Internet is such a critical factor in business IT applications that it now seems archaic and convoluted to access a web page by booting the OS and then read it via a separate browser.

If these two separate yet critical systems are to become one entity, we would have an OS that allows user to access websites directly from desktop; or we would have the browser that also boots up the PC and interfaces all the hardware components that web, apps require.

You may wonder what's the big deal about such a set-up. You could argue that we don't need an all-in-one system, since the OS is bundled with the hardware, and the browser is free anyway. True, but the issue is not about money - rather, the objective is the streamlining or simplifying of software construct to yield a better quality system.

Let's call it Browser/OS (BOS) for the sake of identifying it. The web/systems developers can write codes that fully utilise the BOS's interfaces which seamlessly control and manage PC's peripherals as well remote systems in a single environment.

The BOS would be the single gateway to the TCP/IP network system that is the backbone of future computing. I'm not just talking about cloud computing, but the whole slew of applications and data that even reside on your local drive or local intranet server.

The merging of OS and browser functions into one system may give an excuse for BOS manufacturers to come up with new versions every 6 months or so. That may be true for the some software makers that make their living out of shoving upgrades down people's throats; but there's more humane way of downloading patches or service packs with minimal or no costs.

One interesting development on this front. In retaliation to the recent EU ruling, Microsoft will ship Windows 7 in Europe without any browser installed. This is to spite the EU's statement that Microsoft should allow the browser of user's choice to be installed. But how does the user download the browser of choice from the Internet without the initial browser to begin with?

I won't be surprise if Windows 8 should embrace the BOS concept just to bypass future EU scrutiny, but it'd be much more interesting if we see Firefox 4 or Chrome boot up PCs.

APP Shot

Faster, easier translating
By: WANDA SLOAN
A couple of months ago, I wrote about a utility to help to bring the Google translation service to your desktop. Here is an easier way to do this.

The Google Translate Client automatically loads text from the clipboard and translates it into any of nearly 50 languages.
Google Translate Client for all recent versions of Windows is a small (1.5MB to download, less than 7KB in memory) program that sits silently in the system tray until you need help with another language.

In automatic mode, you simply mark the text you need to be translated, and click on "G" icon in the tray - which you will notice has changed from orange (standby) to green (working).

The program appears on your screen with the translation already under way from the Google servers. In a few seconds, you have your translation, ready for further use.

Of course, there is just a bit of setting up to do after you install Google Translate Client. You have to let the program know your translation needs, first and foremost your language preferences.

The software comes from St Petersburg, so is biased to Russian. A couple of mouse clicks changes that if you wish, and as you see on the screenshot, the languages are always instantly changeable.

The other setup in Google Translate Client is program preference.

When you copy something to the clipboard, you don't always want a translation. If you right-click on the program icon, you get the choice to enable or disable the program in each of the applications you use.

You might want to use it with your Firefox browser but not your word processor. Or you may want to use it in your word processor sometimes, but not right now. The On-Off toggle is always there for you.

The service at (translate.google.com) added Thai to its many languages early this year. It's certainly not perfect, but it has improved in just a few months, presumably on automated feedback from many users.

We're a long way from truly literate translations by computer, but while machines still have problems with the old Groucho Marx phrase, "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana," they're getting a lot better.

Get the program at ( http://www.googletranslateclient.com ).

Email: wandasloan@gmail.com                        

Billy and Akaisha continue to journal and photograph their world travels.

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