Google now suggests followers rather than making you follow them, good move.

It has been reported that Google has made the buzz options more visible with an option to prevent users from seeing your follow list, essential for business users. I actually can’t find this, so if anyone could point it out? I read there is now a tab for buzz…. perhaps it is yet to be rolled out across all accounts.

Finally. shared content on Google Reader will no longer be automatically connected to Buzz either.

If Google continue to refine and improve Buzz (rather than letting it stagnate like so many other Google products) then they may be onto a winner after all.

So I’ve only been using it for a day so this is probably a little premature but….

What’s that noise?

Nevermind, here comes Facebook with a fly swatter! From a business perspective, Buzz may have it’s use as a direct marketing tool and I’m sure it might come in handy for those people using GMail ‘purely’ for business. Where it really falls down is that it doesn’t currently have much scope outside of your normal email circle and only targets Gmail customers.

My main concern is the lack of seperation between business and personal use. I prefer to have many email accounts all managed through my gmail business account. There is no line drawn here for Buzz. OK so I may change my mind in the future after Google tweak and add new features but currently it’s blending my business and social contacts into one big pot.

SEO Buzz

Sorry, as far as I can see there are no possibilities here. There is some integration into your Google profile page but it isn’t helpful.

Potential for Marketing

I’m still a little unsure, it will be interesting to see how people get on using it purely for business but that will not be me I’m afraid. Buzz cuts out massive demographic by being gmail only, in it’s present form it is a tool to promote gmail rather than promote social networking. Facebook provides a more complete solution and makes you wonder, why bother with Buzz as well. On a positive note I must say I do like the fairly seamless 3rd party platform integration (i.e. twitter and blogging). It’s certainly likely to add value to gmail and pull more market share from hotmail and yahoo (both still ahead in the numbers).

The actions of the corrupt MP Mr Mandelson have horrified me (again, oh and I’m not too happy with Alan Johnson either!) and if you have found this post through Google then you probably already know why and I expect you also already know that he is a sock puppet to the music industry. Maybe he really has no firm grasp of why his actions won’t work, despite so many warnings from industry experts such as TalkTalk, but why try and get a grip on such things if your pockets are being lined by industry fatcats?

Even MI5 are against this legislation and rightly so, because people such as myself will blog about this sort of issue and how to get around it.

Anyway, accusations aside,  you are with Virgin Media and you are terrified that your packets might get sniffed? Well there is not a lot to be worried about quite yet and there are some precautions you can take.

Avoid Deep Packet Inspection

Dan Klein, media accounts director at Detica stated that “Encryption of the data packet would defeat us, We’re not going to put the processing power into defeating it.” – source

So you know what to do, enable your encryption! Bear in mind that the software Virgin Media are trialing, CView, will only look for p2p traffic from BitTorrent, Gnutella and eDonkey. I use UTorrent and a quick google gets you this, Enabling Encryption in Utorrent – I tried to find info about the others but no cigar, sorry! At the moment they are only observing copyrighted music torrents.

Wait There’s More

Now it’s worth noting that virgin media is not the only body that will be collecting data on your downloads, there are many organisations that gather information on illegal file sharers and I would heartily recommend you taking a look at Peer Block, the successor to Peer Guardian. It’s an amazing project, the application is easy to use and updates itself based on the latest compiled lists of corporate spys, it should stop these 99.99% of these organisations from getting your IP address, win.

Further Action

If you are in the UK and are concerned about this sort of thing then perhaps you should consider getting involved with or supporting the UK Pirate Party (they certainly need the help) and you never know, a few seats in parliament might shake things up a little, Labour have certainly lost my vote.

I leave you with this delightful video from Dan Bull, nicely put Dan.

For whatever reason, many people are finding themselves unable to upgrade to a 64bit operating system, whether it be Windows 7 or Vista, while others find themselves considering downgrading just so they can connect remotely to work. Well, there is a pretty obvious and easy solution—use a Virtual PC!

This solution is tailored to Windows 7 64bit, but can be equally applied to Vista installs, and it is completely free and easy!

First, grab both these files (for the relevent version of windows 7).

Install them in the correct order!

Start up Windows 7 Virtual PC XP (if you installed them correctly they should now be in Start Menu).

Install your VPN-1 Secure Client.

From your virtual PC tool menu:
Click Tools-> Settings
Click Network
Change your adaptor to use your actual hardware adaptor, not Shared Networking.
Reboot your virtual PC completely

You should now be able to start VPN Secure client and log in from your PC. Happy days.

The combination of Shopify and WordPress has created something remarkably easy to maintain (WordPress is easy and Shopify is hosted), such that he does not need to invest money to update every bit of html. I disabled all comments in WordPress (as they’re not really needed for a shop front), and so far it looks not too shabby—if I do say so myself.

At first, Shopify had me wondering: Would it be flexible enough; How easy would liquid be just to make some basic changes. Well the answer was ‘easy’—you can even create atom feeds of product ‘collections’, and feed them to WordPress, which is something I plan to do later on.

So there you have it, a quick and cheap solution for an e-commerce shop and front end that’s easy for the client to maintain.

Shopify
WordPress

By the way, if you want anything electrical repaired and you’re in or around Edinburgh, then I would highly recommend Sound and Vision Technical Services—Chris and the gang really know what they are doing! Let them know I sent you :)

As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to the meeting

Lies! This was caused by the actual headers and encoding of the email rather than the content of my iCal information. Anyway, after 2 days (and evenings) of trying to get this working I finally broke through at 3pm today!

The following code has been genericised to an extent, if you have any problems getting it working please let me know. It does not generate a reponse when buttons are pressed as it was designed for use from a noreply email address; in order to get a response you would need to update the iCal code. You may prefer to download this with the example rather than copying and pasting, the iCal code is very sensitive to extra characters, tabs, etc.

//Written Using PHP4, it will probably work fine in PHP5. I tested using Outlook 2003/ 2007, Exchange Server 2003, Googlemail, Hotmail and Google Calendar.

//$firstname is the first name of target
//$lastname is the last name of target
//$email is the targets email address
//$meeting_date is straight from a DATETIME mysql field and assumes UTC.
//$meeting_name is the name of your meeting
//$meeting_duration is the duration of your meeting in seconds (3600 = 1 hour)

function sendIcalEmail ($firstname, $lastname, $email, $meeting_date, $meeting_name, $meeting_duration)  {

$from_name = “My Name”;
$from_address = “myname@mydomain.com”;
$subject = “Meeting Booking”; //Doubles as email subject and meeting subject in calendar
$meeting_description = “Here is a brief description of my meeting\n\n”;
$meeting_location = “My Office”; //Where will your meeting take place

//Convert MYSQL datetime and construct iCal start, end and issue dates
$meetingstamp = strtotime($meeting_date . ” UTC”);
$dtstart= gmdate(”Ymd\THis\Z”,$meetingstamp);
$dtend= gmdate(”Ymd\THis\Z”,$meetingstamp+$meeting_duration);
$todaystamp = gmdate(”Ymd\THis\Z”);

//Create unique identifier
$cal_uid = date(’Ymd’).’T’.date(’His’).”-”.rand().”@mydomain.com”;

//Create Mime Boundry
$mime_boundary = “—-Meeting Booking—-”.md5(time());

//Create Email Headers
$headers = “From: “.$from_name.” <”.$from_address.”>\n”;
$headers .= “Reply-To: “.$from_name.” <”.$from_address.”>\n”;

$headers .= “MIME-Version: 1.0\n”;
$headers .= “Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=\”$mime_boundary\”\n”;
$headers .= “Content-class: urn:content-classes:calendarmessage\n”;

//Create Email Body (HTML)
$message .= “–$mime_boundary\n”;
$message .= “Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\n”;
$message .= “Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n\n”;

$message .= “<html>\n”;
$message .= “<body>\n”;
$message .= ‘<p>Dear ‘.$firstname.’ ‘.$lastname.’,</p>’;
$message .= ‘<p>Here is my HTML Email / Used for Meeting Description</p>’;
$message .= “</body>\n”;
$message .= “</html>\n”;
$message .= “–$mime_boundary\n”;

//Create ICAL Content (Google rfc 2445 for details and examples of usage)
$ical =    ‘BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:’.$from_address.’
DTSTART:’.$dtstart.’
DTEND:’.$dtend.’
LOCATION:’.$meeting_location.’
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SEQUENCE:0
UID:’.$cal_uid.’
DTSTAMP:’.$todaystamp.’
DESCRIPTION:’.$meeting_description.’
SUMMARY:’.$subject.’
PRIORITY:5
CLASS:PUBLIC
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR’;

$message .= ‘Content-Type: text/calendar;name=”meeting.ics”;method=REQUEST\n’;
$message .= “Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n\n”;
$message .= $ical;

//SEND MAIL
$mail_sent = @mail( $email, $subject, $message, $headers );

if($mail_sent)     {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}

}

Download Full Source and Example

<a class=”lightview” title=”" rel=”flash” href=”http://www.youtube.com/video_id”>
<img class=”screenshot_thumb” src=”images/thumb.jpg”/>
</a>

I’ll be buying further commercial lightview licenses and rolling this out to all our work website soon. If you are looking for a good lightbox then you can’t go far wrong with this! Check it out via the link below.

The Lightview Website