Is Ghost Blogging Ethical?

This post was inspired by @steveology ‘s discussion at http://ow.ly/2ze7K whereby a number of people agreed to share their views on the subject. As agreed in advance I have not read the other posts though am looking forward to doing so after I’ve published.

The short answer is “No – Ghost Blogging is not ethical” though I’d like to explore the subject a little further.

“Ghost Writing” of books and newspaper/magazine articles seems to be commonplace. I wonder how many readers consider this when reflecting upon the content.

Some public figures both in commerce and the civil service rely upon “Professional Speech Writers”.

I gather that even “The Queen’s speech” is written by her government though that’s perhaps a special case given steeped in tradition that I’m not familiar with.

Is Ghost writing acceptable in these cases? The more I hear of these cases the less comfortable I feel about it.

Given the choice I’d rather listen to music written by the band than something created by a third party. That said I’m sure there are many cases where acknowledge third parties wrote the music that I thought had been written by the band – the difference is it’s easy to find out as the accrediatations are published.

In a social media context transparency is a core tenant – it’s one of the attributes that makes it so interesting. Being able to exchange ideas and points of view with individuals is very rewarding.

Imagine hearing an incredible speech and then finding that live questions afterwards yeilded uninformed answers. Clearly Q&A would not be offered for those who had relied entirely on a speech writer.

Speaking to “the messenger” is rarely as interesting as “the source of the message”.

Social Media is a great leveller for those with something interesting to contribute regardless of their social, political or fiscal standing. Ideas count. Contributing counts. Being useful counts. Hiding behind others is foolish.

How to change the license key for Win7

If you have already installed Windows 7 and wish to change the license (or enter one for the first time) then simply log in to the administrator (or equivalent) account and navigate to the following part of the control panel:

Now all you have to do is to hit “change product key” and enter the new license

Note: you need to be signed in (logged on) as an administrator to be able to carry out the task described above.

Why are car showrooms open during the daytime?

Thanks to Telstar Logistics for the image above

I was recently considering leasing a new company car and hence I visited several main dealer show rooms to crawl around and test drive my short listed vehicles. I visited a couple of showrooms at lunchtime and others either at the weekend or after work. I couldn’t fathom out why on Earth it was near impossible to arrange a test drive for the times I (as a potential customer) could easily fit around my work commitments.

Upon a couple of occasions I took time out of work to visit a dealership during the daytime (in the week) and found the place full of staff and almost empty of customers.

Like many of you I’d researched my vehicle options by reading both reviews and specifications on the vendors websites – all I needed from the showrooms was the opportunity to explore the physical aspects of each and to drive them – the staff in the showrooms added very little value.

From where I’m sat it seems that the way car showrooms (in the UK at least) operate is a hangover from their past and if they were invented from scratch today the entire focus of the service provided would be would be to make it as easy and appealing as possible to select vehicles based on their physical characteristics and driving experience.

Surely dealerships should cater for test drives in the evenings and during the day on both Sundays and Saturdays – currently they’re closed soon after normal working hours and only have a skeleton staff on Sundays.

I wonder how many businesses are long over due for significant re-engineering of the way they interact with prospective customers – making the most of the opportunities provided by the Internet and social media.

Estate agencies face similar challenges and opportunities to re-invent themselves.

BTW: I can’t see a Cadillac being a sensible choice for me in the UK – I just liked the picture 🙂 In the end I purchased a second hand car.

Win7 cold boot took just 28 seconds on my netbook

Windows 7’s Release Candidate has surprised me once again – on my Samsung NC10 netbook it took just 28 seconds to display the logon screen from hitting the power button – that’s for a cold (machine turned off) boot – resuming from sleep is almost instantaneous!

Just 15 seconds later I was logged in (that includes the time for me to enter my password) and running an application.

While running Windows 7 Beta I very rarely turned my machine off – instead opting to use “sleep” due to the tiny power use and reliable “go to sleep”/”wake up” – I expect I’ll find the same with the Release Candidate.

How much disk space is required to install Win7?

Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit edition takes 8.3Gb following a clean install without any additional applications or data.

I recommend going for a minimum partition size of 15Gb plus whatever you think you’ll need for applications and data.

Windows 7 is very good at making it easy for you to expand or contract the partition sizes post install – there’s no need to re-install or mess about with third party utilities 🙂

To resize a partition simply do the following:

• type “Computer Management” at what used to be the “Start” menu
• select “Disk management”
• select the partition you’d like to resize
• Click the right mouse button to reveal the menu and pick the appropriate option – “extend” or “shrink”.

Note: the image below has “extend volume” greyed out simply because the area after this partition is fully occupied by another partition.

Amazing – a bare metal Win7 RC install took just 21 mins on Samsung NC10 netbook

Thanks to geognerd for the image

At 9pm this evening I powered up a brand new Samsung NC10 netbook (I subsequently wrote this post from the machine in question) for the first time. I hit “F2” as the power light blinked into life to change the boot device order – making my USB memory stick(thumb drive) the primary.

I didn’t even both letting the machine boot it’s pre-installed Windows XP Home operating system – I simply booted into a  Windows 7 installation, removed the existing partitions and pretty much took the defaults.

At 9:21pm the shiney new NC10 was fully up and running in Windows 7 RC Ultimate edition with aero glass and sound working perfectly.

At 9:25pm I’d connected the machine to the Internet for the first time via my Vodafone 3G card – I have the “pebble” modem which (like most 3G cards these days) automatically provides the associated software and device drivers.

Where did I get the bootable Win7 USB stick?

I build it myself by doing the following:

• I download the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) from here. The resulting file was 2.35Gb in size. 
• I configured the target USB memory stick to be bootable following the instructions on Jeff’s blog
• The Windows 7 RC installation kit download was a “.iso” file – I used undisker to extract all of the files (and folders) from the “.iso” and place them on the (now bootable) memory stick

Note: I wrote an earlier post with some guidance that you may find useful

BTW the filename for the Win7 RC installation kit following the 2.35Gb download was “7100.0.090421-1700_x86fre_client_en-us_retail_ultimate-grc1culfrer_en_dvd.iso”

I’m delighted with the result – a fast, lightweight system with a beautiful user interface.

Microsoft Pants Man!

If you’ve been watching the BBC’s “The Apprentice” then you may enjoy the following image that I took at last week’s InfoSec – Ed was given a pair of pants by Graham from Sophos – I politely declined his kind offer!

GreenIT: What will it take for mainstream companies to allow their employees to work when, where and how they choose?

I’m working at London’s GreenIT09 conference today and during the keynote I asked the question shown in the title to this post.

As was the case at last year’s conference there is much talk of great progress being made by suppliers and their customers in reducing the electrical power requirements of data centres. The following quotes were referenced:

• “50% of hardware acquisition cost is expended in cooling and power in 2009” – an analyst 
• Power cost will equal server capital cost by 2010″ – an anyalyst

I have read similar quotes from a variety of sources and rather than focussing on the details I think it’s fair to say that data centres consume a great deal of power – supposedly equivalent to the airline industry – the cost of power is likely to continue to increase – power is a significant Operational Expense

Paul Coby (CIO, British Airways) gave a very interesting talk during the keynote – the highlights of his talk were:

• 14% global CO2 emisions Worldwide due to transport, same as agriculture
• emissions from cars and vans comprise 45% total transport, rail is 2%
• BA are “finding the happy conjunction of cost saving, IT efficiency and GreenIT”

I’ve spoken (both online and in person) to many people from businesses across a wide range of organisations (businesses, public sector and charities) over recent months asking how people do their jobs.

Paul’s reference to the incredible percentage (14%) of CO2 emissions being due to transport really illustrates the a key aspect of my findings – most organisations mandate that their employees work at specific locations at specific times using prescribed tools.

We should free people to work when, where and how they choose thereby enabling the following benefits:

• reduce travel times, frequency, cost and stress – enabling people to choose whether to travel in rush hour when they choose to collaborate face to face can reap these benefits. A hybrid of working from home at the start/end of the day can bring significant benefits – preventing people meeting face to face by expecting excessive working from home can be detrimental to productivity. It’s all about choice though as some people will still prefer to work in the office all of the time.
• improved work life balance – being able to “time shift” and “location shift” work can bring significant benefits to both the employee AND their productivity levels. Parents may be able to take their children to/from school and also remain productive (depending upon the age of their children!) when sickness prevents their children from going to school

The technology required for effective remote working has existed for many years – there are innovative products and services that can be purchased to enhance the experience but the basics of a laptop, headset and a broadband/wireless/3G connection can be used by normal (non-technical/specialist) people across the land TODAY without significant additional cost.

Going as far as Voice over IP and video conferencing (using personal/often built-in webcams) can improve the feeling of connection with your remote counterparts. I’m particularly partial to innovative solutions such as Microsoft’s Roundtable device as I blogged about in detail here though don’t get hung up on buying additiona hardware and software – these may make sense once you’ve freed your employees to work remotely simply using webcams.

Clearly some tasks are best carried out in person and some roles/jobs are physically oriented hence are unable to take advantage of “time shifting” and/or “location shifting” – good examples being driving a bus, serving in a restaurant.

In my experience in order for work to be something you do not a place you go it’s critical for the entire management chain to buy into measuring their employees productivity by their results and both parties being clear upon the deliverables and time frames – this is cultural change though as @tebbo pointed out “cultural change starts with individuals”.

People coming into work (typically the so called “Millenials”/”Digital Natives”/”Generation-Y”) are not encumbered by the legacy of how work is traditionally done and hence I’m confident over time the barriers will be removed.

Your comments are much appreciated

How to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7

There’s a twelve minute video on Microsoft’s TechNet site that shows how to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 – it demonstrates the User State Migration Tool (USMT).

The short form is that installing over the top of XP/Vista will result in the personal data from your “windows” directory (for each profile) will be moved to a folder named “windows.old”. P0st-install you can move the data by hand into the corresponding directory structure for the new operating system – there are two problems with this approach:

• you’ll have to accept many file over-write messages and elevation prompts
• you’ll have to re-associate the data with each application – going into Outlook for instance to make it aware of the location of your personal folder (.pst) files

The User State Migration Tool is a command line utility which can be used to automate the operations listed above – it’s really intended for managed IT enviroments as it requires some effort in the form of a script – if you’re doing this for a one off machine you’d probably be quicker to move everything and re-associate the data files with applications by hand.

Windows 7’s Release Candidate is available for all

You can now download Windows 7’s Release Candidate (for free) from here – bear in mind that it’s not the finished product hence you need to make your own call regarding whether to use it with critical data – it is very unlikely to go wrong though it is a possibility hence you should consider keeping live data elsewhere or at least implementing a comprehensive/frequent back up regime.

The Release Candidate will be fully functional until June 2010 when the license will expire and you will have to re-install. If you’re already running Windows 7 Beta then you’ll have to perform a clean install – make sure you back up your data before doing so! There’s a detailed post here explaining the rationale upon requiring a clean install together with a word around for anyone who absolutely insists that they need to install over the top.

Jeff Alexander’s blog includes a great post that gives details and shows screenshots of Windows 7’s Release Candidate in action.

How to install Windows 7’s Release Candidate without burning a coaster (DVD) first?