Frank

Sage data files

Sage Line 50 ACCDATA contains a load of files, and nowhere have I found any useful documentation as to what they are. Here’s a summary of what I think they are. They’re all data files unless otherwise stated. Most of the rest are indexes to the corresponding data files.

Anyone with more information is positively encouraged to leave a comment! Presumably Sage know, but they don’t seem that keen on publishing the information.

1..n.COA	Chart of Accounts
ACCESS.DTA	Access rights for users
ACCOUNT.DTA	Control Information (stuff across all accounts – VAT?
ACCRUAL.DTA	Accruals
ACCRUAL.DTA	Currency
ACCSTAT.DTA	Account Status
ASSETS.DTA	Fixed Asset
ASTCAT.DTA	Fixed Asset Categories file
ASTINDEX.DTA	Fixed Asset index file
BANK.DTA	Bank
BANKWWW.DTA	Bank WWW data
BILLS.DTA	Bills
BNKINDEX.DTA	Bank index file
CATEGORY.DTA	Category definitions
CONTACT.DTA	Contacts
CONTINDA.DTA	Contact Records index file
CONTINDD.DTA	Contact Date index file
COURWWW.DTA	Courier Resources
CREDWWW.DTA	Credit Resources
DEPARTM.DTA	Departments
FINRATES.DTA	Credit Charge
HEADERS.DTA	Transaction Headers file
INVINDEX.DTA	Invoice Record index file
INVITEM.DTA	Invoice Line Items file
INVOICE.DTA	Invoice Headers
MISCWWW.DTA	Miscellaneous Resources
NOMINAL.DTA	Nominal
NOMINDEX.DTA	Nominal Record index file
PREPAY.DTA	Prepayments
PUOINDEX.DTA	Purchase Order index file
PUOITEM.DTA	Purchase Order Line Items file
PUORDER.DTA	Purchase Order Headers
PURCHASE.DTA	Suppliers
PURINDEX.DTA	Suppliers record index file
QUEUE.DTA	List of users currently using
RECUR.DTA	Recurring Entries
REMIT.DTA	Remittance Line
REMITIDX.DTA	Remittance Line index file
SALES.DTA	Customers
SALINDEX.DTA	Customer Record index file
SAOINDEX.DTA	Sales Order index file
SAOITEM.DTA	Sales Order Line Items file
SAORDER.DTA	Sales Order Headers
SETUP.DTA	Setup information – manager passwords &c
SPLITS.DTA	Transaction Splits file
STKCAT.DTA	Stock Category
STKINDEX.DTA	Stock Record index file
STKTRANS.DTA	Stock Transactions file
STOCK.DTA	Stock
TODO.DTA	Task Manager
TODOIDX.DTA	Task Manager index file
USAGE.DTA	Transaction Usage’s file

26-June-101-February-12

Low Energy Lightbulbs are not that bright

Have you replaced a 60W traditional tungsten bulb with a 60W-equivalent low energy compact fluorescent and thought it’s not as bright as it was. You’re not imagining it. I’ve been doing some tests of my own, and they’re not equivalent.

Comparing light sources is a bit of art as well as science, and lacking other equipment, I decided to use a simple photographic exposure to give me some idea of the real-world performance. I pointed the meter at a wall, floor and table top. I didn’t point it at the light itself – that’s not what users of light bulbs care about.

The results were fairly consistent: Low energy light bulbs produce the same amount of light as a standard bulb of three to four times the rating. The older the fluorescent, the dimmer it was, reaching output of a third at a thousand hours use. Given that the lamps are rated at two to eight thousand hours, it’s reasonable to take the lower output figure as typical as this is how it will spend the majority of its working life.
This gives a more realistic equivalence table as:

CFL Wattage	Quoted GLS equivalent	Realistic GLS equivalent
8W	40W	25-30W
11W	60W	35-45W
14W	75W	40-55W
18W	100W	55-70W

Table showing true equivalence of Compact Fluorescent (CFL) vs. conventional light bulbs (GLS)

So what’s going on here? Is there a conspiracy amongst light-bulb manufacturers to tell fibs about their performance? Well, yes. It turns out that the figures they use are worked out by the Institute of Lighting Engineers, in a lab. They measured the light output of a frosted lamp and compared that to a CFL. The problem is that the frosting on frosted lamps blocks out quite a bit of light, which is why people generally use clear glass bulbs. But if you’re trying to make your product look good it pays to compare your best case with the completion’s worst case. So they have.

But all good conspiracies involve the government somewhere, and in this case the manufactures can justify their methods with support from the EU. The regulations allow the manufactures to do some pretty wild things. If you want to look at the basis, it can be found starting here:

For example, after a compact fluorescent has been turned on it only has to reach an unimpressive 60% of its output after a staggering one minute! I’ve got some lamps that are good starters, others are terrible – and the EU permits them to be sold without warning or differentiation. One good thing the EU is doing, however, is insisting that CFL manufacturers state the light output in lumens in the future, and more prominently than the power consumption in Watts. This takes effect in 2010. Apparently. Hmm. Not on the packages I can see; some don’t even mention it in the small print (notably Philips).

However, fluorescent lamps do save energy, even if it’s only 65% instead of the claimed 80%. All other things being equal, they’re worth it. Unfortunately the other things are not equal, because you have the lifetime of the unit to consider.

A standard fluorescent tube (around since the 1930’s) is pretty efficient, especially with modern electronics driving it (ballast and starter). When the tube fails the electronics are retained, as they’re built in to the fitting. The Compact Florescent Lamps (CFL) that replace conventional bulbs have the electronics built in to the base so they can be used in existing fittings where a conventional bulb is expected. This means the electronics are discarded when the tube fails. The disposable electronics are made as cheaply as possible, so it may fail before the tube.

Proponents of CFLs says that it is still worth it, because the CFLs last so much longer than standard bulbs. I’m not convinced. A conventional bulb is made of glass, steel, cooper and tungsten and should be easy enough to recycle – unlike complex electronics.

The story gets worse when you consider what goes in to the fluorescent tubes – mercury vapour, antinomy, rare-earth elements and all sorts of nasty looking stuff in the various phosphor coatings. It’s true that the amount of mercury in a single tube is relatively small, and doesn’t create much of a risk in a domestic environment even if the tube cracks, but what about a large pile of broken tubes in a recycling centre?

So, CFLs are under-specified and polluting and wasteful to manufacture, but they do save energy. It’d be better to change light fittings to use proper fluorescent tubes, however. They work better than CFLs, with less waste. I don’t see it happening though. At the moment descrete tubes actually cost more because they fit relatively few fittings. People are very protective of their fittings. The snag is that with CFLs you need at least 50% more bulb sockets to get enough light out of them.

Standard bulbs produce less light than they could because a lot of the energy is turned into heat (more so than with a CFL). However, this heat could be useful – if your light bulbs aren’t heating the room you’d need something else. This is particularly true of passageways and so on, where there may be no other heating and a little warmth is needed to keep the damp away. The CFL camp rubbishes this idea, pointing out that in summer you don’t need heat. Actually, in summer, you don’t need much artificial light either, so they’d be off anyway. Take a look at document “BNXS05 The Heat Replacement Effect” found starting here for an interesting study into the matter – it’s from the government’s own researchers.
But still, CFLs save energy.

Personally, however, I look forward to the day when they’re all replaced by LED technology. These should last ten times longer (100,000 hours), be more efficient still, and contains no mercury anyway , nor even any glass to break. The snag is that they run on a low voltage and the world is wired up for mains-voltage light fittings. I envisage whole light fittings, possibly with built-in transformers, pre-wired with fixed LEDs which will last for 50 years – after which you’d probably change the whole fitting anyway.

Ah yes, I hear the moaners starting, but I want to keep my existing light fitting. Okay, sit it the gloom under your compact fluorescents then.

14-June-1025-June-12

Barack Obama uses BP as excuse to invade Iran

Could Barack Obama be using the Deepwater Horizon accident as an excuse to invade Iran?

I always had my suspicions about him, but to be fair I’d suspect anyone wily enough to convince the Americans to elect them president. Just look at who they’ve voted for in the past. Incidentally a lot of the British voted for Blair/Brown so it’s not a purely an American issue.

Democratic politics is all about image, not substance, and saying the right things in public is everything if you want to get votes. Many of my thinking American friends wanted “anyone but Bush” and would have probably voted for Kermit the Frog if the Democrats selected him as their candidate. And even that would have been the least-worst choice. But Obama rose to the top.

The last few days have seen Obama and the American news media jumping up and down about “British Petroleum” and how foreigners are responsible for polluting their Gulf of Mexico. I see little concern for the American oil workers killed in the explosion – just a rush to blame whatever foreigners are available at the time. Same old story. Time for a reality check:

BP (not “British Petroleum”) is an international company, a large part of which is owned and based in American.
The Deepwater Horizon rig (the one that blew up) was owned and operated by another international company (Transocean) – originally American and the division operating it was was based in Houston, Texas, USA.
The engineering company responsible for lining the well (which I believe was the cause of the accident) was Halliburton – based in… Houston, Texas, USA.
The crew of the rig were American.
The regulator responsible for the safe operation of the rig was the American Government.

So why is Obama jumping up and down blaming a “foreign” company he’s decided to call “British Petroleum” for this, and demanding they pay for everything? He’s either pig-ignorant or he’s lying through his teeth for political reasons. Given that he’s a politician, it’s almost certainly the latter.

As he’s inherited a wrecked economy, getting a large amount of money from an international company is going to be a good thing as far as his short-term political career is concerned. It’s also important to deflect attention from the fact that his government licensed, regulated and derived a huge amount of income from this operation – even if it was set up before his time in office.

I’m no fan of oil companies, but why should BP foot the bill? This is an accident, with BP being one link in a chain of responsibility running from Halliburton to the US Government. The only commercial reason to blame BP is that it’s the link with the most money. Why are companies operating in America paying the government all this money? For sound regulation and the provision of services. It’s probably a fact that only BP has the knowledge needed to deal with this disaster anyway, but the US government is just as complicit as anyone else. They take the money and the oil, but have a big problem when it comes to taking responsibility. Nothing new there. America is, of course, the biggest consumer of oil in the world.

But what’s really worrying is that this new-age reforming “black” liberal politician is using the American people’s xenophobia for political ends – plain and simple. Anyone But Bush?

To recap: We have another American President playing to the gallery and blaming all the USA’s problems on foreigners to distract attention from his administration’s shortcomings. The Americans seem to be lapping this up, and the rest of the world is back to looking at American rhetoric in disbelief and bewilderment.

So where’s this going to lead? Is Obama looking for an excuse to invade St James’s Square (the location of BP’s rather small global HQ)? I think that’s taking it a bit far.

But wait – BP used to be called the “Anglo-Iranian Oil Company”. The Iranians still remember this, even if most of us have forgotten. It was associated with previous Iranian regimes, some of which are somewhat unpopular. From this point you’re free to make up your own conspiracy theories.

Personally I’ll stick to Occam’s Razer – the simple answer is that Obama is just another stain on the office of US President, albeit nothing like as scary as the alternatives. So far.

8-May-1015-January-13

Electric Cool-box (or Esky) review

We’ve all seen them and wondered. Every gadget suppler has a small electric fridge or cool-box, usually supplied with a cable to run it off a 12V vehicle supply. I’ve even seen some very favourable reviews of these devices, from people with no credentials. Then, last week I needed to cool down various perishable foodstuffs whilst on a road trip, so I bought one. This is a review of this particular unit, but the principles will apply to the whole family of products.

I opted for the Halfords 8-litre cool-box, largely because I knew where to find a Halfords and I knew I’d seen cool-boxes there. I chose the 8L version because I knew the cooling principle they all utilise isn’t very energy efficient; I didn’t want to cool more space than I needed.

The Halfords 8L cool-box is certainly well-made and insulated. It’s very solid, with a hinged lid and catch that suggests quality. This is only to be expected; the Halfords models are not cheap.

Cable storage compartment in Halfords Coolbox — The cable storage compartment is a thoughtful touch

One nice feature of the 8L box is a fitting to hold it securely between two rear seats of a car using the lap belt, allowing it to double as an arm-rest. It’s also small enough to tuck away easily on one side of a boot. After fitting the supplied strap it’s also easy to carry and in another thoughtful touch there’s even a small compartment to store the power cable.

The power lead itself is long enough to reach from the dashboard to the boot without too much trouble and is fitted with a standard lighter plug on one end. The cool-box end of the lead has a proprietary connecting plug fitted, which might be tricky if a replacement is needed. Halfords do sell spare leads, but they’re not cheap!

Halfords 8L Coolbox — Coolbox (with test supply and thermometers)

Halfords also sells a mains adapter for something like £25 – ouch! This is one of the most expensive 12V adapters I’ve seen, but the cool-box is rated at 3A so you do need something a bit chunky. I decided against this purchase.

So far so good – the food was loaded into the cool-box and off we went with the cooler running while the engine was on. 3A is no problem for a car’s alternator but I didn’t want to drain the battery. The instructions also made it clear that running of the battery alone wasn’t a good idea.

However, at the end of the day’s driving, which amounted to several hours, it wasn’t at all clear that the inside of the box was any cooler than the outside. On our return I decided to test it properly to see what was going on.

Theory

These coolers all work using a thermoelectric effect. If you really want to know /how/ this works try looking up the Peltier or Seebeck effects in a good physics textbook. The short story is that if you take two plates made of different metals and place them together you can make a heat pump. As heat passes from the hot plate to the cold plate it generates a potential difference (voltage) between them. This is one of those electrical effects that works both ways, so if the plates are the same temperature and you pass a current across the plates they’ll drag heat from one plate to the other. In other words, is you pass a current through the two plates one gets hot by taking heat from the other, which gets cold.

This sounds very useful! All you need to do is place the plate that’s getting cold inside the box, and cool the plate that’s outside the box with a fan. This gives you a fridge with no moving parts apart from a fan, and as moving parts go, fan’s are a lot easier to manage than compressors and the associated plumbing for the coolant. Unfortunately there’s a snag – it’s not a particularly efficient process. Just how efficient it was in practice, I decided to find out.

Testing

Using a lab power supply and a several thermometers with remote probes to measure temperatures inside and outside the box I left the subject running while empty, after sealing down the lid. The inside and outside temperatures were recorded, with the inside being measured by the temperature of the plate.

Graph 1: temperature over time when empty — Graph 1 – Temperature over time (empty)

The manufactures claim that it can reduce the temperature of the contents by up to 20C compared to the outside. With the normal summer temperature tending to be 20-25C and a reasonable fridge temperature being 5-10C this would certainly be a suitable performance even allowing for a margin implied by the ‘up to’ preceding the actual figure stated.

The actual performance is shown in Graph 1. As you can see, after about an hour the temperature inside dropped from the ambient 22C outside to just 3C inside, where it stabilised; a drop of 19C. Pretty impressive! But remember the 3A current drain – it turns out it needs 3A constantly so you definitely can’t run this without taking power off the engine. Sill, once cooled it should stay cool for a reasonable period, right? Actually, wrong. Take a look at Graph 2.

After disconnecting the power it returned to room temperature in about 20 minutes. Very disappointing!

coolbox-graph-2 — Graph 2 – Temperature restored when empty

However, this isn’t really a good test, is it? Who needs to cool down a empty box – you really need to cool the contents, and what matters is how long the contents then stay cool once the power is removed. To test this I chose to use 1.5L of water in a sealed plastic box as the payload.

coolbox-test-payload — Test payload in Halfords Coolbox

This choice was largely governed by the sealed plastic boxes I had available. There wasn’t space for 2L of water, so 1.5L was a compromise to make calculations easer – and besides, 1.5L or 1.5Kg of food is a reasonable payload for an 8L box. The results can be seen in Graph 3 below.

coolbox-graph-3 — Graph 3 – Cooling effect when full

As you can see, after a full hour the temperature had only fallen by 3C – not much good to anyone. I decided to keep the experiment running for a further eight hours, during which the payload’s temperature eventually stabilised at 10C below ambient. The graph shows the measured temperature a bit lower, but by this stage the outside temperature had also dropped, so it was 10C less.

This isn’t really much good for cooling food down; even after running it all day it’s unable to reach ‘refrigerator’ temperature; your food wouldn’t last long. The only useful thing you can do with it is put pre-cooled items in it and hope they stay that way due to the insulation, because even with the power full on it’s only going to stabilise at about 10C . Graph 4 shows what happened.

coolbox-graph-4 — Graph 4 – Warming up when full

As you can see, thanks to the insulation of the box it does at least manage to keep its contents cool. The tests were carried out away from the wind and sun – ideal conditions, but only sensible.

Conclusion

This is a nicely made piece of equipment, but its real-world performance makes it completely unsuitable for its intended purpose. The best you can say is that if you place cold items in it, it’ll keep them cool as long as you keep it supplied with a lot of power. If you don’t use the electric cooler it’ll work almost as well thanks to its insulated construction.

If you are looking for a workable solution to the problem, and insulated box and a block of ice will easily out-perform this arrangement, at far lower purchase and running costs. The low-tech conventional cool-box (Esky) and freezer pack still has a lot going for it. Don’t waste your money on one of these.

Halfords refunded my money very quickly.

30-April-102-November-23

How to improve Sage network performance

If you accept that Sage Line 50 is fundamentally flawed when working over a network you’re not left with many options other than waiting for Sage to fix it. All you can do is throw hardware at it. But what hardware actually works?

First the bad news – the difference in speed between a standard server and a turbo-nutter-bastard model isn’t actually that great. If you’re lucky, on a straight run you might get a four-times improvement from a user’s perspective. The reason for spending lots of money on a server has little to do with the speed a user’s sees; it’s much more to do with the number of concurrent users.

So, if you happen to have a really duff server and you throw lots of money at a new one you might see something that took a totally unacceptable 90 minutes now taking a totally unacceptable 20 minutes. If you spend a lot of money, and you’re lucky.

The fact is that on analysing the server side of this equation I’ve yet to see the server itself struggling with CPU time, or running out of memory or any anything else to suggest that it’s the problem. With the most problematic client they started with a Dual Core processor and 512Mb of RAM – a reasonable specification for a few years back. At no time did I see issues to do with the memory size and the processor utilisation was only a few percent on one of the cores.

I’d go as far as to say that the only reason for upgrading the server is to allow multiple users to access it on terminal server sessions, bypassing the network access to the Sage files completely. However, whilst this gives the fastest possible access to the data on the disk, it doesn’t overcome the architectural problems involved with sharing a disk file, so multiple users are going to have problems regardless. They’ll still clash, but when they’re not clashing it will be faster.

But, assuming want to run Line 50 multi-user the way it was intended, installing the software on the client PCs, you’re going to have to look away from the server itself to find a solution.

The next thing Sage will tell you is to upgrade to 1Gb Ethernet – it’s ten times faster than 100Mb, so you’ll get a 1000% performance boost. Yeah, right!

It’s true that the network file access is the bottleneck, but it’s not the raw speed that matters.

I’ll let you into a secret: not all network cards are the same.

They might communicate at a line speed of 100Mb, but this does not mean that the computer can process data at that speed, and it does not mean it will pass through the switch at that speed. This is even more true at 1Gb.

This week at Infosec I’ve been looking at some 10Gb network cards that really can do the job – communicate at full speed without dropping packets and pre-sort the data so a multi-CPU box could make sense of it. They cost $10,000 each. They’re probably worth it.

Have you any idea what kind of network card came built in to the motherboard of your cheap-and-cheerful Dell? I thought not! But I bet it wasn’t the high-end type though.

The next thing you’ve got to worry about is the cable. There’s no point looking at the wires themselves or what the LAN card says it’s doing. You’ll never know. Testing a cable has the right wires on the right pins is not going to tell you what it’s going to do when you put data down it at high speeds. Unless the cable’s perfect its going to pick up interference to some extent; most likely from the wire running right next to it. But you’ll never know how much this is affecting performance. The wonder of modern networking means that errors on the line are corrected automatically without worrying the user about it. If 50% of your data gets corrupted and needs re-transmission, by the time you’ve waited for the error to be detected, the replacement requested, the intervening data to be put on hold and so on your 100Mb line could easily be clogged with 90% junk – but the line speed will still be saying 100Mb with minimal utilisation.

Testing network cables properly requires some really expensive equipment, and the only way around it is to have the cabling installed by someone who really knows what they’re doing with high-frequency cable to reduce the likelihood of trouble. If you can, hire some proper test gear anyway. What you don’t want to do is let an electrician wire it up for you in a simplistic way. They all think they can, but believe me, they can’t.

Next down the line is the network switch and this could be the biggest problem you’ve got. Switches sold to small business are designed to be ignored, and people ignore them. “Plug and Play”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that there wasn’t much to a switch, but in reality it’s got a critical job, which it may or may not do very well in all circumstances. When it receives a packet (sequence of data, a message from one PC to another) on one of its ports it has to decide which port to send it out of to reach its intended destination. If it receives multiple packets on multiple ports it has handle them all at once. Or one at a time. Or give up and ask most of the senders to try again later.

What your switch is doing is probably a mystery, as most small businesses use unmanaged “intelligent” switches. A managed switch, on the other hand, lets you connect to it using a web browser and actually see what’s going on. You can also configure it to give more priority to certain ports, protect the network from “packet storms” caused by accident or malicious software and generally debug poorly performing networks. This isn’t intended to be a tutorial on managed switches; just take it from me that in the right hands they can be used to help the situation a lot.

Unfortunately, managed switches cost a lot more than the standard variety. But they’re intended for the big boys to play with, and consequently they tend to switch more simultaneous packets and stand up to heavier loads.

Several weeks back I upgraded the site with the most problems from good quality standard switches to some nice expensive managed ones, and guess what? It’s made a big difference. My idea was partly to use the switch to snoop on the traffic and figure out what was going on, but as a bonus it appears to have improved performance, and most importantly, reliability considerably too.

If you’re going to try this, connect the server directly to the switch at 1Gb. It doesn’t appear to make a great deal of difference whether the client PCs are 100Mb or 1Gb, possibly due to the cheapo network interfaces they have, but if you have multiple clients connected to the switch at 100Mb they can all simultaneously access the server down the 1Gb pipe at full speed (to them).

This is a long way from a solution, and it’s hardly been conclusively tested, but the extra reliability and resilience of the network has, at least allow a Sage system to run without crashing and corrupting data all the time.

If you’re using reasonably okay workstations and a file server, my advice (at present) is to look at the switch first, before spending money on anything else.

Then there’s the nuclear option, which actually works. Don’t bother trying to run the reports in Sage itself. Instead dump the data to a proper database and use Crystal Reports (or the generator of your choice) to produce them. I know someone who was tearing their hair out because a Sage report took three hours to run; the same report took less than five minutes using Crustal Reports. The strategy is to dump the data overnight and knock yourself out running reports the following day. Okay, the data may be a day old but if it’s taking most of the day to run the report on the last data, what have you really lost?

I’d be really interested to hear how other people get on.

27-April-1014-February-13

BlueWatchDog Review

This is an almost brilliant idea. The BlueWatchDog is a thick credit-card sized device that picks up the signal from your paired Bluetooth ‘phone, and if it gets separated from it, sounds an alarm. Great if you’re the type to leave your Blackberry behind or you iPhone is pinched from you handbag. At just £40 it could save you a lot of hassle.

I said it was “almost” brilliant. The snag is that it requires an application running on the mobile device. It’d have been better if it could pair with anything Bluetooth, at least as an option. The application can be used to set the range before the alarm is set off but this is functionally you could live without. As it stands it works with Android, RIM and Apple mobiles. Apple, incidentally, didn’t like the idea of them giving the App away but the company have struck a deal to make this possible.

I managed to speak with the inventor and suggested a version that would work with any Bluetooth unit – possibly by treating it an audio device. Watch this space (and I hope he sends me a sample!)

www.mindyourit.co.uk
0800 999 2177

27-April-1014-February-13

Encrypted USB Flash Drives Review

This year Infosec was awash with encrypted USB flash drives. This makes sense; lost USB drives are a major security problem. In fact flash drives are a major security problem, full stop.

Nearly all the flash drives I looked at had one major weakness – they’re tied to the Windows operating system (or Macintosh, and possibly Linux) in order to get data on and off. They have a special application to get the password from the user and supply it to the drive.

This may be considered a weakness, with a common criticism being that key loggers can capture the password before it can get to the drive. I’m actually not too worried about this because if the host has a key logger running then malware can just as easily access the drive itself, however the drive received its password in the first place.

However, having a Windows application required for access to the data is no good if you’re not always running Windows, and flash drives can be read from anything from a car radio to a photocopier. Even if you are reading it on a PC, the operating system of your choice will be upgraded in due course, but the application needed to access your data may not be.

After a bit of searching did find three genuinely OS-independent devices; the LOK-IT, the hiden Crypto Adapter and the Data Locker

Data Locker

This is a USB 2.0 hard disk, available in capacities ranging from 320Gb to 1TB. It’s a nice bit of kit, with a rubber bump-shell and a touch sensitive LCD panel for entering the codes to unlock it. Data is encrypted using hardware to AES CBC 128-bit or 256-bit depending on the model, and once the password has been entered the host system sees it as a standard drive. There are lots of nice features, like a randomized keypad so wear on particular keys doesn’t give the game away.

As it contains a 2.5″ drive it’s bulky compared to a flash drive, but it’s a huge capacity. If you really need to carry around such a large amount of secure data it’s a good choice. But at £400+VAT you’d be better off with something smaller if you don’t.

The Data Locker is made by Origin Storage in Basingstoke. They’ve been around since 2001 supplying OEM storage products, and aquired Amacom in 2006 – the brand used for Data Locker.

www.datalockerdrive.eu
No standard rate telephone number available.

hiddn Crypto Adapter

This doesn’t actually store anything – it’s a USB to USB adapter with encryption. Basically you plug one end into the host machine and plug your standard USB flash drive, or USB HDD if you prefer, into the top. Then you load your encryption key using a smart-card in the slot below, enter your PIN and away you go. It doesn’t matter what the host or USB storage device actually is; the host sees a standard USB drive.

The unit is mouse-sized and works well on a desktop, but is a bit bulky to carry around on portable equipment. It’s also pricey, at £290+VAT.

This system actually makes a lot of sense as with two units permanently attached to desktop machines in different locations as you can use cheap, standard flash drives to transport the data – even post them – without the risk of data leakage if they’re lost in transit. Using the optional key management software it’s possible to duplicate the keys on the smart cards so encryption works at both ends

The Norwegian makers, hdd, have a range of other encryption products which are worth a look, using the same smart cards to hold keys. I shall be watching them with interest

www.hiddn.no
+47 38 10 44 80

LOK-IT

This USB flash drive is probably the solution for the rest of us. It’s simple. It’s a flash drive with a small keypad allowing you to enter a PIN to activate it. Powered by an internal battery, you’ve got 30 seconds after entering the password to plug it in, at which point it looks like any other USB drive to the host system. Activation status is indicated by either a red or green LED, and once the drive is pulled from the host it immediately returns to its encrypted state.

There are two versions available, one with a five-key PIN pad, and one with the full ten digits. Both have on-the-fly 256-bit AES encryption hardware. Apparently the ten-key version is more popular, but I liked the five-key because it had a draw-back USB cover you can’t lose.

If you enter the PIN incorrectly ten times the units wipe all their data and reset. This could be annoying, but it prevents access if they fall in to the wrong hands.

My only concern about these units is the robustness of the keypad, which is also a tad difficult to operate. It feels flimsy but may be okay. But with the 4Gb version costing just US$60 they’re a very cost-effective and practical solution. No UK distributor is available at the time of writing.

www.lok-it.net
++1 954-889-3535

21-April-1022-April-10

I was wrong about the airlines

At the weekend I said it’d be two weeks before they decided that the risk from the volcano wasn’t that substantial when weighed against profits, and that political pressure would lift the flight ban before the cloud had lifted in about two weeks. It’s actually taken them less than one.

Engines stop and show signs of wear from time to time, but this time it’s going to be reported and a load of concerned hacks who know nothing about aviation will get very excited.

So queue the flying scares – engines stopping, or nearly stopping and one almighty row.

17-April-1022-April-10

Safety is paramount

So the Icelandic volcano makes it impossible to fly in UK airspace. Hmm. The idea is that the volcanic ash, containing silica, turns to glass in jet engines and causes them to stop spinning.

Well I wonder how this one’s going to play out? Let’s see…

I’m sceptical that the ash is that much of a threat – jet engines do fly through dusty and sandy air. This dust seems to be fairly well dispersed (i.e. you can’t see it and radar, apparently, can’t see it). But even it does increase the risk, the “safety is paramount” argument just doesn’t hold water. If it really was the primary concern they’d stay on the ground instead of flying. Flying is more of a risk than staying on the ground, whatever the weather. They’re taking a risk by taking off.

So just how much risk is acceptable? Well when balanced against airline profits I’d say quite a lot. The volcano, by all accounts, shows no sign of slowing down and the weather system we have at this time of year aren’t likely to disperse the ash any time soon. Anyone who knows anything about weather isn’t going to put money on it, I assure you.

I’d give it two weeks – I doubt the cloud will disperse but by then the airlines will have put so much political pressure on NATS and the government (before an election) that they’ll decide that safety really isn’t paramount and start flying again regardless.

There’ll also probably be a big row.

There’ll also probably be a big scare as soon as someone finds a jet engine with glass in it, followed by an even bigger row.

14-April-1029-August-11

Council surveys immigrants for BNP

Your local council is collecting the names and addresses of all non-English residents and passing them on to the British National Party. What a great idea!

That isn’t the intended plan, as far as I know, but most PC councils are doing it in the name of “diversity monitoring” or some such nonsense. Whether this is a justifiable use of taxpayers’ resources is one matter, but the fact remains that the databases they’re compiling will be making it in to the hands of every anti-immigrant group both now in the future. The government can’t keep a database like this secret for long – it requires the cooperation of every single council employee and councillor with access to the data, including the BNP councillors.

I was asked to fill in one such form today, when attending a council Easter-holiday event for kids. My usual response is to refuse to fill in this information on principle and explain, at length, why they shouldn’t be asking. I’ve never had any argument with this approach. Today, when I pointed out that this would tell the BNP where all the Muslims in the area lived, who was in the house and where their kids went to school, one of the ladies with the forms went quite pale.