Yeap, the last day for Mr. Gates - and a short history, with video, on the man has been compiled by the BBC. Well worth a look.

You all know the story right? Ian Usher has put his life up for sale on the internet, with the aid of Ebay. By his life I mean his home, his job, his friends, his car - everything except himself. Interesting, quirky, but why did he trust the users of Ebay to “play fair?”

Just 24 hours after the bid began it was swamped with pranksters. People using other people’s accounts, people playing tricks on each other - you name it. At what point did Ian Usher actually think this wouldn’t happen?? It’s far too tempting for people to put in stupidly high bids - then “blame it on their friends.”

The current (authentic) bid for his life, as of this post, is about £189,000 ($372,000) which he says isn’t enough to cover the cost of the house! Check out the auction here, it ends in 3 days if you fancy moving to Perth.. And no fake bids please. I mean it.

This day 60 years ago, the first modern computer, nicknamed the Manchester “Baby” was switched on to run it’s first successful program. Baby was the first computer to store information digitally, using a Cathode Ray Tube (or CRT), and is the predecessor for how we store information in modern RAM chips.

The invention and concepts 60 years ago were monumental after people realised for the computer to be of any real use, the information would have to be stored permanently and electrically by the machine. Although the data was added by hand, the Baby would constantly read and refresh the bits on the CRT, it’s memory, electronically to keep them from decaying, and is a concept still in use by RAM today. By the time it was revealed this method was capable of storing 4096 bits.

The first program was run on the Baby, this day 60 years ago. One of the inventors, F.C. Williams, spoke of the monumental occasion, “A program was laboriously inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading to no useful result, and what was even worse, without yielding any clue as to what was wrong. But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer. It was a moment to remember. This was in June 1948, and nothing was ever the same again.”

Every now and again, two of my favourite subjects come together (No, not blackmail and hard discs) - Technology and Motorsports.

Formula 1 star of the McLaren-Mercedes team, Lewis Hamilton, has been the focus of a blackmail attempt by a man in Germany, named simply “Dieter.” Dieter somehow obtained a hard drive, that had supposedly been disposed of some months before, that contained documents and other personal information. For those who are unfamiliar with the McLaren-Mercedes scandal of last year, the team were found guilty of using secrets from another team to improve their own car - and this hard drive could possibly had more such evidence on it. Trying to sell the hard drive to the German motorsport magazine, “Bild”, Dieter was arrested by police after the magazine tipped off the authorities, as reported by the Daily Telegraph today.

So how do you properly and permanently remove sensitive information from your hard disc?

Remember - when you delete things in Windows the data is usually still there - just because you can’t access the information doesn’t mean somebody else won’t be able to. The very nature of deleting a file just means renaming the first character of the filename, to let the system know the space it takes up can be used for new files - and the data is still there until new files are written in the same place. And even if the space the file used to occupy is overwritten with different files, there are techniques that can be employed to find out what used to be on the surface of the disc. Once you know this, you need something a little better than the recycle bin in windows to remove your sensitive data, and there are three methods you can use to do it:

The first way is with a program that allows you to securely delete files - rather than by using the recycle bin in Windows, download Eraser. It has a drag and drop interface that allows you to do a multiple-pass wipe so that the bytes the file occupies get overwritten properly, making it practically impossible to retrieve the data that used to be your file. Amongst others, by default, it uses the “Gutmann” method of wiping that employees 35 separate passes of specially selected data to make sure nobody can retrieve the information, chemically, from the drive. This should be enough if you just need to remove the odd file that’s a bit sensitive. It is geared towards doing things in batches, so you could drag files you want to remove into the program and before you log out, process them all in one go. This takes care of single file deletes.

The second way is a little more abstract, and Eraser is up to the task of removing this type of data too. Remember when your files are removed, they aren’t actually erased, the space is allocated back to the system to write files into? Baring this in mind, all the files you’ve deleted previously, will have data scattered all over the drive, in places ready to be overwritten, but for whatever reason the system hasn’t got around to using yet. So the second method is to wipe your free space on the drive. Every byte that isn’t allocated to a file will be subjected to the same rigorous treatment, using the same methods.

When you’ve come to the point when you’re ready to throw the hard drive away and want to be sure there’s nothing left on it, the last method to remove data is to wipe the whole drive. And the best way to do this is to melt it down! Failing that, if you don’t have a kiln in your house, try DBAN (Darik’s Boot And Nuke). Download DBAN, burn it to a CD, boot from that CD and you will be able to wipe any drive in the system with multiple passes of random data. Eraser, above, also supports wiping whole drives and can create a “Nuke Disc” to boot from. DBAN, however is a personal favourite, and I’ve never had problems with using it. This should securely remove the data - although of course, nothing is as secure or cool as melting it - plus you get the added advantage of doing something cool to video and put on youtube!

Firstly, sorry for the delay - I’ve been suffering from something horrible for the past couple of days - hopefully you can’t transmit viruses through the keyboard - human ones at least..

In what seems like now, a problem synonymous with Microsoft releasing a service pack, it appears that the lastest offering for Windows XP has a few problems of it’s own. Within a short time of the service pack hitting the web, users were complaining of lock-ups and random reboots. Now I don’t want to appear to be a person with clear thinking, but surely with a PC you should expect it? I mean by the very nature of the beasts, they are fitted with an infinite combination of different hardware and software no? So surely there will be a few bases left uncovered..? Read Information Week’s interpretation. Of course if you’re one of the “brave” you can get your copy here.

When I found out all I could think was “Finally!” It’s such a great site, but so stuck in the 90’s with it’s subscription based revenue model. Now things have changed, rather than having to subscribe to send a friend a message, you can send them for free! This puts Friends Reunited more in line with the Facebook’s and Myspace’s of this world, and in some respects a lots better. No adding friends, or going to specific pages to find people - they’re already there.

This rethink, coupled with the site makeover has renewed my interest in the site immediately. After casual logins (probably 4 or 5 times over the last year) I can see myself checking up on the site more and more now. Of course, I don’t know if this means the people that are current subscribers get a refund. Perhaps if someone out there is a subscriber, you can let me know.

The micro-blogging site that’s big in America, has been used to good effect in the current US election race. Of course, it’s main users are the geek types, who like to check up on what other geek types are up to (check the links on the left!)

Well now 10 Downing Street have jumped on the bandwagon and started their own twitter feed. If you want to know the latest political developments as they happen, then head on over to twitter, create an account and start following. It will make you a more efficient person at slating the government in real-time!

US Robots posted in Iraq apparently tried to take out their human counterparts, The Register revealed today. It appears that the robots, which had a fitted M249 (usually used by soldiers to suppress fire) for some unknown reason began to train their fire on the soldiers they were there to protect. A high ranking official said, “The gun started moving when it was not intended to move.”

So all this talk of robotic murder led me to a question: What other steps have robots made to try to kill mankind?

It didn’t take me long before I found a report on Slashdot of a Robot lawnmower killing a Danish man. The “Dvorak Spider” didn’t kill him in the obvious way, by slicing him into small human chunks, instead it hurled itself off of a cliff to crush the hapless bacon lover below.

And then I re-stumbled across the recent news of a man in Australia who had built his own suicide-bot to fire a handgun into his head. But then the only witness was the robot.. Maybe the robot faked the suicide note?

Finally, after blowing the dust off of the internet, it appears as early as 1979 a robot had taken out a human with intricate precision. Of course it was made to look like an accident. According to this Wikipedia article, the workers at a Ford factory had overridden the safety features on the robot. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t take Isaac Asimov seriously.

So it’s been on the cards for a long time, according to the evidence. Robots have been systematically taking humans out - in relative quiet - for the last 30 years. Robots are being used more and more to make our lives “easier” so we will eventually get to a point when we’re surrounded. As it stands now there are robots that can park your car, robots to babysit your children or Japanese robots trained to trick you into thinking they are humans. And then there’s the small child-like Asimo. At what point will the authorities actually open their eyes to what’s going on around us?

Firstly Skymonkey.org would like to extend it’s thanks to Russell for taking time out to answer a few questions.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Media Monkey is a music player with a difference. Rather than just playing music (which it does really well) Media Monkey is also a platform for organising your music collection. Not only does it support the normal music file types and MP3 players - including iPods and the such, it also has the ability to rip CDs and convert, for example wma files to ogg. But where Media Monkey really excels is it’s powerful ability to re-organise your music collection. It can take information contained within the ID3 tags of the MP3’s, and use it to create a file structure that suits your needs. Media Monkey is free, but if you purchase the Gold Edition for $19.95, you get extra features such as the ability to monitor directories for updates, and on-the-fly format conversion for MP3 players (just in case your whole library is in ogg format, and you need them in mp3 format for your mp3 player.) You also get all future updates for that version. There is also a lifetime license available that means any new versions that come out will automatically be available for you to download and use in full.

The Media Monkey team consists of 5 people. Russell Samuels, Jiri Hajek & 3 other developers.

Paul: How did Media Monkey first come to being?

Rusty: Jiri was working on Songs-DB because he was unsatisfied with the state of Music Management apps at the time. I was looking for a new business opportunity and had similar thoughts about the need for a music manager that would meet the needs of more serious collectors. We hooked up and MM was born, and since then, it’s been a labor of love.

Paul: Have you written Media Monkey’s front-end with a view to entice current Winamp or iTunes users by providing a familiar interface?

Rusty: We’re always influenced by good ideas whatever their source might be. Early versions of MediaMonkey were designed to use Winamp skins as that was a way of quickly getting a skin library for MediaMonkey, so the player ended up looking like Winamp’s. MediaMonkey’s Tree and Tracklist were modeled after Windows Explorer, the main difference being that MM’s tree is used to model attributes other than location. Newer versions of the player are supported by a better skinning engine, that allows for much more creative designs that can be unique, or modeled after iTunes, Windows Media Player, or any other visually pleasing music app.

Paul: Media Monkey seems to share a few similarities with Winamp. For instance, the Visualisations are compatible with Winamp’s, and the Shoutcast support, plus some other details. Is the code base for Media Monkey completely separate from Winamp, or is it based on, or have pieces in common with Winamp?

Rusty: MediaMonkey was designed to be compatible with many of the Winamp 2.x APIs since that allowed its functionality to be extended in the absence of an active developer base. In early versions of MM, there was common code for a couple of freely licensed input/output plugins. Today, MM doesn’t have any common code with Winamp, though it still supports the Winamp 2.x APIs.

Paul: Are there any plans, other than sales, for monetisation? For instance, are you looking to in the future perhaps fund the free version with ads?

Rusty: We’ve thought about having an ad-supported version, but have rejected that as too damaging to our brand–we don’t want to be labeled as adware. We currently derive a small amount of revenue from affiliate sales of music via Amazon, and hope to grow that with the launch of Amazon’s MP3 store.

Paul: Do you feel the community of users are important to the future of Media Monkey’s ongoing development?

Rusty: Without its community, MediaMonkey is nothing. Our community has translated MM into 15 languages, developed countless scripts, created skins and icons, beta tested, provided invaluable feedback, etc. We try to give back to our community by carefully listening to what they’re asking for, and providing in the free version enough that it is useful for most people. I suspect that with time, our community will become even more critical to MM’s success.

Paul: How do you feel the record industry is coping with the change of people buying more and more music online, and where do you think Media Monkey fits into this change?

Rusty: The record industry’s response to the internet as a distribution medium was to tighten control over content with DRM. We’ve never been a fan of DRM–it’s only caused problems for our users, and believe in a future of unencumbered music such as that offered in Amazon’s MP3 store. But, it’ll still be hard to sell tracks for $1 when they can be found via p2p for free–so the industry will have to provide enough value at any particular price point that makes it worth paying for the track instead of getting it via p2p.

In that context, MediaMonkey will have to get better at helping users find the music that they seek and helping users discover music that they might be interested in, given their tastes. If we do this effectively, it will yield affiliate revenues that will help fund the project in the long term.

Paul: Are there any other plans for Media Monkey in the future?

Rusty: World domination?

Once again, our thanks are extended to Russell for his time. If you are interested, Media Monkey can be downloaded from [HERE]

The first thing I thought was - death throws. I can’t understand why a search engine (that isn’t doing so well) would concentrate on the minority readership. But then, reading further, it appears for some reason that women in their 30’s make up the majority of ask.com’s users! Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s interesting how ask.com’s majority is the rest of the world’s minority. Is it something they should focus on, or perhaps a warning that they need to do better? Or are they aiming at the niche market? [SHOW ME]