Plain English Technical Advice

Domain Distress

Yesterday evening, I fancied a ‘medicinal’ Indian takeaway to counter the effects of lunchtime Christmas celebrations.

Naturally, I Googled ‘Barbican Tandoori’ (my local) and came up with an address of www.barbicantandoori.co.uk

Sadly, somebody appears to have hijacked this address and replaced the original website with a load of pay-per-click advertisements.

All seems perfectly legal though they do appear to be using the original Barbican Tandoori website heading artwork with links maintaining the original page structure—presumably, to maintain any search engine presence previously built-up.

If you do allow your domain name hosting to lapse, as I suspect happened here, it’s fair game for anybody to grab it for their own purposes.

Interestingly, Google appear to have taken some action in that they have disabled pay-per-click advertisements featuring this address, though they still show both the advertisements and the address.

Links within the main search engine results still work as do the Google advertisements on the ‘rogue’ website.

If you want to order BT food online, they now have a website at www.barbicantandoori.com though this doesn’t yet appear in the early search engine results.

Excel Eccentricities

The Credit Card Numbers

The other day, I read an amusing* article about a chap who recorded all of his credit card details on an Excel spreadsheet

When he subsequently retrieved this information, the last digit of some numbers had somehow changed, which inevitably caused a good deal of chaos.

Although an Excel spreadsheet looks simple enough, it actually makes a number of assumptions in an attempt to reduce the user workload—but these assumptions can sometimes give rise to spurious results.

For example, Excel can handle many different types of data including text, numbers, currency, dates, etc.—but, unless you specify the type of data contained in a particular cell, it will make assumptions based on the actual data entered.

Take a typical credit card number such as: 4508 0001 2345 6789

In Excel 2010 (may not be true for all versions), this will be interpreted as a TEXT field because it contains spaces.

However, it the number is typed in, without spaces, as 4508000123456789, it is assumed to be a floating-point number—that being the Excel format for handling very large numbers.

Even if you define the cell to display as a normal number, there will most-likely be an error because the internal format is still floating-point for a number of this size.

A shorter number such as 45080001234 doesn't exhibit these behaviours.

Note that while floating-point numbers have a very high precision, they are always an ‘approximation’ and may not give the desired result in accounting-type applications.

The quick answer here is to recognise that this so-called credit card number is actually a credit card ‘reference’ and not intended for any sort of calculation—it is TEXT and should be specifically defined as such.

*I am easily amused

Rounding Issues

The following picture illustrates a common issue with Excel spreadsheets—the figures in the total column don't actually add-up to the overall total arrived at by 'summing' those figures.

In this second, apparently identical, spreadsheet, the overall total is correct.

By increasing the number of decimal places in two of the columns, it becomes clear that the VAT calculation sometimes generates results which include fractions of a penny and these are rounded when the figure is displayed to 2 decimal places.

However, this rounding of the displayed numbers does not necessarily change the underlying numbers used for calculation so adding-up the two lists (rounded and unrounded) will often produce a significantly different result.

For most commercial accounting purposes, working to the nearest penny is good enough and any greater accuracy in the underlying numbers is going to create these sort of rounding problems—though the same sort of issues could potentially arise with several decimal places displayed.

The answer to this issue is buried in the Excel 'Options' (Version 2010 is shown)—if you set the 'precision as displayed' option, the underlying numbers will be rounded identically to the displayed numbers and the problem is resolved.

Ironically, this generates a message stating that you will permanently lose accuracy though, to my mind, this is the most useful setting for simple accounting applications.

The bigger lesson to be learned here is that, when creating a new spreadsheet, you should always test to ensure that it is actually producing the expected results.

'Cloud' Cuckoo Land

Of late, it has become increasingly trendy to describe various information processing services as being in 'The Cloud' which is just a fancy new name for the old concept of keeping your essential personal and business data on a computer controlled by somebody else.

Indeed, Google have recently launched a new operating system, Google Chrome OS, which is designed around this concept  and Microsoft are hitting the same market with their Web-based Office 365 product.

Apart from the fact that some of these services require payment of an ongoing subscription rather than outright ownership of software and data storage, what does the so-called Cloud Computing actually mean to the user?

The first problem is that the use of these services requires a reliable internet connection and, without that, there is no access to your important data.

Anybody who has tried posting to a blog or social networking site during busy periods will also appreciate that response can be quite sluggish compared to working with documents located on your own computer..

In reality, web-based computing has been with us for some years and several email systems (Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail) are based around this concept as are various messaging and social networking services.

To illustrate how these services can go wrong, I provide two examples of Hotmail issues, arising this week, from my Facebook contacts.

In the first case, my contact found that he could no longer receive email attachments at work via his Hotmail account.

Hotmail have apparently changed their system so that attachments are now stored on Microsoft's Skydrive service and accessed via a link added to the email.

That's not a bad idea in itself (I use a similar service called Winzip Courier) but this particular recipent's company network server blocks access to these external links, making the attachments inaccessible.

My second contact had a more-serious problem in that she found her Hotmail account 'blocked' and has consequently lost around 15 years of work, contacts, links, business plans and personal information.

It's not clear why the account is blocked though 'hacking' is suspected.

After a few days of argee-bargee with Hotmail (or Windows Live or whatever they call themselves this week) have communicated thus:

    'We have concluded our review of the information you provided. Our agents were unable to validate that you are the account owner. The information provided has been reviewed and our agents could not match this information to the account information currently stored for the account.

Our final recommendation is to create a new Windows Live ID account.

Notwithstanding the talk of 'agents', these service-provider help systems are increasingly automated and it is pretty-well impossible to communicate directly with a real person.

To me, It seems inconceivable that anybody would want to open a new account having just lost 15 years-worth of important information.

Don't even get me started on Apple's Mobile-Me which is supposed to synchronise email, contacts, calender, etc, between PCs and mobile devices but has ended-up losing several years of history for one of my clients–it's so good that Apple are presently re-launching the service as ICloud (let's hope that it doesn't become known as ICrap).

Conclusion

It's easy to become mesmerised with the latest 'whizzy' technology even though much of it is old technology with new branding.

In my opinion, important business and personal information is best kept under direct user control with a robust system of backup–'Cloud' computing reduces that control which increases the risk of data loss and exposure.

It's also a good idea to use your own domain name for email–these can be hosted with any domain hosting provider and can be moved to another if any aspect of the service becomes unacceptable.

With Hotmail, Google, and Yahoo, as well as email provided by Internet Service Providers, you can only use their email addresses while you subscribe to those services and you can't really demand reinstatement of those you haven't paid for.

Staying Sane with You Own Domain