UK Information Commissioner

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The UK Information Commissioner’s Office is the independent regulatory authority whose role from our point of view is as the registrar for Data Protection and privacy in the UK. With the soft launch of Life Sign Press then we’ve moved from being a data processor to a data controller.

With the few queries that we have sent the ICO they have replied back with satisfactory answers. Their web site for registration is good (with one annoying flaw *see later on) but you really have to know exactly,

  • what data you plan to collect on the public,
  • how you plan to store and process this data,
  • what you plan to do with the data,
  • how you plan to secure the data and
  • how you plan to get rid of the data.

This is not decided on a whim and this is not a one-off project.

Both Security and Privacy are processes not projects. Expect to be paying for these for the rest of your business life and this cannot be avoided without significant penalties if you get caught.

Open Mutual has had years of experience with handling client data and use of crypto and we can help you with this process too.

* the one flaw is that you have to print the forms that they have created and then send them by post along with your cheque.

Ubuntu

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We are currently Ubuntu fans. Before I was a Mandrake/Mandriva fan and before that a RedHat fan and before that a Slackware fan…..

What have I noticed in the past 14 years of using various GNU/Linux distributions ?  Three things:

  1. The distributions evolve best by doing better than their competition within their niche in the GNU/Linux world not competing against the Windows world. Make it simple for  applications to provide equal cross-platform  performance and by proxy then GNU/Linux competes with Windows.
  2. My children don’t actually care what distribution they can play games on. They know that certain applications run well in Windows, others are only found on Ubuntu (Linux) and that browser-based games are more or less cross-platform.
  3. New installations and upgrades have got easier and faster but as Familiarity breeds contempt, this means that it is trivial to wipe a machine, clean install a new distribution that you got from a Torrent if something has annoyed you with your current favourite distribution.

IBM is 100 years old this week in June 2011. Will Open Source technology such as GNU/Linux be with us in 100 years time ? You can bet your bottom fiat currency it will.

Multiple domain name selections

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As a minimum we buy the three TLD, .com, .net and .org for a domain name.

With most registrars you can forward the emails and web traffic from the two you don’t use to your main site at no extra cost.

The value of the extra domains becomes apparent when you start adding e-Commerce or company blogs or test or administration sites. Whilst your main public-facing domain can be on e.g. the .com you can host test and development sites on the .net or .org.

With Open Mutual we have our .net as our main public facing web site, this .org as a “blog” and the .com is used for client hosting and is used for our business continuity testing.

Most hosting providers allow you to have multiple TLD (usually up to 10) on the same host (shared hosting reseller account or a V-server)  as well as countless subsites so the cost of running multiple TLD is just the cost of the registry fees (say an extra USD 20 per annum) plus extra time in administration of these extra domains.

If the domains are on completely different infrastructure (different DNS and servers) then the administration site can be used to advertise service status for the live domain.

Done right, the administration costs are neutral because when you are planning your business continuity you can deploy your backups onto the other domain names and hosting accounts without interfering with your live system or, equally, you can install new versions of software on the other domains and test the impact by comparing the live and test systems.

 

Don’t forget that .htaccess

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When you install your wordpress site on a new machine then don’t forget to add or change the .htaccess file to allow the permlinks to work properly without getting 404 page errors. What you need to add is right at the very bottom of the WP Admin Settings-> Permlinks administration page. Copy and paste that into the .htaccess file that is (or should be) at the document root of your web site.

If it is not there then you need to create this file. If you are using Windows and try and create a file called .htaccess on your local PC to upload to your web server then you will get an error “You must type a file name”.

Just call it htaccess.txt or similar and then edit that with the WP permlinks related changes and then upload that in FTP. Then rename the file on the server to .htaccess

As the server will be Unix-like then it won’t care about such a filename and now your permlinks will work and you won’t get 404 errors for your posts.

New server up and running

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We’ve shifted our server from where it was to Host Europe (Germany) because the hosting was up for renewal and Host Europe prices for the basic Virtual Server (Ubuntu 10 with 1 Gigabyte of memory) that we need looked good plus I have been using a forum that is hosted with them and never really seen any problems.

Will be moving the .net and a few other domains over next two weeks.