There are a number of exhibitions and conferences that take place in the UK each year for I.T. specialists, people working in or using I.T., and for members of the public. Below we look at five of the annual IT exhibitions that you might be interested in.

1. The MacLive Exposition is an event that Mac lovers are certain to enjoy, but will also be fun for anyone interested in technology and computers. Taking place between the 23rd and 25th October for 2008 in London's Olympia Exhibition Centre, this event is more than 8 years old and therefore very well established. There will be a number of interesting seminars at this event and also an impressive line-up of exhibitors.

2. Another popular I.T. exhibition, which takes place in the Olympia Exhibition Centre, is the 'Online Information Services Conference and Exhibition'. Taking place this year between the 2nd and 4th December, this exhibition really focuses on Information Technology and is an event that attracts people from a wide range of fields. I.T. affects us all these days and everyone from librarians, I.T. Managers, Sales staff and shop owners are likely to attend this show.

3. The 'Human Resource Software Show' similarly takes place in Olympia and is a great show for anyone connected to Human Resource Management. This is an annual event which includes a number of workshops such as 'Document Management 101: taking control of the HR paper trail', 'Learning and Technology: beyond the hype', and 'Managing Personal Web Use at Work'. At this exhibition you will get to see the very latest technology for HR departments and there will be many companies on hand to advise you on all areas concerned with HR software. This show normally takes place in June of each year and there are software solutions for Recruitment, Training, Payroll, Attendance and Feedback.

4. The 'Computer Fair' at the Don Valley Bowl Stadium in Sheffield is an interesting and handy event. Taking place on the 5th and 6th July 2008, this is said to be one of the biggest two day Computer Fair in England each year with more than 100 exhibitors present. This is a popular event with the general public where you can buy just about anything you might think of to satisfy your computing needs.

5. The annual 'Retail Software Exhibition', held at Donington Park in Derby is another interesting event. There are a number of workshops planned and this event takes place in different UK cities being run by the IT Showcase Online. It has been scheduled for the 18th September 2008 and looks to be really useful to these looking at retail software.

NTP servers or Network Time Protocol are devices that connect to a computer network and synchronise all machines to a single time source. Of course most Windows operating systems have an inbuilt NTP program called Windows Time that can synchronise to an Internet time source; however, these can not be authenticated and can leave a computer network open to abuse.

NTP servers are normally rack mountable and take up 1U of space but some are built smaller for networks without a dedicated server room. NTP is based on UDP and requires TCP/IP.

The timing source for an NTP server can either be taken from a specialist radio transmission that are broadcast from national physics laboratories or from the GPS network.

Radio time references are only broadcast by a few countries, in particular the US (WWVB), the UK (MSF), Germany (DCF), Japan (JJY), France (TDF), Switzerland (HBG) and China (BPM). However, depending on the distance from these transmissions it is possible to receive the signals in neighbouring countries although being mainly long wave these signals are easily blocked by mountains, buildings and bad weather.

If a NTP Server is in a location with a clear radio signal it is possible to receive the transmission indoors which has an advantage over the GPS system which requires and antenna with a clear view of the sky (although it is possible to receive a transmission near a window).

GPS is however more accurate than radio transmission and can provide accuracy to within a hundred nanoseconds (a nanosecond is 1 billionth of a second). They can also receive a signal from literally anywhere in the world (as long as the antenna can get a clear view of the sky).

NTP servers are extremely easy to install and just need to be provided with a static IP address and have its internal time synchronized with the external timing reference. Once synchronised (which can take up to an hour) the NTP server will continually ensure all the clocks on the network are running the correct time.

Heightened security options such as authentication can also be used to ensure the NTP Server and network is secure from abuse.

If you have ever been pulled over for traveling above the speed limit then you know how important a radar detector can be. These tiny devices can greatly reduce your chance of getting pulled over for speeding but do you know how they work? It is one of the technological advances that we seem to take for granted.

Most of us have no clue beyond plugging them into the cigarette lighter and mounting them on the dashboard. But are they legal? How do they work? Those are just a few of the questions that you should have when it comes to radar detectors. This is your lucky day.

This article will cover the basics of radar detectors and hopefully by the end you will have some idea of why a radar detector can mean the difference between a speeding ticket and getting to keep your money and your insurance rates low.

What is a radar detector?

A radar detector is a device that measures the radio waves bounced off your vehicle. Police officers use a radar gun that gives off radio waves. When the waves hit your vehicle they are returned to the gun to determine how fast you are going. The radar detector measures these waves and alerts you to the presence of someone using a radar gun to detect your speed.

What is a radar jammer?

A radar jammer is a device that will scramble the radar waves and the LIDAR that are aimed at the vehicle. It is important to know that radar jamming is illegal in the United States and if you get caught with a radar jammer you are facing a fine and possible felony conviction for using one. It is definitely not worth the risk to own one.

What are some brands of radar detectors?

There are several different brands of radar detectors on the market currently. You can choose from a Beltronics BEL RX54 radar detector or you can go with the Whistler XTR-690 Radar/Laser Detector. The choice is up to you and it may come down to what guarantees the company offers along with the price.

Is there a guarantee that I won't get a speeding ticket if I use a radar detector from a certain company?

There are companies that will guarantee that if you purchase their radar detector and still receive a ticket within a year, they will pay for the cost of the ticket. This guarantee is not offered by every company so you will need to check the fine print before you purchase one if this is something that you are looking for in a radar detection company. The company may also have some fine print about paying for the ticket so read, read, read the instructions and guarantee before purchasing.

Today I want to share with you a seriously amazing piece of free software that is seriously revolutionizing the way we think about defragmenting our hard drives. I'm going to be revealing some killer stuff that you may not have heard of, so be sure to read every word of this article... I mean it.

The Problem:

If you've read my reports in the past then you know by now that over time, your harddrive tends to become fragmented. Fragmentation (cluttering of files) causes your harddrive to work harder (NOT good) opening up a specific file or loading a certain application. This in term dramticaly slows down your computers overall performance...

The So-Called Solutions:

Defragmentation programs in essence all work the same.

Yeah yeah, some have more features than others blah blah blah, but the truth is that at the end of the day, they all do the same stuff! Anyways... the point I'm trying to help you understand is that yes...by defragmenting our harddrives we will get a boost in performance but our harddrive will still not be running at their peak!

Crazy huh?

I bet all you Perfectdisk and Diskeeper fans are in flipping out, but hear me out!

Perfectdisk and Diskeeper both do a superb job at defragmenting but not optimizing your hardrives performance.

Confused?

It's simple, let me break it down again. When you defragment your harddrive your in a sense organizing a bunch a unlocated files into a nice folder making it easier for your harddrive to locate it...

Rather than having them spread around your harddrive randomly, and making your harddisk work harder piecing the file together... get it?

Good!

So yes, defragmentation will improve performance but wont give you a big a boost like optimizing your hardrive will!

The REAL Solution: Defragmentation & File Optimization

OK get ready...

This has to be one of the coolest and most powerful fr.ee pieces of software I've ever uncovered.

It's called UltimateDefrag and it does what no other defragmenter does today. It optimizes the placement of your files...and defragments for an insane performance boost!

"But it sounded like such a good idea!" How many times have we heard this in the midst of battling the chaos monster we created for ourselves? In this article, I'm going to discuss an example of this from my time with a former employer, who shall remain nameless to avoid the shame.

As a network engineer for a former employer, one of my major assignments was the buildout of a large SONET fiber optic network. The SONET network used Lucent Metropolis DMX multiplexers to carry both TDM services (DS1/DS3) and fast and gigabit Ethernet. This was a major upgrade that replaced a variety of older Cisco routers and a web of point to point links in the core of the network. As the buildout progressed, a business decision was made that a portion of the network would not be completed or delayed in completion. This was a logical business decision that triggered a chain of bad technology decisions in an attempt to deal with it.

The nature of a SONET network is that it is intended to be used in a ring. This provides redundancy, in case of one break in the ring, traffic will still continue to flow uninterrupted. In this case, we're left with an incomplete broken ring because of the missing portions. Now it's time for the second chaos inducing business decision, we MUST close the ring and do it with minimal to zero cost.

So now we're at the first try. There was existing fiber in place from an office part way up one "horn" to the end of the second "horn". The fiber was out of spec to run the OC48 SONET links but it was adequate to run 100Base-FX Ethernet. So, the first try was to tie an Ethernet port on both ends together with this fiber link and close the ring. Unfortunately, this wasn't such a good idea. Lucent, in their wisdom, had neglected to implement spanning tree protocol on the DMX Ethernet switch ports (only the virtual port connecting the Ethernet switch to the SONET ring had STP). This resulted in a massive and immediate STP loop and interrupted service for about 65,000 people for 10 minutes.

The second try was to insert a Cisco 2924 Ethernet switch in the link and allow the 2924's STP to break the loop. This idea worked perfectly in testing and worked perfectly on installation.

Unfortunately, sometime later, the network once again experienced an STP loop with corresponding service outage. I attributed this to the fact that the 2924 wasn't aware of the STP network of the DMX Ethernet switches and vice versa and they were making independent decisions that might conflict.

Third try was to chop up the SONET network, using scarce and expensive Ethernet ports on the DMXs and reinserting the old Cisco routers. At this point, I decided a mutual parting of the ways was appropriate, given where I could see this was heading. We had taken an elegant, state of the art, SONET network and mutilated it in an attempt to patchwork it, creating an ill performing and unsupportable monster. To say that this would have been a nightmare doesn't say enough. The configuration was far from anything intended by Lucent.

This illustrates the danger of allowing mutually conflicting business decisions made without adequate consideration of the consequences to drive a a series of desperate patches to critical network systems in an effort to compensate. This caused lost revenue for the company, lost customer good will, and loss of reputation. Ironically, I believe that, in the end, it would have been cheaper to have finished the original project.

The moral of this? Consider carefully the REAL cost of technology affecting decisions, both in terms of money and effect on customer service. Don't make assumptions about the capability of your network to absorb unconventional changes in configuration. Make sure you understand all the possible downsides. Consult with an experienced network engineer.

Well of course there IS an "I" in Monitoring! Actually there are two of them. However this very simple concept is often forgotten and quite difficult to accomplish while effectively running IT Operations. I was reminded of this while attending the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando last October.

Gartner analysts talked about the maturity model for running IT Operations as a Business, and they concluded that very few IT organizations had built the framework of People, Process and Technology to achieve a high level automation by welding the right set of tools together for internal IT departments to be able to deliver IT solutions like a service provider.

What's Happening Now
Typically, larger IT organizations run in silo-based organizational structures because of the very nature of technology subject matter expertise. The network engineering group, the database management team, the systems management teams with Unix and Windows, the IT security teams, the back-office application management teams and the e-mail/blackberry service delivery teams often run in separate subgroups.

Most often, these teams use their own independent tools (often from the manufacturer of the technologies they support) or a single narrow/deep tool to assist with performance and event management for databases, e-mail systems, servers or the network. This typical structure leads to 5-10 independent monitoring/management systems that often don't share information with each other.

More important, the lack of or oftentimes extreme expense and ongoing management associated with integrating multiple heterogeneous technologies and applications into a unified monitoring/management system leads to communication breakdowns and knowledge transfer gaps that prevent rapid issue resolution.

The Team Solution
So back to the title of this blog post: "There is no I in Monitoring." The idea is a play on the well-known saying "there is no I in Team." I could not find this commonly used phrase attributed to a specific person, but I have heard it in sports and business coaching as a consistent mantra for amazing results.

By definition, a "team" is collection of people working together towards a universal goal. Partly based on the mnemonic - Together Each Achieves More - which values the togetherness of individuals; this well-meaning adage emphasizes the need to leverage the strengths of individual subject matter experts to maximize the efficiency and success of the team.

So the crescendo moment you have all been waiting for. Valuing the individual strengths, skills and experiences of every one of these silo technology teams, and channeling them through a single tool and a single pane of glass will generate exceptional results in IT Operations Management.

We welcome you to our monitoring world and hope that you'll enjoy learning about our philosophies and the idea of a collaborative team effort in managing IT operations.

Human society is entering an era of ubiquitous computing, when networks are seamlessly interconnected and information is always accessible at our fingertips. The practical implementation of ubiquitous services requires three levels of connectivity: Wide Area Networks (WAN), typically via the Internet, to remotely connect all types of severs and terminals; Local Area Networks (LAN), typically via Ethernet or WiFi connectivity among all the information and communication appliances in offices and homes; and Human Area Networks (HAN) for connectivity to personal information, media and communication appliances within the much smaller sphere of ordinary daily activities the last one meter.

What is RedTacton?
RedTacton is a new Human Area Networking technology that uses the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path!!RedTacton is a break-through technology that, for the first time, enables reliable high-speed HAN. In the past, Bluetooth, infrared communications (IrDA), radio frequency ID systems (RFID), and other technologies have been proposed to solve the "last meter" connectivity problem. However, they each have various fundamental technical limitations that constrain their usage, such as the precipitous fall-off in transmission speed in multi-user environments producing network congestion.

1. RedTacton uses the minute electric field emitted on the surface of the human body. Technically, it is completely distinct from wireless and infrared.
2. A transmission path is formed at the moment a part of the human body comes in contact with a RedTacton transceiver. Physically separating ends the contact and thus ends communication.
3. Using RedTacton, communication starts when terminals carried by the user or embedded in devices are linked in various combinations according to the user's natural, physical movements.
4. Communication is possible using any body surfaces, such as the hands, fingers, arms, feet, face, legs or torso. RedTacton works through shoes and clothing as well.

Basic Principle
RedTacton takes a different technical approach. Instead of relying on electromagnetic waves or light waves to carry data, RedTacton uses weak electric fields on the surface of the body as a transmission medium.
1. The RedTacton transmitter induces a weak electric field on the surface of the body.
2. The RedTacton receiver senses changes in the weak electric field on the surface of the body caused by the transmitter.
3. RedTacton relies upon the principle that the optical properties of an electro-optic crystal can vary according to the changes of a weak electric field.
4. RedTacton detects changes in the optical properties of an electro-optic crystal using a laser and converts the result to an electrical signal in an optical receiver circuit.

The three major functional features of RedTacton are highlighted below.
1. A communications path can be created with a simple touch, automatically initiating the flow of data between a body-centric electronic device and a computer that is embedded in the environment. For example, two people equipped with RedTacton devices could exchange data just by shaking hands. A wide range of natural human actions -- grasping, sitting down, walking, or standing in a particular place -- can be used to trigger RedTacton to start a networked process.
2. Using a RedTacton electro-optic sensor, two-way communication is supported between any two points on the body at a throughput of up to 10 Mbps. Communication is not just confined to the surface of the body, but can travel through the user's clothing to a RedTacton device in a pocket or through shoes to communicate with a RedTacton device embedded in the floor. Unlike wireless technologies, the transmission speed does not deteriorate even in the presence of large crowds of people all communicating at the same time in meeting rooms, auditoriums or stores. Because the body surface is the transmission path, increasing the number of connected users directly increases the available number of individual communication channels.
3. RedTacton can utilize a wide range of materials as a transmission medium, as long as the material is conductive and dielectric, which includes water and other liquids, various metals, certain plastics, glass, etc. Using ordinary structures such as tables and walls that are familiar and readily available, one could easily construct a seamless communication environment at very low cost using RedTacton. (Note that constraints are imposed by the length and environment of the propagating conductor, and by the thickness of the dielectric.)

Mechanism of communication with RedTacton
The transmitter sends data by inducing fluctuations in the minute electric field on the surface of the human body. Data is received using a photonic electric field sensor that combines an electro-optic crystal and a laser light to detect fluctuations in the minute electric field.

The naturally occurring electric field induced on the surface of the human body dissipates into the earth. Therefore, this electric field is exceptionally faint and unstable. The photonic electric field sensor developed by NTT enables weak electric fields to be measured by detecting changes in the optical properties of an electro-optic crystal with a laser beam.

Features

RedTacton has three main functional features.
(1) Touch: Touching, gripping, sitting, walking, stepping and other human movements can be the triggers for unlocking or locking, starting or stopping equipment, or obtaining data.
(2) Broadband & Interactive: Bandwidth does not deteriorate even with duplex operations and simultaneous access by many users! Duplex, interactive communication is possible at a maximum speed of 10Mbps. Because the transmission path is on the surface of the body, transmission speed does not deteriorate in congested areas where many people are communicating at the same time.
(3) Any media: In addition to the human body, various conductors and dielectrics can be used as transmission media. Conductors and dielectrics may also be used in combination.