Sneak is getting a bit fed up of carelessly throwing away the hundreds of bits of paper that come through his letter box going on and on and on about his carbon footprint – especially since he didn’t used to know what it meant.

Fortunately for the planet, man…Sneak woke up during one of IT Week's green seminars and discovered what it was all about. Before then he'd assumed that it had something to do with burglars, their trainers and fireplaces. Apparently, this is not the case.

Bursting with good green feelings Sneak had a look at the government's recently released carbon calculator, and was amused - and surprised - to see that he had come above the national average.

Given that Sneak lied outrageously, he wonders what the rest of the nation claims. Surely not everyone turns their appliances off at the wall? Every night?

Sneak certainly could not live without his illuminated tyre pyre/fridge combo.

June 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Being a big fan of Gordon Ramsey's swearing and cooking – in that order – Sneak was slightly disappointed to see the great man appear in an advert for BT.

The ads show Mr Ramsey rushing around a restaurant setting up his own computer network, while his kitchen - or some vol-au-vents – burst aflame in the background. The chaos is designed to make people think "*&£$ that for a !+*%ing game of soldiers. I'll get BT to set my *&$%ing network up. There is no way I am @#*!ing doing it myself."

Sneak would find the advertising premise a lot more convincing if Gordo uttered just one swearword. After all, how many people do you know who have set up a home network and haven’t turned the air blue. At least once.

None? No, neither has Sneak.

By way of explanation, Sneak does not make a habit of sitting around watching the telly, but had inadvertently been sucked into watching an episode of a Big Brother spin-off show.

In, "Big Brothers' annoying cojoined twin" or something, the "How Clean is your House" ladies trotted out the old urban legend that the chopping board is a less hygienic surface for preparing food on than the humble toilet seat. This came up because the housemates were to the Big Brother house what dog mess is to the bottom of a trainer. Either way, the comparison has been around for as long as we care to remember.

In the world of IT, the chopping board is nearly always swapped for the keyboard.

Either way, Sneak's response is always the same. "You, obviously, have never seen my toilet…"

June 26, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe surprised some observers recently when it gave an unusual commercial name to its Project Apollo software.

AIR, which stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, seems an odd name but some watchers believe that the company has cunningly inverted the moniker given to the new school of applications Adobe wants to dominate - Rich Internet Applications, or RIA. However, Adobe may have been too clever as www.adobeair.com takes browsers not to the software giant but to a maker of “America’s coldest evaporative coolers”.

June 25, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

So The Apprentice is finally over for another year, leaving posh boy Simon Ambrose to ride off into the sunset (well Brentwood) with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help build a golf course in Essex.

Sneak only hopes he has a better experience than last year's winner Michelle Dewberry, who according to a recent interview with The Guardian got to see very little of Sir Alan’s famed business acumen.

"We were going to offer a service to a consumer so that if you have an old telly you pay us and we'll collect and recycle it," Dewberry reflected in the article. "Unfortunately we didn't make provision for the fact that consumers already get that service for free, or they will once a new regulation is implemented."

That would be the WEEE directive then, a piece of legislation that has been on the cards for a decade.

As Dewberry admits with studied understatement, the realisation that Sir Alan's new Xenon Green venture was set up to sell a service that people could get for free left her "in a bit of a predicament".

Far be it from Sneak to offer advice to a man who got out of the computer business just before the home PC revolution, but perhaps the next Apprentice series should see Sir Alan giving himself a due diligence refresher course.

June 21, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been some pretty risible attempts at making technology firms appear “green” recently but digital music is surely a more environmentally-friendly alternative to disk media, right?

Not necessarily. According to a Reuters story, sales of recordable CDs are still growing as users burn files. Also, discarded MP3 players are seen as problematic because they are full of heavy metals. Who would have thought the type of music had anything to do with it?

June 20, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Earth has had more than its fair share of criticism over the past few months. It has been linked to the planning of terrorist attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, prompting calls from some quarters for the service to be banned, while recent revelations that it can now zoom-in to show car number plates and newspaper headlines has got privacy zealots hot under the collar and hot-tub Lotharios nervously looking to the skies.

Sneak, however, hasn’t come to bury Google Earth, but to praise it. Why? Well, this wonder of the Internet Age has been instrumental in answering a question that has long perplexed yours truly, viz: what’s the name of the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island? Answer: Vulcan Point in Crater Lake on Vulcano Island in Lake Taal on Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines.

June 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the international privacy watchdog Privacy International, Google is to online privacy what deaf maiden aunts are to hospital waiting room indiscretion. Wholly unfamiliar.

Sneak, who uses the firms' Gmail email service, is well aware that occasionally it feels like Google is peeking a little too closely at his conversations and browsing habits. In a typical day he is offered advertisements from anything to baseball caps for dogs, to space urinals for ladies to use.

He is not sure precisely what element of his life these ad machines are sniffing into, but he is damn sure that he is going to start washing himself a bit more thoroughly before using his email from here on in.

June 13, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the department of contrived product names comes this new standard for mobile email.

Readers will no doubt be aware of POP (Post Office Protocol) the common method used to fetch emails from ISP mail accounts, but how many have heard of LEMONADE?

No, honestly, this is a real standard, and the rather forced acronym stands for License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented And Diverse Endpoints. OK, it has apparently been around for about a year, but this is the first time Sneak has encountered it.

It is hard to avoid the impression that a great deal of effort went into finding a soft-drink related name for the new standard, perhaps on the assumption that people would form a mental association with POP.

Does this mean we can expect to see more equally contrived names in future? Sneak looks forward to reading about Caller Off-Line Acknowledgment (COLA) or Wireless Asynchronous Terminal Extension Relay (WATER) in future, but if it comes to testing any of them, would much prefer to be involved with some Binary Environment Extension Runtimes.

June 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

An eagle-eyed reader has informed Sneak that when installing the latest BlackBerry desktop software (4.2.2), he noticed that Scotland has its own category, listed separately to the rest of the United Kingdom on the drop-down menu. But before we get complaints from our Welsh and Northern Irish readers, perhaps there is a reasonable explanation.

There may indeed be one, but Sneak can’t think what it is…does Research in Motion maybe know something we don’t about the future of our great kingdom? Or could it simply be the result of overwhelming feedback from nationalist Scots?

June 7, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3)

The bottom is falling out of the hard-core porn business, according to a recent article in the New York Times’ technology section that inexplicably caught Sneak’s eye, and apparently we’ve got Web 2.0 to thank for it. Makes sense. After all, Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about social networking and interactive applications, and you can’t get more social and interactive than sex – or so Sneak has been led to believe.

Such a development was inevitable. It seems slickly-made erotic movies set in exotic locations with cheesy, funky soundtracks are rapidly losing market share to badly-lit footage of amateur fumblings set on ratty sofas – think DFS adverts with copious amounts of flesh, Primark lingerie and grunting. According to the NYT, these bargain-basement bonkfests are being uploaded onto XXX-versions of You Tube in their thousands every day. Sneak hears that the rise of DIY porn is forcing establish ‘stars’ to consider a career change. Perhaps there’s an opportunity here for the IT industry to spice up all those tedious web seminars that Sneak’s forced to watch when he’s not researching online for new living-room furniture.

June 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The annoying “captcha” tests designed to spot spammers may soon be making themselves useful, if no less annoying. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University plan to replace deliberately wobbly and obscured text used to dissuade bulk comment spamming with accidentally wobbly and obscured text taken from old, out-of-print books that are too faded or fuzzy for automated character recognition. The ReCaptcha test aims to kill two birds with a single brick: spammers are deterred and old books get digitised. It’s a neat idea, but to be useful, the system has to present at least two words: one that’s known or previously deciphered by others to actually weed out gibberish answers, plus another new word to actually help with the ongoing deciphering. So we can look forward to doubly annoying tests in the future. There’s no such thing as a free lunch after all, nor a free digitisation service neither.

June 1, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)