Month: December 2011

Technology Bloggers community awards

21 Replies Christopher Roberts

At the end of 2011, here at Technology Bloggers we are going to celebrate with an award ceremony. We are a community blog, and thought the year, loads of fantastic people have been working on continuously improving the blog, taking it to new heights!

Now, at the end of the year, we shall celebrate the people who have helped make this blog the huge success it is today.

This year the awards have all been awarded by me (Christopher Roberts) as a member of the admin team. However next year I hope that we can vote on the awards, so that the community decide who in the community deserves the award.

So, without further ado, the awards!

This year we have 6 awards up for grabs:

  • Top Commenter – The person who posts valuable comments which help to create the fantastic community we have on the blog
  • Top Writer (Contributor) – The contributor who has made the most valuable contribution to the blog – in terms of the quantity and quality of articles published – this year
  • Top Writer (Author and Admin) – The author – or higher rank – who has made the greatest contribution in terms of the quantity and quality of articles published this year
  • Rising Star – Who is really going places? Who is helping to improve the blog and has great potential?
  • Most Friendly Member of the Community – Who has been the most pleasant and kind person on the blog this year?
  • Top All Rounder – The big one! Technology Bloggers ultimate award, who is the best example of a fantastic member of the community?

So, to the awards!

Top Commenter

The Nominations:

  • Alan Tay – Always among the first to add his view, Alan almost always adds interesting information to an article, and he also likes to interact with other commenters – the characteristic of a really good commenter
  • Diana Studer – Diana has taught me many lessons about respect in blogging and always writes very interesting and thought provoking comments!
  • David (from TheOnlyCog) – David speaks his mind, asks questions, adds information, therefore contributing a great deal to the commenting community
  • Chadrack Irobogo – Although Chadrack does not comment very often, when he does, he makes very valuable points, has very good grammar and is always full of support

And the winner is…

Chadrack's AvatarChadrack Irobogo! Pleasant mannered and well written, Chadrack’s comments often bring new information and ideas to the table, which help to improve the community.

Top Writer (Contributor)

The Nominations:

  • Marc Madrigal – Marc likes writing about technology and the web, and he does it very well – useful articles which can be both constructive and thought provoking
  • Alan Tay – Alan’s articles are always popular, probably due to them being well written, interesting and helpful
  • Andrew Doyle – Andrew writes well written articles, which often attract attention from the community

And the winner is…

Alan's AvatarAlan Tay! Alan is a really big member of the Technology Bloggers community, commenting, reading and writing, his articles make great reading and really do add value to the blog 🙂

Top Writer (Author and Admin)

The Nominations:

  • Ron Fletcher – Ron’s articles are among some of the most popular on the blog, he focuses mainly on apps, and always writes good, interesting articles, and then often replies to the comments that arise from what he has written
  • Jonny Hankins – Jonny is new to WordPress, but is making giant steps towards becoming a really good author, he wrights interesting and insightful posts, which usually fire up a debate
  • Christopher Roberts (Admin Team) – Okay, I can’t give an award to myself, but the category was looking a bit empty, since we only have two authors, so I chucked myself in too 🙂

And the winner is…

Jonny's AvatarJonny Hankins! With 8 articles in his inventory, Jonny is quickly gaining experience and becoming a very good writer, who is liked by the community.

Rising Star

Nominations:

  • Jonny Hankins
  • Alan Tay
  • Ron Fletcher

And the winner is…

Ron's AvatarRon Fletcher! Ron has been a great contributor to the blog since he joined us in July, he is getting really good at replying to his commenters, is writing more and more, and what he is writing is getting better as time goes on.

Most Friendly Member of the Community

The Nominations:

  • Chadrack Irobogo – Always giving support, Chadrack is a very friendly character
  • Marc Madrigal – Marc grins from ear to ear in his profile pick, and that happiness seems to come across in the friendliness of his comments
  • Goodwin A I Manson – A very new member of the community with just a handful of comments (3 I think!) Goodwin writes pleasant and friendly comments
  • Lillie Ammann – Lillie is always full of support and always writes in a kind way

And the winner is…

Marc’s AvatarMarc Madrigal! Marc has been with the blog almost since the beginning, and he has contributed many helpful articles as well as interesting comments, the pleasant manner in which he conducts his writing and replying, makes the experience all the better 🙂

Top All Rounder

Nominations:

  • Alan Tay
  • Jonny Hankins

And the winner is…

Jonny's AvatarJonny Hankins! I felt I had to choose someone who writes for us and comments for this award, and I didn’t want to nominate myself, so I had the choice of Jonny and Alan, both fantastic candidates, however I feel that because of the outstanding progress he has made, Jonny deserves this award 🙂

Winners of Technology Bloggers Community Awards - 2011

The Nominees

Here are the 2011 nominees who didn’t get an award. They are also very deserving individuals, and I urge you to check out their sites!

To Conclude

There we have it, we had 6 awards, and 11 different people were nominated for those awards. Of those 11 people 5 of them now have one (or more – Jonny!) of Technology Bloggers first ever awards! Well done all 🙂

I know I have only mentioned a few people, but it is all of us that make this blog what it is, so thank you everyone!

And finally…

A big big thank you to everyone for a fantastic year! 2011 has been great, so lets have have an even better 2012 🙂

Happy New Year!

Cutting Fuel Emissions from Transport Systems

11 Replies Jonny Hankins

In this the second post of my series about environmental conservation issues, I look at technology whose use could contribute to lessening the planet’s dependency on fossil fuels.

One of the major concerns for the environmental lobby is, and has for a long time been, the environmental cost of transport systems. As we know the vast majority of goods and people use petrol as a propellant, produce lots of pollutants and don’t do the planet any good whatsoever.

There are various option however that are readily available today for cutting down on petrol use, and in this post I would like to introduce a few.

The internal combustion engine is a simple machine, an explosion in a chamber forces a piston out and that is attached to a rod that drives a wheel (or 4 in most cases), but it is a simple operation to exchange the explosion for another form of inertia. We can in fact run a standard vehicle on air, as these plans show.

An air powered engine

Plans for an Air Engine

In 2010 for example the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology unveiled a prototype of a motorbike powered solely by compressed air. The project was created by lecturer Simon Curlis and carried out by a team of students. Curlis’s goal was to produce an emissions free motorbike capable of travelling at more than 100 miles per hour, a feat that went on to achieve on a dried up lake in Australia. Take a look at this report for further details.  

The motorbike is a standard Suzuki GP 100 frame fitted with a rotary engine and a couple of tanks of compressed air stored under the bodywork. A wonderful idea, but you just have to bear in mind that compressed air is highly explosive and doesn’t produce as much power as petrol, but is of course emissions free!

But we can address one of these problems as well as the cold hands in winter issue by investing in an AIR car.  In order to resolve the problem of having to store huge quantities of air the AIR car has a small petrol driven compressor that refills the tanks when they are low. The fuel required to maintain this system is incomparable, with the owners claiming at least 100 Km to two litres of fuel, with the advantage that you don’t need to use any petrol at all in town, you just run the compressors during out of town driving.

The development company that produce the cars above have signed a deal with TATA, and hope to produce production models soon, and they have several different models today including a small urban transport bus. Several US manufacturers are also following suit.

If a life on the ocean waves is more your scene take a look at the largest solar powered ship, currently sailing round the world. The 60 ton Planet Solar is an impressive looking catamaran, and can sail for 3 days without even seeing the sun due to its enormous production capacity and batteries. You can check it out via this video on YouTube.

The ship above may look like an expensive toy for boys, (as does this fuel free solar powered aeroplane), but solar powered sails do exist and are in use on commercial freighters. A company called Eco Marine Power produces rigid sails that not only harness the wind on large cargo ships but also produce electricity as they are in effect giant solar panel sails. Click here for a photo and description of their research. Ironically enough they are best suited to oil tankers, as they don’t have the problem of cranes for cargo that get in the way.

And talking about sailing ships another company called Sky Sails produces a large Kite that you attach to the front of your ship to harness the wind. On a 25000 ton ship the 320 square metre kite lowers fuel consumption by about 30%. Hardly new technology though, Sir Francis Drake knew how to do it!

Shipping may not strike you as particularly relevant to this argument but you might be surprised. Shipping is the main cause of sulphur emission into the atmosphere, and the problem is political in nature. At sea you can burn anything you want and so the shipping companies buy and burn something called heavy or bunker fuel, in short the dregs of the petroleum refining industry. Extremely polluting and damaging to the health. Had you ever noticed how much smoke a ship makes when it is steaming into the distance?

A schooner sailing vessel

Schooners are still in use across South East Asia

On a personal note I would just like to add that sailing ships are still used across South East Asia to transport goods. I saw lines of men and women carrying sacks of grain on their backs up planks on to wooden ships with my own eyes no more than 10 years ago. The photo above gives you an idea, although I did not take it. These wooden schooners are sailed to larger ports where they are unloaded by hand and their goods (sacks of foodstuffs) are left in piles that are then craned onto big ships and sent to Europe, unfortunately not by sail and producing a lot of smoke!

I haven’t addressed the related issue of bio fuels for use in transport in this article but will do so in a later post. Next week I will take a look at alternative forms of electricity production and new technological developments on that front.

Does Security Have to be Technical?

14 Replies Alan

I had been a software engineer for at least 3 years specializing in digital security. A month ago, I attended a small workshop which talked about IT Security for corporate and the speaker said this somewhere in the middle of the workshop:

“Security is a process. It does not have to be really technical and the most important part is the process.”

I stunned for a while and suddenly my mind wondered away from the workshop deeply thinking, what is the speaker trying to deliver? I started this serious thinking simply because it is not said by some non-technical or sales person. Instead, the person speaking in front of me is a Certified Ethical Hacker.

A padlock key on a keyboardAt the end of the workshop, I begin to understand what he is trying to deliver. After 3 years of writing programs for the benefit of security, I turned out saying that security is a process. Why would I say that? Look around us. All the tech that you need to protect yourself from cyber crime is there. Anti-virus, firewall, anti keylogger, parental control, password manager and many more are all available in the software market. There is no reason for us to say in terms of technology, we are not good enough in security.

What makes so many of us a victim of computer or internet threat is the lack of proper process in computer and internet security. Security is not a short process where you only apply if you need it. For instance, you don’t only apply security when you had just downloaded a file from an unknown site which required a security scan.

Security is an end to end process. This means that the moment your computer boots up, security should be applied until the time your computer shuts down. People usually failed to stay secure simply because they don’t apply security from the very start. Agree?

So what’s your view? Do you still think that security has to be something technical?