If you need to quickly relocate, or re-order, a paragraph within a document you might typically highlight the paragraph and either drag it or use edit, cut and edit, paste to move it around.

Alternatively, just ensure the editing pointer is somewhere within the paragraph then press the SHIFT and ALT keys together – whilst SHIFT and ALT are pressed simply use the cursor keys to move the current paragraph up or down a paragraph.

“For Windows 7, SP1 includes only minor updates, among which are previous updates that are already delivered through Windows Update” – Windows 7 Team Blog.

Early indications are that Windows 7 SP1 may make an appearance at the end of 2010 or early 2011 (and be delivered via Microsoft Updates [5], and whilst the official line for the first service pack (SP1) of Windows 7 indicates that it will include only minor updates and a roll-up of updates previously delivered through Microsoft Update, [5], it is somewhat likely that new features may be made available to tempt us to upgrade to the first service pack. This is especially indicative as many people may be waiting for the first service pack before they upgrade to Windows 7 in the first place.

But what might these new features include?

• First off, there could well be speed enhancements to the platform particularly to take into account advances in technology [2].
• The addition of RemoteFX into Remote Desktop [4] – a set of graphics virtualisation enhancements that work with Windows 2008 R2.
• Performance enhancements to BitLocker and Drive Encryption [6]
• Additional social media integration – this has already made it’s way into Microsoft Office tools but is it likely
• Internet Explorer 9 particularly as Internet Explorer 9 Beta is speculated to arrived mid to end of 2010 [7].
• Enhancements to virtualisation through the implementation of Dynamic Memory [9] memory management technology.
• Support for USB 3.0 possibly?

An early beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is currently available [8] although this is subject to change prior to its release.

These are only speculation of course and remember the official line is minor updates only – but official lines can change [3]!

Windows 7 SP1 References

[1] Windows Server Division WebLog,
Announcing Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1

[2] Softpedia,
Windows 7 SP1 to Feature Performance Improvements

[3] Windows 7 News & Tips,
Windows 7 SP1 to Feature Performance Improvements

[4] Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog,
Explaining Microsoft RemoteFX

[5] Windows 7 Team Blog,
Talking About Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

[6] Tech ARP,
ED#115 : Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Roadmap

[7] Softpedia,
Internet Explorer 9 Beta Next – New IE9 Builds Every 8 Weeks

[8] TechNet Evaluation Center,
Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta

[9] Windows Server 2008 R2,
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Beta and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Beta

A patch, and fix, has since been released for the platform by the developers and users are recommended to patch the particular version as soon as possible.The affected platform version was 3.8.6 which was made available on 13th July 2010 and the fix was made available on 21st July 2010.

vBulletin is a popular platform for operating online discussion forums and has been in the community for over ten years. Developed for use with PHP and popular open source database application MySQL the application is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

For more information visit the vBulletin article Security Patch Release 3.8.6 PL1.

Video has historically been a broadcast medium, but imagine watching a video and being able to click on something of interests and get more information.

A new technology, “LinkTo”, announced from How To TV, the producers of brand-funded instructional videos, enables a video creator to link objects, via “hot spots”, featured on their online video to specified web pages – these could provide background information, purchasing details, opt-in forms, or other information depending on what you need.

The service is currently available directly from the LinkTo.tv website and also to users of Brightcove and Ooyala. Current adopters of the technology have included Harrods, Jaeger, npower, and Dell.

Russell Goldsmith, co-founder of How To TV, said “Ooyala serves over 500 customers, including 250 global media and enterprise customers. We think this is an exciting opportunity for these brands to take their existing video assets and create more engaging and actionable activities through our LinkTo technology."

Adding interactive hot spots is quite straightforward which adds to it’s appeal. The first step is to upload a video in a supported format (FLV, MPEG, AVI, MOV, WMV, MP4) and up to 500MB in size. Next, you add a preview image (although this can be set later), then hot spots are added by playing the video, pausing at the point where a hot spot is required, and selecting “Create Hotspot”. Once a hot spot is created, a time line is generated and the hot spot can move resized, moved, and tested. Finally, you simply need to associate the hot spot with a landing page but selecting “New Page”.

Once your interactive video is created you can obtain information from an analytics panel including information such as the number of times the video player has loaded, the number of views, click rate, and engagement rate (click rate measured as a percentage of views).

The potential this offers for online video is huge as it allows video creators to not only engage with their audience, but also add a further layer of depth to the experience, whilst also enabling the possibility of click-through purchases.

For further information visit the LinkTo.tv website.

As of 22nd July Facebook own statistcs press page is reporting more than 400 million users but only 50% log on to Facebook in any given day.

This is particularly interesting as the site claims to have increased its membership by around 100 million members in the last six months alone. Compare this with MySpace which has around 65 million users (as reported by the BBC) or nearly 70 million in the US (as reported on MySpace press room).

It is a curious figure as I suspect a number of people have multiple accounts, or unused accounts, on the Facebook service, for a number of different reasons, even though managing multiple accounts would constitute a violation of Facebook terms of service:

• To separate groups of friends
• To keep business interests away from social interests
• To reflect different social interests
• Forgotten other account details, trial accounts, or one-off memberships
• For marketing or promotional reasons
• Business based membership rather than personal membership
• Fake memberships for illicit purposes
• Accounts that are no longer used and have not been removed

I guess it depends on whether you consider a member as being an account that exists on the system or a unique individual? Presently, it is far too easy to create an account as all that is really needed is a valid email address and how difficult are they to get?

The extensibility of Facebook is one of it’s key features but one of the features that is sorely missing from social networking sites, but would make a huge difference, is a verified user feature – a safety and security module which clearly and positively identifies members as being who they say they are.

When you open a previously saved document you just need to press SHIFT and F5 to place the editing cursor where it was when you last saved the document – so if you need to pop out of the office for a few minutes you can close your document safely in the knowledge that a quick combination key press can let you carry on where you left off.

You can also use it when editing an open document as it remembers the last few editing points – so repeatedly pressing Shift and F5 cycles through the remembered places in your document.

fflap.com has an interesting approach, built using open source tools, to helping you make more profits, and sell faster, from your eBay sales by utilising social networks (currently Twitter and Facebook) as a marketing tool – or as they say “make the social net work”.

To get fflapping you simply need to sign up to the service, select a suitable subscription package (there is a free option which currently allows you up to 3 daily fflaps), though you might want to take a look at the Professional subscription which increases your fflaps up to 50 and adds in a number of additional features including reporting, tracking, and scheduling.

fflap.com has also made it to the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch too – in the form of ifflap, a social networking tool for eBay, for which it tells us it can “harness the power of social networks to increase trading profitability by as much as 32% and sell items up to 60% faster”.

fflap.com founder, Jonathan Yates, said: “eBay businesses require innovative new tools to enable them to sell their way out of a difficult economy. The ifflap release continues our passion to develop eCommerce applications for use by individuals and businesses with new and exciting technologies such as the iPad”.

To learn how fflap can help you visit fflap.com.

Slacker Radio Announces Addition of ABC News in Personal Radio Service

Slacker Personal Radio, the personalised radio station, allows you to create your own radio station to your own tastes – with the ability to mix artists and over 120 genre stations from rock to comedy. With your radio station you can rate songs, artists, and program your listening as you refine your interests.

Slacker, Inc. announced today that ABC News is to be added to the Slacker Personal Radio service which will provide listeners with up to date news from one of America’s most trusted sources.

"Slacker is the first to offer listeners access to such a wide range of customizable audio content – from millions of songs across custom and expertly crafted music stations, to comedy and now ABC News," said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker. "Our listeners have been excited about the prospect of accessing news in our service and we are pleased to be offering them premium content from one of the most respectable brands in a truly innovative way."

Slacker Personal Radio, currently only available in the United States, can operate direct from the web or from an array of devices including BlackBerry smartphone, iPhone, iPod touch, Android-powered smartphone, iPod touch, Slacker-enabled SONY TV or Blu-ray player or any of the hundreds of products where Slacker is available. Let’s hope it comes to these shores pretty soon!

Check out Slacker Personal Radio.

• Flow export which enables third party reporting
• Virtualisation technology to allow hosting of virtual partitions
• HTTPS (SSL) acceleration technology
• Enhancements to high availability capabilities

With our ever increasing demands on data bandwidth – the requirement for effective optimisation solutions becomes ever more important. There are three key factors to effective traffic management: Visibility, Control, and Optimisation:

• Visibility: The ability to inspect network activitiy and drill down to a deep level
• Control: The ability to control network traffic and effectively manage resources
• Optimisation: To learn from visibility and implement appropriate control measures to enhance throughput and effectiveness

In addition to the enhancements to the operating systems Exinda are also launching new hardware including the “10060”, a next generation x60 WAN optimisation controller offering up to 20 Gbps WAN optimisation for data centers and the “4061”, a 250 Mbps optimisation controller for branch offices.

The Exinda 10060 sounds particularly interesting as Exinda tell us “The Exinda 10060 enables organizations moving from private line MPLS services to commercial internet WAN services as a primary backbone, the WAN performance management required to deliver data across the Internet reliably”.

For more information visit Exinda.

When you launch your web browser and type in a particular web address your computer sends a query to a local DNS server which then asks other DNS servers and returns what it believes to be the matching internet address in number format. We say “what it believes” as there are many internet addresses in use which require a vast number of domain name servers – from top level servers (which manage the last part of the web address such as .com and .org) to domain level servers and local DNS servers that private businesses may use. All of these DNS servers need to work together to keep on top of the regularly changing pattern of domain names to numbered addresses and by introducing a distributed mechanism the management of these systems becomes a little simpler but synchronisation becomes much more complicated – and this is where problems may creep in.

It is possible to intercept some DNS requests and modify them, and also for some computers to simply pretend to be valid DNS servers when they are really giving out false information. This means you could type a domain name into your web browser but you may end up on a completely different website.

The purpose of DNSSEC is to make this particular part of the internet, the request and transmission of addresses to numbers, a little more secure by adding new fields to messages involved in DNS communications – and these messages will be digitally signed for an added level of security. Fortunately, a hardware appliance is available to handle the automatic signing of DNS messages which should make integrating the system into an existing infrastructure somewhat easier.

The core of the work involved in turning DNSSEC into a reality is contained within three primary RFC (Request For Comments) documents, these are RFC 4033, RFC 4034, and RFC 4035. If you have been keeping up with my adventures in reading the entire set of RFC documents (more than five thousands) you’ll know that I am currently up to RFC 1000 – so there is a little way to go before we hit DNSSEC! That said the DNS protocol itself is initially defined in RFC 1035 – which itself goes back as far as RFC 882 (Domain Names – Concepts and Facilities).

For more information visit the DNSSEC Securing the Domain Name System website.