Rather than splashing out on MS Office, spending on other software packages and website memberships, what are the free alternatives? It might surprise you how much you can get for free (legally!).

This is a free alternative to Microsoft Office available on PC and Mac. It includes alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It is absolutely free, developed by a community of developers offering their time without charge. It’s compatible with MS Office, so if somebody sends you a document you won’t have a problem opening it.

Go to the OpenOffice website

Rather than make calls over the phone, Skype allows you to place calls to other Skype users for free, or to landlines and mobiles for a small charge.
Go to the Skype website

As well as being free, the beauty of Google Docs is that your documents are stored online, so they’re available wherever you can access the internet from.
Go to the Google Docs website

This is a collection of free textbooks that anyone can edit. It’s a wiki so expect similarities to Includes the World History Project.
Click here to go to WikiBooks

Includes literary analysis of many classic novels. The site is a bit confusing to navigate, but does have excellent content.
Go to Novelguide.com

Not a content provider in itself, but a useful starting point for searching with Google, Wikipedia, a dictionary as well as unit conversion tools and translation facilities.
Go to the Schoolr website

Useful website for finding the online degrees available in your country.
Go to the Study2U website

This is a great tool designed to help students organise their studies and take notes during school. It’s designed to make note-taking during lectures as easy as possible.
Go to the Notely website

Price comparison website for books. Bookfinder searches both new, used and rare. Boasts the capability to search 150 million books.
Go to bookfinder.com

No list on educational resources would be complete without this fantastic (yet contraversial) encyclopaedia.
Go to Wikipedia

A great idea for a site. Live Mocha is a social networking site where you can help others speak your native tongue, whilst at the same time learn another language from other users.
Go to the Live Mocha website

Algorithm

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī

We know that algorithm was originally a mathematical and linguistics term. It dates back to the 9th century AD and a mistake in interpreting Hindu to Latin – Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote a piece on calculations with Hindu numerals in 825 AD, and when it was translated to Latin in the twelfth century, the translator used “Algoritmi” as the authors name, so the title was (approximate English translation) “Algoritmi on the numbers of the Indians”. So essentially the title was misunderstood, and “algoritmi” eventually “algorithm”. Here’s Muhammad on the right. He was a very serious looking fella with the bags under his eyes

ASP

The MS language started off at Aspect Software Engineering. They’d completed dbWeb, which was a commercial failure. Although Microsoft stepped in and bought ASE as they were creating i-Basic (dbWeb’s successor). MS then renamed it to ASP.

Boot

Baron Münchhausen

Short for bootstrap, it literally comes from the term ‘to pull one up by one’s bootstraps’. That particular term has been traced back to The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe, who lived in Germany during the 18th century. He was a librarian, but considered a rogue by his biographer, so supposedly a librarian you could sit next to at a dinner party. The reference to bootstraps stems from a story where the Baron escapes a swamp by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. The Baron was a real person, known for telling tall tales about his adventures (other feats include riding a cannonball and visiting the moon). The psychological disease Munchausen Syndrome is named after him, in which sufferers are driven to pretend to have an illness when they really don’t.

Bug/Debug

Thomas Edison first used the word ‘bug’ in a letter to Theodore Puskas in 1878.

“It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition–and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing gives out and then that–”Bugs”–as such little faults and difficulties are called–show themselves”.

The word ‘debug’ was first used in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1945, and wasn’t used in computing until the mid-1950s.

C

C is so-named because its design was influenced by B, a language that died out in the ’90s. A relatively new language called D was influenced by C (as well as C++ and C#).

C++

Originally called ‘C with Classes’ (it was first developed as an extension for C). When it became a commercial language (in about 1983) it was renamed to C++, as “the name signifies the evolutionary nature of the changes from C”. The ++ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to C’s ‘++’ used to increment the value of a variable.

C#

Originally called Project Cool (C like Object Orientated Language), Microsoft wanted to keep the name, but changed their mind to name it C#. The ‘#’ is musically inspired, ‘C sharp’ being a semi-tone above C.

ColdFusion

Initially called Cold Fusion before becoming ColdFusion (one word instead of two), possibly for trademark reasons. The first version was created by JJ Allaire of Allaire Corp. and couldn’t do much more than access a database. Allaire Corporation were bought by Macromedia in 2001 who were in turn bought by Adobe a few years later.

CSS

Originally called CHSS (Cascading HTML Style Sheets), the ‘H’ was soon dropped as stylesheets could be used by other markup languages other than HTML.

EMACS

Based on the simple WYSIWYG editor called ‘E’ used in the Stanford AI lab in the early ’70s, EMACS stands for E with MACroS.

Erlang

Agner Krarup Erlang

Developed by Ericsson, You might think that Erlang is short for ‘Ericsson Language’, although it’s actually a reference to A. K. Erlang, a Danish engineer, mathematician and all-round bright guy. Although the guys at Ericsson admit that the double-meaning wasn’t a coincidence.

Flash

Originally called FutureSplash, it was created by a small company called FutureWave, a four-man company in San Diego who wanted to compete with Macromedia’s bloated ShockWave plugin. Having none of that nonsense Macromedia bought out FutureWave and went on to develop it into Flash.

Hypertext (as in HTTP and HTML)

Ted Nelson

Hyper is a greek word that means to overcome the traditional constraints of written text. Ted Nelson came up with the word, as well as hypermedia. He got a bit pissed when people started saying ‘interactive multimedia’ instead of hypermedia, not able to understand why anyone would want to use so many more syllables.

Java

Originally called Oak (Java’s creator, James Gosling had an oak tree outside his office window and didn’t really have much imagination). It was renamed to Green (guess he was still staring at the tree) before finally being renamed to Java from a list of random words.

JavaScript

Originally called Mocha, then renamed to LiveScript before settling on the current name of JavaScript. As you’ll probably know it has nothing to do with Java. Some believe its name was a marketing ploy by Netscape to ride the coattails of Sun’s Java, which was gaining some serious popularity at the time (around 1995).

JPEG

Developed by and named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group.

MPEG

Stands for Moving Picture Expert Group, who are an ISO Working Group. You can check out the official MPEG website here, although I have to warn you – it’s not pretty.

Perl

Originally it was called Pearl, after the Parable of the Pearl in the Gospel of Matthew. Although it was renamed when its creator, Larry Wall, realised a language called PEARL already existed.

PhotoShop

Thomas Knoll's 'Display'

Originally named ‘Display’ when it was a small project for the Macintosh Plus back at the University of Michigan in ‘87. A PhD student called Thomas Knoll was the developer behind the project. When his brother saw the potential in Display, they put six months aside to create ‘ImagePro’. They then changed their minds on the name again and renamed it PhotoShop when it was packaged along with a slide scanner.

PHP

Stood for ‘Personal Homepage’ in its inception in 1993, until version 3 in 1997 when it became known as a recursive initialism, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PuTTy

There’s no actual reason for the name, although TTy is the common Unix abbreviation for a terminal.

Python

Nothing to do with the snake, it’s actually named after Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There aren’t any similarities between Python and the BBC comedy, it just so happens that Guido van Rossum was reading the scripts from Monty Python when he was creating this language.

Ruby

In Ruby’s case the name was chosen before any code was written. In a choice between the names Ruby and Coral, Yukihiro Matsumoto opted for Ruby because it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues.

Spam

Another Monty Python reference. Some suggest it’s an acronym for ‘Shit Posing As Mail’ or ‘Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages’, although the accepted version is that the name is based on a Monty Python sketch about SPAM being the main ingredient in every dish offered in a cafe. Here’s that clip:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

The luncheon meat called SPAM is always spelt in uppercase. The makers of SPAM have never complained about the potential infringement on their trademark, as long as unsolicited emails are refered to as ’spam’ in lowercase only.

Wiki

A popular misconception is that wiki is an acronym for ‘What I Know Is’. Although I’ve since learnt that’s a backronym. It’s actually based on the Hawaiian word for ‘fast’.

XML

The eXtensible Markup Language could have been named MAGMA (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), MGML (Minimal Generalized Markup Language) or SLIM (Structured Language for Internet Markup). XML was designed by a W3C Working Group of eleven members who never actually met face-to-face.

2008: Quantum of Solace

Daniel Craig’s current James Bond outing with Olga Kurylenko. Discovered when she was 13, she began modelling before moving into films. Her last action movie was in Hitman, where she had a face tattoo and got it on with a bald bloke with guns.

2006: Casino Royale

Daniel Craig’s first outing in his tux with Eva Green. Another model-turned-actress, Eva was in Kingdom of Heaven (a Ridley Scott epic) before getting Casino Royale. After her Bond film she appeared in The Golden Compass and is soon to be seen in Franklyn playing a woman with multiple personalities.

2001: Die Another Day

Halle Berry sold the movie on her Ursula Andress beach scene re-enactment (here’s a comparison), although this was the last of the Bond franchise for Pierce Brosnan, who in spite of vying for another shot as the secret agent got dumped as part of the re-imagining of the series with Daniel Craig onboard instead. They were talking about a spin-off with Berry as Jinx. Thankfully the Hollywood bigwigs seem to have forgotten about that after seeing her as Catwoman.

1999: The World Is Not Enough

Denise Richards was the other Bond girl in this title, but I discount her on the grounds that she couldn’t act if her life depended on it, and hopefully some day it will. Sophie Marceau was the one true Bond girl here. She’s massive in France, with a movie out next year called Percussions where she stars opposite Christopher Lambert, who apparently still gets work also.

1997: Tomorrow Never Dies

Teri Hatcher makes an appearance as the Bond Girl ‘Paris Carver’ soon after her days as Lois Lane. In TND she plays a desperate wife married to a power hungry sociopath and seduced by Bond. Her career picked up again with Desperate Housewives. Michelle Yeoh of Crouching Tiger plays the other Bond Girl in this outing.

1995: Goldeneye

After a six year break, the franchise came back with Pierce Brosnan as Bond. Goldeneye was probably Brosnan’s best Bond movie. Izabella Scorupco didn’t really get the career break she was looking for, and like so many Bond Girls before her has faded into obscurity – only making a brief appearance on Alias and dragon movie Reign of Fire since her Bond days.

1989: Licence To Kill

Timothy Dalton’s last go in the tuxedo, and Carey Lowell as another Bond girl who really hasn’t done much of note since her flirtations with the Bond.

1987: The Living Daylights

Going for the bob-cut like its going out of fashion or something, Maryam d’Abo played the cello, not the sexiest of instruments – but with its case easily converted to a sled for a quick and daring escape down a snowy mountain, they’d have been screwed if she’d played the violin. Maryam still pops up every now and again in TV movies.

1985: A View To A Kill

Obviously things aren’t going so well for Tanya Roberts these days, reduced to wearing just a couple of old paisley ties she found in her granddad’s loft. She does look like the archetypical 80’s babe in her part as Stacy Sutton. Roger Moore’s last go at saying ‘Bond, James Bond’, before he lost his licence to kill. He was really old anyway (he was 58 at the time). She was most recently a regular as Donna’s mum/mom, Midge on That ’70s Show.

1983:  Octopussy

Fact: there will never be a Bond with a title as awesome as Octopussy. Maud Adams plays the title role of Octopussy herself, which must have been delightful for her given that her real name’s ‘Maud’. These days she does a bit of work in her homeland, Sweden. Her English-speaking work tends to be bit parts in various TV series and low-budget Indie movies. She’s the only Bond Girl to make a repeat on-screen appearance, since she also had a role in The Man With The Golden Gun.

1981: For Your Eyes Only

Melina Havelock was the name of Carole Bouquet’s character, with Roger Moore in full swing as the geriatric Bond. She’s French, and still keeps herself pretty busy in her home country in various French TV shows, movies and other things the rest of the world won’t ever see (other than Quebec, eh?).

1979: Moonraker

Lois Chiles has chosen to keep her haircut from when she played Dr Holly Goodhead, only 30 short years ago. Less consistant is her career, these days limited to guest appearances on TV shows.

1977: The Spy Who Loved Me

Where the list starts looking at the real wrinklies. Barbara Bach played Major Anya Amasova opposite Roger Moore. One of the better-reviewed Bond movies, this outing saw three Oscar nominations. She’s now married to Ringo Starr and hasn’t done any acting work since 1986.

1974: The Man With The Golden Gun

Roger Moore’s first movie playing Bond. Britt Ekland was stunning. She now looks like she’s permanently pressed her lips up against a car window. Her only listed work since 1992 was a small part in Lexx.

1973: Live And Let Die

Jane Seymour starred opposite Roger Moore as Solitaire. Despite the name, Jane doesn’t seem to prefer playing with herself – she’s now on her fourth marriage. She keeps busy with TV work and lives in the UK.

1971: Diamonds Are Forever

Diamonds are forever, but Lazemby definitely wasn’t. Sean Connery comes back for one final shot as Bond. Did you know he wore a wig in every Bond movie? Jill St. John has the honour of acting alongside the great Scotsman playing the great Englishman wearing the great wig. The last thing she did of note was Seinfield in 1997.

1969: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

George Lazemby appears as the only actor to play Bond just once in a movie (Bob Holness once played him in a radio play, and Barry Nelson played him in a TV adaptation of Casino Royale). Diana Rigg appears as the woman who Bond marries. The whole movie has a dark sense of doom about it. Still, Diana Rigg was pretty hot stuff back in her day – Emma Peel being her best known character, kicking ass through the late-sixties in The Avengers.

1967: You Only Live Twice

Japanese actress Akiko Wakabayashi was one of the first Asian Bond girls, and also a nightmare name for the guys doing the opening credits. Wakabayashi played Aki, which is the least imaginative Bond girl name I’ve come across. Akiko left acting after Japanese filmakers started cutting budgets when the economy started looking shaky, and she didn’t bother getting back into it after things were back on the up. In one interview with G-FAN Magazine she said she didn’t get back into acting because of injuries she sustained during the making of a movie (it’s not clear which movie this is, but apparently it’s not You Only Live Twice).

1965: Thunderball

Claudine Auger plays Domino opposite Sean Connery’s Bond. Her accent was too thick for English audiences so her voice was dubbed by the same woman who did the dubbing for Ursula Andress – Nikki Van der Zyl. Although she only played voices, it technically makes Van der Zyl the only actress beside Maud Adams to play a Bond girl more than once (thanks to Brandt for the correction here).

1964: Goldfinger

Honor Blackman is a bit of an English institution. I remember her when I was growing up playing the granny in ‘The Upper Hand‘, the British remake of the US series ‘Who’s The Boss?‘. She also preceded Diana Rigg in The Avengers. Still, in the world of Bond she’s remembered for playing Pussy Galore. She’s now in her 80s and still working on various TV shows in the UK.

1963: From Russia With Love

Daniela Bianchi was another actress to get dubbed because of her thick Italian accent (she had to speak her lines phonetically as she didn’t speak English). Daniela married into money a couple of years later and didn’t need to work ever again.

1962:  Dr No

The Bond movie to feature Ursula Andress, who’s scene where she walks onto the beach from the sea is the most well-renowned scene out of every Bond movie. As mentioned above, her voice was dubbed over because her English wasn’t clear enough. The rest of her performance is all Ursula. She still works occasionally (as in once every few years) and lives in Europe (possibly Switzerland or Rome) with her long-term partner, Lorenzo Rispoli.

Those concerns may not be as accurate as they may first appear. We haven’t seen the economy in such a downturn in nearly 30 years, so effectively this is the first time Internet industries have faced this situation (ignoring the dotcom bubble burting days, which arguably Internet businesses brought on by themselves).

Marketing budgets are famously the first budgets to get cut during a recession (in spite of many experts encouraging businesses to increase ad spending to take advantage of the decrease in competition). So when the chips are down, what will marketers do?

Direct marketing

In the late 70s up to 1980 direct marketing (junk mail, telemarketing, coupons) really started taking off. Companies loved direct marketing because they could see a highly accurate measurement of the ROI (Return On Investment). Traditional print, TV and radio increases awareness, but it’s anybody’s guess how that converts to sales. Direct marketing was cheap and the results could be tracked. When the turn of the 80s brought about an ugly state of affairs for the economy, money was pumped into direct marketing as the rather nervous suits making the decisions could see where the spending was going.

Direct mail has clear similarities to digital media: it’s relatively cheap and completely accountable.

More knowledgeable clients

I think everyone involved with digital media in the context of either advertising or web design has experienced clients who know nothing about the Internet and new media. That’s fair enough to a certain degree – it’s ‘new’ after all. Although if you consider 1996 to 98 the ‘breakthrough’ years for the Internet going mainstream, that’s 12 years marketers have had to come to grips with this new medium.

These days ignorance is not an option, and as a result I’m seeing clients increasing their understanding of the Internet. The team at work I’m on seem to be asked less and less to create brochure-ware websites and simple banner campaigns. Instead we’re seeing more clients ask for applications taking advantage of social networks and web services. The clients I work with now are not only getting to grips with the Internet, but they’re actively involved with the development of ideas for new work.

Consumer habits

When I was a kid, if I was spending time at home it would usually involve the TV. These days television takes second place to time spent online. Advertising will want to go where the consumer goes.

Customer engagement

Outside of what would seem like obvious benefits to digital campaigns, such as saving money and tracking ROI, the Internet allows brands to take part in dialogues with its consumers. What were once faceless corporations with no more than a PO Box and a logo can now create a forum for hosting conversations about its products, its industry or any other activity it chooses to be associated with. The Internet has brought brands forward so far that they now have a voice as well as an image.

On the other hand…

Of course, I may be way out. Some of my peers believe that a lot of our clients see digital as an addition to other core marketing activities. For example, a website may be an extension of a TVC. In my opinion that may have been true five years ago, but these days web content stands up by itself. Take a look at how the US presidential nominees ran their campaigns – making use of every social network they could to get their messages out – Facebook, Twitter, and blogs all playing a part.

I’m not the only one

It seems plenty of other bloggers and industry news sites agree (or would like to) that the recession could be good for digital. This article by Netimperetive outlines pretty much what I’ve said already. There’s also this excellent post by Shalabh Pandey about digital media not being phased by the recession. He’s come to the same conclusion as I, and his post benefits from some good references.

2009 – Digital’s golden year?

There’s no doubt that next year is going to be tough for a lot of industries. I wouldn’t want to be making cars right now. For digital we’ll probably start seeing some really innovative ideas coming about as brands move into this space with the moneybags that were destined for the mainstream media.

Knock on effect for dot-coms

Relying on advertising, the dot-coms that are probably feeling a bit glum may want to be a bit more upbeat. If you’re an Ebay or Yahoo! or other publicly listed company you may not have much reason to feel any better since these guys rely on sophisticated business models that go beyond relying on advertising revenue (Ebay bought Skype! Why?). Smaller dot-coms may be better off and end up really benefitting over the next year or two.

Jobs

It’s early days, but I haven’t heard of any digital agencies letting people go. It’s pure speculation, but I expect there will be an anxious period when marketers cut budgets severely and some jobs are lost as a result, but as the Marketing Managers, Account Managers and Planners get into thinking about the following quarter (we’re talking 2nd quarter 2009) they may embrace the potential of the web, leading to the prophesied ‘golden age’.

I use a budget web hosting company for a website that collects data that’s important to me. I don’t want to rely on the hosting company to maintain this by themselves, as I’ve been burnt this way before. I also don’t want to pay for a further hosting solution to look after my backups either.

The code below will get a sql dump of a MySQL database and email it to any address. The SQL will be the body of the email – we’re not going to try and attach it as a separate file or anything too clever.

mysqldump -h DB-SERVER -u DB-USERNAME –password=”DB-PASSWORD” DB-NAME | mail -s mysqlExport EMAIL-ADDRESS

I’ve installed this on two machines – one uses Plesk so installation was simply pasting in the command as a new automated (or scheduled) task. The other allowed me to create my own Crontabs, so I puttied into the web server and typed ‘crontab -e’ and added the new task to run every day.

In Gmail, after I was happy everything was working I set up a filter to delete the email from the server the minute it arrived. This way my database didn’t eat away at my mailbox size. Since mail is kept in my trash folder for 30 days, that’s 30 days of backups I can access whenever I need to.

Update 04/11/08
Thanks sxeraverx for pointing out that this is only suitable for smaller databases. I forgot to mention that – please only use this method on databases small enough so that creating the SQL dump file won’t be too big for your email application to accept.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX5OVu4OP8Q

At work it’s been a bad week for our hosting partner. We found out on Monday that they had been serving Webalizer on our server without telling us for a whole year. So that’s one year of confidential marketing reports freely available to anyone who stumbles on the URL (which was not hard to guess). After ignoring my first request (marked urgent) they replied with a snotty email telling me it stats are installed by default, but these days they don’t do that. Of course, I was overjoyed to hear that their new customers don’t suffer this embarrassing lapse in security.

No apology.

On Tuesday I chased a new account request with them that wasn’t done from the previous day. An equally unapologetic response.

On Wednesday we realised that after repeated requests to have somebody who has moved to another team in my company to be removed as a contact, it still wasn’t done. They told us to go through every individual domain registered with them and to change the contact name listed. We responded with a firm ‘hell no,’ as we’re the paying customer and will not spend hours going through our domains because of their inability to create an efficient management tool. They responded back with what was effectively flipping us the bird, saying they’re not willing to make the changes.

Today they told me that the Senior Developer at Host wasn’t an authorised contact onour account. I sent them email proof that I requested Werner has the same authorisation as I do back in January. Their response was to tell me that we’ve got two accounts, and Werner’s only authorised on one. No apology.

I understand how it can be hard to say sorry. When something goes wrong, putting a ’sorry’ in an email takes guts. Although when you don’t do it, it makes you look cowardly and a little pathetic. We don’t doubt they’re good at what they do, and an apology wouldn’t change that view but actually help us in that we’d know they understood something went wrong and will make sure it doesn’t happen again.

‘Sorry’ for the rant. See?

Google has a monopoly that has not shifted in spite of the money Microsoft and others have pumped into creating their own rival search engines. Cuil came from nowhere. It has some innovative ideas such as being black and displaying results in a number of columns across the page. It also implements suggestive text (something that Google offers as Google Suggest, but this is not a default feature on it’s main search page).

For a moment ignoring the accuracy of Cuil’s results, the features that make it different haven’t exactly been heralded as ground-breaking. There was a ‘black’ Google around some time last year, which was an environmentally-aware site that argued in displaying a while screen, your monitor used more electricity: so a black screen uses less power, thus saving the planet’s resources given the number of people who would usually display the white Google pages. People soon realised this was a false argument, and ended up forgetting about the whole thing.

I really don’t like the results in columns.  It’s not how I look at information. I can see that by doing this, Cuil can display more results on the screen without the user having to scroll, but when I read listings, whether it be in a search engine results page or the classified ads in a newspaper I will read top-down. Cuil wants me to read along the page and then down. This makes information harder to see and is more work for the eyes.

Cuil is also missing the nice features Google has. If I search for ‘Time now in London’ on Google it will tell me immediately. The same as if I were to type ‘Weather in Sydney’ or any one of an array of searches Google regognises and answers without me having to leave the results page.

Although the most important part of the search engine is the accuracy of the results. Cuil seems to provide pretty accurate results on some occasions but has some spectacular failures. Most notably Cnet’s Buzz Out Loud Exec. Editor, Molly Wood searched for herself on Cuil to find that the photo attached to her biography in the results is of a completely unrelated woman who is a good thirty years her senior.

If I were to stop using Google today and force myself to use an alternative, Cuil would not be that alternative.