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Tales from the Terminal RoomJuly/August 1999 Issue No.1 |
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Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X July/August 1999 Issue No.1 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. Welcome to the first issue of Tales from the Terminal Room, a newsletter for anyone who uses electronic media, and particularly the Internet, for locating information. Tales from the Terminal Room (or TFTTR) will be a monthly newsletter, with the exception of the July and August issues which will be published as a single issue. Content will include reviews and comparisons of information sources; links that have been added to RBA's Business Sources on the Internet; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. Why "Tales from the Terminal Room"? About 15 years ago, I started to write a column for the AIOPI Newsletter. The intention was to provide a sort of "Agony Column" with hints and tips on using the new fangled technology - micro-computers - that were gradually being introduced into organisations. These expensive machines were not given out to all and sundry but placed in a special room - the Terminal Room - where people could pay homage. In fact, bowing down before them or kneeling in supplication was just about all one could do as getting anything remotely sensible or useful out of the wretched things was a nightmare. Even dedicated computer bods could be reduced to tears by these recalcitrant machines, so the definition of "Terminal Room" as given in The fairly concise New Scientist Magazine Dictionary, 23/30 December 1982 seemed particularly apt:
Thus the Agony Column was christened "Tales from the Terminal Room". I have continued to write about information technology's "little ways" and idiosyncrasies in various publications. Today the hardware combines with the Internet to entertain us with an infinite variety of glitches, meaningless error messages and downright cussedness and so it felt appropriate to resurrect the column as a newsletter in its own right. The technological element will still be omnipresent but there will also be reviews of information sources and Internet services. As with the original TFTTR, if you have a horror story or want to warn potential users of the shortcomings or total uselessness of a system, or if you have found a way of overcoming a problem, your contribution (anonymous if you prefer) will be warmly welcomed. Karen Blakeman In this issue:
UK Telephone Directories ComparedThe arrival of the official BT Online Phone Directory on 20th May this year was greeted with amazement and disbelief. After all, an official Web version of the UK residential directory had been "coming soon" for at least two years! Now that the dust has settled, it seemed a good time to compare the various Web based UK telephone directories, both residential and business. The services I tested were: BT UK Online Phone Directory (http://www.bt.com/phonenetuk/) My main test searches were: My neighbour's telephone number My own telephone numbers is a bit if cheat as one is ex-directory and the other is with a local cable company so I expected the directories to have problems with those. With the "Fired Earth" search, I was particularly interested in seeing if their Taplow showroom, which was opened about 18 months ago, was included in any of the results. This would give an indication of how comprehensive and up to date the directories are. BT UK Online Phone Directory (http://www.bt.com/phonenetuk/) This contains the addresses and telephone numbers of BT subscribers (provided that they are not ex-directory) and also the directories from most of the alternative telecommunications services. There has been mixed feedback on the latter: some cable subscribers (like myself) have found that their numbers are not listed, or that their details are a couple of years out of date. It seems that this is because some of the directories supplied by the alternative telco companies are not always up to date. For the first few days after its launch access to BT's new service was painfully slow, presumably because the whole world and his dog went online to try it out. Numerous problems were reported in the Usenet group uk.telecom: sometimes the database would give zero results when the searcher knew that there were entries matching the search criteria, or it would just seize up. Reliability and speed of access have improved but there are reports that the site still throws tantrums if accessed with some versions of browsers and that it crashes some set-ups. I find that via my 266 AMD portable (128 MB RAM) and with Netscape 4.5 the site regularly causes an "Illegal Operation" after about 5 or 6 searches. The site also occasionally does some very weird things with what one would expect to be straightforward searches. When you search for residential numbers, you must type in the surname of the person and a town or county. I had a problem with the location field when I checked the number of a friend who lives in North Yorkshire. I first of all simply typed in Yorkshire and was presented with the message "We do not recognise the area you have entered". I had to type in the full "North Yorkshire". It would have been better had the system attempted to offer me alternatives rather than leave me guessing as to the nature of the problem. The initials of the person you are looking for and the street address (or part of it) are optional. You then just click on the People button. The results are displayed 25 per screen and give the names and addresses of potential matches. To view the telephone number you have to click on the name. It had no trouble finding my neighbour's details but not my own which was as expected. However, a rather odd thing happened when I expanded the location for the search on myself from Reading to Berkshire. It came up with one entry with an address in Portsmouth. When I last looked, Portsmouth was in Hampshire but perhaps you know different?! To search for a business, you use the same screen but click on the Business button. You cannot search by business type e.g. plumber and you MUST type in a location. This is different from BT's original EYP (see below) where you can leave the location field blank for a search on the whole of the UK. The new directory found 9 entries for ICI in Runcorn, most of these being names of ICI subsidiaries but with identical addresses and telephone numbers. There were 32 entries for Dillons in London including Dillons bookstores, newsagents, chemists etc. and fax as well as telephone numbers. It found ASLIB in London with no difficulty and had Fired Earth's Taplow showroom. The results of a business search are displayed 25 per screen as for the People search but do include the telephone numbers on the same screen as the names and addresses. BT Electronic Yellow Pages (http://www.eyp.co.uk/) This covers businesses only. You can search by company name or business type, and location. The Location is optional but if you wish you can search by town, county or post code. A nice feature is that if you specify a town and get zero results, you are offered the option to expand the search to county level and then to the whole country. It is best to search for a business type in the singular e.g. plumber rather than plumbers because EYP will then present you with related options e.g. plumbers, plumbers merchants, bathroom fitters. If you are unsure of what to use as a business type there is a browsable A to Z of business classifications. EYP has always had problems with abbreviated names. The search for ICI came up with the ICI Weston Club. To find the main company address and telephone number I had to type in "Imperial Chemical Industries". It did find ASLIB in London, though. With "Dillons" and London it came up with two listings that were nothing to do with book shops. To find the book shops I had to use the asterisk as a wildcard - "Dillons*". This gave me 24 entries some of which were the book shop. For the plumbers search I found 28 entries. The Fired Earth search returned a total of 27, the most comprehensive listing of all the business directories, but did not include the Taplow showroom. The results are displayed with 20 entries per screen and with advertisers listed first. The other entries are then displayed alphabetically. The list starts at a random point within the alphabet so there is no advantage to be gained by having the business name AAAAAAA Aardvark and Son. You can jump to any letter of the alphabet by selecting a letter from the alphabet bar at the bottom of the screen. EYP now has links to maps showing the location of the business. The help file says that you can view a maximum of only 60 entries per search but I have found that this is no longer the case. ThomWeb (http://www.thomweb.co.uk/) This is a collection of all the local UK Thomson directories. When you connect to the site you will see that it is in fact now part of the Infospace service, which also provides the infamous 192 UK residential directory (see below). You can search by company name or business type and location, and like EYP the location is optional. You can search by town county or postcode. Also, like EYP, if you type in the business classification in the singular it will prompt you to choose from a list of related classifications. It can handle abbreviated company names so searching for ICI presented no problem (3 entries). For Dillons in London, I was prompted to select a more specific location from a list and chose Central London; it came up with 9 entries all of which were the book shop. The plumbers in Chester search came up with 79 entries - by far the largest number of all the directories I tried - but I did notice that some of them were not based in Chester itself. Results are displayed 20 per screen with "enhanced" listings or advertisers first. The rest are sorted alphabetically but you can jump to any letter of the alphabet by selecting a letter from the alphabet bar at the bottom of the screen. There are no maps and the site can be annoyingly slow at times. However, there does not appear to be a limit to the number of entries that you can display. Scoot (http://www.scoot.co.uk/) Scoot lets you search by business type and location or by company name and location. The default is business type and you have to click on a link in a graphic to the right of the screen to switch to searching on a company name. If you search on a company name you do not have to enter a location. For a business type, the location has to be a town or post code; you cannot do county wide searches. For searches by business type or classification based in London, you are prompted to specify a post code area or select from the list that is presented to you. It had no difficulties with ICI in Runcorn (5 entries) but could not find ASLIB under any guise. A search for Dillons in London came up with 8 entries which included a newsagents and a chemists. For plumbers in Chester, Scoot came up with 35 having first asked me to select a classification from three possible options and to confirm the location from a list that included Chester le Street, Chesterton and Chesterfield as well as my original Chester. There were 14 entries for Fired Earth but not the Taplow showroom. Results are displayed 20 per screen and sorted by distance from the location that was specified.(It is no longer possible to sort alphabetically by name.) Paid for expanded entries are surrounded by a box and their place in the listing is dependent on their distance from the location as are the standard entries. Scoot does sometimes get it wrong, though. I tried a search for plumbers in Birmingham and number two in the results list with a distance from Birmingham of 0 miles was a paid for link for a plumber that was based in West Yorkshire! Ask Alex (http://www.askalex.co.uk/) This is a business listing and one with which I have had a variety of problems in the past, the most irritating being that the number of results sometimes changes when a search is repeated. You can search by name, product or service, and location (town county or post code or leave blank for national search). Ask Alex has the same problems with some abbreviated company names as EYP, so a search on ICI gave zero results but searching on Imperial Chemical Industries came up with 3 entries. It coped with Dillons in London (28) but included a number of non-bookstore Dillons and failed to find ASLIB. The search on plumbers in Chester gave a reasonable list of 28. The Fired Earth search came up with 12 entries when I first tried it and did not include the Taplow showroom. However, when I ran my searches the next day to double check my results it came back with 22 entries that *did* include the Taplow address. It would appear, therefore, that it is not always totally reliable. Apart from the residential search in Bt's white pages, all the other directories gave identical results when the searches were rerun the next day. Results are displayed 10 per page with priority i.e. paid for, listings first. Sorting appears to be by relevance ranking but there is no information on how this is calculated. 192.com (http://www.192.com/) Until Bt's official web site was launched, i-CD's UK Infodisk was the only source of UK residential telephone numbers on the Web. There have been innumerable discussions on bulletin boards and Usenet newsgroups about the quality of the data: chunks of the country are missing and much of the information is five years or more out of date. The database producers have always been very vague about how they gather the data but it has been suggested that hard copy mailing lists and electoral rolls have been used. This would account for how the names and addresses of ex-directory numbers and of people who do not even have a phone were included in the database. These appear to have been removed now. Use this as a last resort and remember that the data may be out of date. ConclusionsResidential listingsIf you are looking for a person's home telephone number and address, then there is only one reasonably reliable source: the BT phone book at http://www.bt.com/phonenetuk/. Its main drawbacks are that you have to specify a town or county and it is a little temperamental. Business listings
RBA Business Sources on the Net(http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/) New linksStock Markets and Company Financials (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stocks.htm) Annual Report Gallery (http://www.reportgallery.com/) Provides an alphabetical index of approximately 1000 listed US company home pages and annual reports. There is an International page with links to CAROL (http://www.carol.co.uk/) for UK and European Annual Reports, Global Corporate Information Services (http://www.gcis.com/) for Japanese Reports, Korean Report Gallery (http://www.ucc.co.kr/) and AFS (http://www.afs.co.za/) for South African Reports. The Korean Report Gallery home page takes an age to download and it is totally graphics driven. If you decide to persevere, you will find that many of the Korean reports are not taken from the company Web site but consist of information supplied directly to UCC. Many of the reports are quite old and none are more recent than 1997. A check of the last update of the Report Gallery gave a date of 5 January 1999. The PDF Gallery is under construction. The Company Notices, which are supposed to be updated daily, are also out of date with the most recent being dated 29th December 1998 and the latest entry in the news releases section is 3rd March 1999. The AFS site has only five companies listed and most of the links give Error 404 messages. The whole site appears to be moribund(it was last updated on 14 June 1998). Public Register Annual Report Service (http://www.annualreportservice.com/)
Global Corporate Information Services (http://www.gcis.com/) These things are sent to try us!Printing Web pages: making the page fit your paperA problem that is on the increase and one that drives me mad is that some Web pages, when printed, are too wide to fit onto a standard piece of paper. The page looks fine on your screen but when you hit the print button the text that was on the right hand side of the screen vanishes into the margin. The most common causes of this are tables that have been set up with a fixed width that exceeds the width of your paper, and text that has been inserted as preformatted text. The SEC filings on the official EDGAR site are an example of the latter. Horizontal scroll bars at the bottom of your browser window are a warning sign but may not be apparent if you are viewing the page on a large screen. If you are using Netscape you can use the Print, Preview option to see whether or not the page will fit onto your paper. Otherwise it is a case of trial and error. There are several things that you can do to squeeze the Web page onto your paper.
URL of this page - http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/1999/july1999.shtml TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
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| This page was last updated on 14th August 1999 | 1999 |
