When the first earthquake hit on Sept 4th, I was in Christchurch doing some routine maintenance at a client’s head-office. Aside from a pretty scary near-miss involving a million-year-old chimney, it was a relatively minor event as far their IT went and they were back to work within a couple of weeks. In the February 22nd earthquake however, their office was totaled.

The costs to Christchurch in terms of lives lost or uprooted and frayed nerves has been given heaps of coverage since the quake. It’s been an enormously traumatic six months for our second-biggest city and in the business sector we’re hearing about business owners who have survived with lives and staff intact but with offices and IT systems un-reachable or even, completely destroyed.

Many of these businesses are rallying together – larger corporations are re-locating staff to other centres, while smaller guys are, in some cases, working off laptops at the CEO’s house. We’ve seen organizations like Melanie Morris’s Christchurch Business Recovery Centre open to help SMEs get back on their feet by providing services ranging from access to office equipment like stationary and computers, right through to boardrooms and a place to have your mail delivered.

One of the major problems facing many of these businesses though is data-retrieval or loss. This is a crippling problem that, for many, will spell the end of a business they’ve poured their heart and soul into.

The client I was visiting in September was saved this issue because a few months ago, they converted to a cloud hosted service for their email and data storage. For so many other businesses I’ve helped out over the past few weeks though, the picture is much more grim. Many of them were running off a physical server, stored in their building, which is now completely unreachable. All their project, job information, financial records, client contacts, staff records and business information are lost or, at best, only as up to date as their last back-up. In many cases, this means more than a month of data lost.

We’ve been helping out some of our IT mates down in Christchurch by restoring the most recent back-up of their clients’ data on virtual machines hosted in the cloud which, in most cases, means these businesses can get back up and running within a day. Being hosted in the cloud means that if something happens to the computer system they’re working on – an aftershock causes more damage or a laptop simply breaks down for some reason, their data is current and safe, with a number of back-ups stored around the country. Hopefully meaning one less thing for these frazzled business owners to worry about.

Until recently, Microsoft’s Small Business Server was really the only option for most growing businesses. Data costs were astronomical if you were using the cloud for everyday server storage. Now though, the cost of sending all that information back and forth to off-site servers is so low it often works out cheaper than installing an on-site server. One of the big benefits to this is that your data is being backed-up in real-time at a number of different server storage locations around the country. This means, even if something was to happen to your office, there are duplicate copies of your data, heavily encrypted and safely stored in units elsewhere in NZ.

We’re doing as much as we can to help these clients get back on their feet until their regular Christchurch based IT providers can take over again and then we’re going to be systematically making sure our own clients are protected if this sort of event happens again. What about you?

And Sexy Photo Gate, which is especially hilarious for not even bothering to hyphenate. Oh, Hong Kong, how I loves ya.

So, “Antennagate”. If you don’t already know – and of course you do, but I’m probably going to describe it in some entertaining manner – the iPhone 4 loses signal when you hold it the wrong way (which is to say, the way you’ve always held every mobile phone you’ve ever used). The problem is not insoluble, if you’ve got some duct tape handy, but due to the impending threat of lawsuits and of people not liking him, Steve Jobs has announced the inevitable: free cases for everyone.

What I like about the whole thing is that the problem somehow didn’t come up in testing, and in my cartoonish imagination, that’s because no one testing the iPhone 4 thought to actually use it as a phone. “How’s the testing going?” “Just tried out an app that gives me live updates of the salinity of Wil Wheaton’s sweat: works fine.”

Anyway, this is all going to blow over soon enough. If that’s the biggest complaint about the iPhone 4, it sounds pretty damned sweet.  And these scandals never last. Remember Toallagate? Yeah, me neither.

We shall conclude with a song.

You know those animations where a kid in a movie opens a book and the ink spread out and displays the page in a kind of spreading creeper of art? I want to see the Light Touch hovering over a book that is blank except for a few small points of reference for the computer, and have an interactive book that knows when you’ve turned pages.

That’s possible now. You know why? Because we’re living in the future.

Naturally, Engadget’s title image is of the optimal use of Flash – watching Homestar Runner cartoons.

Internet Explorer 9 will support the Canvas graphics technology and the video and audio tags specified as part of the still-developing HTML5 standard, said Ryan Gavin, senior director for Internet Explorer, at a media event in San Francisco. The company demonstrated the performance of the third platform preview as compared to other browsers, taking specific jabs at Firefox and Chrome as it made its demonstration.

As part of its bid to overhaul Internet Explorer–which is still the world’s leading Web browser but has been losing share and cachet–Microsoft has chosen a new strategy for rolling out code to developers and browser enthusiasts. It released the first “platform preview” of IE9 at the Mix conference in March, and has now released new versions every eight weeks, Gavin said.

So says CNet.

Particularly amusing is Microsoft speed-testing IE9 with a game that’s apparently parodying the Google Chrome speed tests mentioned on this blog some time ago.

Meanwhile, the iPad is also upsetting the usurpers of the common handheld book, with e-book reader readers catching on to the fact that they are increasingly obsolete.

But as the iPad release date draws nearer in New Zealand, I get a feeling that I haven’t had since swine flu (or was it bird flu?) For months, I’d mind my own business, occasionally hearing about the flu on the news, and basically ignored it. But then I realised that this is exactly what people do in zombie movies in the lead-up to the night when everyone turns into a zombie. These little hints that you ignore, until it’s too late and the world is never the same again.

Of course, most people consider world zombie domination to be a bad thing, and that’s not what I’m saying about iPads. What I’m saying is that I have this growing sensation that Apple’s redefining people’s experience of technology, dragging us (some kicking and screaming) into the 21st century.

Consider this little gem. Japanese scientists (yes, them again) are playing around with touchable holography.

Touchable holography. Apple’s pioneering interface philosophy. Velcro.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

So wait till your mum isn’t behind you before you open it.

I remember when CD-ROMs first came out and someone told me they could carry 500MB of data. It sounded insane to me – who could use that much data? Then the CD version of Monkey Island came out, and we all had a good laugh.

From the nation that brought us karaoke, Final Fantasy games and ninjas, a research team has worked out a cheap alternative to current DVD technology that could store 25 terabytes of data. That’s more than it sounds, so you might want to click here and put it in perspective. No one can dispute that we are now that much closer to storing Christopher Walken’s brain on DVD.

Actually, that’s not very new. That’s what lots of people do every day.

But what if that wasn’t actually Gmail? A clever new kind of phishing is out, called tabnabbing. Aza has the details. Looks like we’ll have to be more vigilant than ever about where we enter our passwords and usernames.