It’s shades of Mark Twain channeling Benjamin Disraeli, who may or may not have said there are three types of lies, one of them being statistics. But perhaps that 58 percent or 33 percent or whatever figure will increase over time, and that will be a good thing.

The Harvard Crimson said over 3,000 students used Google Book Search, part of the Harvard-Google Project, in September. The project scans books and makes them available through Harvard’s online catalog.

As more works are fed to the scanning machines, the number of readers should increase. Anyone who has ever tried to locate a book in a library to study, only to find it has been checked out, should see why book scanning is a good thing.

Harvard, and the various universities engaged in Google’s book scanning, are the test beds for this. Their populations probably represent a part of the population that does continue reading books after high school and college.

Google has been fought on a couple of fronts with regards to book scanning. Someone with greater knowledge of publishing will have to explain to me why a scanned out-of-print book exposed to the public represents a dire threat to the free world; email me, Authors Guild.

I’m cynical enough to have some issues with some of the things Google does, but book scanning isn’t on the list. More people use the Internet now than ever, so maybe part of the time they spend online will involve encountering books through searches and other avenues.

Or maybe they’ll just keep using the Net for porn. At least the erotica book genre will receive more exposure.

Blogger reviews are the most meaningful to me-along with reader reviews posted to Amazon and B&N. But it’s particularly gratifying to get a good review from someone you already respect, even if you don’t know them.

That was the case today as I was reviewing my RSS subscriptions. In my “technology” folder is mip’s scan, which I’ve been reading pretty religiously for quite a while now. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that the blog’s author-Michael Ianna-Palarchio (Mip to his friends) had reviewed “Blogging for Business”-and liked it.

I particularily like how the book doesn’t get lost in the hype of blogging. There’s no “blog because it’s cool” aspect to this book. It sticks to an important first principle that I apply to all the IT work I do – let the business lead.

And to top it all off, Mip links to US and Canadian bookstores where the book is available. I knew I liked this guy!

Add to Digg | Yahoo! My Web

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

Shavlik has a product called NetChk Protect, which automates the management of critical security patches and spyware from one easy-to-use console.

Shavlik cites the following features of NetChk Protect, which is designed for the enterprise:

• Precisely manage spyware activity and patching on a large network from one easy-to-use intuitive console
• Scan the network for spyware and missing patches without requiring agents on each system
• Provide rich-targeting and system grouping by Active Directory organizational unit, domain name, IP addresses, IP ranges, and hostnames. Plus, if you already have Shavlik HFNetChkPro, you can leverage all your existing configurations to scan for spyware.
• Provide accurate, up-to-date spyware data and inform you of the impact of the particular spyware or other unwanted applications on your enterprise, classifying contaminations, so you can prioritize your remediation efforts to return infected systems to their previous state
• Assign administrative credentials to each system or group of systems, if necessary
• Scan now, schedule a scan for later, or indicate recurring scans to run at specified intervals
• View high-level summary reports and detailed reports of a specific machine or group of machines
• Customize reports to provide analysis of the spyware or patch threat by workstation, group, detection type, threat, and classification
• Automatically email spyware and patch detection and remediation reports to administrators, end-users, and executives

Shavlik offers a free evaluation version of NetChk Protect as well as a nice portfolio of other security products.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

However, while many people create indexes on their SQL Server tables, many people don’t maintain them properly to ensure queries run efficiently as possible. I’ll begin by giving a quick overview of how SQL Server 2000 stores data and how indexes improve performance. Then, I’ll spend quite a bit of time explaining why, when, and how to maintain indexes with DBCC SHOWCONTIG and DBCC INDEXDEFRAG to ensure queries run in the most efficient manner.

SQL Server 2000 stores data into what is known as a heap. A heap is a collection of data pages containing rows for a table. The data isn’t stored in any particular order and the data pages themselves aren’t in any sequential order. The data is just there with no real form or organization. When SQL Server accesses data in this form, it does a table scan. This means SQL Server starts reading at the beginning of the table and scans every page until it finds the data that meets the criteria of the query. If a table is very large, this could greatly decrease the performance of queries.

Indexes will hasten the retrieval of data. It is important to understand how data is used, the types of queries being performed and the frequency of the queries that are typically performed when planning to create indexes. An index is far more efficient when the query results return a low percentage of rows and the selectivity is high. High selectivity means a query is written so it returns the lowest number of rows possible. As a rule, indexes should be created on columns that are commonly searched; this includes primary and foreign keys. It follows that columns that contain few unique values should never be indexed; this will increase the number of rows returned in a query.

There are two types of indexes to consider when planning: Non-Clustered and Clustered Indexes.

A non-clustered index stores data comparable to the index of a text book. The index is created in a different location than the actual data. The structure creates an index with a pointer that points to the actual location of the data. Non-clustered indexes should be created on columns where the selectivity of query ranges from highly selective to unique. These indexes are useful when providing multiple ways to search data is desired.

A clustered index stores data similar to a phone directory where all people with the same last name are grouped together. SQL Server will quickly search a table with a clustered index while the index itself determines the sequence in which rows are stored in a table. Clustered indexes are useful for columns searched frequently for ranges of values, or are accessed in sorted order.

Each table can have only one clustered index, however up to 249 clustered indexes can be added per table. For more information on how Clustered and Non-Clustered indexes store data visit http://www.sql-server-performance.com/gv_index_data_structures.asp

While I could go on and on about how SQL Server 2000 stores and accesses data in a heap and in an Index architecture, I will move on to discuss maintaining indexes with DBCC SHOWCONTIG and DBCC INDEXDEFRAG.

Once indexes have been created, it is important to maintain indexes to ensure the best possible performance. If indexes are not maintained, over time the data will become fragmented. Fragmentation is the inefficient use of pages within an index*. There are a number of tools available that will help with optimizing indexes to ensure they are running well, however I will only discuss DBCC SHOWCONTIG and DBCC INDEXDEFRAG in this article.

The DBCC SHOWCONTIG command will provide fragmentation information on data and indexes within a specified table and it will also determine if the data and index pages are full. If a page is full, SQL Server must split the page to make room for new rows. This statement should be run on heavily modified tables, tables that contain imported data, or tables that seem to cause poor query performance. When the statement is executed, here is what will be returned:

Statistic Description

Avg. Page density (full) Average page density (as a percentage). This value takes into account row size, so it is a more accurate indication of how full your pages are. The higher the percentage, the better.

The DBCC INDEXDEFAG command will rebuild a specified index or all indexes for a specific table. This command also allows use of the fillfactor option which reduces the number of page splits per data or index page. Using the fillfactor option increases performance on insert and upstate statements. If a data page is full, SQL Server must split the page to make room for the new rows. The fillfactor allows specification of a percentage of space to leave available on the data pages for inserts and updates.

Let’s observe an example:

Running the query on a table called member:
DBCC SHOWCONTIG (member) WITH ALL_INDEXES

DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning 'member' table...
Table: 'member' (786101841); index ID: 2, database ID: 14
LEAF level scan performed.
- Pages Scanned................................: 192
- Extents Scanned..............................: 26
- Extent Switches..............................: 187
- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 7.4
- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 12.77% [24:188]
- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 48.96%
- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 96.15%
- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 6721.0
- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 16.96%
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.

DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning 'provider' table...
Table: 'provider' (850102069); index ID: 2, database ID: 14
LEAF level scan performed.
- Pages Scanned................................: 3
- Extents Scanned..............................: 1
- Extent Switches..............................: 0
- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 3.0
- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 100.00% [1:1]
- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 33.33%
- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 0.00%
- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 5596.0
- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 30.86%
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.
There are a few specific things to take note of and will help determine if index pages are full or if they are heavily fragmented.

The fullness of the index pages can be determined by reading the “Avg. Bytes free per page” and “Avg. Page density (full)” statistics. The “Avg. Bytes free per page” figure should be low and the “Avg. Page density (full)” figure should be high. You’ll notice that both tables likely have very full pages.

The fragmentation level of an index can be determined by comparing the values of “Extent Switches” and “Extents Scanned” and having a clear understanding “Logical Scan Fragmentation” and “Extent Scan Fragmentation” values. The “Extent Switches” should be almost equal to “Extents Scanned.” Based on the examples above, this is the way it should look. “Logical Scan Fragmentation” and “Extent Scan Fragmentation” values give a good indication of a table’s fragmentation level. These values should be as close to zero as possible (10% may be acceptable). The ‘member’ table is highly fragmented and the provider table is slightly fragmented based on the numbers above.

These issues can be corrected by dropping and recreating a clustered index with the FILLFACTOR option specified. Also, the DBCC INDEXDEFRAG command will compact an index, taking into account its FILLFACTOR, which will improve the statistics.

After running the queries below:
DBCC DBREINDEX (member, '', 80)
DBCC DBREINDEX (provider, '', 80)

DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning 'provider' table...
Table: 'provider' (850102069); index ID: 2, database ID: 14
LEAF level scan performed.
- Pages Scanned................................: 2
- Extents Scanned..............................: 2
- Extent Switches..............................: 1
- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 1.0
- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 50.00% [1:2]
- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 0.00%
- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 0.00%
- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 4346.0
- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 46.31%
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.

As a result of running the DBCC SHOWCONTIG and DBCC INDEXDEFRAG commands, we were able to diagnose and greatly reduce fragmentation on the ‘member’ and ‘provider’ tables. The member table is almost perfect and the ‘provider’ table shows great improvement. This will result in an extraordinary performance increase on queries that are run against these tables.

*For more information on fragmentation, visit this link: www.sql-server-performance.com/

Desire Harris is a support specialist with ORCS Web – a company that provides managed hosting services for clients who develop and deploy their applications on Microsoft Windows platforms.

Joseph O’Sullivan, Software engineer and Adam M. Smith, Business product manager of the Google Print team wrote this in the Google blog:

“Some of us admit to a misspent youth lurking in libraries, devouring books on anything from “the survival of the fittest” or the explorations of Lewis and Clark to the essence of philosophy or Victorian detective yarns. This immersion has made us certain of one thing: there are a million and one books are out there waiting to be found (tens of millions, by some counts) – but library collections just aren’t that easy to search.

We launched the first part of Google Print in October to make the world of books more discoverable. The thing is, most books in the world are out of print. By working with libraries as well as publishers, we’ll have access to millions of books, including many unique volumes that haven’t been read in years. Soon a new generation will be able to discover them too.”

Rich Ord is the CEO of iEntry, Inc. which publishes over 200 websites and email newsletters.

Rich also publishes his blog WebProBlog which focuses on internet business and marketing trends.

However, Yahoo has been receiving criticisms because of what some consider a glaring oversight, or worse, a type of favoritism. The problem stems from when you perform a spyware scan with Anti-Spy, Adware programs are not being scanned for, unless you indicate the toolbar to do so. This is done by selecting a check box that says search for Adware.

Because of this, some have accused Yahoo of playing favorites with adware companies. Speculation, according to eweek.com, centers around a financial agreement between Yahoo and Claria, makers of the infamous Gator eWallet.

Claria’s creation, once installed on a users computer, gathers information such as surfing habits, and returns this information to Claria. Using their GAIN ad service, Claria then begins serving pop-up ads, as well as other types of advertising, to the user based on the information collected.

This service is viewed as Adware, and is normally not a desirable feature users want on their computer. Because of programs such as these, many different programs have been created to assist in the removal of such services.

As I mentioned before, Yahoo is the first search toolbar to include this type of feature. However, because it doesn’t remove Adware by default, people are speculating that the relationship Yahoo has with Adware companies like Claria is affecting the functionality of Anti-Spy.

According to Claria’s S-1 filing with the SEC, Overture, Yahoo’s ad service, contributed 31% worth of Claria’s revenue through paid listings.

Yahoo spokesperson Stephanie Ichinose commented on the fact that Anti-Spy incorporated PestPatrol’s spyware removal technology, and that she wasn’t certain if you had to prompt PestPatrol to remove Adware like you do with Yahoo’s Anti-Spy. “What this is all about is providing the users with visibility into their computer and to help them manage it as they see appropriate,” she said.

In eweek.com, Ichinose declined to comment about Yahoo’s relationship with Claria, and whether or not it will change or be terminated.

If you are a user of Yahoo’s new toolbar, and you would like to Anti-Spy to search and remove Adware, you must designate it to do so by selecting the check box. Perhaps when the Anti-Spy toolbar comes out of beta testing, this issue will be resolved.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

My OS is Win 98 SE and had a perfectly running HP scanner 3530c untill I updated to IE6 from 5.5. Every time I try to scan something now an IE box opens (not the browser itself) and tells me I have an error on the script of this page and do I want to continue running it. No mater what I choose to do it scews up file://C:Program FilesHewlett-PackardDigital Imagingbbfedirectordirector.htm /line 261 char 4, which then adds more lines and characters as I try to get it to dissapear.

I went to the HP site and as per instructions uninstalled IE6 and service pack 1, uninstalled the scanner, reinstalled IE6 and serv pack 1 and reinstalled the scanner and still the darn thing wont scan. So now I have a perfectly good scanner that won’t work. My hard drive is partitioned. Should I reinstall Win 98SE or what please? To complicate matters I live in Greece and the scanner directions are all in Greek , my Greek is pretty good but….You’d think they’d add English just in case but no

thank you
Harry

Try this: In your Control Panel, double-click the Internet Options icon, click the Advanced tab, and place a CHECK next to DISABLE SCRIPT DEBUGGING.

Hope this helps,
Carey

Carey Holzman owns and operates Discount Computer Repair (602-527-9723) in Phoenix, Arizona, where he offers repairs, upgrades, custom built PCs and network wiring at highly competitive pricing. His networking tips have appeared in David Strom’s book, The Home Networking Survival Guide (McGraw/Hill), and his own book on PC maintenance is currently available at local book stores, amazon.com or directly through him. His free informative web site can be found at http://www.careyholzman.com. Donate $30 to help maintain his site and you’ll get a free autographed copy of his book. Carey can be reached directly at carey@careyholzman.com. Ask Carey a Question! Free Windows help is just a click away.