Dan Rooke’s Blog

I was reading the latest issue (852) of Auto Express over the weekend and came accross the article entitled ‘Your Car’s Secret History Exposed’. The article covers how the history of a vehicle can be discovered by using a car history check service. The Auto Express team visited an HPI, one of many such services, call centre and listened in on a number of calls.

One particular conversation came from the seller of a vehicle who wanted to find out what information would be given to potential buyers of his vehicle by HPI. His car had been stolen a year ago but was recovered by the Police. The owner proceded to repair the damage and thought all was well once again. That’s not what HPI thought.The history check that was performed showed that the car was stillrecorded as stolen. The owner disputed this and consequently his storywas checked out with his insurer and the information held by HPI ontheir database was updated. If the owner hadn’t have made this phonecall and paid the fee to receive the history of his vehicle then anypotential buyers would have been deterred from the purchase.

I feel that this raises questions about how data stored is kept relevant or up to date. Section 14 of the Data Protection Act 1998states that a data subject has the right to request the respective datacontroller to rectify the data. In the case mentioned this is whathappened.

I believe that it should be the right of the data subject to expectdata to be kept accurate wherever this process is feasably possible. Inthis case, the data subject would be the vehicle, due to theinformation being about vehicle. Obviously this would have thepotential to be huge and affect so many companies and indeviduals, nodoubt why this hasn’t been adopted. Such an ammendment to the DataProtection Act would simply be unviable. I ask the question though,what use is all this stored data if it is inaccurate?

Eventually it will reach a stage that if any of your personal detailschange, you will have to notify all organisations who keep hold thisinformation on file - this has the potential to be hundreds, if notthousands, of organisations. If there is not already a need, there willbe a need for some simplification of this process otherwise ourdatabases will be rendered useless with old, inaccurate data.

I have been experimenting with backing up and synchronising data between my local server and my web server (Delphi) at Site5.

I have setup MySQL Administrator to backup my databases to my server on a daily basis. This is a fully automated backup of all databases.

I have also setup SQLyog to synchronise selected databases between my server and Delphi. This allows me to post this blog entry locally and for it to be replicated accross to the MySQL database on Delphi automatically, and vice versa.

The next step is fully automate the backing up of files between the two servers.

I have just upgraded my blogging software to pLog 1.0 from version 0.3.2. It is available now from pLogworld.net.It appears to be more polished offering some new features that I’m sure will be handy. Let’s hope I can keep the spam under control!!

As you can see, I am currently using one of the new bundled templates. I will get round to changing this shortly, not back to my previous design though. I think it’s about time for a change, I shall see what I can come up with!

EDIT: I have come up with this template as a start. Let me know your thoughts!