Until very recently I had a mobile phone provided by the company that I worked for. When I left I reverted back to a personal phone I had with a t-mobile u-fix deal. Unfortunately this is a pay-as-you-go/contract hybrid and quickly proved to be costly as I was toping up every few days, No problem I thought, I will move on to a contract.

A call to t-mobile quickly showed that was going to be more difficult than I expected. If I wanted to move onto a contract from PAYG I would need to extend my existing u-fix contract by … Read the rest

I am pleased to be able to announce that I have now setup my own business, Ammat Consulting, offering strategic consultancy and tactical support to software companies of all sizes. This business makes use of the over 20 years I have in both software development and running of software based businesses.

The website was launched this week which gives further details of the services on offer. You can visit the site here http://www.ammatconsulting.com.

I have already secured a number of clients but still have some time available. If you think that I may be able to help you … Read the rest

Looking for technical information? The the web is a great place to start but there is just so much out there, where do you begin? Also sometimes it is nice to have an offline copy to refer to.

Today I stumbled upon a great site that has collected together a whole load of technical resources to download, somewhat imaginatively title The Quick Reference Site it has a collection of both quick reference guides and ebooks. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have been update in quite a while but there is still plenty there to get your teeth into.

If you … Read the rest

This must be one of my favourite sites at the moment – what the font. It allows you to upload an image that contains some text. The site then uses character recognition to match your text against a database of fonts and tells you which are the closest matches. It works well, particularly when the characters in the images are of a reasonable size.

I originally thought that that this would only be of limited use on an infrequent basis but I have found myself using it regularly. I have never made a note of the fonts used in … Read the rest

The BBC has been reporting from SXSW this week and today was reporting on how email use is being replaced with status posts to the like of Facebook. While I agree with the premise of the argument I don’t agree with the reasons given.

This shift in communications is, I believe, more of a generational thing.

My grandparents were of an age where they wrote letters and if the message was urgent or time bound then they would send a telegram. We have, for example, a telegram sent from my Grandfather to my Grandmother during the second world war but … Read the rest

Sometimes working from home shows things that I would have been unlikely to have seen had I been in an office – principally because I wouldn’t have been stood staring out of the window! Anyway, I was, and I saw this car driving down the road. Realising the significance of it (and that we live on a cul-du-sac so it had to come past me again) I rushed to get my camera, getting this picture as it drove away.

What you see here is a car equipped with a series of cameras mounted on the roof for the (probable) purpose … Read the rest

So the web has turned twenty, happy birthday to it. That means it came to life in 1989 so I have known it for 60% of its life and I can safely say in that short time it has revolutionised my life. If you want to read more about the beginnings of the WWW ITPro has this article Photos: The web turns 20.

Also if you are wondering about the picture on the left it is, apparently, the computer that Tim Berners-Lee used at CERN.… Read the rest