If you have read any of my previous posts about spam comment entries you will have felt my fustration coming through that a) this happens and b) that there seemed to be little to do about it. However, thanks to a post from Steve Conlan, I seem to have found a simple way of blocking out the spammers.

As the spam comments are made by a machine and not a human the answer is to check for signs of human life. Normally this would be done via entering some sort of distorted word held in an image that cannot be … Read the rest

There was an article in this month’s PC Magazine that detailed a number of applications that you could run from a USB key. Some of these were fairly run of the mill but some were also pretty impressive and included: Firefox, Windows CE and, most amazingly of all, OpenOffice. I have tested all these out and can say that they do indeed work. What is most impressive is that these are fully functional applications and given the number of dlls and registry settings that most programs seem to need this is quite an achievement.

So this led me onto … Read the rest

You know when you think you have had a great idea and then you find that you were probably very wrong? Well after my last post Comments please? I am beginning to regret turning the bloody things on.

Since the comments page went live I have received three comments for each of the last two entries. I was really pleased when I saw the comment count and wondered what people could be finding to say about my words. In short the answer is nothing – it is a new (to me) form of on-line spam where on-line gambling services flood … Read the rest

I recently had the opportunity to purchase a large amount (for our business at any rate) of kit, including six laptops and five servers. Having bought Dell kit previously and had no problems we elected to do so again. It was a tourturous experience that I would not wish upon anyone, friend and foe alike.

Once the kit had finally arrived I set about building it to our specification. We had elected to take the laptops with Windows XP PRO pre-installed. What I hadn’t bargained for was all the other things that were also installed. For example FOUR ISPs on … Read the rest

For those that don’t have the time or attention span to read a manual a quick reference card can be a short cut to gaining the information you need in the shortest possible amount of time. Unfortunately these are not always available and so you are left having to pick through the manual to find just the information you want. However, there is another way and once again it is provided by the power of Google.

By entering the following into a Google search literally hundreds of quick reference cards are returned in PDF format for easy printing.

"quick reference … Read the rest

Working in the software industry for the last fifteen years I have seen a lot of code written by other developers, some good, some bad. Inevitably you can’t always get the code to do what you want it to do and frustrations spill over and the temptation is to put an acerbic note in the comments. Usually the end user does not get to see these comments as they are compiled into something that is only machine, not human, readable.

So I was very pleased to see this (very tame) comment remaining in a source file (MyMagazines.htt) from the Zinio … Read the rest

I discovered another great thing about Greymatter today – it is BlackBerry compatible. This entry is being posted via my BlackBerry 7230 and will be submitted over GPRS.

This is a great feature and means that I will be able to post no matter where I am – like the States in two weeks time!… Read the rest

There have been a number of occasions when I have been out and about and would have found it useful to be able to text a landline phone. Well with a new service from BT, BTText it seems that you can.

The service allows you to both send and receive SMS messages from a home phone. I have only tried the receiving part but it does seem to work. If you have a suitably enabled phone you can read the message on the text display, if not you get to hear the message read by some alien from planet Mars. … Read the rest

After 12 months of negotiations the company I work for, AppSwing, have pulled off something of a coup by receiving investment from Citrix – not bad for a company of seven employees! Read the full press release below:

AppSwing Limited Receives Strategic Investment from Citrix Systems

AppSwing Limited, a leading developer of mobility middleware solutions for extending applications to wireless handheld devices, announced today it has received a strategic investment from Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in access infrastructure solutions. Privately-held AppSwing will use the funding to further develop and market its flagship AppServer™ solution, which … Read the rest

How’s this for a neat gadget and a free one at that.

A colleague of mine recently returned from the Citrix Solutions Summit in Orlando and presented me with this 1.3 mega pixel camera that all the delegates were given. It’s about the size of a cassette tape (if you remember such things!) and is pretty featured packed for a give away at any rate.

As well as being 1.3 mega pixels it has an internal memory of 16mb, a built in flash and a rechargable battery which gets it’s charge when you connect the camera to your pc via … Read the rest