Microsoft Office for iPad

March 30, 2014 | Comment

Now here’s a funny thing. I have deleted my iWork apps from my iPad and replaced then with their Microsoft Office equivalents. More than that I am also considering an Office 365 subscription just so that I can edit Office docs on the go. Why on earth would I do that?

Quite simply because Office is the defacto standard for work documents and while there is a real convenience to Google Docs (the real-time collaboration is unbeatable) nothing renders an Office document better than Office and that includes iWork.

While I have dabbled with iWork on my Mac I regularly … Read the rest

Ignorance of Security isn’t Acceptable in 2014

March 13, 2014 | Comment

I noticed the other day that on one of my accounts for a company I have done business with in the past (lets call them “Marketing File” as that is what they are called) was using what I considered to be a weak password. When I went to change it I found that I couldn’t do it through the web interface but had to call their support department. At this point I could hear the sound of faint alarm bells in the back of my head.

When I called the number and explained that I wanted to change my password … Read the rest

A Life in Computers

March 11, 2014 | 1 comment

A trip to The National Museum of Computing at the weekend was a real trip down memory lane for me. You can read about our visit to Bletchley Park at a later date but I wanted to highlight some of the more significant computers that have featured in my life that were on show there. The dates are pretty loose as my memory is not what it once was!

Teletype (c. 1976)

I have written previously about how I encountered my first “computer” at secondary school. In fact this wasn’t a computer at all but basically a printer with a … Read the rest

Happy 1st Birthday Pebble

March 2, 2014 | Comment

So I’ve now had my Pebble smart watch just over a year so I thought that it would be a good time to reflect on the aims and whether they have been met.

For those that don’t know the Pebble is the darling of the crowd funding site Kickstarter, the first and to my knowledge still the only project to have raised over $10M. This was significant because it was only aiming to raise $10,000 and showed  what a huge demand there was for smart wearables.

I, along with thousands of others, pledged my support and settled down for … Read the rest

Sneaky LinkedIn

February 21, 2014 | Comment

So what’s the difference between the two images above? Well at first glance they would seem to be the same. Both invite the individual to connect with you on LinkedIn, right? Well almost but there is a very subtle difference that if you miss it you could end up spamming people who are not already on LinkedIn.

At some point in the past I must have let my guard slip and allowed LinkedIn to suck up all my contacts from my address book and since then it has been keen that I connect with everyone. Of course, not everyone is … Read the rest

What we did Before StackOverflow

February 18, 2014 | Comment

So StackOverflow the question and answer site for programmers went down yesterday and if what you read is to be believed all coding stopped. Of course that wasn’t the case but it did make me stop and think about what it was like before the internet.

As I have stated before I have been coding a very long time. Professionally since 1988 but I have been programming in one form or another since I was 11, i.e. long before either StackOverflow or the Internet was around. Just how did we cope back then?

While they aren’t too popular now, for … Read the rest

4G Arrives in Reading (sort of)

February 14, 2014 | Comment

20140214-085900.jpgI noticed this morning that my iPad was now showing a 4G notifier in the header rather than the usual 3G.

Three, my network provider, have been very good saying that they wouldn’t charge any more for this unlike other operators. Today I found out why – it doesn’t work, at least not in Reading where I am.Switching to 3G I immediately got a lovely fast signal whereas on 4G nothing.

I am hoping that this is a temporary thing and will quickly improve when more cells are rolled out. Here’s to super fast mobile access.… Read the rest

Accessing Amazon RDS Instance from Remote phpMyAdmin

February 3, 2014 | 7 comments

imagesOne of the great services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack is Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). This is a properly managed database server that you can run alongside your existing application server instances allowing the load to be spread.

This all works well but management can be a little tedious especially if you have been used to managing your existing MySQL server through phpMyAdmin. However, do not despair as it is possible to manage RDS from phpMyAdmin running on a remote server and this post shows you how.

This article assumes that you already have both RDS and … Read the rest