VMWare on Vista

August 29, 2008 | Comment

Just got a new laptop running Windows Vista Business and while it hasn’t been as painful as I had expected (having 4gb of ram helps) I did spend all of Wednesday morning trying to resolve a problem with VMWare Server. Installation was fine but as soon as I tried to start an image the machine just died but there was obviously something going on as the hard disk light was working overtime.

A quick search (once I had regained control of my machine) showed that this is a known problem and is due to Windows trying to page out the … Read the rest

What Time is it?

August 22, 2008 | Comment

AppSwing have been using an online project management system FogBugz for a few months now and it’s very good. However, what makes it stand head-and-shoulders above the competition is not the functionality (which is superb and well executed) but the attitude towards support. I have emailed their help desk a few times and have always had a quick and helpful response but what got me this week was an email stating that the service would be down for maintenance. Nothing unusual in that but what WAS unusual was that they had noticed that I was in the UK and provided … Read the rest

Wordle

August 15, 2008 | 1 comment

Here’s a neat way of representing information in a very graphical way: Wordle. Using this service you can either choose to enter some text, perhaps a presentation or speech or direct it at the RSS feed of a website. That’s what the picture below shows – the feed for this site. Weight is given to the words that are used more frequently. So from this graphic you can see my obsessions coming to the fore: Google, Mobile, Interesting, Friend and Small!

Whether you use it as a business tool or just for a bit of fun it is slickly … Read the rest

Magic Bullet Get Video Coverage on BBC

August 14, 2008 | Comment

A friend of mine runs a small media production company, Magic Bullet, producing high-quality corporate videos. It was the Magic Bullet team that was responsible for the iPhone video produced for AppSwing.

It can be very difficult for small business to make themselves heard but occasionally you can manage to get your head above the parapet. Magic Bullet have been producing a series of videos for the University of Reading and the latest seems to have caught the imagination of the national media featuring on both the BBC and Telegraph websites.

It’s great coverage and interesting too. Check … Read the rest

Perfect travel speakers – the x-mini

August 13, 2008 | 1 comment

I was introduced to these speakers by a friend who, like me, has a keen interest in all things gadgety. I have tried a number of portable speakers in my time but most are either too big or the sound is too weak. The x-mini gets round both of these problems in a neat way.

The unit itself is tiny – certainly small enough to fit neatly in the palm of your hand and therefore in anyone’s travelling kit bag. The real neat bit though is how it gets more bass. By twisting the unit it opens out to reveal … Read the rest

Cuil Search

July 28, 2008 | Comment

A new search engine (do we need another one?) has opened for business today. Cuil (pronounced Cool) is brought to us by a couple of ex-Googleites. I thought that I would give it a spin. Cuil reckons that it indexes three times the pages of Google and ten times that of Windows Live Search so my hopes were high to find some new pages.

First impressions were good – it looked slick and had a nice clean interface – though not as clean as Google. The acid test though is on search ability. Initially I searched for “Neil Thompson… Read the rest

Intel Predicts Positive Future for Mobile Web

July 25, 2008 | Comment

A report from Intel today (via the BBC) predicts that mobile web is in for a bright future with 1.2 billion connected devices by 2012. This prediction was made at an event to highlight a range of Intel chips for web-enabled mobile devices.

Gadi SInger, head of Intel’s mobility group, made an interesting point that “The fact that people want to be on the internet all the time means they will be looking for the ability they have today say at their desk and to have that anytime and anywhere.”

What is significant about this statement is that at … Read the rest

Giving something back

July 25, 2008 | Comment

There’s an interesting post over at Web Worker Daily that asks the question “How do you give something back to those providing information on the web?” It’s a good question. Whenever I need information the web is the first place I turn whether it is for the parameters for an obscure function to who was in that movie and it very rarely lets me down. So how do I give back? I guess it is by adding to that pool of information either through this blog or, perhaps, more specific information on a topic such as the Williams F1 team… Read the rest

Project management – a beautiful thing!

July 18, 2008 | Comment

I was sent this today and thought that it deserved a wider audience as it is all so true…

It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It cannot be done in one month by impregnating nine women.
Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.
You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.
At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.
The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situatee.
A problem shared is

… Read the rest

Windows Virtualisation with Sun VirtualBox

July 4, 2008 | Comment

Virtualisation has become all the rage recently. Running multiple instances of a system on a single piece of hardware is a very compelling proposition as everyone try’s to get more out of their investments. While virtualisation is typically applied to server environments there is no reason why it cannot be used on a suitably specified desktop PC or laptop.

In the past I have tried out virtualisation using with Microsoft’s VirtualPC or VMWare’s offering but I wanted to give VirtualBox, principally because it is open source and I knew that it was available for Mac so if I move … Read the rest