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

This site is built using the content management system, Greymatter, of which I have written previously. The admin pages for Greymatter are great but for a novice offers little easy control over the look and feel of entries. This is where a very neat little control, HTMLArea comes in. This is a free control that gives the user a rich edit control allowing control over items such as fonts, colours, links and images making entering entries more like Word than Notepad. You can see the full range of functionality at the HTMLArea page.

So how do you include HTMLArea … Read the rest

As already stated elsewhere I am getting back into doing my family history fuelled by my wifes new years resolution. Even better I have now found a way of combining the search for my ancestors with my love for my mp3 player! Strange though it may seem but my iRiver iHp-140 is just the thing for capturing the past.

One of the first things that any family historian will tell you is that the best place to start your research is by speaking with your relatives who are still alive. They will have stories and information on your relatives that … Read the rest

Now here’s a great idea brilliantly executed – the Namco 5 in 1 Stick – all those games you used to play down the arcade now neatly contained in a small box with a joystick on the top. Plug it into your TV and you have access to great classic titles such as Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaxian, Rally-X, and Bosconian.

Proving how good the original games really were this is highly addictive fun with the Thompson family being pitted against each other to see who can get the top scores. I’m not normally a game player but even I have … Read the rest