It’s all about thin clients on a grand scale

We definitely seem to be heading back around the thin-thick cycle except this time it’s going to be on a massive scale … and includes the consumer market. The technology has evolved so much recently that we now have all the same benefits and far less of the negatives of “thin computing” from 15 years [...]

Software As A Service / The Cloud!

I’ve resisted this for a long time, preferring the traditional self-hosted, outright purchase model and have been a very reluctant convert! But over the last few months I’ve been starting to use more applications that operate on a SAAS basis.

Evernote
Remember The Milk
SourceAnywhere Hosted
Net Intelligence
Google Apps

Why?

These applications are VERY good at what they do – they [...]

Blackberry 4.5 OS

In an attempt to sort a different problem I downloaded the new Blackberry Desktop Manager last night and it prompted me to upgrade the Core Blackberry software to 4.5. Never one to hold back on the latest of anything I fired it on. Not sure how I missed this upgrade last year but there are [...]

Reinstall of Vista – what software goes back on?

It’s nearly Christmas! And the phones were quiet this afternoon (for once!). And my PC at work has been driving me around the bend for the last 3 months, so it was time for drastic action …..
After a fresh reinstall of Vista SP1 64bit – here are the tools that are pretty much essential to [...]

The New Facebook. Can 2,131,123+ people be completely wrong?

YES! When they think that facebook should bring back the old style site! In my opinion FB have  played a UI blinder and just sealed their continued success – at least for the next year – which is about as much as anyone could foresee in this industry.
In one fell swoop they have :-

Relegated [...]

Stuck in the airport at BFS!

This :-
UK flights hit by computer glitch
British airports were forced to delay and cancel flights
Flights to and from UK airports have been cancelled and delayed because of a computer problem at the main air traffic control centre at Swanwick.
Air traffic controllers said the computer glitch had now been fixed, but it is unclear when delays [...]

Chrome mania

A lot has been written this week about Google’s recent foray into the browser market. Been using Chrome for a week or so now and have to admit that I like it a lot. I’ve always been an IE user and over the last couple of years I’ve tried Firefox, Safari, Opera – I tried [...]

Launchy … get quick access to your programs

Here’s another neat little application I use all the time. Launchy runs in the background and provides a way to load applications quickly from the keyboard.
Hit Alt-Space and type the first few keystrokes of the application you want to launch – then Enter and away you go. If your Start Menu looks anything like mine [...]

Better note taking

One of my worst habits is writing scrappy notes on sheets of blank paper – these get filed on the desk,  in my drawers, cabinets, on the floor, at home, in the car ….. I also have dozens of Windows Notepad documents created when I’m out and about with Todo lists, customer requests, useful information [...]

SQL Replication Fun!

We use Microsoft SQL Server as the back end for our Retail Management & EPOS software. On most systems we use merge replication configured with pull subscriptions. Recently we’ve had a few instances of the replication mysteriously hanging on a merge – the first sign is usually the client calling to say their system is [...]