Honey, I Shrunk The Internet
If any UK-based Internet users noticed that the Web was running a bit slow last Thursday, I apologize. Probably I was partly to blame. I managed to send an extremely large zip file on a four hundred...
View ArticleLiving in a Cage
Funny stuff, wireless. We take for granted that we can wander aimlessly about the office or home while maintaining a robust connection to the outside world, or just to the server down the hall. Let's...
View ArticleYour Giraffe Is Upside Down...
Reading a UK computer magazine last week, I came across the delightful phrase "like playing a recording of a swarm of hornets to a group of blindfolded mime artists". It conjures up a vivid mental...
View ArticleCum On Feel The Noize
Why is it that the U.S. manufacturing industry seems unable to make anything with an electric motor in it that works without generating enough noise to wake the dead (or, at least, the sleeping)? Its...
View ArticleIn Search Of An Up-to-Date Definition
Maybe we've just been lucky with car insurance. When somebody reversed into the side of my wife's parked car some weeks ago, our insurance company sorted it all out with one phone call, got the car...
View ArticleSock It to Me
I was rather concerned to discover this week how little I know about socks. I have a colleague who is a sock expert - even to the extent of knitting her own in a most startling range of textures,...
View ArticleImage-inary Complexity
Like most computer geeks, my needs are simple and few - a quad core box with a big disk, a decent connection to the 'Net, plus occasional injections of coffee and cold pizza. My daily bread-winning...
View ArticleLocation Dependent Narrative
Perhaps it's just anecdotal evidence, but it seems like you often hear about people who are afraid of the countryside. For those of us brought up amongst fields, trees, and wildlife, this seems an...
View ArticleWhat's In Your Sandwich?
One of the most amazing things about being in the US is the unending choice of stuff - everywhere. And that fact that everything seems to consist of all kinds of other things. Waiters in restaurants...
View ArticleWeather It's Musical?
If I told you that my wonderful wife bought me a Vantage Pro 2 for my birthday, you might be thinking I was now spending every afternoon outside polishing a gleaming new custom sports car, or happily...
View ArticleMaking a Use Case for Scenarios
Technical writers, like wot I am, tend to be relatively docile and unflappable creatures. It comes with the territory (and, often, with age). Especially when most of your life is spent trying to...
View ArticleDrowning in Vagueness, Maybe
Life was a lot more positive when my grandfather was alive. If he felt ill, he simply had to pop into the local pharmacy, explain his symptoms, and they would sell him a bottle of liquid or a box of...
View ArticleRecovering Old Memories
There's an ongoing discussion about how we, as a society, should be archiving our heritage to make it available to future generations; that is, if global warming, financial crises, and energy shortages...
View ArticleHow Broad Is Your Band?
I'm glad I'm not a doctor or a dentist. They say that, if you are, every conversation you have with people who know you starts with a description of the pains in their feet, or asking for advice on...
View ArticleAgile Government
Talking with a colleague the other day about how a pre-agreed plan can morph over time so that the final outcome bears almost no relation to the original specification, I tossed into the conversation...
View ArticleFiring Up The Imagination
Ever since we moved into this house some ten years ago, my wife has irregularly reminded me that she hates the rather cheap and nasty, imitation coal effect, fan driven, generates hardly any warmth,...
View ArticleIt Configures
Some weeks ago, I rambled on for a while about making a use case for scenarios. It came about through an experience working on a project where a specific set of features of the software were so complex...
View ArticleAnd The Winner Is...?
Oh how we Brits laughed when the people of the US couldn't seem to decide who was going to be their next president! With their hanging chads, threats of legal action, and people standing in queues for...
View ArticleThe Soundtrack for Our Lives
Watching a rock music documentary on TV the other day, I heard one of my favorite presenters, Mark Radcliffe, utter the wonderful phrase "Lead guitarists are people who create the soundtrack for our...
View ArticleOn Cloud Ten
Two thousand and ten is, they say, the year of the Cloud. Yes, I know they've been saying that for a few years, but it really does seem to be a technology that is heading skywards (ouch, sorry) this...
View Article"Trainspotting" ... the Photos
A holiday weekend, and it rained. What a surprise. Still, it meant I actually got round to fulfilling a promise from a few weeks ago about firing up the film scanner and digitalizing some of the better...
View ArticleHow to Avoid a Speeding Ticket
I was reading a story (a.k.a. urban myth) this week about an eminent quantum physicist who was stopped for speeding in his car. When told by the traffic cop that he was doing 63 miles per hour, he...
View ArticleArtist or Artisan?
Let's face it, those of us who work in the hi-tech world of computing tend to think of ourselves as being - well, not to put too fine a point on it - intellectual; even skilled artisans of our trade....
View ArticleMore Railway Stuff
One of my previous jobs involved travelling to a variety of locations selling things. Amongst those locations was the British Rail Engineering works (BREL, more familiarly known as just "The Plant...
View ArticleHow To Build A Website For Less Than Three Million Dollars
If you have a few minutes to spare, why not pay a visit to the UK Advisory Network website? How could you resist reading about how it is "promoting closer working between Government and the private...
View ArticleWhy Doesn't Stuff Go Bang Any More?
We had one of those disastrous spells here at chez Derbyshire a couple of weeks back. It started with trying to switch our mobile phone contracts from one supplier to another, and ended with what seems...
View ArticleMinimalism is Made in China
You'd think that going minimalist in terms of interior design would be easy. Just decide which three items you want to keep in each room, and throw the rest away. In fact, if you are unfortunate enough...
View ArticlePhotographic Forgetfulness
It's interesting (at least, I think so) how the issues we face here at p&p in creating useful and practical guidance are almost exactly mirrored in other industries and technologies. OK, so the...
View ArticleAre Geeks "Creative"?
A colleague pointed me at an interesting discussion the other day about whether geeks are actually "creative". It comes partly from a recent post by Ian Betteridge that rails against the claims that...
View ArticleCan I Plug My Guitar Into My DNS Server?
Well, perhaps last week I could have. It turns out that it was happily performing as an amplifier. And there was me thinking I understood this stuff. Another Decidedly Negative Scenario in terms of my...
View ArticleCause and Defect
As far as I know, nobody has yet been able to answer the long-standing question of what will happen if you spread butter on the back of a cat. Will it exhibit the buttered-toast effect, or will it...
View ArticleSaving the World, One Packet at a Time
According to the latest update bulletin from MessageLabs that lands in my inbox each month, around 90% of all emails passing over the Net are spam. And their global report says that around 120 billion...
View ArticleBattery Phishing?
If you're a Douglas Adams fan, you'll know all about the fabulously beautiful planet named Bethselamin. The ten billion tourists who visit it each year were causing so much erosion that they introduced...
View ArticlePsycho Babble
As last week's babble seemed for some unaccountable reason to wander towards a science fictional theme, I thought I might as well follow up this week with something from my favorite (well, one of my...
View ArticleTOC Tick
I'm sure my wife won't mind me publicizing the fact, but she is rubbish at packing stuff. When loading a car, instead of starting with the biggest items she starts with the nearest ones and then finds...
View ArticleIt's Cornwall, So It Must Be Thursday
Is it still a holiday when you never seem to stop travelling, you can't quite figure out what day it is, you're not really sure where you are, and you can't remember where you are supposed to be...
View ArticleReference for the Universe Class
I'm not quite sure why my blog seems to have got stuck in some science fiction oriented hysteresis loop at the moment, but I might as well take advantage of it after reading an article last week about...
View ArticleThe Only Place I Can Phone Is Home
OK, I might as well admit it - I'm a mobile technology dinosaur. My mobile phone is obviously of no use at all these days because the only thing you can do with it is make and receive phone calls. As I...
View ArticleMonuments To Our Brief Moment In Time?
I can't help wondering what people will actually make the effort to go and see in a hundred years time. What are we creating now in terms of engineering marvels or wondrous architecture that our...
View ArticleIn At The Depend
Which is the best way to prevent intrusion attacks on your server from the network? What is the largest size of application XAP file you can deploy to a Windows Phone 7 device? When should you cache...
View ArticleJoie de VB-er
Well I'd have to say I haven't had so much fun for ages. Playing with familiar stuff (and some less familiar stuff) has revived my joy of writing complicated algorithms and creating useful utilities....
View ArticleInvoking the Dark Side (using a Cassette Player)
I previously thought that the reason you used to see miles of cassette taped entwined in the bushes at the side of motorways was because the driver discovered that his or her Mother had accidently put...
View ArticleWhen Did the Web Get a Small "w"?
Here in England, the well-known and much loved actress Emma Thompson recently started a debate about the use by kids of slang terms that only serve to make them sound stupid. She cites things such as...
View ArticleGetting Knitted
So it's been an interesting couple of weeks. I've been enthralled by some ancient mechanical technology, discovered that I can no longer buy a very ordinary item of computing equipment, pondered on the...
View ArticleSo Far, So Near...
So here's the problem with the Internet. They say it's supposed to bring everyone closer together and make the world a smaller place. But actually, at least in a virtual sense, the opposite is...
View ArticleLet Them Eat Cheese
When you think about it, it's clear that software architects and developers should rule the world. Not that - in reality - they don't already. Let's face it, almost everything that goes on in the world...
View ArticleIn England's White and Pleasant Land
I received an invitation to attend a "highly recommended" course this week on how to maximize use of Office Communicator, Live Meeting, and the Office Conferencing System. Specially timed, no doubt, to...
View ArticleIt Was Twenty Years Ago Today (Not)...
So here a question: in how many consecutive years must something happen before it stops being a once-in-twenty-year event? I only ask because it would be nice if the people who pretend to run the...
View ArticleIt's Non-Denominational Gift Giving Season Again
Some while back, I was explaining why "USB" stands for "Unexpected System Behavior" (see Top 10 Tips for New or Nervous Computer Users). However, while roaming the web looking for something different...
View ArticleThe World Changed at 10:30 AM
While I can't say that I'm a fanatical weather watcher, I am interested in the way that the contributing factors change and provide the rudimentary basis for weather forecasting (at least in the short...
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