General on When Software Attacks!

I wouldn’t be where I am today… How encouraging kids in computing is important

Sat, 31 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been mulling this blog post for a while. Those of you who know Black Marble will have seen that we all believe very strongly in encouraging young people to take up computing and put time into sharing our knowledge and expertise. I thought it was worth sharing how I got to where I am today, which would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of three key people who worked with technology. There’s a message in the story though, about how we need to help the next generation of computing professionals in the same way.

Avviso: A Content Publishing Framework for SharePoint 2010

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

words and pictures logo

Last week was really exciting for me and my colleagues here at Black Marble as the work we’ve been doing with a partner came to fruition. Words and Pictures are a communications agency based not far from us, and we’ve been working together on a great product that builds upon SharePoint 2010 to greatly improve content publishing.

Social Networking: The double-edged sword of maintaining an online presence

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Exploring the new frontier
#

I’m writing this post whilst watching my Windows Home Server slowly copy data onto an external drive. I mention that not because of its pertinence, but to indicate why I found myself having time to join Facebook.

New and coming Microsoft technologies you need to look at

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was the annual Black Marble Tech Update event, where we try to cover every product in the Microsoft arsenal in half a day, telling local businesses what’s coming and what deserves attention.

Remote working solutions (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the snow)

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We lost remarkably few days of productivity to the bad weather at Black Marble. That wasn’t because we were all intrepid, hardy types and all made it into the office. Far from it – some of us live in areas where they don’t grit very often and can’t make it to the main roads.

Berlin: Four storeys of Windows 7 goodness

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As you walk out of the U-bahn at Potzdamer Platz right now, you are faced with the most enormous advertisement you have ever seen. Well done HP and Windows 7 – subtle it most certainly is not!

Berlin: Legoland Experience

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’d love to say that I enjoyed the Legoland Experience in Berlin, located beneath the Sony Centre in Potzdamer Platz. I’d love to, but I can’t – I’ve been to a conference you know; none of this sightseeing malarky for me.

Places to eat in Berlin: Coa

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s becoming a tradition that every time I attend a conference or travel anywhere interesting I post at least a couple of places to eat. Perhaps ironically, none of the places I am about to post about serve cuisine that you could reasonable call German.

20 Jahre Mauerfall

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Monday night saw the official celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the historic events which saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and paved the way for German reunification.

Sadly, the night was cold and wet – the rain was falling in torrents as we made our way to Potsdamer Platz and walked towards the Brandenburg Gate. We managed to stand right next to one of the large screens on which proceedings were to be shown – next to the gate and near the dominoes which were to topple during the night.

Ich bin ein Berliner

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As you may know, TechE d 2009 EMEA is in Berlin this year. You may also know that this year is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m here in Berlin, which means that I’ll try to blog what’s going on at TechEd. However, this post is all about the really cool idea Berlin has for the celebrations!

Joining in the background noise: I am now on Twitter

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

One of the reasons I enjoy conferences like @media is that I can be persuaded to change my mind on things. After a persuasive argument from Nick I’ve decided to alter my stance on twitter and give it a go for a while.

Things to do in Seattle: Gameworks

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As you probably guess, Richard and myself were in Seattle for a short conference last week. The evening entertainment on one night was a trip to Gameworks. If you like playing video games with your mates, going head-to-head at things like Sega Rally, then you’ll have a good time in Gameworks.

Places to eat in Seattle: Etta’s Seafood

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

On our arrival in Seattle, Richard and I had a great meal in Etta’s Seafood, which is not far along the road from Pike’s Market, heading out with the bay on your left. The food was excellent – fantastic chowder and a burger cooked just to your taste. A warning though – if you’re a wee slip of a lad like I am you may find the portions daunting. It was a friendly, charming place and great welcome to the city.

Places to eat in Seattle: Marcella’s Cookery

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight we ate in a place we’d seen recommended by Sara Ford in her blog: Marcella’s Cookery. A fantastic little New Orleans-style eatery run by the eponymous (and very friendly) Marcella and her husband, Anthony. The food was fabulous, well cooked and happily discussed by the chef himself. Between us we tried a number of dishes and all were excellent. Anthony (the chef) told us that he moved to Seattle after Hurricane Katrina and I think it’s Seattle’s gain – we had a great time and I can wholeheartedly recommend the place.

Things to do in Seattle: Baseball

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Seattle 2009 008

We had a great night tonight. Our visit to Seattle coincided with three home games for the Mariners, and I went to my first baseball game tonight. Not only was it a fantastic match, going right down to the last pitch, but one of the batters obviously realised I was a baseball newbie and kindly hit me a ball as keepsake!

Places to eat in Seattle: Lowell’s

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

slide1

Richard’s an old hand in Seattle, so he suggested we ate breakfast at Lowell’s down at the Pike Place Market. I’m really glad he did – the eggs benedict were fantastic. We ate great food with a fantastic view of the bay. If you’re ever in Seattle I can wholeheartedly recommend that you try Lowell’s while you’re here.

UK Hotels take note – this how to do coffee in my room!

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in Seattle this week (just as a big heatwave has rolled in). As I type this I’m looking out from my room at the Westin over a great view of the bay. In the corner I hear my coffee brewing. None of your little kettles and sachets of instant coffee here. Look what I got:

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 1

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s 7:25 AM. Andy and I are hoping to make a whistle-stop trip to the Cathedral before making it to the conference early enough to get good seats for the keynote.

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 0 - Greetings from Barcelona

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ola! Andy and I are now in sunny Espana. Only it’s not sunny. Oh well… However, true to form we started our trip, having registered at the conference centre, by eating hot dogs in a german fast food joint in a Spanish shopping centre! If you’re passing, Kurz & Gut does pretty good food.

Barcelona-bound

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Andy and I are travelling to Barcelona this weekend for TechEd EMEA IT. I’m really looking forward to some of the sessions on Hyper-V, SharePoint and Forefront.If you’re going to be there, feel free to drop us a line and say hi.

Vista on Dell Mini 9: Using junctions to move files off the SSD

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Flush with my success earlier in getting apps installed on the SD card now mounted as ‘c:\SD Program Files’ I installed a few things. I then hit a snag.

When you install apps using an MSI, the installation files get cached by Windows Installer. Steadily, c:\windows\installer gets bigger and bigger, so whilst my apps were no longer taking up space, the install files were (and some of those are quite large).

Vista on the Dell Mini 9: Installing applications on an SD card

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m still trying new things with the Mini 9. I now have an image file that I can restore to the Mini which has my base install after running sysprep. The problem I have is storage space – the SSD isn’t quite big enough.

Getting Vista on the Dell Mini 9

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Our second Mini 9 arrived in the office today. This one is for Andy and myself to use whilst out of the office. Richard has successfully upgraded his to XP Professional, so we had to try to push the bar out a little further – we’re running Vista Business.

Vista on the Dell Mini 9: Redux

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been chipping away at this for a while now today, and I’ve learned a few things on the way:

When Vista says it suggests installing the battery drivers for the system, don’t. The zip file it suggested I install broke power management.
Patch the system fully as an admin user before logging in as a restricted user. It will save you hours of time.
Sysinternals Diskmon doesn’t work with Vista - you need to run it as admin, and that certainly isn’t an option for my restricted users.
Vista when hibernating just shows a black screen. That’s not very helpful the first time you try it, on a silent machine with no disk activity lights at all.
think Vista takes longer to hibernate and come back from hibernation than XP, although coming back from sleep is much quicker than it’s older sibling.

Overall, I’m still happy. I have Vista, Office 2007 and Live Writer and 3.5Gb of disk space free. With no serious hacking the Dell runs at around 50% memory usage witrh a browser and live writer running. I can live with that. Battery life appears OK. It’s 10:30 and I’ve been using the Dell since 8pm, thrashing the disk (as much as there is one) and the wi-fi, and I’m at 38% battery. That puts me on track for about four hours or so and I can live with that.

First thoughts on the Acer Aspire One

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You can’t say that things never change. I nipped out to Tesco last night for a few bits of shopping – you know, some beer, spices for cooking, etc – and came back with an Acer Aspire One. As you do…

Dell Mini 9: A Day In The Life

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Colour me impressed. I managed well over four hours’ battery life today and found the Mini 9 a joy to use. I have encountered a snag, however, and it wasn’t one that I expected.

First thoughts on the Dell Mini 9

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m down in London tomorrow, and rather than lug my laptop on the train I’ve borrowed Richard’s shiny new Mini 9.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with it. I’m still not sure about the keyboard, even after a couple of hours typing away – the keys are small and some of them are smaller still, which makes typing an interesting experience. However, I’m sure I would get used to it with time. The thing is, a netbook is not aimed at being your everyday machine, so does a quirky keyboard become a barrier to use if that use is intermittent?

Browsers are like buses

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You wait around for ages and then two come along, all at once! No sooner have I downloaded IE8 beta 2 than Google announce Chrome!

I’ve been using IE8 for a few days and I’m quite impressed. I’ve just downloaded Chrome and I have to say, it’s a darn good browser. The feature I most wanted from any tab-based browser and one I’ve mentioned before in the context of IE is present in Chrome - tabs you can drag between windows.

Touch Diamond Battery Life

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post about the Diamond I said I would let you know what the battery life is. I therefore carefully refrained from giving it any charge over the weekend, even when connected to my PC.

Useful .Net Search and Replace tool

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I need to update something like 300 web.config files today, with the same change in each. I turned to my old friend Google for his recommendations and up popped a magnificent free tool from Nodesoft.

CITP

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Received in an email today from the BCS:

I am delighted to inform you that your application for Chartered IT Professional (CITP) status has been successful.

Comment Spam and Contacting Me

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You may have noticed that I have disabled comments on my old posts. You may also have noticed that I have now disabled the Contact Me function on my blog.

Congratulations Richard!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well done Richard, who has been given the accolade of Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Visual Studio Team System.

Blogging On The Move

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We try to dogfood here at Black Marble so I’m writing this on my HTC TYTN. How? With Richard’s new app

Hats off, lads

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Just seen the sad news of the passing of Arthur C. Clarke. The world was better for his having been in it, and will not be the same without him.

Taking time to enjoy the scenery

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You know, the thing about RSS is that it’s a bit like the advent of the motor car - you miss things. Just as driving around means you don’t get to pass the time of day with folk, or discover that tiny little deli you’d never notice from the road, RSS dehumanises the web.

The XPERIA X1 - A Windows Mobile device that I could really get excited over

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Before I joined Black Marble I had a succession of Sony Ericsson smartphones - the P800, P900 and finally a P910i. They were great - the size was good, the UI was good, the handwriting recognition was excellent (with a grafitti-style interface that meant I could really get a good turn of speed) and I could work most functions one handed with the fabulous Jog Dial. Please note that the jog dial was sadly emasculated with phones after the P910i when Sony Ericsson foolishly reduced it’s degrees of freedom to simply rolling back and forth and clicking.

Balancing customer needs against forward motion: IE8

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve watched the debate with interest but not posted anything until now. The news of Internet Explorer 8 keeping it’s new rendering engine to itself unless you tell it otherwise caused a strong outpouring of opinion around the web.

Spring cleaning

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You know, one of these days I’ll find the time to properly redesign this blog. In the meantime, the excellent Kid Congo theme from the latest version of Community Server will suffice, albeit with the alteration of colours to match our corporate blue.

Web site development: University of Bradford Part 1

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

One of the last projects I was involved in before I left the University of Bradford to join Black Marble was a new design for the external web site of the institution. I’d pretty much finished the construction of the page layouts and styles before I left, but it’s only now that the site is about to go live. I’ve threatened a few people with a series of posts on how the site is constructed and although I’m not there any more it seems topical.

Web development helpers: Redux

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After posting yesterday about useful tools for development I stumbled across another little gem of a utility. IE7Pro is much more of a usability-enhancing tool but it has a wonderfully handy tool nestling within - Save Current Tab As Image. If you need to do grabs of pages for documentation or presentations and the page is more than a single screen in length this will transform your life - no more cropping and stitching!

Updating firmware on SPV M3100 (HTC TyTN)

Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Still no Windows Mobile 6 update for my Orange SPV M3100, but they did release an update to WM5 recently.

Installing said update turned out to be slightly trickier than I expected. I don’t know if anybody else has experienced the same problem, but a word to the wise - don’t try the update on Windows Vista!

Vista Upgrade - attempts 4, success 0

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have yet to succeed in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Each time it runs through to the completing upgrade phase, gets about halfway through that bit whereupon I get stuck in a reboot cycle.

Windows Home Server - something for my father

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

On Saturday I got the email telling me that I’d been accepted onto the Home Server Beta 2. I’m excited about this product in a way that I haven’t been about new software solutions for a while.

General on When Software Attacks!

I wouldn’t be where I am today… How encouraging kids in computing is important

Avviso: A Content Publishing Framework for SharePoint 2010

Social Networking: The double-edged sword of maintaining an online presence

Exploring the new frontier #

New and coming Microsoft technologies you need to look at

Remote working solutions (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the snow)

Berlin: Four storeys of Windows 7 goodness

Berlin: Legoland Experience

Places to eat in Berlin: Coa

20 Jahre Mauerfall

Ich bin ein Berliner

Joining in the background noise: I am now on Twitter

Things to do in Seattle: Gameworks

Places to eat in Seattle: Etta’s Seafood

Places to eat in Seattle: Marcella’s Cookery

Things to do in Seattle: Baseball

Places to eat in Seattle: Lowell’s

UK Hotels take note – this how to do coffee in my room!

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 1

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 0 - Greetings from Barcelona

Barcelona-bound

Vista on Dell Mini 9: Using junctions to move files off the SSD

Vista on the Dell Mini 9: Installing applications on an SD card

Getting Vista on the Dell Mini 9

Vista on the Dell Mini 9: Redux

First thoughts on the Acer Aspire One

Dell Mini 9: A Day In The Life

First thoughts on the Dell Mini 9

Browsers are like buses

Touch Diamond Battery Life

Useful .Net Search and Replace tool

CITP

Comment Spam and Contacting Me

Congratulations Richard!

Blogging On The Move

Hats off, lads

Taking time to enjoy the scenery

The XPERIA X1 - A Windows Mobile device that I could really get excited over

Balancing customer needs against forward motion: IE8

Spring cleaning

Web site development: University of Bradford Part 1

Web development helpers: Redux

Updating firmware on SPV M3100 (HTC TyTN)

Vista Upgrade - attempts 4, success 0

Windows Home Server - something for my father

Exploring the new frontier
#