When Software Attacks!

In the Mix

Well, it’s just after 3pm on day one of Mix:UK 07. I’m taking a break with a coffee so I thought I’d post. It’s mixed bag down here (sorry - no pun intended). The technology is fantastic - the stuff that can be achieved with WPF and Silverlight is excellent. I’m still a little uncertain that usability has been sacrificed on the sacrificial alter of bling, however. To be fair, that’s more telling about the rapid-development nature of conference demos, where the wow-factor is more important, but I think it’s a very, very significant issue which should not be allowed to get lost in the excitement.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Web site development: University of Bradford Part 1

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, August 27, 2007

Web development helpers: Redux

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!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 26, 2007

Web development little helpers

As web development gets more and more complex having the right tools to help you figure out what’s going on is essential. I thought I’d do a quick post on the ones I find most useful. In no particular order, then, here they are. Virtual PC This one is a godsend, because as we all know, running multiple versions of Internet Explorer is hard. VPC, now available as a free download from Microsoft, allows me to run the numerous variants of IE our clients require me to test against.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 25, 2007

SharePoint problems with access rights

I spent a while knocking my head against a problem with a SharePoint server farm that’s worth posting about. It’s also worth a big hats-off to our Technical Support Coordinator at Microsoft Partner Support who dredged up the article that finally pointed us in the right direction. The problem I’ll post later about our approach to SharePoint installations, but I’ll summarise thus: We create multiple user accounts to the SharePoint services - a db access account, an installation account etc etc.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Updating firmware on SPV M3100 (HTC TyTN)

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! The first part works OK - it connects to the device and interrogates it, but when it actually tries to connect and download the new firmware it fails.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, May 14, 2007

Analysing Active Directory

I think I’ve mentioned before how I’ve been updating our IT infrastructure. Company growth has meant a need for expanded services. Add to that new versions of SharePoint and Exchange, mix in a need to run virtual servers for development and you have a need for more tin. Over the past six months I’ve expanded our domain to keep pace with our growing needs. The number of physical servers we have has increased, with a few more virtual servers for specific roles that I prefer to keep separate but which don’t really merit their own box.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, April 15, 2007

What happened to the idealists?

Douglas Coupland’s Jpod has been doing the rounds in the office of late. I enjoyed MicroSerfs, so approached Jpod with excitement. Frankly, I’m disappointed. It’s not the writing - I ’ve enjoyed pretty much all of his books. It’s not that the books are similar in approach and style (they are) but rather the contrast in the lives of the characters. Overall, MicroSerfs was optimistic. The characters in the book were using their talent to make the world a better place.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, April 15, 2007

X2100 IPMI Redux - success!

In hindsight I should have thought of it, but even if I had, others got there first. You may remember my problems with IPMI on our X2100 servers from an earlier posting. Today I had cause to revisit the matter, as we’re having terrible issues with the Nvidia RAID on one of our servers. The lack of a Windows version of IPMItool is still a pain, but I am leagues closer to a usable solution now, thanks to Cygwin.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Vista Upgrade - attempts 4, success 0

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. I have tried this now on three separate machines and two different installed partitions on one of them. Two of the machines were Shuttle SN25G2 SFF boxes with Nforce 2 motherboards and the onboard nforce 2 (basically a geforce 2) video.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 19, 2007