When Software Attacks!

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.
If you just want IE6, Microsoft have a handy downloadable pre-built VPC:
Download Virtual PC
Download the Internet Explorer Compatibility VPC Image

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. In this instance we were building a three server setup - db server, web server, index server. The accounts were created first, logged in as a domain admin. I also installed SharePoint as the domain admin, but didn’t run the config wizard.

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