When Software Attacks!

First thoughts on the Acer Aspire One

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… To be fair, I have been looking at them closely, and Tesco are by far the cheapest place to get one. I picked up the 1Gb RAM, 120Gb HDD Linux model for about two hundred and fifty nicker, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Dell Mini 9: A Day In The Life

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. You see, I’m now sitting on the 21:30 train from London Kings Cross to Wakefield after having been in the big smoke for a day of meetings. I got onto an empty train and picked a seat with a table – I want to get some work done on the documents required after my meeting and I thought the space would be nice.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, September 30, 2008

First thoughts on the Dell Mini 9

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, September 29, 2008

Browsers are like buses

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Touch Diamond Battery Life

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. That means that it received no power from 5.30pm on Friday until it died (which it did, eventually). After that time, exchange push carried on notifying me of email immediately on arrival until 8pm, after which it downshifted to checking every hour and continued like that for the rest of the weekend.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 14, 2008

Useful .Net Search and Replace tool

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. Why magnificent? It’s advanced mode allows you to specify start and end tags and update everything in between. That’s fantastic for dealing with big chunks of web.config files! Better yet, give it a file mask and a path and it will run through the entire folder tree if you like.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, July 5, 2008

CITP

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

Comment Spam and Contacting Me

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. Why? Comment spam, and more recently, a huge influx of spam via the contact form. I will try to find a solution via some kind of community server plugin. In the meantime, posting comments will be open for 14 days after I make a post and will then automatically switch off.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

Congratulations Richard!

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

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

Catching Up

I’ve been far too busy lately and whilst there have been lots of things I wanted to post about, time has not been on my side. Before I start to forget some of the points I thought a quick post was in order. @media 2008 was great. Slides and audio are just filtering onto the blog now. A highlight for me was Indi Young’s talk on Mental Models. I now have her book on my desk (waiting for having the time to read it) and I’m excited about how the technique might interface nicely with the User Stories we use for feeding requirements into our Scrum development process.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, June 13, 2008