When Software Attacks!

Blogging On The Move

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

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Community Launch Events

A big thanks to everybody who came to the Server 2008 launch event last week. Andy and myself had a great time presenting to such an enthusiastic crowd. In the end we ran long because of the amount of dialogue around the new features of Server 2008 and I hope everyone went away having got something useful. Now I need to reduce the two hours of material down to a perky 45 minutes for delivery at the VBug-hosted launch event on April 30th.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 14, 2008

Hats off, lads

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Taking time to enjoy the scenery

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. For example, I subscribe to the blog of my good friend Nick Smith. Since he hasn’t posted about his new redesign, I didn’t know about it.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 17, 2008

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

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 11, 2008

@media 2008

After sadly missing last year due to workload, I am excited to be able to attend @media 2008 in London along with Tom and Lauren from Black Marble. If you know me and you want to meet up please get in touch!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, February 10, 2008

Balancing customer needs against forward motion: IE8

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. I must admit, my initial reaction mirrored that of many others - that it’s just plain wrong (although my good friend Nick’s posting took some concentration to ascertain his thoughts!). Why hold back on improved support for CSS; why hide the fact that the engine now passes ACID2?

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, February 10, 2008

Spring cleaning

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.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, February 10, 2008

EMEA Project Conference: Keynote Thoughts

Well, the keynote just ended and I needed to check email so I thought I’d do a quick post. A good chunk of the keynote had already been covered by yesterday’s partner-only sessions. However, Mike Angiulo publicly announced that the Office 2007 family Service Pack 1 will be available on December 11th, 2007. I guess that means we can tell the world! I’m surprised, actually, that I haven’t noticed this on any of the SharePoint blogs I frequent.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, December 4, 2007

EMEA Project Conference - Madrid

Finally, after all the excitement that Richard and Robert had in Seattle and Barcelona, I find myself in the Auditorium Hotel, Madrid for the EMEA Project Conference. According to the multilingual sales blurb in my room, the hotel is the largest in Europe, and I must say it’s very nice. We flew in yesterday and today is an MS Partner-only day before the conference itself kicks off tomorrow. Project Server is something we’re very interested in using ourselves, and it’s integration with SharePoint (MOSS/WSS) makes it an attractive solution to anybody who has already deployed MOSS for their corporate intranet, as we have.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, December 3, 2007