Monday, May 17, 2010

Back breaker


Saw this in an IT article about party bands. I feel for the poor guy dancing around stage with a Korg Trinity. Those babies weren't light. Or wireless.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

I love Google search suggestions

Type "how to tell" and see what you get. As of right now this is the list, which reads like a story:


  1. how to tell if a guy likes you

  2. how to tell if a girl likes you

  3. how to tell if someone is lying

  4. how to tell if a girl is a virgin

  5. how to tell if your [sic] pregnant

  6. how to tell a girl you like her

  7. how to tell a guy you like him

  8. how to tell if a guy likes you quiz

  9. how to tell your parents your [sic] pregnant

  10. how to tell if a diamond is real



Please tell me Google is manipulating it for PR purposes!

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

UPS Fedex mail

I don't like mornings, and I can't multi-task, especially if one of the tasks is talking. So reading my emails this morning while on the phone was always going to be a bad idea! Especially when the mail is this one...

The sender was "United Parcel Service", but the subject was "Fedex Tracking N5421062126". Yes, they're two completely separate and competing companies, but no alarm bells in my still-asleep head. Neither did it raise my suspicions that I haven't ordered anything that might be delivered by these guys, nor that it was addressed to an email I don't use any more.

Here's the not-too-convincing body:

Unfortunately we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on October the 18st in time because the recipient's address is not correct.
Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office

Your UPS


No detail whatsoever, and something tells me UPS doesn't sign off mails to their customers like that (I could be wrong!).

Still on the phone, I read the body, failed to notice the sender reconnoiteringpk1@razzi.com, and open the attachment! Luckily it was a zip, and finally something must have clicked in my brain to stop me run the executable inside.

When the call finished I came out of autopilot and only then realised how close I'd come to riddling my PC with all sorts of who-knows-what. Moral of the story: stay in bed till after lunch :)

Monday, August 31, 2009

Whose View ?

The last Tuesday Push featured a great site called Whose View. It's an Irish review website that allows users to rant and rave about products and services. It has all the main categories you'd expect:


  • Restaurants

  • Food & Drink

  • Bars & Nightlife

  • Shopping & Fashion

  • Health & Beauty

  • Arts & Culture

  • Hotels & Travel

  • Local & Home Services

  • Recreation

  • Automotive

Of course I'm most interested in the last one – it should keep the car dealers on their toes!

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

PNG images appearing darker in IE8?

I've noticed this happening on a couple of sites. I'm not sure if it's really just an issue with the way Photoshop saves colour information, but no doubt it's useful to know.

See discussion on Boagworld

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Windows 7 compatibility

The transition from XP to Win7 has been great, so far. There are a couple of tools I still haven't installed, but everything I need for day to day work is up and running without issues. FWIW here's a list of apps that are running successfully on Windows 7:


  • Adobe Reader 9

  • Firefox 3

  • Textpad 5.2

  • Open Office 3.1

  • Skype 4.0

  • Photoshop CS2

  • ActivePerl 5.10

  • ActiveTcl 8.4.19

  • Collabnet Subversion Client 1.6.2

  • Tortoise SVN 1.6.2

  • InnoSetup 5.2.2

  • Koolmoves 6.2

  • WinMerge 2.12

  • VMware Workstation 6.5

  • Synergy 1.3.1

  • putty 0.54

  • XAMPP 1.7.1 which includes

    • Apache 2.2.11

    • MySQL 5.1.33

    • PHP 5.2.9

    • SQLite 2.8.15

    • OpenSSL 0.9.8i



Saturday, May 23, 2009

Windows 7 shutdown

If you have lots of programs running, there's a nice looking screen shown after you've chosen to restart or shutdown. It lists the programs that are still open, and they fall off the list as they close down. You can choose to cancel or to force the action. It seems like a more graceful way than in XP where you can be waiting minutes for it to notice if programs are holding up the shutdown.



The only problem for me is Textpad always has an unsaved doc that I've forgotten about, and I have to cancel the shutdown in order to get back to Textpad and choose what to save or discard. Then I have to initiate the shutdown again. In XP I could always switch back to Textpad to close it, and shutdown would still be in progress.