The Pinged Hobbit

Cloud Computing is the new buzz word. It’s all over the place as people believe that in the future desktop apps will be replaced by web apps. Instead of having Word and Excel installed on your local system, you will use something like Google Docs to create and edit your files. Instead of using Oulook you will keep all your emails in a web based email solution like Gmail.

For mobile workers like me this is ideal. No matter where I am working I would be able to access the apps I usually use and the data I need to work with. But putting my other hat on, that of IT admin and data security ‘expert’ it’s a bad thing. With cloud computing you lose control of your data and your what your users are actually doing with it because the apps and the data are no longer on your server. You cant track who is doing what and you cant effectively back up your data because it is stored on somebody else’s server. Continue reading »

As I may have mentioned before I dabble in web site design when asked to by some of my friends. I don’t claim to be a master but I know enough CSS to get by. One of the things I have always had problems doing before is placing a div so that it always appears at the bottom of another, in effect creating a footer using nested divs. It wasn’t until tonight that I came across a solution to this problem that was so simple I cant believe I haven’t seen it before. Continue reading »

One of my friends has recently asked me to start looking at building him a website for his own personal fitness business. I was doing some web searching for some ideas and I came across a nicely compiled list of inspirational fitness quotes that I thought I would share with you for free. Just click here to download the pdf. Continue reading »

Most people are quite comfortable buying goods online these days. They will happily use sites like Dabs and Amazon to purchase the goods they need. One of the things I have always disliked about shopping online is knowing exactly how big something is before I buy it. Just about every item ever has its size listed in it’s description. This is great but sometimes it’s very hard to actually work out how that looks in real life. Well enter Sizeasy. Sizeasy is a nice site with a simple concept, you give it the dimensions of the item you are looking at and a real life objectand sizeasy then shows you a diagram with the two objects draw to scale side by side. Can be quite useful for working out just how big that phone you are ordering is!

Picture the situation, your waiting for that all import file sending through by email. It’s got something inside it that you urgently need. Maybe it’s an image for your project at university, maybe it’s important information for that quote your putting together. Finally the file comes through, you save it to your desktop and then extract it from the zip file. Then you you go to open it only to find it’s in a format that your computer doesn’t have a program to open it. What do you do? Continue reading »