The number of people capable of building a web site is growing daily (I said capable, I didn’t say good 
. Something else that is also growing along side this is the number of web based applications being built. More and more developers/people with some know how are devoting time to producing some kind of application that uses a web based language like ASP or PHP. The hard part about building something that uses a server side script like PHP is that it is impossible to test your application with out access to a web server. I suppose you could just upload it to an active web site and test it live on the internet so to speak. Would you be honestly comfortable releasing something that hadn’t been tested? It would be all too easy for some one to find an exploit to use that causes serious problems. I’d say it’s much easier to have some way of testing this on your local network, that way if you have no internet access for some reason at least you can keep working
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If you use Skype you probably know all about the Skype In service. You pay a monthly fee and get a phone number you can give out to people which they can call from any phone and you received the call on your computer via Skype. Continue reading »
A lot of people would say the only thing Internet Explorer is good for is downloading something else to surf the web with. Truth be told, I’d tend to agree. My current browser of choice is Firefox and it has been for a long time now. That’s not just because I spend most of time using a Mac either. Even when I use a Windows machine I still look for the the FF icon to do my web browsing. I only use IE when I have no other option, like if I am using an ASP based app which does seem to need IE to run properly. Judging from the ever growing market share of other browsers against IE. Its a fair assumption that more and more people I coming to realise that they don’t have to be stuck with what comes installed on their machine. Continue reading »
Everyone likes to make pretty effects on their photos but not everyone can afford Photoshop (and lets face it not everyone has the skill to use it properly). But fear not there are plenty of tools out there that give you the ability to add some pretty neat effects to your photos with out needing to have PS. We thought we would bring you a few of our favourites. Continue reading »
Remote support utilities are one of the things I find very useful in my normal working life. I’ve spoken before about Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue. It’s so much easier to support a client when you can see what they are seeing on their screen. The biggest problem with both Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue is their cost. There not particularly expensive, but if your a small IT company with a few distributed clients it might be too much of a stretch to your budget to afford them. Ammy Admin is a free utility that provides much of the functionality of the paid for apps, but at no cost. Continue reading »
I’ve spoken before about portable applications that I like to carry with me on a usb drive just to make my life easier. Well as it’s been a while since I covered them, the utilities on my stick have changed some what. Some have fallen out of favour, others have taken their place. With that in mind I thought I would put together a more upto date list of what I find it useful to carry around with me.
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 »
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!
For the past week or so I’ve been using a new email client. I’ve been a big fan of Thunderbird for a while, I like it’s simplistic style and it’s easy of use. I also like that it’s not made by Microsoft! The biggest draw back I’ve found with Thunderbird is it’s search routines. I find it to not always be reliable for looking for things that I know are in my inbox somewhere. I stumbled across Postbox and thought I would give it a try. Continue reading »
| In this time of credit crunch a lot of companies are trying to cut their costs which is completely understandable. A major source of out goings can be travel costs. Most companies have travelling salesmen, guys who move around from place to place for a one hour or two hour meeting, which basically consists of a short conversation and a demonstration of the software they are trying to sell (obviously I am only talking IT salesmen here). With that in mind one of the most obvious ways to cut the travel costs is to look into doing online demos of the software linked with video conferencing. That way your sales guy can sit in the office and hold demos one after the other, not only cutting travel but also increasing the number of demos possible in one day. |
| There are quite a few payed for offerings out there that allow you to share you screen with multiple people over the web, take for instance Cisco’s WebEx. But if you are like me and don’t want to pay for it there are quite a few open source/free alternatives available if you do a little digging. With this in mind I thought I would look at some of the examples I have found: |