Alexanders the estate agents currently have a banner on their web site which proudly proclaims their use of “State Of The Art Technology & Integrated Computer Systems”. The effect of this boast is somewhat lessened by the fact that their site claims that today’s date is “November 18 108”. They also have a “rental property… Continue reading Technology Failure
Category: tech
Combining Google Accounts
Somehow over the last few years I have acquired two Google accounts. One of them is associated with my Gmail email address and the other is associated with my dave.org.uk address. Recently I heard that the G1 phone ties itself to a single Google account when you activate it, so if I’n going to get… Continue reading Combining Google Accounts
Phone Company Web Sites
My current mobile phone contract has finished so I’m looking around for a new phone. This means that I’ve spent some time over the last few days looking at phone company web sites. And it seems that although they might be selling cutting edge technology, phone companies still get their web sites built by the… Continue reading Phone Company Web Sites
Technology Hates Me
About ten days ago, I took delivery of a new toy – a Dell XPS M1330 laptop. I spent last weekend happily repartitioning and installing Fedora Linux and I was planning to write an entry this weekend about how well I was getting on with it. Except, I’m not. It’s stopped working. I did some… Continue reading Technology Hates Me
Fuzzy Matching
As a freelancer, I’ve got more than a few jobs through Jobserve. In the past, they used to just post email addresses of the agents who were advertising the roles, but recently they’ve got cleverer than that. They now publish an email address that goes to the Jobserve servers before being passed on to the… Continue reading Fuzzy Matching
Insane Terms and Conditions
Whilst waiting for my comment to be published on the Daily Mail web site, I took a quick glance at their terms and conditions – just to ensure that there wasn’t some obvious rule that I was breaking by calling attention to their hypocrisy. I didn’t find the “you can’t disagree with us” rule, but… Continue reading Insane Terms and Conditions
Their Own Worst Enemy
Sometimes (actually, it’s really quite often) Free Software enthusiasts are their own worst enemy. Their insistence on using completely free formats for audio and video instead of the proprietary formats that most people use means that their message is often only seen by a tiny minority of people – generally the people who don’t need… Continue reading Their Own Worst Enemy
Phone Strangeness
My current phone is a Nokia N91, I’ve had it for well over two years, which is probably the longest time I’ve owned any phone, and I’ve been very happy with it. Of course it’s showing its age technologically now, but I haven’t had any problems with it. But last week, whilst I was in… Continue reading Phone Strangeness
Why Corporates Hate Perl
Over on O’Reillynet yesterday I wrote the first part of a series of posts entitled “Why Corporates Hate Perl“. I’m working through some rough ideas that might just form a talk of the same title at next year’s YAPC::Europe. I didn’t think that anyone would take any notice of my random thoughts, but this morning… Continue reading Why Corporates Hate Perl
Showing Appreciation
I’ve mentioned here before that I run a small free software project which supplies simple web programs. The programs are quite widely used, but we generally only hear from the users when things go wrong. It was, therefore, nice to get a mail from someone who hadn’t had any problems and just wanted to say… Continue reading Showing Appreciation