Tag: tech

Hardware Catalogue

Based on a conversation in the pub last week, here’s a list of the kinds of computer hardware that geeks often own, rent or otherwise have access to. Listed (approximately in descending order of size. I don’t have all of these. Which do you own. Have I missed any? External web server – often a… Continue reading Hardware Catalogue

New Phone

My Orange contract expired last week so I was in the market for a new phone. I had my eye on a Nokia 6630 as the Orange web site said that I could get one for £30. But when I called Orange to arrange it thy said that it would actually cost me £150. This… Continue reading New Phone

Rojo.com – How Not To Send Email

Rojo is an RSS reader. I tried it out for a week or so last year, but soon decided that I still prefered Bloglines and forgot about Rojo. That is, I forgot about them until a couple of weeks ago. Then I got an email from them. They had decided that they would start to… Continue reading Rojo.com – How Not To Send Email

The Internet is 10

The internet is 10 this week. Well, no, of course it isn’t. It’s been around in some form or another since 1969. But a leader in today’s Guardian says that this week is being celebrated as the tenth anniversary of the internet as a mass phenomenon – and I can’t really argue with that. Interestingly,… Continue reading The Internet is 10

Enterprise Perl

I’ll be speaking at the LinuxExpo Conference in London on October 5th. The subject of my talk is “Enterprise Perl”. Here’s the blurb. Perl has always been used by some of the largest and most successful companies in the world. In this session we will take a look at what makes Perl so useful to… Continue reading Enterprise Perl

New Social Networking Site

O’Reilly have launched their new social networking site Connection. I seem to spend a lot of my time recreating my social network on whatever is the current trendy social networking site. In the last couple of years I’ve been on Ecademy, Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn and probably a few more that I’ve forgotten. Anyway, I’ve signed… Continue reading New Social Networking Site

How Not To Phish

If you’re planning to embark on a phishing attack, here’s a little tip – get your text checked by a native English speaker. Here’s the text of an email I just got. IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION Since 1968 National Westminister Bank is serving its clients with the most reliable service. In Banking the most important part is… Continue reading How Not To Phish

New Perl Books

I noticed that the O’Reilly stand at Opentech on Saturday had a few new Perl books. I think that a couple of these books are particularly important. Over the last few years I’ve heard a lot of people saying that Perl isn’t suitable for large scale programming projects as it doesn’t constrain programmers in the… Continue reading New Perl Books

Greasemonkey Arms Race

A few random thoughts came together in a vaguely coherent form on the way home from Opentech yesterday. Allow them to share them with you. For years we’re been trying to persuade web designers to move away from nasty “tag soup” HTML and to use clean semantic markup with stylesheets to control the presentation. This… Continue reading Greasemonkey Arms Race