If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Not sure how to subscribe to a RSS feed? Read Subscribing to blogs the easy way. Thanks for visiting!We moved office recently as some of you may know. We thought we’d treat ourselves to a professional grade broadband router more in keeping [...]

Programming is still way too hard. Even the smallest piece of software takes a huge amount of effort to build.
Software tools are not great. The tools I use now are not really that far away from what I first started using professionally in 1992. Back then it was a command line compiler with make scripts [...]

I’ve been trying to get my head round what the Alarm Numbers mean in Intellipool INM. Just when I think I’ve got it everything just slips away.
The idea seems to be that you can escalate Alerts. If something gets ignored you can change the Action so that a different person gets notified or [...]

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 has been out for over a year now. I would say that it is quite possibly the worst piece of software to come out of Redmond for a very long time. I am amazed that they released it. I am mortified that they still haven’t fixed it.
The bug that makes me [...]

I was daydreaming today and I wondered just how many files actually make up the openxtra website. For a small site you would assume that wouldn’t be many?
Well, I’ve counted and I got quite a shock. The website is made up of 4974 files. And that doesn’t count the databases. There are three of those.
It [...]

I wish I’d known this 3 and a half years ago
When starting out in business or anything else where a website or email is important. I’ve got a bit of advice for you. I call it the domain telephone test.
Get hold of a colleague or friend, ring them up and arrange for them [...]

More fun with GSM Modems. The Falcom Samba 75 behaves in the same way as the Samba 55, i.e. the CD doesn’t actually load the driver or the phone software so you still have to load them by hand, just like the Samba 55.
Mind you the screen image of the phone that turns up is [...]

Open source software never ceases to amaze (and delight) me. I’ve found another gem, though not a network management package this time!
Sqlite is an excellent embedded database. I’ve been playing around with it for the last week or so and I am really impressed with it. It’s quick, it’s simple and it just works.
One of [...]

I’ve been seeing lots of activity on the Desktop recently. Apple started it all off with their Dashboard built into OSX. All very impressive but hardly of much interest to Microsoft Windows users.
Anyway. Google have brought out a similar system for Windows users called Google Desktop. It has been through a few versions now and [...]

Brendan from Sentinal was kind enough to point out a new open source network mapping tool. It looks really good and so far seems to work! It’s called The Dude, probably sounds better in an American accent, and I tried it on our test network with the following results.

There are more screenshots on the [...]