Sloppy Development

May 17, 2013 | Comment

I spend all my working day dealing with software development and developers and have done so for the last 25 years. Over that time I have come across some interesting practices and learnt how to do things the right way. The five years I spent with Admiral Computing in particular was an invaluable education in delivering quality software.

So when I come across something like that shown to the left I find it both amusing and perplexing in equal measures. How can a menu item called “Test” make it through to a live system? Clicking the link takes you through … Read the rest

Netflix vs Lovefilm

May 13, 2013 | Comment

I can’t remember the last time that I bought a DVD having moved over to streaming a while ago so I thought I would take a look at the two biggest services in the UK to compare their content. I decided not to look at streaming quality, price or any factor other than catalogue.

I order to be a little bit objective I decided to look for the top films of 2010 and 2011 as chosen by Total Film Magazine. The results are shown in the table below.

As you can see, in this very small sample, there was no … Read the rest

Adding a new watch face to Pebble

May 10, 2013 | Comment

You can watch all my Pebble videos here:

http://dsktp.net/pebble

… Read the rest

RunKeeper for Pebble

May 8, 2013 | 1 comment

Pebble have slowly been making good on all that was promised when the watch was announced on Kickstarter. This week saw the launch of RunKeeper integration, as you can see from the image below.

It is incredibly easy to use mainly because there aren’t options whatsoever. When you start an activity the details (time, distance and pace) are all clearly displayed on the watch. The centre button allows you to pause and resume the recording, which is useful, but that’s the lot. It works well.

Since delivering the watches the team at Pebble have been steadily delivering on a number … Read the rest

Changing the Colour of your Pebble Watch

April 23, 2013 | Comment

If, like me, you entered the vote to choose the colour Pebble option and they didn’t pick your colour and had to go with the black or maybe you are fed up of waiting for your colour Pebble to arrive and so have switched to black – good news! You don’t have to stick with it, slickwraps.com make a whole range of wraps just for the Pebble that can quickly change the look of your watch and are really easy to fit.

The video below shows you just how easy it is.

Also check out my video on adding a … Read the rest

Is Google Keep a Keeper?

March 22, 2013 | Comment

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So Google have released a new product roughly one week after axing a raft of others including Google Reader, much to the angst of the general tech public.

Google Keep is a note taking application allowing you to keep important information in your drive for searching and reviewing at a later date.

It is similar in thought to Evernote but without any of the usefulness of it. As it says in the image above Google Keep is just a bit too simplistic right now. All you can do is create a note with a title and some text content and … Read the rest

Twitter Patent = Death of App.Net?

March 21, 2013 | Comment

So Twitter have finally been granted a patent for, well, Twitter. They applied for the patent in 2007 and it has only just been granted given that these things take a while to work their way through the system.

From what I understand the patent is pretty widely worded and could be interpreted as many things and cover all multitude of sins, however, if it covered things that look like Twitter then APP.NET should be worried.

APP.NET looks and feels like Twitter and the only major difference is that it is a paid service with a limited free account also … Read the rest

What we did Before Google

March 20, 2013 | Comment

I was away over the weekend and spotted this on my in-laws book shelf – The Internet Atlas by Richard Dinnick. A guide to the “best 1,000 sites on the web”.

Even though the book is only a few years old, it was published in 2000, it is a fascinating snapshot on what the web was like only thirteen years ago.

It includes sections on the browsers available which besides Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape also includes the first alpha version of Mozilla.

There is also a section on search engines which includes Altavista and Ask Jeves along with … Read the rest

Documenting MySQL Tables in MediaWiki

March 11, 2013 | Comment

The last few companies that I have worked for we have setup an internal wiki that everyone uses to hold information about all aspects of the business including, of course, the technical team. We use MediaWiki for this mainly because it is easy to setup and is also familiar to users through Wikipedia.

One area that we try and document is the database structure. Having this on hand and searchable in the wiki allows new employees to quickly get to grips with it and makes us all more productive.

The issue is that creating the MediaWiki tables by hand is … Read the rest

Keep Your Cables Together and Tidy

March 10, 2013 | Comment

Having multiple devices that need regularly charging and no universal agreement on a standard connector for doing so creates a problem of having to keep track of numerous differing cable types.

Now I know that there is a European agreement to have the micro-USB as the de facto charge cable standard but none of the three items I have to regularly charge conform to this: my iPhone, iPad and Pebble watch.

I’m not going to get into the debate of whether manufacturers should be compelled to meet the standard rather than charging an eye watering £15 for an adaptor that … Read the rest