I created an end-user provisioning tool a while back and it’s been running on “autopilot” ever since. Recently I received a question from a new contractor on the project via the service Helpdesk. It seems, someone triggered the “email routing test” on behalf of the contractor.
The contractor (a software developer) contacted Helpdesk asking for help [...]

I keep wasting hours tweaking and re-writing my blog’s look-n-feel. No sooner do I get it working the way I like, that I go too far and then decide to start over with some other theme.
The most recent activity was to leverage a theme with lots of cool JavaScript. I wanted it to be flexible [...]

I fell out of the software developer track for a number of years. I was a strong (although not the best) C language developer and had some C++ talent but I shifted gears when Java took off at my company. Since that time, I have done mostly scripting based hacks and small tools as “brain [...]

I have a couple of pages on my blog to highlight some of my interests. For example, cooking and more recently, the restoration of a tower clock.
What I wanted to do was to have those pages include a list of posts. I could have solved it by creating “templates” by adding custom PHP files [...]

I’m amazed how different the various browsers interpret stylesheet settings. My development is against FireFox and during test, I get around to checking Internet Explorer 6. (Eventually, I’ll add IE 7 to my tests.) I always find things that don’t work or look as expected. For those who have a long history with web user [...]

 I stand fast with my technological point of view that no solution will succeed without having an established interface. I tend to leave some of Bill Gate’s creations out of the mix because monopolies don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world. I’ll also eliminate very small niche software. These tend [...]

If you use more than one computer and they are not complete duplicates when it comes to the tools installed on each, then you may need (or just want) to share clipboard content. I have my writing and graphics tools on one machine while I have software development tools on another. I often need to [...]

We use Lotus Notes for our business email. I started using the new Lotus Notes 8 starting with their public betas. I really like the integrated email, instant messaging, news reader, and activities. I also had a chance to try out a few other Eclipse plug-ins integrated and extending the total experience.I really liked [...]

I came across an interesting article about an alarm clock …
About 3 months ago I bought a new clock radio. Last night, I found that I needed to use the alarm for the first time. So I looked at all the buttons, took a wild guess as to how to set the alarm, and [...]

Its is quite amazing how you can start your day in the usual way and then have it change dramatically.  I started today “blog surfing” - which is not uncommon for me. I saw a post titled; “Lessons for a Successful Life“. The blogger made a compelling case for spending the next 90 minutes watching a professor [...]

I was blog surfing this morning and came across a post at Bill de hÓra talking about web applications. I’ve suffered through too many software architecture meetings where 3-tier design was *absolute* only to be followed up a year later by software architecture meetings where our entire focus was on making our 3-tier solution *work*, [...]

My primary work machine these days is a Thinkpad X60 with only a 1024×768 screen. This means I must be diligent to keep “always on” applications to their bare minimum size.
I got rid of all the cool UI space hogs like Docks. I added a virtual desktop solution (VirtuaWin) and my taskbar is only one [...]

If you are a Microsoft Windows user and need a “relatively” simple solution for screen capture and editing - say, for uploading to YouTube - then you might find the combination of Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder and Microsoft Movie Maker a good place to start. There is a tutorial on how to use the [...]

I recently saw how a virtual team of a few hundred people chose to share information.

setup a “community” to manage membership and let participants choose to subscribe and un-subscribe. GOOD
setup a Wiki to establish a calendar of meeting topics. OK
setup a “quick” file sharing site for posting presentations. GOOD
email out the links to the above [...]