Push the Button

11 Dec 2008

I thought I’d start my first post on my new blos with a bit about why I’m starting it. For the last couple of days I’ve been attending an event for The Higher Education Academy where the staff from all of our subject centres and our office in York got together to collaborate and discuss various topics as well as have a bit of a seasonal do.

The Path to File Enlightenment

14 Nov 2008

One of the most useful little scripts I’ve written allows me to copy a file’s path to the clipboard.  This provides a quick and easy way of pasting it into a file attachment dialog or even into the body of an e-mail. It’s certainly one of the most useful little automations I use on a daily basis.

Destroying Mobile Opera's Bookmarks

13 Nov 2008

One of the problems I’ve found frustrating recently with my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone is the Opera mobile browser bookmarks. The browser has been preloaded by my operator with a number of bookmarks that I have no use for.

Using VCF to transfer contacts

08 Nov 2008

I recently changed my mobile phone to a Samsung Omnia i900.  Whilst there are several issues with it at the moment - mainly due to Vodafone being way behind on tweaking any of the Samsung firmware releases, I’ve found it to be a good phone, but it hasn’t been great at getting the contact data off of my previous phone; a Sony Ericsson K800i.

After trying a few options I managed to get a neat transfer of data that worked well.

When I rule the web...

02 Nov 2008

I’ve been working on a few updates on web sites recently and like many web site developers I have been struggling with some nice browser based variations.  I hope one day to find that Internet Explorer will actually display pages the same way every other browser seems to be able to without a special style sheet tweak or HTML workaround.

The Algebra of Martial Arts Recruitment

18 Oct 2008

I’ve been training in martial pursuits for my whole adult life and I am now facing a publicity problem.  What makes people want to join a martial arts club?

Look - No Pens

09 Oct 2008

Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to visit Old Billingsgate in London for the MISCO Expo ‘08.  After standing in line for twenty minutes a good few hundred yards from the entrance I managed to get in and was pleasantly presented with a Wenger laptop backpack and a nifty wireless Kensington mouse.  The venue was quite small but there were plenty of suppliers packed in.

Drupal 6: Maintaining your style offline

18 Sep 2008

I’ve been migrating some web site content over the last few days onto a new installation of Drupal.  The original site is still in place but in order for the Drupal site to run properly I needed to install it to the site root and set it offline.  Originally I’d redirected the domain URL to the old index.html page, but this caused a few problems for Drupal saving settings.

Flaming registered globals

14 Sep 2008

I run a number of web sites on a relatively cheap hosting service called Dataflame.  My current bandwidth doesn’t let me run sites particularly well from home (just yet anyway), and the technical issues I’ve had sometimes have been infuriating, but for the price, I think the service is probably quite reasonable.

On-line Photo Albums

10 Sep 2008

There are lots of different photo albums out there available to upload your photos to.  I’ve looked before at flickr and I even have a photobucket account somewhere, but I had a situation recently where these didn’t quite fit my needs.