Software

has your company got a Community Manager ?

My support for the Disqus commenting system used on this blog is well documented. I have also had great support whenever I have had minor issues with a service I paid precisely nothing for.

Disqus are a small company with less than 10 employees. However, Disqus are not a cottage industry operating out of Daniel Ha’s garage. Disqus are funded by venture capital (Union Square and angel investors) and raised $500,000 in the last round of funding (March 2008).

5 useful Firefox plugins

For reasons that are too long and tedious to recount here, I have had cause to rebuild my Lenovo T61 laptop many times over the last month, using a bewildering range of operating systems, Linux distributions, live CD’s and dual boot configurations.

During this time, gparted and an external USB 500GB disk drive have become very close and reliable friends. In fact, I have only lost data once and, inevitably, that was due to my own stupidity.

intelligent automatic follow/block script for Twitter

London, near England - 23 April 2008. For immediate release.

Brightside Software Enterprises are pleased to announce the immediate availability of ‘FriendOrFoe’.

Tired of being followed by those mindless idiots on Twitter, not to mention those horrid spammers ?

Tired of having to search out new friends with similar interests, sense of humour and outlook ?

Tired of being a ‘soul in isolation’ with 0 (zero) friends in the whole wide world ?

a lesson in software design

This blog used to run on WordPress but now runs on Habari which is a blogging platform currently being developed by a set of very talented people.

Undoubtedly, the number of developers and users running Habari is far fewer than the massive community using WordPress. Similarly, the number of available themes and plugins available for Habari is relatively small (albeit growing daily) and dwarfed by the vast, almost bewildering wealth of add-ons and the extensive range of themes available for Wordpress.

Stalag Facebook

Not so much a walled garden as a high security prison with barbed wire and electric fences.

Ask fights back

I don’t know whether Ask have changed their agency but I think this advert is a marked improvement on the previous campaign.

Imagine you were a tourist looking to visit London, which site would you choose ?

just the job

Note to self: Dust off CV and apply for this job on Monday morning.

Any client who is interested in people ‘running projects from cradle to grave’ intrigues me.

sync'ing Thunderbird with Google calendar

Just installed the Lightning extension which provides an embedded calendar (Sunbird) within Thunderbird.

This is made even more useful by the addition of the Provider for Google Calendar add-on that enables seamless, two way synchronisation between Google Calendar and Thunderbird.

how a digital camcorder drove me to suicide

Back in the old days, things were very simple. You filmed endless hours of footage with your analog camcorder; your summer holidays, opening Christmas presents around the tree, your child’s first steps and birthday parties.

Then, the night before you set out on your next summer holiday, the wife utters words that strike fear into the very heart of your soul:

‘Charge the camcorder batteries and have you transferred all the tapes to video so we can re-use them ?’

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Facebook penetration of corporate America

I was interested to read that Microsoft have over 17,597 employees registered on Facebook out of a total of 70,000 employees.

I thought I would try to discover how other leading IT companies compared, including my own. The staff numbers come from Google Finance and the rounding errors come from me.

The following Facebook networks are only open to company employees with a valid email address although, obviously, a better metric would have been some measure of recent activity.