Posts in category "software"

Last night, I happened to catch my wife composing an email. I noticed that when she sent a personal email to her friends, she invariably typed From Norma as the subject line. This just seemed really weird to me.

I asked her what she thought of the 'semantic web' and whether she had given any thought to adding tags to her personal emails such as 'Norma' and 'From' to help build a valuable taxonomy for her friends.

She looked at me blankly and said 'Just because you work with computers, you think you're so clever, don't you ?'

Thankfully, Scoble has finally found the Disable Snap button on his WP dashboard. Only another 641,000 WordPress blogs to go.

If you don't know what I am talking about, just explore Jonathan Lewis' excellent Wordpress blog and see how long you last before exploding. [Hint: hover over a hyperlink]

If you can't be bothered, look here although a screenshot can't do justice to the mind numbing effect and irritation factor.

Tom Raftery also notes the presence of the dreaded Snap preview and asks for opinions. In fact, this post started out as a comment on Tom's blog but I think this now merits a full-blown rant.

Hi Tom I dislike those Snap previews immensely.

In fact, I absolutely hate, despise and loathe them with a vengeance.

WordPress.com added Snap functionality for all users (default=TRUE). To be fair, following lots of user feedback (surprisingly not all of it positive), WordPress made Snap a configurable option so users could disable the damned distracting Adware popups.

Judging by the number of WP blogs still displaying them, it appears the default is still enabled.

I think WordPress and Snap are great friends in the Web 2.0 sense but no disclosure about money changing hands was ever made.

I would pay WordPress good money to disable Snap. Permanently. Maybe a new business model presents itself.

Andy

Despite occasionally enjoying this site and subscribing to this Oracle focused offshoot, I always laid awake at night, endlessly tossing and turning, wondering what this curious and cryptic acronym WTF stood for.

I need wonder no more. Technorati have finally put me out of my misery.

WTF actually stands for 'Where's The Fire ?' My immediate reaction was 'WTF ?'

No wonder Technorati killed that product at birth.

After my recent brush with disaster, I realised that my, err, backup strategy relied on me remembering to perform a manual, occasional Wordpress export or a database backup.

This was acceptable while I was messing around with this blogging lark but now I realise that it would be a little disappointing to lose the entire contents of my blog.

While Bluehost run backups (which have saved my skin once), it would be foolish to completely rely on my hosting provider and the height of stupidity to rely on me !

As I said to a lovely hotel receptionist in Brussels recently, struggling to find the reservation made on my behalf for Monday night, 'We have a saying in England - if you want something doing, then do it yourself.' She nodded sagely as she eventually unearthed my booking for Tuesday night by which time I would have left the country.

Unlike Mark Rittman, I can't really count on the goodwill of both my readers to manually type in more than 500 articles, so I looked around for a fully automated backup that would backup all of my MySQL databases (not just WordPress) using cron.

AutoMySQLBackup does exactly what it says on the tin and works like a dream.

I even tested it on a local installation because we all know backups are worthless unless you prove that you can actually restore them.

Excellent article by Seth Godin about the perils of PowerPoint.

Just look what it did to the poor pigeon.

Meet Dan Morrison. His main aim in life is :-

Currently dedicated to linking all IT professionals together in one network so they can find each other and communicate.

Don't scoff. Dan already has 93,822 connections (including me) on ITtoolbox so he's very nearly half way there.

Dan - Let me know when you've finished and I'll have that list of email addresses in exchange for a box of vintage 1980's records.

People never ask me:

Norman - why don't you post a pretty Zoho chart of your blog posting frequency by month ?'

I could write a thesis about this but a picture will have to suffice.

Great news. Bill Gates has heeded my advice and I will be able to purchase Vista online and download the media. This means that I no longer have to buy an expensive box full of fresh air from Microsoft.

Burning a DVD is probably still recommended just in case the seamless Windows upgrade fails and I discover, to my horror, that none of my drivers work any more and I have to format the hard disk in order to boot the computer.

However, I take a similar attitude to risk averse Siebel customers contemplating the recently released 8.0. I have a large and demanding customer base (son and daughter) and an integrator who wastes all my hard-earned money (wife) with a perceived requirement for 7x24 operation and high availability.

On reflection, it's probably better to let other idiots people suffer the pain and iron all the glitches out before I take the plunge when SP1 is released.

That reminds me; I really must ring my Dad tonight and warn him not to do anything stupid.

I have experimented with many different RSS readers in the past. However, in recent months, nothing has managed to dislodge NetVibes as my preferred feed reader.

However, I still occasionally use Google Reader and like the recent addition of detailed statistics about your RSS subscriptions and reading habits.

Matt Cutts posts an example of his own data and Robert Scoble also likes the new features.