Archive for Software
February 24, 2010 at 23:22 ·
Filed under Software, Web Design
I arrived in London tonight for a couple of days training starting tomorrow. Upon arrival and saying goodbye to the nice air hostesses with the interesting headwear, I checked my emails to find a client in a panic as his website was falling apart in IE7 for some unknown reason.
He was quite concerned as, although it’s never good for a site to fall over, this week he received quite alot of media coverage and was getting alot of traffic off the back of it. Not a good time for a site to fail but as with Murphy’s Law…
Anyway, after a quite look on my iPhone I realised that a third party script had failed. I hasten to add, I did not develop this site, I’ve just took over the maintenance recently after the company that built the site went to the wall. Digging into this site, it’s not hard to see why, but that’s beside the point.
Speaking of the point, I suppose I should get to it, I just wanted to let you know about a useful little site, net2ftp, which is a web based FTP client. This handy little web app made it super easy, once I found the nearest Internet point in the airport, to jump in, disable the offending code and get the site up and running again until I can get a closer look.
Also worth a mention is FTP on the Go, an FTP client iPhone app. I have this as well but don’t store any usernames or passwords on it for security reasons*, and can only recall the FTP details of my own site off the top of my head. But, if you have the memory for it, it’s also a great little app that will allow you to edit code via FTP anywhere.
As I was reminded again tonight, this can come in very handy indeed.
*On that security note, always remember to log out of any remote FTP service or risk the consequences at your peril!
November 7, 2008 at 10:54 ·
Filed under Hardware, Software
I have one of those days yesterday which ended with my laptop not recognising my external hard drive. As I have nearly 160GB worth of music, photos and web design resources, this was slightly concerning to me. Despite being a Freecom drive, Windows (XP) tried to find a driver for ‘Cypress AT2LP RC42′. I let Windows try and find the driver on the Internet (which has never worked for me ever) but to no avail.
Fearing the worst, I then turned all my hopes to Google and discovered (as per usual) that I wasn’t the first to have this problem. Basically, it wasn’t the drive that had the problems but the enclosure that houses the drive. The enclosure itself had threw a hissy fit and lost its driver therefore leaving the drive unrecognisable and inaccessible.
After trying several possible remedies, I stumbled upon my eventual solution. To cut a long solution short, I basically uninstalled the drive completely, downloaded a new driver for the enclosure then flashed the drive upon reconnection. As you can imagine, I was very relieved to see my drive come back to life..
However, it has given me in the kick up the arse I’ve been needed to invest in additional back-up media, I need something around the 320gb mark, any suggestions?
April 20, 2007 at 16:44 ·
Filed under Software
So, the dust has settled and on the whole, Vista has failed to make any big waves. In fact, reception has been so lukewarm Dell has been forced to resurrect XP.
This is surprising in some ways but no so much on others. Surprising in that people generally want to the latest and greatest when it comes to technology but with so many people now relying heavily on their computers for their everyday lives, I’m not surprised that people don’t like the upheaval of an unfamiliar OS.
Its taken Microsoft so long to get to the stage where XP is relatively stable and works well with the majority of 3rd party software including peripherals such as phones and cameras (commonplace in every household in the country these days) that the task of disrupting this bliss to to have to find new drivers etc is something people don’t particularly relish.
Like wearing in a pair of new shoes, if you want to benefit from Vista, you’re going to have to stick through the transition period. However, it seems that many, including myself at the minute, are just as happy to slip into the old XP slippers…
March 2, 2007 at 11:58 ·
Filed under Software
I got my first play with Vista last week as I set up a mates new computer. I was not impressed. Within less than a minute, a program had stopped responding and had to be manually ended. I’ve no idea what it was and what stopped working but it wasn’t a good start. Upon further exploration I was grated to discover that I had to ‘allow’ everything. Extra security feature, fair enough, but the whole reason I use an operating system and not a command prompt is so that I don’t have to worry about such things, good old XP managed to take care of most of these issues all by itself. My friend later told me that it was spitting out his Office 2003 disk and refusing to install it, as word is his most used application, he’s not a happy camper.
And apparently he’s not alone according to this report from the BBC Vista is causing all sorts of software problems, and I’ve also heard of problems with corrupting iPods and broadband issues when using Vista.
As regarding look and feel, its looks very Fisher Price-esque to me, big and cartoony but maybe that will grow on me…But that won’t be for a while as I think I’ll be sticking with XP for the foreseeable future…
