From the monthly archives:

January 2008

Amazon buys Audible

January 31, 2008General Tech

Michele and I love Audible. We buys stacks of audio books from them. The interface is intuitive, they have good bargains, and if you are clever (like my wife is) you can time your purchases for maximum buying power (look into how they do their credit system – trust me, you can save a lot).So, [...]

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SBTUG: Links, contact details from last night

January 31, 2008SBTUG

[UPDATE: Fixed the News file link]
We had an excellent start to the year, with Cecelia Haddad taking us through Public Relations (PR) and Peter Ward covering the new features in SQL Server 2008 with a focus on those giving the most business value.
Here’s some links and contact details.
Cecelia Haddad: Marketing Elements
Peter Ward: WardyIT
Here’s [...]

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Silly money continues to flow

January 31, 2008Technology

When will the correction finally come? We've seen no end of silly money being thrown around by Venture capital companies of late, and now it seems that Google and Facebook are chasing grad students with fistfuls of cash. $95K for a grad student with no experience is crazy talk, but the comments on the post [...]

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Visual Studio 2008 Product comparison

January 31, 2008Microsoft

Rob Caron has the goods, pointing to this MSDN article that compares the VS2008 range. The MSDN page is a good summary and includes links to other areas, such as this VSTO overview.
Technorati Tags: VS2008 comparison, Rob Caron, VSTO

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ELCOM: Career plans for Developers – Part I

January 30, 2008Elcom

Part of my brief at Elcom is to look after all the developers (ie people management). This is something I enjoy, especially when seeing developers grow and improve themselves.
During November and December I sat down with each of my staff and started preparing their career plans. It is their responsibility to work out their goals [...]

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TIP: Compressing Virtual PC images

January 24, 2008Tips

If you’ve got a stack of Virtual PC images clogging up your hard drive(and who doesn’t these days?), here’s how to compress (or compact) them.
1. With the Virtual PC image running, choose Capture ISO Image… from the CD Menu

2. When the dialog opens, find the Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso image (it’ll be in your [...]

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TIP: Selecting multiple items in Outlook

January 22, 2008Tips

Outlook allows you to select multiple items with just your mouse.
The trick is to position your cursor in the very left part of the first column so that the cursor changes from pointing North-West to pointing N-E.
Here’s how it is normally:

Now position it a little more to the left and your cursor will change [...]

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Chris Sainty on LINQ to SQL

January 21, 2008Microsoft

Chris Sainty has a series of excellent posts on LINQ to SQL.
Start here, and the just subscribe to his blog for the updates (11 of them so far if you include his post on Extension Methods).
Technorati Tags: Chris Sainty, LINQ, SQL

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Visual FoxPro Sedna… the wait continues

January 21, 2008Visual FoxPro

I'm with Andrew MacNeill on this – where's Sedna? Craig Boyd notes it is imminent. There's been a bit of palava about whether Microsoft should fix SP2 before releasing Sedna. I'm all for getting out Sedna as quickly as possible. Who knows what issues we might have in SP2 that are only highlighted by Sedna? [...]

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VSTO videos and links

January 21, 2008VSTO

Daniel Moth has a bunch of videos here from his blog. They are all related to v3 of VSTO. Available on Channel9. (One of the links isn't working at the moment – I've left a comment).
Technorati Tags: Daniel Moth

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User group suggestions

January 21, 2008General Tech

Chris Williams has 21 thoughts on running a user group.
All good ideas, but 10 and 12 struck home with me. One thing we need to realise is that sometimes people can't make it and you'll have a very small group – don't take it personally (as I usually do and get all concerned). More importantly [...]

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VBA to die?

January 21, 2008Microsoft

Heh – here's how to get yourself mentioned in the VSTO blog – just read too much into a product release and blog about it.
People love these kinds of rumours, especially when they talk about a software company turning their back on long standing clients. Always gets attention.
Thankfully this load of hokum about VBA being [...]

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TECHNOLOGY: Security, email and SPAM

January 21, 2008Technology

Reading through Australia’s IT news roundup over the last few weeks has been illuminating.
Security
Take security exploits and spam for example. This reminder on SQL exploits welcomed us back to the new year, alongside this note about how 70K web pages were hacked in a single week. And a new take on the hijacking side [...]

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TIP: Using GMail +

January 21, 2008Tips

GMail (and some other email providers) supports the ‘+’ directive in email addresses.
Thus, if your GMail address is:
barackobama@gmail.com
Then, emails sent to the following address will reach you as well:
barackobama+temp@gmail.com
Based on the email address sent to, you can set automatic spam filtering or other rules.
This is handy for signing up on web sites, since you can [...]

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Domain name shenanigans

January 21, 2008Technology

The news earlier this month about Network Solutions automatically registering any domain you search for on their site has been universally condemned. And rightly so. Supposedly providing a service, but actually reducing service for your (potential and existing) customers is only ever going end up with reduced market share.
I first read about it on TechCrunch, [...]

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Microsoft office space allocation

January 21, 2008Microsoft

One of the Exchange team members gives a quick run down of how office seating is allocated at Microsoft. They have a bit of a problem with too many staff at present, so seating is at a premium. The first comment (by Brian G) on the post gives a suggestion as to how it could [...]

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Google, Wikipedia and China

January 20, 2008Technology

Three interesting things happened last week.
First up, Wikipedia turned 7 years old. Happy Birthday Wikipedia. Wikipedia was and is the world's first open source encyclopedia, and remains one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world. Big things happen slowly.
Second though, Google hit 600USD. This, after hitting a high of 747USD last November. [...]

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Geocoding a physical address with Yahoo and VB

January 20, 2008Technology

Code Project has a nice little article on how to use Yahoo Web Services to return the geocoded results of an address lookup. For those who don't know, Yahoo has a full developer network with stacks of articles for a variety of development tools including .NET. Also check out their Developer Centre blog.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo [...]

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