From the monthly archives:

April 2008

SBTUG: Last minute change tonight + Prizes!

April 29, 2008 Main

We’ve had a last minute change to tonight’s meeting.
Unfortunately Mitch Denny has had to pull out (due to illness), but in his place Richard Banks will be presenting.
His session will be covering Agile Project Management.
Richard is a Principal Consultant at Readify and a Certified Scrum Master.
Full details are available on the SBTUG site here.
(Note: [...]

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TIP: Introducing people who already know each other

April 28, 2008 Community

No doubt you’ve done this at some point:
You’re at an event or user group and find yourself chatting with someone new. A friend of yours strolls over and joins the conversation. Being the polite person you are you introduce your friend to the new person. They reply with ‘oh yes, we already know each other [...]

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SBTUG: Mitch Denny speaking on Enterprise Software Development this Wed + Prizes!

April 27, 2008 Community

This Wednesday 30 April 2008 at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we’ve got another great meeting organised.
This month: The Evolution of Enterprise Software Development presented by Mitch Denny.

When: This Wed 30 April 2008
Time: 6pm (until approx 8:30pm)
Where: Microsoft, North Ryde
Contact: Craig Bailey : 0413 489 388
Cost: Free (Pizza [...]

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COMMUNITY: CodeCampOz 2008 report

April 27, 2008 Community

When: 25-27 April 2008
Where: Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia
This has easily been the best CodeCampOz I’ve been to (and I’ve been to all of them . Mitch and Greg have done another stellar job organising this event. All of the sessions have been high quality and relevant. Big thanks to Microsoft, Readify, IT Masters, SSW [...]

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REVIEW: Premium Economy on Air New Zealand

April 27, 2008 Personal

On my recent trip to the MVP Summit I flew Premium Economy class over to the US. Premium Economy is new for Australia-USA trips and is only available via Air New Zealand (to LA) and JetStar (Star Class to Honolulu) as far as I know. Qantas will be offering the class later in the year. [...]

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TIP: SQL Server 2008 – changing default ‘Edit Top 200 rows’

April 22, 2008 Link

Brad Marsh alerts us to this handy option in SQL Server 2008 – how to change the default result set sizes. They default to 200 for Edit and 1000 for Select, but can be increased to… everything if desired. Proceed with caution though – there’s a reason Microsoft put these new limits in.
Technorati Tags: SQL [...]

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CodeCampOz and SBTUG this month

April 22, 2008 Community

I’m heading home from the US of A today, which sees me arrive back in Sydney (hopefully) on Thursday morning 24 April.
CodeCampOz
The next day I head down to Wagga for CodeCampOz. That finishes up on Sunday (27 April) and I fly back to Sydney that night.
Elcom
On Monday I’m back in the office, ready [...]

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Behind on blogs – too much information

April 22, 2008 Blog

Following on from my last post, it’s interesting to see how far behind I’ve drifted in my blog reading over the last few weeks. Over 50K unread posts… Even TechCrunch (my first blog stop every day) has 215 unread posts.

A number of these will be easily dismissed (eg I subscribe to general feeds like [...]

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Twitter versus Blogs

April 22, 2008 Personal

I find it interesting that the more time I spend on Twitter, the less time I spend directly reading and writing blogs. The reason for this (besides the obvious time factor) is that I am finding more and more that most things I need to know are alerted to me via Twitter. This isn’t to [...]

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A quick catch up with Frank Arrigo

April 20, 2008 Microsoft

There’s plenty to talk about after the MVP Summit last week. But that’ll have to wait. For now, you can either read the shenanigans courtesy of Schnubbs’ blog, or… you can watch this quick 2 min video where a bunch of us caught up with Frank Arrigo. Can you believe he’s been in Seattle for [...]

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.NET OpenID project chugs away

April 10, 2008 Link

There’s a lot of noise about OpenID (it’s great, we can’t live without it, it’s safer, it’s the future, etc, etc) but very little actually happening (in terms of real adoption). TechCrunch has had a few thought provoking posts on the matter – decide for yourself whether OpenID has become little more than a marketing [...]

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Important Microsoft announcement… about Mouses

April 8, 2008 Link

I’m assuming you subscribe to Microsoft’s Press Release feed right?
Well, for the one, or possibly two people world wide who don’t, I just wanted to make sure you are alerted to this highly important development. You will be overjoyed to learn that the Wireless Optical Notebook Mouse 3000 will be available in five colours [...]

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A little birdie told me

April 8, 2008 Link

I’m only a Twitter newbie (ie less than 1000 tweets), so I haven’t yet tried to convert anyone over to it… but that said, I’ll happily point you to a post like this one from TechCrunch. The value in Twitter for me is simply this: immediacy of information. In a few months I’ll elaborate a [...]

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Angus McDonald discusses Watir

April 8, 2008 Link

Angus gives an excellent overview of how to get up and running with Watir, a open source testing utility. Watir is basically about automating web browsers in order to help test web sites.
This is something we’ve been struggling with at Elcom. Like most web companies we end up having to do a lot of manual [...]

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What do I spend my time on?

April 7, 2008 Link

It’s always interesting to see what you spend time on the most… but tracking it can be hard. There’s various programs available of course, but you never really know how accurate they are. Does it count the idle time you spend reading an email on screen, and how does it tell that you weren’t actually [...]

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TIP: Hiding the Office 2007 Ribbon

April 6, 2008 Main

A simple one. Sorry if you all know this already – but I keep coming across people who’ve missed it – so please read on.
You can easily hide the ribbon in any of the Office 2007 programs simply by double clicking on the tabs.
Thus

becomes

with just a double-click on the Home tab (or any tab).
Oh, [...]

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TIP: Dates in Outlook

April 3, 2008 Main

I don’t know if you read the Outlook Team Blog, but if not I recommend it – there’s stacks of goodies over there.
Take this one for example, on entering dates in Outlook. I didn’t realise you could enter a date as easily as ‘next tue’ and Outlook would work it out for you automatically:

Gets [...]

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