I’m currently doing some fantastically exciting (!) web work for a large national company who have the pleasure of using mssql – poor people.

Mssql is like some horrible, deformed half cousin of MySQL. It doesn’t have lots of useful features like LIMIT and so on.

But one of the most annoying is the lack of [...]

The following story is reported by our man at the sharp end, Nick the Van (real name withheld for operational reasons!).

Honcho: Why doesn’t the colour printer work?

Designer/Tech: Is it plugged in?

Honcho: Does it need to be?

Designer/Tech: Seriously???

Honcho: You said you installed a wireless network!

There you have it, what more can I possibly add?

I had this tired argument the other day with yet another person who bought some crap 3rd rate MP3 player which doesn’t work with iTunes etc.

So for the record here’s how it works:

Apple’s iTunes store/DRM is not a lock in.
It is both optional: users are not tied to subscriptions plans and can use [...]

The BBC often report some good stuff on technology and web sites. As web design is my line of ‘work’, what follows is some comment on a bunch of reports I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.

“According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don’t understand the terms [...]

I have been asked this a number of times recently and thought it was worth putting in here.

There are two simple ways to quit a non-responsive application from the desktop.

1 Press the ‘Cmd-Alt-Esc’ keys to pop up the ‘force quit’ window. From here you can choose an application to force quit. Very unhappy [...]

If you, like me, have thousands of email messages in Apple Mail (on Tiger) and have found over the years it gets a little sluggish, then this handy tool may well fix it.

Vacuum Mail by Leland Scott just plain works. I won’t bore you with the gory technical detail other than it rewrites the [...]