Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

The Lone Server

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 11th Jan, 2008

Today I came across an interesting viral marketing campaign that Microsoft have embarked on. It’s the story of The Lone Server, which is allegedly the last Windows 2003 server that Microsoft are using now that they have switched all their other servers to Windows 2008.

Oh, and The Lone Server even has a Facebook and LinkedIn [...]

Web Conferencing Case Studies

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 10th Jan, 2008

One market I like keeping an eye on is the Web Conferencing market. I don’t know if it’s because of the time I used to spend playing with webcams or because I think it’s the way business will be conducted in the future, but it’s something that animates me. I used to enjoy playing with [...]

BizTalk 2006 R2 Released

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 14th Sep, 2007

After month of testing, it’s nice to see that Microsoft have finally pushed BizTalk 2006 R2 out to the world. Here’s the blurb:
With the introduction of the fifth full version, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 builds upon the Business Process Management and SOA/ESB capabilities in prior releases to help organizations extend core process management technologies even [...]

Switching my feedreader

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 6th Sep, 2007

Till now I had been an avid supporter of SharpReader as my tool of choice for reading feeds. It’s been a great tool for quite some time, has a couple of flaws, but I was happy to live with them for the functionality it gave me. Today things have changed however, as Google Reader adds [...]

Business Applications

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 22nd Aug, 2007

There’s quite a bit of speculation around about how effective Google office suite will be in taking dominance away from Microsoft Office. However, in the battle between titans, it’s worth remembering that there are other products out there that can have a positive impact on organisations that use them.
One such product suite is OfficeClip, a [...]

Vista revitalised

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 7th Aug, 2007

I found a post on Techmeme that mentioned that there was an update out for Vista to deal with some performance and reliability issues. I downloaded it, installed it and my computer feels visably quicker. I don’t know if there’s a physiological element here; whether knowing that I’ve installed a performance update makes my computer [...]

Running the BBC iPlayer on Vista

Posted by: Owen on Sunday, 5th Aug, 2007

Well, I’ve been keeping my eye on the BBC iPlayer project for a few months now. They’ve been the subject of quite a bit of criticism recently based on the fact that their client runs on Windows XP only, no Mac, no Linux, no Vista. However, this week I came across a thread that implies [...]

Struggling with software

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 2nd Aug, 2007

Don’t you hate it when something that used to work suddenly refuses to? I’m running a plugin called FireStats on this blog and it doesn’t seem to like my installation much. It’s been running fine for months on end. All of a sudden it’s refusing to write to a temporary folder on the server where [...]

Windows Mobile 6

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 23rd Jul, 2007

I’ve finally got Windows Mobile 6 running on my XDA Orbit (HTC P3300/Artemis), which really wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I went with the Black & Blue ROM by Tom Codon which comes ready packaged with a number of utilities and toys and a great little theme.
Installing it was a bit [...]

Windows Home Server finally ships

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 16th Jul, 2007

Good news for the Windows Home Server team, the fruits of their labour has finally shipped. They’ve been working on this product for the last 8 years and it will be interesting to see how the market will react to this new offering.
For those of you who are unaware of Windows Home Server, it’s essentially [...]

Google makes Microsoft change Vista

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 20th Jun, 2007

Interesting news today about how Microsoft is having to modify Vista to make it easier for third parties to deploy their own desktop search products on their flagship operating system. This will be part of SP1 for Vista and should be ready to be released through their normal software distribution channels. This change was instigated [...]

3D Mind Maps

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 1st Jun, 2007

I find that when I’m studying I tend to keep notes in a form very similar to Mind Maps. I find it quite intuitive yet, I’ve never taken it a step further to look at computer information organizer software. There’s a selection of packages you can use as an Information Organizer, including FreeMind and Labyrinth [...]

To WordPress or not to WordPress

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 15th May, 2007

Ian Fernando just asked a question on V7N as to whethr to go for WordPress or not. His questions are specifically about  extensibility, customization and spam. Here’s what I responded:

Easy to manipulate: WordPress has an extensible API that has allows 3rd party developers to write plugins for it. There’s a wealth of plugins out there [...]

Looking for a registry cleaner

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 7th May, 2007

I’ve had a couple of crashes on Vista in the last few days which is quite distressing. I know it’s usually caused by driver incompatibilities, but I wanted to make sure it’s not some corruption in the registry. Now, Micro$oft used to produce a registry cleaner called RegClean, but they discontinued this a few years [...]

Creating surveys

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 6th Apr, 2007

I sincerely believe that the best way for a business to improve is to always listen to customers’ feedback and react accordingly. And don’t just wait for a customer to give you their feelings on your products/sevices, but make it a point to solicit this information and use it to optimise and improve your business.
One [...]