Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

Microsoft embracing the real world ..

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 22nd Feb, 2008

Lots of people are commenting about yesterday’s announcement from Microsoft about their intentions to be more transparent, provide more information to the community and make their flagship products more interoperable. In a nutshell, they said that they are implementing the following principles:

ensuring open connections
promoting data portability
enhancing support for industry standards
fostering more [...]

Do you web conference?

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 21st Feb, 2008

I was playing with the video display in the our board room a couple of weeks back and noticed that it doubles up as a video conferencing display. It’s actually pretty awesome as the camera easily captures the whole room and it’s part of the IP network the runs through the whole organisation. I haven’t [...]

Choosing a projector

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 12th Feb, 2008

A projector is quickly becoming an essential piece of office equipment. It’s a great way to run a meeting (assuming you’ve done the right amount of preparation), and can be a good way to use software during a meeting .. and no, I don’t mean Facebook.
So what do you need to think about when choosing [...]

Unlocking your iPhone

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 6th Feb, 2008

I hasn’t been long since the iPhone entered the UK market, however we’ve had the advantage that it’s a follower market and we’ve been insulated from the initial cycle of the technology and been introduced to a more recent built. One interesting side to that even though the iPhone has entered the market relatively recently, [...]

The Twitter Debate

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 17th Jan, 2008

There are some interesting conversations on Techmeme at the moment discussing the merits and downfalls of Twitter. It seems to have been sparked off by Twitter falling over during the MacWorld keynote speech and made more public Dave Winer discussing whether Twitter would be more stable if it were decentralised, but there’s a very interesting [...]

A car full of gadgets

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 16th Jan, 2008

It’s funny how I seem to collect gadgets wherever I go. I have a number of toys in my car, but I must say, my favourite has to be my GPS unit. It’s a small device the size of a tennis ball, but it keeps me from getting lost. It has maps for all of [...]

Technical Evening

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 9th Jan, 2008

Wow, it’s been a pretty busy evening; I’ve been getting my hands dirty with a whole range of different things.

My Fonera arrived! It’s a great way to share your WiFi connection in a controlled fashion, so that you have control over what bandwidth you charge, who uses your connection and whether you want it to [...]

Running Virtual Server 2005 on Vista

Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 5th Jan, 2008

I’ve just spent the evening struggling trying to get Virtual Server running on Vista. How hard can it be, you ask? It’s a Microsoft application to be installed on a Microsoft OS, right? Well, Vista has been very much engineered to “protect” the user, so basically some components you need aren’t installed, the default installation [...]

User Generated Christmas Content

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 2nd Jan, 2008

This Christmas has been pretty innovative for a lot of people. Not for me, as I spent most of my time away from home visiting family in Malta. However, getting back to the office, I’ve found a huge selection of custom-made eCards, greeting movies and other visual treats which have been created by friends, family [...]

Time to go wireless?

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 3rd Dec, 2007

I have a couple of friends who have been looking to move their ADSL connection onto a wireless connection and have asked me advice as to what router to get. I must admit that it’s been a few years since I looked at what was available on the market, and I am presently surprised at [...]

My Xmas Present is here

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 30th Nov, 2007

Found a surprise on my desk this morning, my Christmas present arrived! I blogged about it before but for those who hadn’t seen the post, I bought myself a 2Gb MP4 playing watch. And today it arrived! Here’s the unboxing:
The box shows what’s on the inside:

Opening the box, the watch is arranged in a nice [...]

Merry Xmas to Me

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 29th Nov, 2007

I thought I’d treat myself this Christmas, so I’ll be buying myself a watch. Not any ordinary watch, but a 2Gb MP4 playing watch. We’re actually buying a bunch at the office, some people buying some for themselves, some as gifts, but I’m looking forward to having a new gadget I can play with.
I’ve never [...]

Dealing with cross-browser issues

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 26th Nov, 2007

It can be pretty frustrating to design a website that’s perfect in your client’s eyes only to find that it doesn’t work in a different browser to the one you developed it in. That’s why it makes sense to test as early as you can in as many different browsers a possible. And making your [...]

The 12 most common application level hack attacks

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 26th Nov, 2007

I got an interesting paper in my email today entitled The 12 Most Common Application Level Hack Attacks written by Watchfire Corporation. Most development probably know about most of these, but it was nice to see them collected in one place. In a nut shell, these are:

Cookie Poisoning
Hidden Field Manipulation
Parameter Tampering
Buffer Overflow
Cross-Site Scripting
Backdoor and Debug Options
Forecful [...]

Getting to grips with Twitter

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 21st Nov, 2007

I’ve finally managed to get Twitter ingrained into the way I do things. Have you tried it yet? If so, does it work for me? I originally found it interesting, but could never see myself leaving a browser open on Twitter, or going back to visit the website, so it didn’t really catch on.  Now [...]