I hadn’t really thought about it before, but Andy Budd has a very similar presentation style to my own. He’s incredibly enthusiastic and passionate about what he’s speaking about, and he wanders around waving his arms in an extremely animated way. Snap! The topic of usability testing is an important one. I always try …

It’s a muggy day today. With thunderstorms expected, the morning air was thick as we walked over to the South Bank Centre. I found Douglas Crockford’s opening session thoughtful. It wasn’t what I was expecting – I had anticipated a focus more on methodologies and approaches to improving quality. instead, it was an …

One of the reasons I enjoy conferences like @media is that I can be persuaded to change my mind on things. After a persuasive argument from Nick I’ve decided to alter my stance on twitter and give it a go for a while. A few others recently have suggested that I should sign up to the microblogging system even if I …

Not providing lunch at the conference was perhaps a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, Wagamamas is just so close (mmm… chicken katsu curry); on the other hand, lots of people were nodding off in the warmth of the first session. Which is a great shame, because Dan Rubin is a really good speaker (and singer, …

It’s good to see familiar faces once again here at @media. This year’s conference is around the same size as the first one in 2005 and it has a strangely familial feeling. Nick’s here as a volunteer ‘@mediator’ so he was manning the desk as we registered. A note at this point about the conference swag: aside from the …

Lauren and I set off for London later to today. It’s @media time again and I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. As usual Patrick Griffiths has lined up a fantastic group of really inspirational speakers and, whilst smaller in the light of the current climate, I have no doubts that it will be useful. I’ve been …

Whist trying to work out if there is any way to get around the problem I am suffering with Sharepoint workflows idling inside a Typemock Isolator test harness I have been having a good look at CThru; a set if libraries for Typemock that, and I quote Codeplex here, ‘… allows creating interception and isolation …

I was installing a new PC for a friend yesterday; after using the Easy Transfer Wizard (first time I used this and I can heartily recommend) to move their settings from their old XP system to their new Vista one I got the 0x800106ba Windows Defender error on start-up. Now there is a lot of frankly useless comments on …

Andy Westgarth and the guys at VBUG Newcastle very kindly invited me to speak about and demo some of what I consider to be key features in Windows 7 and Server 2008. If you read the blog and would like to see what I really look like, are interested in the topic of the talk or interested in VBUG in general, come along! …

Whilst upgrading a single server TFS 2005 to a dual server 2008 install I hit a problem. I had installed the new 2005 Data Tier (DT) and patched it without issue. However then I tried to apply the patch VS80-KB19156-v2-x86, the Quiescence GDR patch, on the Application Tier (AT) I got the 29109 error: SQL Reporting …