We have been suffering some staff problems recently, everybody we hire has a name that is already in use elsewhere in the company. So we have decided to reorganise the Black Marble name space, initial thoughts included post name numbering , but nobody could agree if the numbering base should be zero or one and Richard …

Incase you haven't found out already Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 is out for download , ours has just finished downloading and I will update on new features over the next few days. b. Technorati tags: Visual Studio

Rik sent me this to illustrate the pain of not having a new server within the last week and has suggested that we may need to move to this if his demands of a bi-weekly addition to the server farm is not met. b. Technorati tags: Humour

Well it was bound to happen , we have split my blog posts off on its own. As ever BM Blogger's is the aggregate blog. I feel all alone in a big empty space , no doubt I will fill it up soon. enjoy. b. Technorati tags: Black Marble

Scientific American has a interesting article on a Data Center in a box. Basically it is a standard shipping container full of Sun Servers. I am our our IT manager would like one! it should fit on any house's driveway, a stylish addition to any home. It is an interesting spin on the old IBM data recovery model where …

After posting yesterday about useful tools for development I stumbled across another little gem of a utility. IE7Pro is much more of a usability-enhancing tool but it has a wonderfully handy tool nestling within - Save Current Tab As Image. If you need to do grabs of pages for documentation or presentations and the …

As web development gets more and more complex having the right tools to help you figure out what's going on is essential. I thought I'd do a quick post on the ones I find most useful. In no particular order, then, here they are. Virtual PC This one is a godsend, because as we all know, running multiple versions of …

It may surprise some but I am a huge fan of board games, I feel that they can provide a great social event and some of the newer games produced over the last 10 years, are truly sublime. However I did not expect to see the World bank trying to fight poverty by producing board games, especially commissioning a game …

I spent a while knocking my head against a problem with a SharePoint server farm that's worth posting about. It's also worth a big hats-off to our Technical Support Coordinator at Microsoft Partner Support who dredged up the article that finally pointed us in the right direction. The problem I'll post later about our …

I have been having a phase of reading novel's I read years go, this time it is Neuromancer by William Gibson (published 1984). This choice was triggered by it being reviewed on BBC Radio4's A Good Read, the suggestion of Bill Thompson the BBC technology columnist. I have been surprised by how little it seems to have …