Black Marble has standardised on Acer for our notebooks and in general we have been very very pleased. They are powerful , cost effective and nice to use. The only problem that has occurred in the last few months is that my 8200 ( 8204 ) had a cosmetic fault ( the lid had delaminated ) , this was dealt with quite …

Until recently there has been little or no information about Orcas unless you are actively looking , what has been noticeable over the last few weeks is that the DPE crowd at Microsoft in the UK and PM's from corp have been blogging more and more prolifically. Last month is did a brief overview of Orcas and the rest of …

I will be speaking about Scrum at the second Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club meeting next Thursday 8th March at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. So if you are interested in a quick introduction to Scrum, or just want to meet other developers in the Yorkshire region interested in Agile methods come along.

For a long time ( my time with XP ) , I have used Baden Slick Run to run commands using the keyboard. For those not familiar with Slick Run you set it up point at application assign a quick name and when you press the windows key + Q , type the quick name and the app starts ( with all appropriate command line params as …

The .NET micro framework is now available .NET Microframework , the MF adds a new project type to Visual Studio. the first thing I noticed is that the name space for the libraries is Microsoft.SPOT , SPOT was the original name of the MF. I would expect this to change before release. I think any desktop developer and …

I have been spelunking through a pile of documentation on Sharepoint and came across a comment that people who follow the priciples of REST (Representational State Transfer) are referred to as RESTful or for the more extreem RESTafarians. As this seems to be the case I wonder if someone who advoates SOAP is SOAPful or …

In hindsight I should have thought of it, but even if I had, others got there first. You may remember my problems with IPMI on our X2100 servers from an earlier posting. Today I had cause to revisit the matter, as we're having terrible issues with the Nvidia RAID on one of our servers. The lack of a Windows version of …

I am a big fan of virtualisation and it as a concept has changed development practices so I am pleased that Virtual PC 2007 is out and FREE , get it and install it. Virtual PC 2007 32/64 bit enjoy b.

On Saturday I got the email telling me that I'd been accepted onto the Home Server Beta 2. I'm excited about this product in a way that I haven't been about new software solutions for a while. I've taken part in beta programmes before. I've been around a while, and as an IT pro you get desensitised after a while. Vista …

I have yet to succeed in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Each time it runs through to the completing upgrade phase, gets about halfway through that bit whereupon I get stuck in a reboot cycle. I have tried this now on three separate machines and two different installed partitions on one of them. Two of the …