We're back up north after Mix:UK 07 and I thought I'd follow up my earlier post with a few thoughts on the event and it's content. Before I do that, however, I need to give a cheer for our guys: Jonny performed incredibly in the Guiter Hero competition to be triumphant in front of his screaming supporters, and Sam, …

Well, it's just after 3pm on day one of Mix:UK 07. I'm taking a break with a coffee so I thought I'd post. It's mixed bag down here (sorry - no pun intended). The technology is fantastic - the stuff that can be achieved with WPF and Silverlight is excellent. I'm still a little uncertain that usability has been …

One of the last projects I was involved in before I left the University of Bradford to join Black Marble was a new design for the external web site of the institution. I'd pretty much finished the construction of the page layouts and styles before I left, but it's only now that the site is about to go live. I've …

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 …

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 …

Still no Windows Mobile 6 update for my Orange SPV M3100, but they did release an update to WM5 recently. Installing said update turned out to be slightly trickier than I expected. I don't know if anybody else has experienced the same problem, but a word to the wise - don't try the update on Windows Vista! The first …

Douglas Coupland's Jpod has been doing the rounds in the office of late. I enjoyed MicroSerfs, so approached Jpod with excitement. Frankly, I'm disappointed. It's not the writing - I 've enjoyed pretty much all of his books. It's not that the books are similar in approach and style (they are) but rather the contrast in …

I think I've mentioned before how I've been updating our IT infrastructure. Company growth has meant a need for expanded services. Add to that new versions of SharePoint and Exchange, mix in a need to run virtual servers for development and you have a need for more tin. Over the past six months I've expanded our domain …

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 …