Technology, Productivity and Automating Everything…
One of the first apps I loaded onto my laptop (after paving it and installing Vista Ultimate) was Windows Live Writer (which I’m using to compose this post – on a plane at 38,000 ft on my way to Boston). So it all installed OK, I ran it and it launches…
I’m very impressed with the improvements in Outlook 2007. The ToDo bar is proving a real godsend – it can (optionally) display a calendar (one or more months), appointments (fill the remaining space in the ToDo Bar or a only a fixed number of appointments, and Tasks. Left is a…
Last weekend I upgraded my work laptop to Windows Vista (Ultimate edition) and Office 2007 Professional (I believe these are actually released ‘officially’ to business customers tomorrow (30th Nov), but I got the RTM copy fro MSDN Subscriber Downloads. Anyway, the Vista install went very well – nice and easy,…
At work I have been the champion of an Integration Framework for our Archive One product. This is a set of API’s, events and open file formats embedded into the Archive One products that allow customization ‘around the edge’. The kind of thing that can be done with the Integration…
At work, we use SupportSuite for support case tracking. This is a real neat product but the support is dreadful. I was running version 3.0.0.80 and there are a few problems with it, they recently announced version 3.1.40. I set up a testing copy and tried an upgrade – no…
At work we are heavily into MAPI (we provide email archiving solutions). MAPI is Microsoft’s mainstream supported and recommended protocol for accessing Exchange. There are currently two main versions of MAPI – ‘Exchange MAPI’ and ‘Outlook MAPI’. Exchange MAPI is the version that is installed when you install Exchange System Manager…
In the first version of my GPS Library software (written in VB6) I had a ‘Protocol’ property that indicated which protocol we were using (for example Garmin, Magellan, NMEA etc). Then, every time we needed to do something at the protocol layer (Sending or Receiving data) we had an if…
In the first version of my GPS Library (written in VB6) I had a big horrible multiple nested if statement that handled the intelligence behind what to do when a new frame of data was received – if we were sending Waypoints to the GPS and the frame was an…
About 4 or 5 years ago I wrote a GPS ActiveX control in VB6.0.Although it work really well (and fast), it was difficult to maintain – to be honest it was pretty messy, a large monolith with some real horrible 283654276354 line functions.I sold it as Kapie Systems for a…
One of my gripes with dasBlog is the reporting. To get to reports I have to browse to my blog, login and then view the reports online – bit of a pain doing this every day (yes I am so vain that I like to see my stats on a…