Manda QoP

Going Google

2011-11-29T11:22:00.001+13:00

Okay, time to bite the bullet. I'm always going on about how great Google Apps are and promoting them to other people, but for some reason I'm not fully utilising Google to their full potential when it comes to my own business, so to see how easy it is to set up with Google Apps, I've decided to migrate my website from its current opensource FuzzyLime CMS to Google.I was planning a complete

Chromebook Review

2011-10-17T10:56:00.000+13:00

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a Google presentation in Auckland. It was a chance to catch up on the latest news from Google Apps and to also get a first look at an actual Chromebook. Chromebooks aren’t yet available (officially) in NZ and Ed from Google said that they’re due for release here early next year. If you can’t wait that long then Amazon are doing some good deals and you

Death of an icon

2011-10-14T09:37:00.003+13:00

One of my all time heroes died this past week at the age of 70. A man without whom modern coding would not exist, and yet news reports have missed this sad event. I sent the following email to NZStuff in the hope that some coverage will belatedly occur. The younger iOS generation should know about dmr and what he did for all of us. --------------------- Hi, There's been a lot of press

Method Fusion

2011-03-29T10:34:00.000+13:00

I'm a great fan of Agile, Six Sigma and any other tools that make development, project management and profitability easier to achieve. I also believe that you should use the tools and not allow the tools to use you. You don't have to worship at the church of Agile in order to reap benefits from its various tools, and you certainly don't have to pick one style over another, pick, choose and

Toothpaste to the rescue

2011-02-17T20:30:00.002+13:00

After getting my new phone last year, an HTC Desire, I’d been having great fun taking loads of photos with the camera, it rocks... I haven’t used my real camera since getting the phone, but then just before Christmas disaster struck. Okay, maybe more of a minor inconvenience than a disaster, but I have a cure that others may not know about. The basic hardware layout of phones means that the

Volvo YCC

2011-01-31T12:25:00.000+13:00

Did you know, that in 2005 Volvo created a car for women, that was designed by women. What I want to know is, how they managed to find a group of women even more sexist against women drivers than most men are?The car has:No bonnet or any access to the car's internal workings (women don't need to look at all that scary stuff) An engine that automatically sends a message to the garage when it needs

It’s drastic, but I bet it would work.

2011-01-13T19:43:00.001+13:00

If you tend to only read the local news, you may have missed the news that rhino poachers in South Africa are now being shot dead This seems to be rather drastic but I bet it helps lower the poaching incidents and I think that this approach would work for recidivist drink drivers. Here’s my plan (I’ll put it in place when I’m queen of the World):1. You’re caught drink driving.

Thank you Google

2010-12-05T10:31:00.000+13:00

Google, you rock! The Navigation add-on on the Android is rather spiffing, especially now you've fixed it so that it works in NZ. However, there is one wee bitty problem in the function where you can speak your destination, though it is proving somewhat amusing. We've tried Kiwi, English, South African, Welsh and German accents, which all result in some interesting locations; only when we

Further adventures on the dark side - DB2

2010-12-05T10:23:00.000+13:00

DB2 is currently driving me insane. All the normal things you can do in SQLServer seem to be missing, PIVOT for example, which in SQLServer allows you to.... wait for it.... cross tab your queries, weird that eh? Though if they'd been really creative about it then it could have caused your data to do a rendition of swan lake before settling down into a cross-tab; that I would pay to see.

Adventures on the dark side

2010-08-24T21:24:00.000+12:00

Last week I trundled along to a full day event covering various aspects of Oracle DB schemas, indexing and database optimisation. Why did I do this? From a personal point of view I like to understand SQL from all the different viewpoints. I spent 2 years as a Sybase developer, I am currently studying for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 exams and have recently been focusing on performance tuning

Cycle Powered Internet Surfing

2010-06-30T12:13:00.000+12:00

We were having one of the usual random discussions at work today, you know the kind, conversations that start off relatively normally, degrade into utter cobblers and then go off at weird tangents and you end up discussing cycle powered internet. Overview In order to surf the Internet, staff members need to use the pedal attachment on their PC to generate surfing minutes. Plus points Less

Strange goings on in SQL land

2010-04-30T09:36:00.000+12:00

Weird things with dates I have a simple sql script that extracts raw data from a quality centre database and extracts it to an excel spreadsheet, part of this is shown below: SELECT bg_bug_id as DefectID, bg_detection_date as RawDetectionDate, convert(varchar(10), bg_detection_date, 103) as FormatDetDate, bg_closing_date as RawClosingDate, convert(varchar(10),

Logic FAIL: Monty Hall Problem – GAH!

2010-04-28T10:18:00.000+12:00

Now those of you who know me well will know that I love maths, I can spend hours and hours playing around with equations and figures and formulae, however a friend (http://rocko.co.nr/) told me at the weekend about the Monty Hall Problem and this one got me right in the logic chip. My first reaction to this was ‘that can’t be right, it doesn’t make mathematical sense’. It is a very counter

SQL Server 2008 Certifications update

2010-04-12T10:16:00.001+12:00

SQL Saturday in Auckland went really well on Saturday. Huge thank you to everyone who attended and especially to Dave Dustin for pulling it all together. On Saturday I re-presented the 15 minute certifications talk. As the last time this was presented was November 2008, there were quite a few changes. The ppt slides have been updated to reflect the changes since Nov 2008 and the latest

Shiny Things

2010-04-07T12:46:00.001+12:00

One of the hardest things for me as a geek is forcing myself to walk past shiny new games with large pink SPECIAL OFFER PRICE stickers on them. Please supermarkets, don’t put cut price games on the way to checkouts where you can ensnare sun-starved and fragile geeks. Point in question, yesterday I went into the big red shed to buy a printer for the office and only through sheer willpower

Google Lab

2010-03-11T21:13:00.006+13:00

If you're one of those people who uses Google for email, searching for internet stuffs and looking at their house on Google Earth, then it's time to do a bit more wandering around the Google site. Did you know that there are LOADS of other things going on with Google? Have a bit of a browse around their site one evening whilst you're having a surf and you could find all sorts of cool little

Some much needed sleep

2010-03-10T12:00:00.002+13:00

I’ve been feeling pretty tired recently, well, for about 10 years. Various trips to the doctor have resulted in all manner of weird diagnosis’ for this, including when I was 30 the wonderful medical opinion of “it’s just because you’re older now, it’s normal, of course you won’t feel as energetic as you did in your 20’s” erm…. I’m not an expert or anything but I’m pretty sure that’s not right.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life

2010-02-25T17:10:00.002+13:00

This isn't a geeky post I'm afraid, apart from a brief bit of science content courtesy of Wikipedia. I try to avoid blogging on personal items however, this is a pretty major change that will be taking place in my life and I'm fairly sure that people are going to notice. On the 15th March I'm having a gastric sleeve operation. This removes the portion of the stomach that releases ghrelin, the

Wonder days

2010-02-16T13:29:00.007+13:00

I've been thinking about IT and how it has changed, for most people I guess it's changed for the better, but for some of us it's just not fun anymore. IT used to be about inventing, creating, figuring things out, getting excited about new things and going to work was a great adventure. For fun I'd pick up a new language and figure out writing a little app, like the little game I wrote using

Busking day

2010-01-24T17:45:00.003+13:00

Hola - so today was a day of busking and lawn mowing, the busking was far and away more fun. My friend is still a LONG way from raising the 1500 quid that she's trying to raise for The Meningitis Trust, so if anyone out there feels that someone completing a half ironman in Jan, full ironman in March and the London Marathon in April is working hard enough to warrant some of your money, please

Darth Vodem

2010-01-21T09:40:00.003+13:00

Unable to stand the pressure of not being able to check my work email whilst on the client site, I have given in to the empire and purchased a prepaid Darth Vodem. On the plus side, it only cost $90 and came with $40 free credit, then got topped up by another $10 when I entered my details online. Groovy. See folks, this is what happens when your IT people block gmail and some of your

w00t!

2010-01-12T22:34:00.002+13:00

This morning at 8am NZT I passed my MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 certification exam. It was a 20 minute trial resulting in a 92% score. One was aiming for 100% but at that time of the morning it's just lucky that I could even spell my name on the form. I am, to be perfectly honest, gobsmacked.So kiddies... the trick to making this exam so simple? Lots of practical experience that gets the stuff into

Police Officer Dragged By Stolen Car

2010-01-11T20:30:00.002+13:00

NZ Journalists really are shockingly bad. A police officer gets dragged along underneath a stolen car and what do they focus on? The officer has had a sex change. What the hell does that have to do with the story? It is completely and utterly irrelevant!

Avatar

2009-12-13T19:48:00.002+13:00

I've had the Avatar game on pre-order for a wee while and was very happy to receive it last week on release day. I was expecting a box to arrive with a pair of swanky red and green glasses after all the 3D hype, but I guess the Wii version isn't 3D as no swanky glasses for me. I am a tad disappointed in that side of things. Anyhoo... on to the game itself. I started playing Avatar last week

Dynamics CRM - reinstalling a broken install

2009-10-12T13:31:00.006+13:00

A week was spent doing battle with virtual machines, setting up servers, sorting out IIS, SQL Server, AD etc etc... and when everything was in place, Dynamics CRM was installed. More time was then spent making sure that the install would make it past the verification page and at long last we had a beautifully set up instance of Dynamics CRM running on a virtual server, attached to our domain and