tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18985671992026417122026-05-06T21:44:26.512+01:00All things techy, Motorsport and me.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-11582890072949119672018-08-09T20:00:00.000+01:002018-08-09T20:00:26.622+01:00

Firstly let me say I'm not a finance expert, nor do I hold any qualifications in economics - so what I'm about to talk about is just my own hypothesis... Is Tesla really going to be a key player in the future? Recently there has been a lot of talk about Elon Musk's plan to take Tesla back into some kind of private ownership. Now whether or not this is possible, let alone legal in the way it was

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-91924087128831824222017-07-26T21:29:00.000+01:002017-07-26T21:29:26.346+01:00

The UK Government has announced that it intends to pass a law that will make the sale of petrol and diesel cars illegal from 2040 onward. I've read a lot of comments on social media by people who are either scared of losing the comfort they have with a hydrocarbon based fuelled vehicle or misinformed by the 'negatives' of an alternative fuelled car, namely electric battery powered. I intend to

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-11972102117039634222015-07-15T10:40:00.000+01:002015-07-16T16:54:40.921+01:00

The dust has truly settled now on an enthralling and very entertaining inaugural season of the all-electric single make Formula E racing series. It has succeeded in places where Formula 1 and other events have failed, being very accessible to fans, great racing and great personalities to boot. But what does season two have in store? The SPARK FE01 cars will remain mostly the same with the

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-5426417479537321282015-07-11T12:03:00.000+01:002015-07-11T12:03:35.844+01:00

This week saw the arrival of the Google Car in Austin, Texas. This is the next stage in Google's attempt to evaluate how well the car performs outside of California where it has so far performed very well it seems, covering over 1 million autonomous miles. The odd looking vehicle is still someway off production and retail sales but what does it mean for the world when it does start to hit

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-359911571527886512013-05-10T17:48:00.000+01:002013-05-10T18:35:44.476+01:00

After reading this great piece on how a very promising Kickstarter project for a spiritual successor to the 1990's Road Rash series is failing to reach a fairly modest goal of $160,000 (by nearly $40,000 last time I checked), it got me thinking: is Kickstarter starting to lose it's appeal? The article is written by Paul Fisch, one of the senior developers on the project, highlighting where

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-15718837362342085162013-04-18T19:56:00.001+01:002013-04-24T15:30:43.630+01:00

A recent complaint filed on Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with the Federal Trade Commission, requested that the agency investigate the US's four major wireless carriers into their practice of providing Android updates to customers. The ACLU are concerned that a large majority of Android handset users are being left behind in the update curve. This means that there are an

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-90075876088418841202012-03-06T20:54:00.000+00:002012-03-06T20:54:52.097+00:00

A week on from first installing Ubuntu and each day I boot into it with less and less apprehension. I said my next test would be video playing and thanks to VLC (installed from the Ubuntu Software Centre of course) I was playing every video (in various formats) I threw at it. Burning ISOs also is a doddle thanks to the built-in software. The only item left to try is to install the Java SDK

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-10955495957509622512012-03-01T20:51:00.000+00:002012-03-02T10:01:47.556+00:00

I'm a few days into my "Week with Linux" and so far I have yet to find a reason why I wouldn't want to stick with it. So today I decided to throw it a challenge that even my Windows install has had trouble with in the past... my printer! It is an HP3900 series which for some reason has trouble installing on about three different Windows 7 based machines. Not to say I didn't get it eventually

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-4051553995262553852012-02-28T21:04:00.002+00:002012-02-29T09:34:25.696+00:00

After my previous post speculating about the possibility that both Apple and Microsoft are lining up a significant change to the open nature of their respective operating systems, I've decided to pose one of the questions to myself... Will I go Linux? The only way to see if it is a possibility is to test the theory. And by test I mean spend at least a week solely using Linux on my

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-48901401895271317612012-02-20T15:29:00.002+00:002012-02-20T15:29:14.731+00:00

A few weeks ago Google announced the release of a beta version of Chrome for Android (well Ice Cream Sandwich to be more precise). The initial findings are very positive for what a full release could bring, the obvious being the sync between the desktop version on on your mobile device. But doesn't it kind of limit the advantage a Chromebook running ChromeOS might have had? For me a tablet

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-12254203984039075902012-02-17T13:25:00.000+00:002012-02-17T13:54:07.147+00:00

With details of the next version of OS X (10.8 Mountain Lion) being released through developer previews, one feature has caught the eye of the geek technology press in particular... Gatekeeper. As the OS News article explains "Starting with Mac OS X 10.8, Apple's desktop operating system will be restricted to Mac App Store and Apple-signed applications by default (with an opt-out switch),

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-7833002810680865602012-02-09T14:42:00.001+00:002012-02-09T14:42:09.928+00:00

Ooh how exciting! Look what my work has just bought for me! As the world becomes ever more mobile, we are trying to make all our web services mobile friendly. And rather go down the App route with these offerings, we made the decision that fancy mobile websites would be the more inclusive decision. We don't want to be upsetting the three Windows Mobile 7 users now do we?! And it would mean that

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-10951416982767989832012-01-19T21:51:00.000+00:002012-02-17T13:35:05.595+00:00

Security is hugely important and huge business. Recently there have been some high profile security breaches and presumably a lot of instances of unauthorised access that have not been made public. The implications for businesses and their customers can be devastating. Some companies never recover from a disaster, especially those with no or even a poor disaster recovery policy / procedure /

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-20881599772335067192012-01-16T22:45:00.001+00:002012-01-16T22:45:35.984+00:00

... go through some training again. We should all try to keep our skills topped up and thanks to the Codecademy Team it is something all developers (and wannabe developers) can do for free! http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0 They are offering a free week by week tutorial for learning Javascript. So far, two weeks in and I have to say I'm very impressed, teaching programming principals in

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-86176020599200267762012-01-09T14:23:00.002+00:002012-01-09T14:30:07.593+00:00

I love stats. I spend quite a bit of my job compiling and analysing statistics. As this is the first blog post of the year, I thought it would be fun to look back at the browser/visitor stats for people looking at my blog. Here are some of the highlights: 86% of visitors were new to the blog (not been running that long so to be expected). Over 2,000 unique visitors were recorded in 2011. 50% of

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-39716023317247952902011-12-08T11:19:00.001+00:002011-12-08T11:21:20.523+00:00

Just read a fascinating piece by the guys at Sony Ericsson about how they take the latest Android source code release through development and testing to deployment to consumers. Most end users should read this to appreciate the time and effort required to get it working on recently released handsets. Some might start to realise that it isn't a case of "Next, next, next, finish". Lots of time and

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-29141039726346382792011-11-25T10:12:00.001+00:002012-02-17T13:35:58.103+00:00

A month or so ago I decided that I would take advantage of the recent price drop of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Android mobile phone. They had been dropping price quite substantially from the £349 RRP to a recent low of £129.99. I picked mine up direct from O2 for £149.99 knowing that I would be using my new favourite network GiffGaff (powered by O2). My motivation for this choice of phone

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-79094756777388833592011-11-23T11:51:00.001+00:002011-11-23T11:53:55.955+00:00

After a short period of testing this, I've found that a mailto: link only seems to accept a character limit of 500. I've Google it and found a number of 2000 should be more the case? One work around would be to put some of the addresses into the 'CC' field I suppose, but not as elegant as I would like. So where is the limit? The browser? The e-mail client? Or is it an RFC agreed limit? Anyone

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-14683234581750144142011-11-22T11:36:00.001+00:002011-11-22T11:38:53.267+00:00

... stop clearly good code from working?! Whilst trying to write a VBA piece to export a chart from Excel as a PNG with a colleague today, we spent AGES trying to get a very simple section to work (specify the file name and open the 'Save As' dialogue). After what felt like an eternity we discovered that taking the .extension off from the file name string solved the problem! Now I thought that

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-88652693248653005582011-11-16T10:18:00.001+00:002011-11-16T10:21:41.550+00:00

After months of trouble with Vodafone (http://tonyyeb.blogspot.com/2011/07/giffgaff-too-good-to-be-true.html) I have made the permanent switch to the O2 powered network, GiffGaff. I have to say that performance has been excellent on both mobile internet and voice/SMS. In my experience they have easily put some of the bigger networks to shame, providing great value for money and service

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-42038653400814421882011-10-25T10:11:00.001+01:002011-10-25T10:11:53.143+01:00

Last week saw the one year anniversary of my blog! Woop! Firstly it highlighted my lack of recent posts. Sorry but working in education you find that September and October are the busiest months. Secondly I've really enjoyed posting my little nuggets of information. And thirdly thanks for clicking the Google ads. The small amount they bring has been greatly received. I'm hoping to be back

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-75688719150509457322011-08-24T14:52:00.001+01:002011-08-24T14:52:33.691+01:00

After a day of testing by auth1299 (thanks once again) I am happy to release DHCP Checker v2.4. Hit the download link for your copy: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16702040/dhcpcheckerv2.4.zip Please pass on any comments, suggestions, donations and bugs to the email address in the file or in the comments of this post.

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-72521470706256122782011-08-23T15:31:00.000+01:002011-08-23T15:31:00.129+01:00

Thanks to auth1299 who kindly offered to test and help iron out bugs in v2.3 we should soon be able to release DHCP Checker v2.4. It is now only compatible with Windows Server 2008. Future versions may include IPv6 support. Anyone using that internally yet? Is there any need? If you do please get in touch and maybe we could do some testing in the future.

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-11944606783302993432011-08-12T15:29:00.000+01:002011-08-12T15:29:53.567+01:00

A few days ago the multiple mobile OS development environment PhoneGap finally reached version 1.0. Here are a few of the technical improvements you'll find in PhoneGap 1.0: Overall API stability and “pluggable” architecture W3C DAP API compatibility Contacts API Remote debugging tools I hope to install and test very soon. Feel free to post any findings in the comments.

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1898567199202641712.post-31252793635665042212011-08-09T08:51:00.001+01:002011-08-09T08:53:06.083+01:00

While working on a mobile only website, I wanted to make the site just for mobile devices (a bit like m.youtube.com or m.facebook.com) and no matter what I did the page was always bigger than the screen of the target device. Anyway thanks to Google the answer was in their Android Developer help: http://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/targeting.html <head>     <title>

Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09628988035652973072noreply@blogger.com0