Real World Computing

I'm not a person who does a whole lot of product bashing here on my blog but right now, I'm pretty miffed with DELL and it will be a cold day in hell before I give them yet another chance. My first Intel/AMD PC was an IBM XT and I was pretty happy with it at the time. A few years later when IBM went down the Microchannel route, their brand name got so dirty that I thought I'd never see myself going back to it. I was therefore quite surprised when their hardware turnaround (they abandoned microchannel and came back to the fold) produced such great devices. I stuck with IBM until they stopped making PCs - and never regretted a minute of them. Those were classy machines. When IBM sold out to Lenovo, I had to find another brand name. It's fine to buy some brandless junk for home but when you've got a business to support, a brand name is everything - and they usually come with a SLA. Unfortunately, there weren't many brands left in the PC market. I decided to g...

A long time ago, it was common practice to simply put your email address on the web using a mailto url link. Unfortunately, this practice results in a ton of spam coming your way courtesy of spambots. A Potted History of Methods Over the years, a lot of different methods for getting around this problem have become available. These include the low tech methods, such as having text which reads " send email to myaccount at hotmail dot com " and needs to be reinterpreted by the reader. The use of escape codes (try http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php for an example), and several other ways of encoding the address in javascript. No method has been more successful than simply giving people a blank form to write their email in. Now, in Lotus Notes/Domino, this is simplicity itself but when it comes to html, you need to write a bit of code - and even then, you need to be careful not to expose anything on the web. Getting External Help It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel wh...

After a seemingly interminable wait from IBM, it looks like Foundations is finally released (and moving) within Australia. This article from Australian IT looks at the benefits and low cost of implementing the solution. Flexible EPSI takes the Lotus Position http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,,25462866-24169,00.html If I were starting out with a small business, there's no question as to what I'd be recommending because unlike the competing products, IBM Lotus Foundations will give tech-savvy businesses room to grow. Their comments on the use of a hosting solution (which would be one of my other choices) are particularly interesting; "We went to the shared environment, but we grew reasonably quickly and it just became more expensive as every licence was a lot more money and the bandwidth we were consuming was costing us money," EPSI co-founder Nigel Wilson says. "We wanted more flexibility to do more things, and this hosting organisation was just not set...

Today, I read a brilliant article; Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html Rob Weir has repeated a series of tests he did a couple of months ago. This time on updated software. Specifically, he's testing to see how well spreadsheets transport (with their formulae intact) between the various Open Document Format (ODF) compatible applications. The results of his earlier tests were quite encouraging and it was exciting to see that Microsoft were coming to the party with Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 offering support. But what kind of support exactly? Well, it turns out that they're VERY incompatible and very dangerous too. They happily import values into Excel but they lose all the formulae. Nasty. Imagine importing a critical financial spreadsheet without knowing that the formulae are gone. There's a couple of Notes on the site for IBM Lotus Symphony to correct but since they concern the beta releas...