Monthly Archives: October 2009
WordPress 2.8.5
It’s been a year now since I was first properly introduced to WordPress and started using it to create an online archive of my work. Over the last 12 months I have grown to appreciate the power and flexibility of this piece of online blogging software and feel the need today to go in to a little more detail.
WordPress is a free and open source publishing application which gives home users the ability to quickly and easily create an online blog using their own domain name. Blogging, the term used to describe the maintenance of a website used to chronicle information has become incredibly popular in recent years as more users realise that the Internet provides a global platform which can be used to broadcast their ideas or opinions.
For most, the prospect of coding a website from scratch is not just a daunting but potentially impossible task, and … Read the rest
Windows 7 Release
“It’s the big week when Windows 7 is launched on Thursday, but one statistic that grabbed my eye was in a Wikipedia article stating that there are estimated to be three times as many XP computers in use today than Vista ones (68.49% XP versus 22.39% Vista). This suggests that XP is far from being the dinosaur system that the marketing people would have us believe. I’ve still got two XP desktops and no complaints, even though they are getting on a bit.
It also leads to questions about how popular Vista was with the general public and business world, and in this a recent BBC article a Microsoft executive admits that Vista never fully recovered from the early criticism, and they hope for better things with Windows 7.
Two quotes in particular that stick out is that of Annette Jump, a research director at a technology research firm who … Read the rest
Kongregate
This week Matt Stevenson from our Torquay Road store has kindly offered to write about the fantastic gaming site Kongregate which, as a non gamer, I felt ill-qualified to cover. Enjoy!
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A year and a half ago I was shown a website that was pitched to me as “YouTube for video games” and as an avid gamer I was rather keen to get on this website and see just how it worked. The website was kongregate.com and it has since become one of my top visited sites for many reasons.
Kongregate currently features 19,620 completely free mostly independently produced games and more are being added daily. Whilst not necessary, users are encouraged to register for an account so they can use the sites social element and contribute to the site with ratings and reviews.
The social part of the site (to justify endless hours of gaming instead of getting … Read the rest
MediaPortal
Tomorrow evening represents a huge technological change for football fans as we see the Ukraine v England World Cup qualifier this Saturday become an Internet only event. The move follows the collapse of the television company Setanta who previously had the rights to the game after no alternative agreements with conventional broadcasters were reached.
Personally, I don’t fancy the idea of sitting in front of a laptop, dressed in full England Away Kit, by myself. Half the experience is surely either the pub atmosphere or having the game played on a big screen with a couple of mates and I genuinely wonder how many people will stump up the £11.99 subscription fee (£4.99 if paid two days in advance).
The idea that one method of watching the game is so palatable and one so disagreeable got me thinking about how our opinions of these two types of media are so … Read the rest
dBan
Over three years ago my web developer at Refresh Creations wrote an article which I published dealing with the question of formatting a hard drive so that the contents were completely unrecoverable. Whether you plan to sell your computer on at the end of its life, recycle it, give it to charity or even chuck it at the tip, it is imperative that you dispose of any potentially sensitive data on the hard drive.
I try not to recycle articles however meeting people on a weekly basis who would more than happily sell a computer on eBay after having simply used Windows to delete their old data has convinced me that in this instance it is necessary.
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With data security becoming a greater issue on a daily basis it’s important to make sure that you securely remove all your data from your hard drives before you decide to sell … Read the rest
