After recently reading “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains“, I’ve been a bit provoked about how much time I waste online when getting things done. Chasing hyperlinks to all kinds of content, checking twitter, get distracted by mail. Major context switching! So I’m experimenting with a new workflow where I disable the network card on my PC , and just come online every few hours to clear the mailbox.  It’s been [...]

I’ve just installed a brand new OCZ Agility 3 Solid State Drive (SSD) into my ASUS UL80JT ASUS Laptop. The BIOS saw the drive immediately, so I figured I was in the clear. Sadly Windows 7 said it couldn’t find any devices to install on! Yikes! I discovered in this thread that other people have faced this problem too, and they had worked out some fixes. And (for me at least), there was a very easy [...]

You’re busy trying to use the Bootcamp Assistant to install a bootcamp partition on your shiny Macbook, when suddenly you’re greeted with the dreaded fragmentation dialog of death: So what does “The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved” actually mean? I mean, I’ve got 25Gb free and I only want a 10Gb windows partition! The answer lies in fragmentation. OSX seems to want a contigious block of clean disk to write [...]

So what *do* you do when your small child erases your iPhoto collection? I guess you undelete from the trash… But what happens if you didn’t know your photo collection was in the trash and you emptied it? You go to your most recent backup. But what happens when your most recent backup is 6 weeks old (you know, just before your newborn arrived?). You panic. I’ve had a Mac Mini for over a year, and [...]

I’ve played around with Google desktop (and others) in the past and never had much success. They all slurped too much CPU, didn’t handle my OpenOffice files or PDFs, and came with interfaces that were either too simple, or far too complex. My local Aussie PC mag, PC Authority did a feature on desktop search technologies this month and gave the editor’s choice to Yahoo! Desktop. I didn’t have much luck with Google desktop, but [...]

It would be pretty insane to argue that regularly delivering running, tested, value-add code is hazardous to any project. But when it comes to iterations, if you’re not careful the mojo can get very funky pretty quickly. I’ve just finished reading a fantastic article by Alistair Cockburn on the misuse of iterations in agile projects… and I’ve just realised that I’m living the nightmare myself! Alistair’s argument comes down to the fact that shipping iterations [...]

While some of my development is done on Mac, and some on Linux, most of my time is spent on Windows. Not really fussed about operating systems these days, so happy to work on whatever. Anyways, I work with this guy Shayne who knows more about Windows utilities than anyone, and he keeps showing me cool stuff. The first one is a clipboard extender called Yankee Clipper. This beast keeps a running history of your [...]

Well, my McAfee license has expired and I’m in the market for a new Virus Scanner. This time I’m after something that won’t bring my machine to a grinding halt, but still has current signature goodness. Enter F-Prot. These guys have been around forever – I remember their DOS software running on our PC Labs in undergrad circa ’92 – but their current offerings are just great. You can get editions for Windows, Linux & [...]