Well I’ve been using #! for about a week now. I’m still enjoying it’s simplicity but the Openbox desktop started to get on my nerves a bit. For that reason I’ve decided to give the Xfce version a try. I could have simply converted my existing installation into a multi-session one but instead I decided to go for a fresh install and I’m glad I did because it gave me another chance to appreciate the installation process.
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For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been using Ubuntu almost exclusively on the desktop. But recently I’ve been thinking about making a change. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this post but needless to say I have been in search of a new distro. I only have 1 absolute requirement when choosing a new one, it must be Debian based. I’m a big fan of Apt which in my opinion is unrivaled as a package manager. Read more…
Today I finally got around to fixing my wife’s laptop. It’s a HP Pavilion DV8000 series machine running Windows XP which is about 4 years old. It died about 12 months or so ago and has been hiding under the bed ever since. Read more…
Last week I was browsing the web just trying to catch up with some posts that I’d received through Twitter when I came across this from Allison Randall on the Ubuntu archives.
The main thing that jumped out at me was a reference to something called Quickly. Read more…
One of the biggest tech stories in the news today has been the new Apple App Store “try before you buy” apps. As far as I can tell this is actually just a separate section of the store where all the ‘Lite’ or ‘Free’ versions of pay for apps can be viewed in one place. In which case I don’t see how this is anything new at all.
In order to actually bring something new to the App Store and deliver better value for money for iPhone, iPad, iPod users what Apple actually needs to do is implement the 24 hour refund policy that is available on the Android Market.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the new coalition government gearing up for an attack on the BBC. First we had the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt calling for a cut in the licence fee. Currently the full cost of the BBC licence fee stands at £145.50. This works out at just under 40p per day.
So for the same price as a tabloid newspaper containing a substantial amount of advertising, celebrity gossip and a small amount of actual news (biased of course) you can get access to the wealth of content provided by the BBC. Read more…
I read a quotation from Andy Burnham yesterday on LabourList about the Labour party being too London-centric and it got me thinking about an issue that has been annoying me for some time now. Namely the habit that the Labour party has of parachuting candidates into safe seats around election time. Read more…
Does anyone remember the sketch from the Fast Show where the woman is repeatedly ignored by the men she’s with? They’re trying to solve a problem and she’s giving them the answer but they don’t hear her. It’s like she’s not even there.
Then suddenly one of the men comes to a realisation and repeats her idea exactly. Brilliant say the others and away they go leaving the woman standing there thinking WTF! Read more…
Over the last couple of days there has been report after report about how the new coalition government are going to demand cuts of up to 40% in some departments. This figure has been revised from the 25% projected previously. There are various theories being expounded for this increase. Some people are saying that the cuts have to be this deep in order to manage the national debt whilst others argue that the tories are using this as an excuse and these cuts are simply part of their plan to advance some right-wing ideology. Read more…
I’ve recently come across an issue with the DateTimePicker component within the .net framework. The problem is basically that you cannot set the Value property of the object to nothing. This makes it impossible to bind to business objects where a null date field is needed (DateTime.MinValue or Nothing in VB). I thought I would document my solution in the hope that someone else may find it useful. Read more…