While glancing through LifeHacker feeds some time last week, my eye was caught by the headline "The pomodoro technique fights deadline anxiety with a timer". Not having heard of the technique before (although for all I know it may be old hat by now), and wondering how tomatoes fight anxiety, I read further. If you have not heard of the "Pomodoro Technique" before, I suggest you look at the Pomodoro technique site which gives a full explanation of what it is all about, and provides .....

Over the past couple of months, I have painstakingly avoided any articles related to Windows 7. My daily RSS feed, lifehacker, seemed to be particularly enthralled with all the new features. I did not have the time to "play" on a virtual server, and not wanting to install a beta or pre-release software as my primary operating system I simply ignored all of these articles. The other day, however, we acquired some new laptops and I found myself in a bit of a quandary with regard to.....

With the price of terabyte level storage media coming down significantly in the past few years, we decided it was high time that we setup a network backup server. In reality, the price of a computer and storage is marginal in relation to the cost of losing the data that i am rather embarrassed we have not done it sooner. Not wanting to invest in software, and also wanting to keep OS size down to a minimum, we decided on Linux as an OS. Since we had a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 on disk,.....

EDIT: I see SAGNS has updated and improved their website since this article (edited: 15 September 2009) A while back, while working on a rural settlements database, we were asked to consider the SAGNS database as a reference for settlement names. The data that we received was, to put it mildly, very poor. Locations were in the sea, in the northern hemisphere, in South America and for 50% of the database - nowhere at all. added to that, the alphanumeric data was full of mistakes a.....

a bit late, but I read a very interesting article - the anatomy of the twitter attack, outlining exactly how a twitter employee was recently hacked. Baiscally it boils down to the hacker using the Gmail password recovery which emailed the password to that Gmail account users secondary mail account. When requesting the password recovery tool,  Gmail offers a reminder as to which email account it is in the form of *******@h******.com. The hacker then guessed it to be a hotmail.....

A couple of weeks ago, I read an interesting article about Ekahau Heat Mapper through my RSS subscription to Lifehacker (article here). Ekahau offers a range of features depending on the version you choose (from Free to Survey professional). From their website, the primary features are listed as: "Ever wondered how far your wireless goes, or how far do the neighbouring wireless networks extend to? Ekahau HeatMapper will display the coverage area of all the access points in the .....

We recently had a requirement to provide a layer control with label and colour customisation for a Openlayers based web solution with a Mapserver WMS. As part of this project we were pleasantly surprised as to exactly how customisable Mapserver is through the URL request to the mapserv CGI  (perhaps i shouldn't be surprised!). What we first did is create a database driven layer control, enabling the user to turn layers and labels on or off. The url is .....

Christopher Schmidt announced yesterday on the OpenLayers mailing list, the final release of OpenLayers 2.8 The email follows. The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the release of OpenLayers 2.8, the latest stable release of OpenLayers. The 2.8 release adds a number of important features, the full list of which can be found in the Release Notes, at http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.8/Notes. Some of the highlights include: Support for multi-layer vect.....

We are busy on a project that requires the application to be run on a windows 2003 server running Apache 2.2 as the primary internet server. Since IIS can run PHP applications, I figured that Apache would run dotnet without any problems. As it turns out there is a module for running dotnet application. It is however not very well supported and you have to make sure you get the Apache 2.2 version, which can be found here http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=.....

We have just finished a successful upgrade from Umbraco V3.0 beta to Umbraco V4.1.2 and all went well. It was not an upgrade in the sense of applying updates patches, instead, more of a case of redesigning the entire site on a seperate URL and transferring existing content across. V3.0 beta has served us very well for the past 2.5 years, however, we decided it was time to upgrade not only to stay current, but also to have our blog integrated into our website. We were previously .....