Category Archives: News

Internet Explorer to Start Automatic Upgrade

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Fantastic decision by Microsoft (at last) to start automatic upgrades of Internet Explorer for everyone. As a developer we have all spent time griping about IE 6, its not good for users and its not good for developers. The web is a potentially dangerous place and IE 6 is no longer good enough to keep the user safe. The browser has been criticised repeatedly for its security flaws and the pace of patches being made available to address these. Similarly the advantages of moving to IE 9 are gladly welcomed by all developers I’m sure. IE 6 is now over 10 years old (first released in August 2001) and offers little of the features and capabilities of modern browsers.

Microsoft’s decision to change direction on this will entitle everyone to upgrade to the latest browser remaining safer than ever before and improving how 600 million people experience the web.

Official news from MS on the upgrade and roll out plan can be found on the Windows Team Blog

 

 

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Facebook security has changed and they’ve said nothing

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IMPORTANT NOTE : FB has changed and said nothing. Take a look at your URL (top box on your screen.) If you see “http” or just “www” instead of “https” you DO NOT have a secure session & can be hacked. Go to Account Settings – Account Security – click Change. Check box (secure browsing), click Save. FB has automatically set it on the non-secure setting! Do everyone a huge favour, copy & re-post

 

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IE 6 will out live IE 7 – and I have proof

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Microsoft have gone and released IE 8 (19/03/08) and with it finally gained ground on being a ’standards conformant’ web browser. This is excellent for the average user and long overdue. In fact it should in time make our lives as web developers easy simply because cross browser checking should be less demanding – will we ever be able to test in one browser?But then I was left thinking about how quickly this would be adopted particular within the elearning industry and I realised it may cause an interesting issue:Our user base has 2 principal operating systems

  1. Windows XP / Vista
  2. Windows 2000

The vast majority fall into the Windows XP group and therefore have the ability (from the manufactuer not necessarily company IT) to update. It is not unreasonable to assume the Microsfot update tool will push this out shortly. So everyone currently on IE7.0 moves on to IE8.0 probably within 6-12 months. But hang on a moment what about all those people on Windows 2000. There is no IE7.0 for them and certainly therefore no IE8.0.
Consequence: IE 6.0 is actually the last option here without an operating system upgrade which lets face it is unlikely if the machine has been around this long.So it therefore becomes conceivable that we’ll be left supporting IE6.0, 7.0 & 8.0 in the very near future, with decreasing attention given to IE 7.0.

And the proof…

http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie8-vs-ie6-rise-of-the-new-machine

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Firefox collections plugin

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Firefox has released a useful extension which I’ve been hunting for for some time now.

Simply: the ability to define a collection of plugins and install all of them with a single instruction. In fact they’ve gone further than this and allowed us to create collections of plugins which are available for others to click and grab. It really is simple and very useful.

Head over to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/editors_picks to see more. And if you’d like to access my all things google related collection check out the following: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/cdb63c71-9c70-f92a-5d80-554beb600806

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Westminster Annual Motorcycle Parking

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If like me you comute into work on a motorcycle and would like to purchase an annual motorcycle parking ticket then this guide may help:

Navigate to:  http://www.westminster.gov.uk/cashlessparking/

Click on Manage My Account

Click on My Account and login using your mobile phone number and pin.

Along the orange toolbar click on ‘buy permit’, you can now select to buy an annual parking ticket

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Evaluation of wordpress as an induction site?

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Great idea presented to me today – the idea that a company induction site could all quite easily be sat within an instance of wordpress. WordPress being the blogging tool used by thousands on a daily basis to provide a strong and capable back bone to maintain and publish content. Plus throw in the facility that it provides plugins and static pages and we have a small induction site which can be maintained without an IT person – perfect.

So where’s the downside – well it aint custom so it will look like your actually in a blog, this could if not maintained mean that content doesn’t get ‘posted’ for sometime. Could this mean that the content looks old, and the site looks poor. Possibly but on the flipside the ease of adding content might suggest that any editor responsible for the induction site could add stuff. Of course if there is no sub-editor either process or person then we could end up with a shambles but I’m prepared to guess that this wont be the case.

From a costing point of view its extremely encouraging – wordpress is free and we have the skills to hack the code into various shapes. Add to that that all the really juicy content is stored elsewhere – videos, articles etc and it we have a compelling opportunity to bring something into being without excessive cost of bespoke development.

I’ll update again shortly with pitfalls and successes.

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What is your throw away value?

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Concept:

Since childhood and the days I started receiving a reasonable amount of money each week (e.g. I’d got a job in the local cinema) I’ve had this concept of a throw-away-threshold. This is the amount of money that in a particular period, usually a day I’m prepared to twitter away to a hunch or meaningless indulgence.

At the age of 15 it was set at the amount of £1. Over the years I’ve watched it change and whilst watching a DIY home renovation program yesterday evening where it was clear their threshold had reached £200 I realised that at the grand age of 28 my threshold had reached £10.

I sighed and realised this had made my day, it feels grounding to still have a relatively low value before reasoning must take over from passion to take out my wallet.

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