Category Archives: Technology

Is Stack Exchange Now Free?

Well, that depends on your definition of free.
In Stack Exchange 1.0 you could pay them a monthly fee to setup your own Stack Exchange site, on your own domain, and you were free to use it for whatever you liked.
In Stack Exchange 2.0 you no longer have to pay them a monthly fee (hurrah!) but [...]

Windows XP, The New DOS

Windows XP is the new DOS. A piece of legacy software which hangs around forever and elicits a “I had no idea companies still used XP” reaction from the new IT guy, twenty years after it was supposed to be replaced by something better.

Google Trims The Fat, Gets Serious

January 14th, 2009, marks the day that Google grew up.
In a coordinated series of blog postings Google announced its intention to scuttle a number of its poor performing products, let go of some staff and close some of its offices — showing that in 2009 it intends to focus on keeping costs down and make [...]

Internet Speeds In Australia

Not only is broadband expensive in Australia, but it is also slow. Slow, as in painfully-slow. In comparison to other developed countries like America, Sweden, Japan, South Korea and so on, it is appalling. But what is really annoying about all of this is that it is not necessary — our Internet connection speeds are stuck in [...]

The ‘Twitter Becomes Useful‘ Tipping Point, Where Is It?

I’ll admit it upfront: I’m a lousy Twitterer. I try to give it a go every month or so by tweeting frequently, replying to other peoples tweets and generally participating, but then I usually drop off the face of the twitter-earth within a day or two — mostly because I find that it consumes too [...]

Cuil’s Text Overload Problem (Amongst Others)

Cuil has received a lot of bad press over the past few months. Unfortunately, much of it deserved. I hadn’t used Cuil since it was launched but after it’s spider visited one of my websites (and proceeded to trigger a bunch of 404’s by looking for files that are long gone — a mistake that [...]

The Problem With The Cloud

The long saga that is Omnidrive appears to be over. For those of you who don’t know, Omndrive was an Australian startup that offered free online file storage and had some early success.
I have been a registered user of Omndrive for around three years, although I haven’t actively used it in about two years. Their [...]

TechCrunchIT Is A Little Light On The IT

I was excited when TechCrunch first unveiled TechCrunchIT, but not anymore. Steve Gillmor is obviously very passionate about his writing — but he doesn’t really cover the topics I imagined an IT Enterprise blog would cover. What’s more, every post is a mini-essay and he’s the only (active) writer. If the TechCrunch gang are serious about [...]

Bad Idea Of The Week: Google SearchWiki

Google SearchWiki is a bad idea. Google’s regular old search engine might not be perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the competition and it’s a hell of a lot better than any human powered search engine could ever be.
My hope is that Google isn’t serious about this and that it’s simply [...]

Small Basic: Fun Programming For Kids

A few weeks ago Microsoft unveiled a new little projected called Small Basic. The projects aim is to provide kids with a simplified environment where they can learn the basics of programming — and have some fun while doing it.
Derived from the BASIC programming language, and based on the .Net platform, Small Basic has been [...]