Domain.com

So I dipped my toe into web development as a favor for a friend and it feels like I've been bitten through no real fault of my own. While the site design isn't necessarily what I would have chosen or gone with its was exactly what he wanted and it seems to work quite well. 

He wanted to put the site live and asked for my opinion on web hosting. Domain.com have been recommended by various online communities I visit for the last 4 or 5 years, they also have a pretty good ethical stance (they seem like saints compared to my regular hosting provider... GoDaddy) anyway despite good promotional offers and Domain.com are crap, hosted applications (phpBB, WordPress etc) are very very slow, and their customer service is no existent. It takes 3-4 days before someone even looks at any tickets you submit, they'll then comment and provide information unrelated to your actual problem, claim your issue has been fixed and then close the ticket so you have no chance of providing feedback OR confirming that the actual issue has been resolved. Its one big JOKE! We'll be waiting for the hosting to come up for renewal and then migrate away.

GoDaddy.com > Domain.com

Video File Conversion

It seems that a lot of video files these days are avi. This is a little annoying as the HP Touchpad doesn’t natively support avi files so I have to convert all my videos to mp4. I have used various converts in the past and had mixed results. Recently I found a great bit of open source software that works very well.

Check out http://handbrake.fr/ for all your video converting needs

You should only open attachments from a trustworthy source

I have dealt with an issue today that took me a little while to figure out.

A user using Outlook 2007 was getting prompted every time they opened an attachment to either save or open it.

"You should only open attachments from a trustworthy source"

On my computer this seemed like a simple fix, unchecked the box that says "Always ask before opening this type of file" However on my end users PC this option was grayed out. Turns out that Outlook needs to be running in Administrator mode. This lead me to my next problem, all their Outlook shortcuts lacked the "Right Click - Run As Administrator" option. So I created a new shortcut for the user on their desktop pointing it to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe they now have the option to Run Outlook as an administrator.

The Easiest, Fastest Way to Update or Install Software

The Easiest, Fastest Way to Update or Install Software

http://ninite.com/

Backups

I discovered a new backup tool today

EaseUS Todo Backup Free

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/download.htm

From my initial testing this looks very good (especially for a free product)... I'm currently waiting to find out what the snag with this product is

GMail Update

So I've been using GMail for a little under a month now and I am still very impressed. I am still unsure how it would fit into a larger organisation (with 10+ seats) there are 2 things I dislike about it at the moment.

Firstly there's the username issue, I finally managed to get my username straightened out and in fairness I may have been partly to blame. I had assigned my required forename.surname as an alias to my current account, so I was unable to rename until I removed this alias - so after waiting the required 5 (or was it 7 days? I actually waited 14) I finally started to rage at Google, hammering my keyboard with search terms until I finally gave up and decided to mess around with my account settings the error message in a round-about way lead me to believe removing the alias would work, and it did!

Secondly I don't like how the username you sign into email with follows you across all of Googles sites. Now for most people this isn't a problem and its actually benefits them but for me it doesn't. For my personal business I have my own domain and therefore use that for all my email, I have a separate signon for Blogger and for YouTube (although I think I somehow ended up managing to link the Blogger and YouTube accounts)

It's not really a problem, but it is an annoyance.

Google Chrome

I never got caught up in the hype of Google Chrome when it first came out. Since I first got online I’ve been a massive fan of tabbed browsing and I used to use a bit of software called “Kitty Browser” This is back in the Windows 98 days but I believe it just wrapped IE5 and added some additional functionality. Fast forward a number of years and we now have Firefox (and recently IE7,8 and 9) thrown in some “Add-ons” and you have a very solid browser.

Enter Google Chrome, I tried it a year or two ago and quickly uninstalled it after 30 seconds. Today I’ve tried it again and given it a really good go. I’ll report back anything of note but my first impression is that rendering of web pages is amazingly quick, this thing is like lightning compared to IE/Firefox, I’d dismissed what others had said about it but having now used it I am very impressed.