HMRC impose tough new practices on businesses

Anyone who has recently migrated to the UK from North Korea, China or the Islamic Republic of Iran in order to start a new live of freedom and a business will feel like they never left home now that new powers and penalties have been granted to our incumbent government’s fighting hand; HM Revenue & Customs.

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Dell XPS M1330 laptop review

Although I wasn’t unhappy with my three year old Toshiba M200, it was never going to be powerful enough to handle Windows Vista and still be snappy enough for the new Visual Studio 2008 from Microsoft. Despite a very heavy day to day workload, I don’t get the chance to get out now as often as I did in my days of contracting around the UK at client sites. However, as recent sales of the new Macbook air have shown, ultra-portable machines aren’t just bought by globe trotting road warriors. Simply put, ultra portables are lighter, thinner and being designed for portability - tending to favour a tighter form factor with robust construction over features. My Toshiba M200 had the usual Toshiba robustness and reliability, but didn’t have an internal optical drive or camera. Ultra portables are nearly always premium or luxury line models, with a higher price tag for the same performance point than their larger counterparts. Read the story »

What a day! Super-car driving and Super-phone integration.

It’s been a busy day today. Today, I was at the iT Showcase Live event at Mercedes-Benz World, Brooklands. It was fairly quiet for an exhibition, although the exhibitors didn’t give much away, Mercedes did - running rides of their AMG performance vehicles all day long. I managed to get a free pass and a spine-tingling face-breaking trip in a lovely new supercharged 500bhp CLS 63 AMG. When I finally got home, news was breaking that Apple had licensed the Activesync technology from Microsoft for use in their iPhone. This means a great deal for the IT industry, and I shall explain later. First however, the car.. Read the story »

Silly progress messages

Silly progress bars with almost comical user feedback seem synonymous with Microsoft Windows, but this has to be the craziest estimation I’ve ever seen. 16 months to apply compression to a 250GB hard disk drive on a fairly powerful Vista Ultimate SP1 machine: Read the story »

Unloved Software

David Scott Kane (no connection) has been recently blogging about unloved software and “bigged us up” as an example of doing it right;

“In my last entry I bemoaned the look of most Micro-ISV software (and some bigger ISV’s too) and how amateur it looked in general.  I thought it’d be nice if I showed an example of a product (that I have no relationship with at all) that simply looks well done and balanced.  See this link at Evolved Software.   As you can see it’s icons are nicely chosen and fit well with each other.  It doesn’t bend or break design rules and pretty much adheres to standards.  The result is a nice professional and easy to intuit interface.  Well done to the developers!” - Scott Kane - “The Recursive ISV”

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