I’m back!

Back online again! My previous hosting provider decided to cancel the account and delete the site. Rather annoying but considering it was a free account I can't really complain too much. I hadn't been blogging much anyway. Too busy with my new company (which is going from strength to strength).  I've managed to recover most of the old posts, but I missed a few after early October.  Oh well…..

Joomla! reaches v1.0.2

It didn’t take them long! The Joomla! developers are racing along releasing updated versions left, right and centre. Joomla! is already up to v1.0.2. I installed the 1.0.1 release the other day. Looking good. Can’t wait to see where they take this.

Leave of absence….

You may have noticed a slow down in my blogging recently. It’s due to the fact that I’ve just changed jobs!

I now run my own consulting company called IT Directions. We (me) are IT consultants with a focus on collaboration technologies (mainly Sharepoint at the moment), mobility (of course) and performance testing/performance management but we also do all the pre-requisite stuff that NZ companies have to do like general infrastructure stuff (storage, mail servers, firewalls, vpns), web design, etc.

Consequently, I’ve been rather busy with the intial startup stuff so blogging has taken a back seat. Also, it’s been a rather quiet time recently news-wise, as I prefer to not do the me-too type blogging that a lot of sites tend to do. I prefer to blog on things that aren’t widely known (or really interest me ).

Windows Sharepoint Services etc.

A new blogger – PJ Hough, the Group Program Manager for Windows Sharepoint Services has started blogging.

Link: Windows Sharepoint Services etc.

Mambo renamed to Joomla!

For those who don’t know – Mambo is an awesome open-source PHP CMS. It has a huge following and a large community built around it. A few weeks ago the core development team split from the company that was promoting the product because of differences of opinion in how the project was being controlled. The core development team have formed a new holding company called Open Source Matters and have taken the existing code to continue development with.

Now, as of 1 Sep the project is officially known as Joomla!.

Link: Joomla! – Main

2 really useful shortcuts for Sharepoint

Here’s a really good post on creating a couple of really useful shortcuts that make your life easier when setting up Sharepoint sites. They let you get into design mode or add webparts on any webpart page without needing the Modify Shared Page menu.

Link: Two Invaluable Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Shortcuts

Sharepoint RSS webpart with no installation

I found this post today. Absolutely cool! A webpart that can load and display RSS feeds without requireing any server-side components. Just upload the webpart and add ot a page. Awesome!

Link: x5 » Windows SharePoint Services RSS (WSS-RSS)

Artisans vs Workers

Been reading a series of posts on Nic’s blog regarding the differences in the way people work and perceive their work. I have to say that I completely agree with his latest observation. I tend to get very distracted at work during the day, so I do my most productive work in the evening. Hence I tend not to get into the office until around 9:15 after dropping my daughter of at school. I also try to get away about 4:45 in the afternoon to try and beat the traffic. You get the impression that people think you are slacking off because you aren’t at work on the dot of 8:30 and leave before 5:00. No one seems to take into account the work done after 5:00 because it’s never seen. This really annoys me! I am much more productive in the evenings because there are far less distractions, so I tend to use the days to schedule meetings and catch up with people and do the work that can’t be done anywhere else (because of hardware requirements for example). I don’t see a lot of point in sitting at a desk accomplishing nothing just because you’re paid to work certain hours. It makes much more sense to measure performance on the quality of the work done rather than whether or not you are at your desk. I’m in total agreement with Nic – I prefer small companies, early in their life cycles or “startups”. The environment is much more conducive to the way I work… Hence the reason why I have quit my current role with a very large company to go into business for myself (contracting to start with, but things will grow from there).

i-mate releases JAM Pocket PC Phone Limited Edition

Found this on Geekzone. This is great news! The one thing that really let the orignal JAM down was the lack of memory. At only 64MB it just didn’t quite cut it once you load all those necessary utils The new version comes with 128MB and you get a free 500MB SD card to go with it. What more do you need?

(sarcasm) But wait there’s still more! It’s charcoal! Now that makes all the difference (/sarcasm)

Seriously, it’s a good improvement to the original and comes bundled with a bunch of extra software (anti-virus and Skype).

Link: i-mate releases JAM Pocket PC Phone Limited Edition

HTC Apache??

PocketPCThoughts has an article that allegedly shows the HTC Apache. This is apparently the CDMA version of the new HTC Wizard which is itself the replacement for the HTC Magician (iMate JAM). Phew!

All I can say is that I want one! A JAM sized Pocket PC Phone Edition device with EV-DO support, WiFi and Bluetooth…. outstanding. It doesn’t even look TOO ugly….

Link: The HTC Apache Revealed