The BBC reports that PCWorld will no longer sell floppy disks when existing stocks run out. It’s not surprising. In recent years, several PC manufacturers have stopped including floppy disk drives, including Dell and HP.
As the price of storage has dropped, USB has become standard on all machines, and online storage has become more common, the death of the floppy drive was to be expected. Besides, 1.4mb isn’t even enough space to hold Firefox.
Then there’s the fact that pre-vista versions of Windows being installed on machines utilising RAID need to get their drivers via floppy disk. This caused a huge headache a little while ago, when I had to reinstall Windows on a Dell PowerEdge server.
Nevertheless, it’s good to see the end of this antiquated technology. RIP, FDD.
From redemption in a blog:
If you’re doing web development or design of any sort, you have to check out Joe Hewitt’s talk on Firebug at Yahoo! – download the movie or watch it online, just make sure you watch it.
If you aren’t already using Firebug, this will convince you. If you are, you’ll probably find some gems in there that you didn’t know before. I didn’t know that you could log events to elements on the fly, or press the up and down arrow keys to adjust numerical values (such as margins and paddings), or edit the values in the box model layout diagram, or hover over variable names to see a tooltip of their values in the JavaScript debugger, or conditional breakpoints.
If you’re doing any sort of web development work and not using Firebug, get it now! It’s extremely powerful, and should be part of every web developer’s toolkit. This tool alone is a big reason to use Firefox, as there’s nothing that comes even close to this for Internet Explorer.
The video is a little blocky – even the downloadable version, which weighs in at 128mb, though it’s an interesting presentation and worth watching. Watching it, I realised I’ve only used a fraction of what Firebug has to offer.
Tags: firebug, firefox, web development
More cool Google functionality. They’ve combined books and maps functionality, so that you can now see places mentioned in a book on a map, and the ‘tooltip’ shows the page number and excerpt from the paragraph mentioning the place.
Found out about this from Brad’s Blog, who mentions the 9/11 Commission Report as being a brilliant example, which it is.
This will be made even better when we see a mashup with something like Zoomr or Flickr, which have geotagged photos. Then the map will be able to actually show photos from a place, which would really be awesome.
Tags: google, maps, books, flickr, reading
After reading Patrick Steele’s post about his first Amazon order, I thought I’d login to my account on Amazon and check what mine was.
For a second I was mystified, as Amazon.com only showed recent orders from 2006 and 2007, though I’ve been using them a lot longer than that, though then realised that Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk don’t share their order history (though you can use the same login on both sites).
Like Patrick, to make it interesting, I’ve included my first five books.
Admittedly, I went a bit crazy, as that’s the same time I went from working part-time in a supermarket, to suddenly landing my dream job working in a web agency, and actually making some decent money.
Although the books above are the first bought on my own account, the first book I remember buying on Amazon is ‘Direct from Dell’, though it was before I was old enough to have a credit card, so I asked my older brother to get it for me instead!
Generally though, when you’re working in retail making £3.50 per hour, it’s not really viable to go out and spend a day’s wages on a book unless you absolutely have to (eg. textbooks), or you’re really interested in something. A couple of articles on Dell in computer magazines sparked my interest, resulting in the purchase, and starting a love affair with tech business biographies.
According to my order history, in the same year I also bought ‘Amazon.com – get big fast’, ‘Business the Amazon.com way’, ‘Barbarians led by Bill Gates – Microsoft from the inside’, ‘The inside story of Scott McNealy and the rise of Sun Micrososystems’, ‘Weaving the Web’, ‘The Nudist on the late shift’, ‘Startup’, ‘Only the paranoid survive’, and many, many more…
Haven’t got the Dell book anymore. When sorting my things out last year, getting ready for marriage and moving, I sold it. Admittedly, it was a bit tough due to sentimental value, but it’s not like I was going to read it again.
Despite leaving two big boxes of books in the UK, I’ve already started accumulating books here, and probably need to get myself a bookshelf soon as the desk is getting quite crowded! 
So, Motorola is making 3500 people redundant, which represents about 5% of their total workforce of 67000 employees worldwide. Fourth quarter profits are down a staggering 48% from last year, from $1.2 billion in 2005 to $624 million in 2006.
I’m not surprised. They make rubbish phones, and with the market getting more competitive, customers will go elsewhere. Perhaps this will serve as a lesson, and they’ll actually make handsets worth buying now.
Hopefully the same will happen at Samsung and they’ll pull their socks up too. When I got the t809 it seemed okay, as as soon as I realised it was substandard, the only viable solution was going back to a phone that is still a strong contender, the Sony Ericsson p910i.
Speaking of mobile phones, what is all the fuss about Apple’s iPhone. The problem is that Steve Jobs is a very powerful speaker, and even if he was talking about an absolutely shocking product, people would still be buying it.
As a reporter says in Why Apple Makes Me Cry:
It’s undoubtedly something to do with Jobs himself. He’s a great, almost evangelical figurehead for his company. The firm, serious face poised above the black polo neck could be the hawklike visage of an inspirational priest, an inquisitor or cult leader. You immediately sense, and share, his deep need to get his team to do something beyond adequate, beyond acceptable.
The article is terrible, but correct in its statement about Jobs. Speaking of which, iCon Steve Jobs : The greatest second act in the history of business is a fascinating biography about him.
Back to the topic, the iPhone is expensive, locked down to Cingular, lacks 3G, doesn’t have removable memory, has battery life issues – which is fixed and can’t be changed by end users, and is not extensible by third parties.
I’m not going to be getting one. Experience indicates that it’s better to stick with the players who know what they’re doing: Sony Ericsson and Nokia.
Tags: motorola, samsung, apple, iphone, steve jobs
I’ve been using Jott a little since finding it through Ben Casnocha’s blog some time ago. It’s a cool application, and great for keeping track of ideas when on the go. Does mean I have to do my fake American accent though, or the transcription comes out very weird.
Another cool application is WikidPad which is an application-based wiki. I’ve been using it to keep track of business ideas, software ideas, and a basic journal (though I’m going to create something better for this).
One of my goals this year is to get more organised and these applications definitely help. Was speaking to Nick, and he recommended reading Getting Things Done, which has been added to my Amazon wishlist though I already have a ton of books to read.
The Getting Things Done time management seems like a good methodology, and I tried the GTDMail Firefox extension for a short while, though ended up uninstalling it as it interfered too much with my email. Maybe once I read the book it’ll make more sense.
In any case, I won’t be re-installing the extension. Not into my main copy of Firefox anyway, though it could work well with a seperate GMail account and Portable Firefox to create some kind of time management application.
Tags: jott, wikidpad, getting things done, organised
Just saw this. Microsoft have released Accounting Express 2007, which is a free tool for small businesses to help with creating quotes, invoicing, taxes, etc. I’m using Excel to keep track of all these things, which can be very painful to use.
I’ve installed this and am trying it out. Need to play with it some more, but I’ve got a feeling that I’m ultimately going to end up with Quickbooks. This is definitely a good tool for people just starting out though, and it’s free
It also seems to integrate with EBay and Paypal quite well, and should help people running EBay businesses (which is one of the things I want to start this year too).
A friend pointed me in the direction of this: Amir Saffar is not ‘Indian or Paki’. It’s the email correspondence between the dubai-based web agency North55, and job applicant named Amir Saffar (who’s clearly the kind of person you don’t want to employ). Hilarious stuff. Read it!
Tags: north55, dubai, amir saffar
If you’re trying to connect to a SQL Server 2005 database from an ASP.NET 1.1 application (and possibly ASP.NET 2.0 apps too, though I haven’t tested this), you might find yourself getting SQL Server does not exist or access denied error messages, though you can connect to it using SQL Server Management Studio.
It appears that the SQL instance name must be specified in the Data Source. Eg.
Data Source=ipaddress\SQL01;Password=password;User ID=userid;Initial Catalog=databasename;Persist Security Info=True;
Not sure if this is issue is specific to the hosting company being used, but I think it’s something to do with SQL Server 2005, based on this post anyway.
Tags: sql server, 2005, asp.net
Came across this interesting EBay Architecture PDF which talks about EBay’s growth and how the team coped with this. There’s some talk about the database, which is pretty important when you’re executing 26 billion SQL queries per day.
Interesting point it makes about scaling the data tier - no business logic in the database (no stored procedures). This is something I have to agree with, and have been following this rule for about the past 18 months. It’s helped make projects more structured, and easier to maintain, though arguably it’s not using all of the power available in the database. It’s worked extremely well for me though.
Unless there’s a strong reason to use them, using stored procedures can usually be avoided, and they certainly aren’t required for every single add & update action. I’ve also found that triggers are often not needed, and are often mistakenly used by developers to maintain referential integrity when check constraints will achieve the same thing and offer better performance.
[Via A developer with good habits]