I’d like to see the European Union spend some more time investigating regional pricing. I’m in the market for a new monitor and I’ve seen a number of people recommend the Dell 2001FP, it’s a nice looking monitor with a good spec. More importantly everyone who has bought one has recommended it. This monitor looks pretty good and I considered buying one. Being a diligent consumer I decided to do some pricing, for comparison lets use the details at Dell 2001FP UK and Dell 2001FP US. Read on →

I do most of my small scripts and minor hacks in Perl, it’s powerful, cross-platform and it has CPAN. While I’ve spent some time investigating other languages such as Python, Groovy and even sed and awk for certain tasks, only one has held my interest; Ruby. It was recently announced that the second edition of the Pragmatic Programmers Programming Ruby (the pickaxe book) is now available for preorder in PDF and dead tree formats. Read on →

On this page you will find a number of my shorter scripts, applications and bits of code I find helpful and that scratch my own itches. Each one is accompanied by a short explanation of the script, any dependencies, any needed configuration and a link to the code itself. Unless otherwise stated all the code on this page is GPL'd and you are free to do what you want with it. Read on →

I’ve added a new entry to my miniprojects page, the getpageranks script (written in Perl) allows you to pass in a file containing URL's, one to a line with whitespace and comments allowed. Each entry in the file will then be checked with Google and the PageRank will be displayed. Note: If an invalid URL is given the PageRank will be returned as zero, this makes it very difficult to determine which sites are invalid and which are just unpopular. Read on →

Unless you run IE on Windows with the Google toolbar installed it’s always been difficult to determine the PageRank of any given URL, while a FireFox/Mozilla extension was created it was, from my experiences, very flaky. It also required manual use. I was pleasantly surprised today to see a module called Google::PageRank hit my local CPAN mirror. I’ve had a quick play and it worked on all my test cases. Tool writers, start your engines! Read on →

My current employer uses Adobe software to print PDFs from a number of programs, Visio, Project, Word and Excel are prime examples. In a valiant attempt to avoid giving Adobe more money we decided to have a look elsewhere and see what was available for Windows users. It didn’t take long to notice OpenOffice, it has document compatibility with Word and Excel and integrated PDF printing; it’s just not very good. Read on →

Firstly I’m going to disclose the fact I have a Mac, it’s an old G3 iBook which has three very important features, it’s got good battery life, weighs very little and has easy to install and use wireless. This is what I call my convention computer and it gets taken to all the tech events I attend; but thats about it. I had a discussion with a couple of GLLUG members this weekend about laptops and the fact soon emerged that I’m not exactly fluent with the Macs GUI. Read on →

I’ve just finished reading You Need to Be a Little Crazy, a book that puts the life and day to day activities of an entrepreneur under the magnifying glass. The book is a pretty balanced look at the type of people that set up a company under normal circumstances (not a bubble), the down-sides and potential risks are mentioned to deter the casual and uncommitted members of the audience while the author conveys the reasons he enjoys the challenge and tries again and again; even when everything goes wrong. Read on →

For the last year or so I’ve been offering access to a set of RSS feeds for Packetstorm Security, these feeds scrape the latest exploits, files and other similar web-pages. While they were originally for my own benefit they became quite popular and they have a good few hundred people watching them. Unfortunately due to the fact the data is screen scraped from the HTML the feeds have proven to be an annoyance to me whenever the site changed its layout, which wasn’t often enough for me to ditch them but it was often enough to lose me a couple of Friday nights, firstly I’d like to say thanks to all the people that emailed me letting me know they liked them and wanted them fixed and working. Read on →

Crossing the chasm is possibly THE book to read on marketing and selling in tech start ups, I’ve done three of them and it gets really disturbing to sit in the office and say “Oh no, we’re entering chapter two."; it really is that insightful. One of the basic premises from the book is that technical adoption follows a pattern, firstly you get innovators and early adopters. These are followed by the pragmatists, the conservatives and eventually the luddites. Read on →