Earlier this morning, one of my colleagues asked me if I knew what a particular icon meant in Outlook. I didn’t, but some googling turned up a full list of icons on Robert Sparnaaij’s How To-Outlook site, which also features other Outlook hints, tips and downloads.
Tag: Useful Websites
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When mapping software doesn’t quite get it right…
I heard about this whilst watching the BBC Top Gear motoring programme last night and had to give it a go… The RAC‘s route planner on their website is a great tool, but try entering a route from Nottingham to Bideford, avoiding motorways, and the system will return a 1070.9 mile (1723.4km), 42 hour and 24 minute route via Ireland and France (at least until Map24 patch their software)!
Strangely enough, if you enter the same route using the Map24 site it doesn’t seem to get lost in this way.
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Tracking down music from TV adverts
Have you ever heard a song on an advert and thought “I really like that – I wonder who it’s by and what it’s called”?
Well, I did exactly that tonight and a few minutes later a Google search for
t mobile mates rates ad musicturned up a fantastic link – the HMV music from TV page, which told me that the track I was looking for was “Ooh La La” by Goldfrapp.Unfortunately for both HMV and T-Mobile neither of them made any money from this (I switched my mobile back from Orange to Vodafone today and I bought the Goldfrapp track at the Apple iTunes Music Store) but it’s definitely worth a look if you like the music you hear on a TV advert!
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IT and the law
Some time ago, I stumbled across the About Cookies site which contains a really interesting (and useful) description of what cookies (of the browser variety) are, how they are (and should be) used, and how web site designers need to act in order to comply with the law. AboutCookies.org was produced by a law firm – Pinsent Masons – and they have another site called OUT-LAW which they claim has “5,000 pages of free legal news and guidance, mostly on IT and e-commerce issues. These issues can affect any organisation, and OUT-LAW is as much for those in a software start-up as it is for the compliance team at a bank”.
It’s certainly true that the legal issues surrounding IT are becoming ever more complex (and are something I find interesting reading – itself a worrying observation!). I’m neither qualified to comment on the law, nor affiliated with any legal firms, but it seems to me that OUT-LAW is probably worth a read for anyone who wants to ensure that their site (and business IT) is compliant with all necessary legislation.
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Get safe online
I was at Microsoft’s UK campus last night where, since last week, lots of plastic cubes (just like the logo below) and even stickers on the mirrors in the washrooms have appeared displaying the message “Get Safe Online”.
No-one from Microsoft was allowed to say what it’s all about yet, but some quick googling turned up the National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU)’s Internet safety campaign – Get Safe Online (Project Endurance), which is a joint government and private sector initiative aimed at helping consumers and small businesses to use the Internet safely (due to be launched at the end of October) with partner organisations including the UK Government, BT, Dell, eBay
, HSBC, LloydsTSB, MessageLabs, Microsoft UK, the NHTCU, Securetrading and Yell.
So far GetSafeOnline is just a single page, but I’m sure more will follow.
Other Internet safety sites include the United States GetNetWise initiative.
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Go to… Citrix online
Last week I had a product demonstrated to me from The Dot Net Factory (they have several products, all of which look interesting to me and I hope to blog some more about them soon) but as they are in Ohio (USA) and I am in the UK the demonstration was carried out across the Internet.
Apart from the products that were being demonstrated, one of the things that impressed me was how easy it was to join their web meeting – hosted by the guys at GoToMeeting – part of Citrix online. Citrix also have GoToAssist and GoToMyPC products but from the point of view of an end-user with limited time to spare, I was amazed at how easy it was to click on a link and (after installing a small ActiveX component) view the meeting host’s PC. We didn’t use the voice facilities as The Dot Net Factory called me on my mobile phone but GoToMeeting was definitely good from the point of view of seeing the system that the guys were talking to me about and I’d certainly recommend it for hosting meetings across the Internet.
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Wikimedia
I often link to Wikipedia as I think it’s one of the best “for further reading” information sources on the Internet; however today I stumbled across Wiktionary – a sister project which provides a online dictionary and thesaurus (although I must confess that at the time of writing the thesaurus category is currently slightly limited and I do tend to use Microsoft Word for that feature).
I think that the wiki paradigm has a tremendous potential for information sharing (one which many companies seem totally blind to at present) and it turns out that the Wikimedia Foundation has a whole load of similar open content projects.
I’ll end this post with something I picked up from Wikiquote:
“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones”.
[Linus Torvalds (at the 1991 launch of his Linux operating system)]
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Practical advice for webmasters
Last year I blogged some advice on spam-proofing a website from Thomas Brunt’s Outfront site. Although Outfront is billed as a “FrontPage learning community” (urgh!), it also includes some practical advice for web authoring techniques such as looking at writing pages which are compliant with web standards, advanced use of mailto links and preparing photos for publication on a website, as well as some topics I have covered in this blog like custom error pages and the use of .htaccess files.
The site also features a good description of RSS (although most people familiar with blogs will also know RSS!) and design tips for producing a good website.
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Using e-mail properly
Craig Murphy has a whole load of interesting advice filed under project management, and one which caught my eye tonight was his post on using e-mail properly. Speaking as someone who spent two hours yesterday filing the last month’s worth of business e-mail (after spending too much of his holiday time generally getting his files which were spread across several PCs and external hard disks into some kind of order), I think I might try to take some of this on board in my new job…
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10 steps to help secure SQL Server 2000
I just stumbled across this 10-step plan to help secure SQL Server 2000 and thought it might be useful to note…