Category Archives: Software Tools

The iPhone and the clipboard: an uneasy alliance

I recently spent some time as a guest of the Ontario judicial system. No, not as a prisoner, something much more unpleasant: jury duty. Recommended Reading This is the second time in five years that I’ve “done my duty”, and … Continue reading

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ePub Crawl: Pulling a Book out of an App

A few months ago, technology publisher O’Reilly began selling some of their books as iPhone apps [iTunes link] for a surprisingly low price — generally just $5.  These are the full versions of the books, not just an extract.  The apps … Continue reading

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Look Ma, No Button: Forcing Google Chrome To Become the Default Browser

I recently switched browser preferences from Firefox to Google Chrome.  I was forced to make the change by a lack of RAM — the software development tools I use eats up most of my RAM, and Firefox has become so … Continue reading

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Review: The Twitter Book(: The iPhone App)

In the last few weeks I’ve gone from someone who thought Twitter was the apex of pointless self-obsession to, well, someone who reads books about Twitter and then writes reviews of them. While there is definitely more to Twitter than … Continue reading

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PDFs: Authorized copying prohibited

Grrr, what is the deal with PDFs and copying to the clipboard? We all routinely copy and paste information from one document to another, right? Even the hipster non-readers on the iPhone design team have grudgingly conceded this point.  PDFs … Continue reading

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Notepad++ and F11

Notepad++ Shortcut Mapper A quickie regarding a favourite app: Notepad++. It is generally rock-solid, so I was rather startled earlier today when I accidentally hit F11 (thought I was in Visual Studio) and Notepad++ disappeared.   No “save changes” warning, no … Continue reading

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Upgrading WordPress at netfirms

Um, in case I’m not the last netfirms user to realize this: the reason why the WordPress version hasn’t been upgraded from 2.0 is that we’re supposed to do the upgrading ourselves. According to netfirms’ support, new WordPress blogs are … Continue reading

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The Accidental Backup

The other night I had one of those “senior developer’s moments”. After checking some files into SourceSafe from Visual Studio I noticed a red checkmark next to the project file. I hadn’t touched the project file for days, but thinking … Continue reading

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I Am Freeloading (And So Can You!)

It has been many a year since I’ve darkened the door of a public library. It’s not just that I object to my tax dollars being used to organize the siphoning of profits from publishers and authors by — to … Continue reading

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Blogging from Zoho

Every once in awhile I come across a piece of free software that I would gladly pay to use. I love to write about these gems because a) they deserve the publicity (if you call being mentioned in my blog … Continue reading

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