They don't make 'em like they used to.

If you’re of a certain age then you will probably have seen, and may even have owned, one of these calculators…a Sharp EL-508A. Back in my schooldays in Ireland, they were very popular. And after I met my wife and we moved in together I was pleasantly surprised to see she not only had been the owner of the calculator pictured above, but still had it and used it pretty frequently. In...

Plan for failure

I am a self-confessed technology fan. I shy away from the term geek, pointing at my wife and kids as examples on the ‘normal’ life I lead, but truth be told it’s probably not too shy of the mark. As a result of this bias towards technology, I naturally gravitate towards technological solutions to problems rather than anything else. Sometimes this is the right choice to make,...

Telephony pt.1 – to PBX or not?

Traditionally, the decision to install your own Private Branch Exchange (PBX) was pretty simple. If you had more internal phones than outside (trunk) lines, then you needed a mechanism to allocate internal extensions to outside lines as needed. (Although another reason for having your own PBX might be to enable free internal calls, call transfer and call conferencing.) Initially, the line...

The first casualty of the Microsoft-Novell deal

Many of the large, end-user oriented open source projects require many developers, mainly because to make something slick and user-friendly is not a small undertaking, and almost certainly beyond the means of one or two people within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, the larger companies with a stake in open source software (e.g. IBM, Novell, etc.) offer up development resources in the...

How Cool !

In the past, you may have used your spare CPU cycles (as I have) to benefit the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, or to research a cure for cancer. Both are worthy uses, although one more than the other, depending on your point of view. More recently I have not been utilising my computer in this way, mainly because it costs to keep computers running 24×7 if you were...