New Stuff

Basecamp to Microsoft Access integration

Steve Backman — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:21:41 -0500

Did you know you can export your entire Basecamp project space into an XML file? This is a great personal reassurance feature of BaseCamp. You can at any time pull everything you have put into Basecamp back out into a transportable format. (Well, not everything—not uploaded documents—but definitely everything else.) Go to “Account” and scroll down to “Need to export your data.”

What can you do with all this stuff once you have exported it?

Make GMail your desktop email handler

Steve Backman — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:38:07 -0500

More and more people use webmail as their everyday email program. Google GMail and Yahoo Messenger are the two most popular, despite some loss of desktop convenience compared to Outlook or Thunderbird. A big frustration is not being able to quickly forward a page you are reading or document you are working on as an email attachment.

Computing in the Clouds

Steve Backman — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:17:59 -0500

Moving our office this summer, we ended up having a gap between moving out and moving in. I got many questions about what we did with all our servers while bridging the gap. Fact is, though we use many such things, most of it is out there in the “cloud.”

Passwords and personal data security

Steve Backman — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:36:10 -0500

Data security has been in the news again lately with new stories about stolen laptops (Anheuser Busch) and credit card break-ins. Its easy to slip into the mindset that nothing is safe so why bother. One point of vulnerability that has been on my mind lately is passwords.

Take the Firefox 3 Pledge

Steve Backman — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:20:12 -0500

I’ll be celebrating Download Day Tuesday June 17. That’s when Mozilla will release Firefox 3, the new generation of the Open Source browser. I have used test versions of Firefox 3 for months and love it. I love the performance and speed even when I have multiple tabs open, which I almost always do. Right now, I have Firefox 22 tabs open, and the browser remains perky and stable. Yes, it’s using up a huge amount of my computer’s free memory, but I’d rather give it to that then most anything else on my desktop.

Set Default EMail Client, Thunderbird or Outlook

Steve Backman — Sun, 8 Jun 2008 05:19:00 -0500

Setting the default Email client means that when you click Send Link, Send Email or Attach to Email in your browser or destkop program, Windwos will open your email program with the document or page set placed in a new message.

BlueAnt: Great Product, Great Service

Steve Backman — Wed, 4 Jun 2008 06:40:47 -0500

Being in the customer service line of fire myself, I'm always impressed when a small company manages both good products and good service.

Memorial Day

Steve Backman — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:39:38 -0500

I visited the Forest Hills Cemetery today, on Memorial Day. I rode my bike over for a quiet afternoon visit. Fresh flags had gone up along the winding roadway in, and commemorative flags marked some of the graves.

Backing Up is Not Hard to Do

Steve Backman — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:17:19 -0500

Recently my Carbonite back-up stopped working. Carbonite is one of the new breed of low-cost, on-line, continuous data back-up services. I have tried Mozy and Jungle Disk as well, and stick with Carbonite because I started with it, it works quietly and reliably, the control panel is simple, and its costs just $50 a year for unlimited storage.

Heathrow's T5 and technology project management

Steve Backman — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 19:31:25 -0500

I have been trying to follow the problems in the new T5 terminal at Heathrow Airport. There are small project management problems and there are big ones. Ours are modest. On the scale of big, you have T5 which apparently included 400,000 hours of software development (that’s a lot of lines of code!), a full year of testing and a full year of training. Yet its open was a technology disaster.