Back in June this year, Microsoft announced that they were cutting Microsoft Money. Now, I've been using this app for well over 14 years now (my transactions go back to July 1995), and so I was a little peeved, to put it mildly. I know that the application itself will continue to work — although at some point I would be unable to install it on any new PCs or hard drives I may get: there's good old activation for you — but the online features would also be cut off at some future point. No more automatic downloading of transactional data from the banks I use. […]
READ MOREI write a monthly column for PCPlus, a computer news-views-n-reviews magazine in the UK (actually there are 13 issues a year — there's an Xmas issue as well — so it's a bit more than monthly). The column is called Theory Workshop and appears in the back of every issue. When I signed up, my editor and the magazine were gracious enough to allow me to reprint the articles here after say a year or so. After all, the PDFs do appear on each issue's DVD after a few months. When I buy the current issue, I'll publish the article from the issue a year ago. I bought November's issue this lunchtime, so here's November 2008's article. […]
READ MOREExcuse the pun, but I really like my Roomba. I'd been thinking of buying one for a long while, just to try it out, and then a couple of months ago I happened to notice a refurbished unit (the iRobot Roomba 560) on buy.com at $100 off the new price. So, I thought, why not, plonked the virtual money down and a few days later it arrived on my doorstep. […]
READ MOREToday I got an email from eBay asking whether I'd mind filling out a survey for them. The survey was one of those that asked questions designed, quote, to improve the user experience when buying, unquote. Generally, with these, I tend to fill them out, providing I have the time, and by that I mean it'd better take much less than 10 minutes or I will just abandon it. Of course, if the survey is on something I feel strongly about, I'll stick it out — at least most times. […]
READ MOREGot an iPod or similar music player? […]
READ MOREI was chatting with Mehul in the DevExpress offices yesterday about writing iPhone apps with MonoTouch. He wanted to know what iPhone app had most impressed me, now that I'd had the phone for a little while and therefore what I might be trying to emulate in my own programming. My reply was Sudoku Grab. […]
READ MOREOver the summer I spent quite a bit of time on top of my normal work activities (at least those I couldn't put aside) writing a couple of chapters for Professional DevExpress ASP.NET Controls. Yes, I've been saying for a while that I'd never write a book again, but this was an opportunity to quickly write something that would appear in a book form, without my name being on the cover. Unfortunately Wrox didn't listen to me and put it there anyway :). […]
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