There are a number of reasons why this blog has taken a bit of hiatus in terms of posts in the last few months. Probably the most important of which is that fact for once in the UK we seem to actually be having a summer, coupling this with my daughter forcing me to watch all of the Doctor Who’s since the reboot (honestly she’s only 4 but she’s quite persuasive) means I spend a lot of time outside on the bike or in explaining the fighting differences between Daleks, Cybermen and everything in between. A slow spiral down the web plug Secondly has been the slow demise of an excellent webhost,...

Let’s start this post off with a simple question. You do know what a spudger is don’t you? What you don’t and more importantly you don’t know how you could use one to take apart an iPad. Well you’ve come to  the wrong place to find out what and how. You can find the right place to do that at iFixit who are the self named ‘free repair manual that you can edit’ but actually are like a parts catalogue that shows you what you can do with technology and then gives you a link to buy the widgets that you need to do said task from their online shop. In this particular case, pun intended,...

Whilst this post might have more to do with a game played with leather and willow to a guy who lives in a part of the world that could only accommodate ice cricket for most of the year, well to be honest the UK isn’t much better for cricketing weather either but that’s beside the point, it’s actually about this years ESRI’s Developers Summit which I was lucky enough to attend this year in Palm Springs. To ArcGIS 10 and beyond! The 2010 #DevSummit was a cornucopia of new technologies and online systems rolling out towards the release of ArcGIS 10. Even though I work for a distributor there was...

I should caveat this post with the often used phrase, ‘don’t try this at home kids’. When tinkering with the guts of any system and modifying the information being sent to and from a service by ‘hacking’ into the request pipeline of a message your opening up a whole can of performance and stability worms that need a great deal of testing under load to understand the direct effect on the scalability of any site. A Simple Question This post is based upon a question I had with a customer at our recent DeveloperHub conference in Birmingham. He asked how it would be possible to watermark an image...

The other day I built a computer almost from scratch. I can admit it, I can nerd it with the best of them when pressed, ok I don’t even need to be pressed. I had a bunch of components lying around, a not too old processor, a bunch of fast RAM and a laptop hard drive all I needed was a case. That was easy to rectify as I’ve always fancied building a little PC and Shuttle do some excellent barebones machines. Now the premise of this post is not the coolness of my new computer (although it is quite nice) but the ease at which it took to build. When I was Young. When I was young and the ‘internet...