I wish An Coppens all the best, of course, but I’m at a loss as to the purpose of her book ‘Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business‘. Much of the focus, at least in terms of examples given, is on mega-business. Microsoft. Google. Facebook. That’s all very well but, if you’re hiring for a mega-business then these tips are already likely to be ingrained into your company culture – and, if you’re not, then you probably can’t afford to hire in quite the same way that they do. That’s not to say that a small business can’t attract excellent graduates, of course, just that they techniques that they’ll need to use are rather different. Continue reading “Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business”

I don’t normally repost (actually, up to now, I’ve never reposted) other people’s blog posts here – but, in this case, I’m going to make an exception.  You can read the original article here: http://helpinghandsfortacloban.wordpress.com

Continue reading “Helping Hands for Tacloban”

A quick note on Heartbleed. You may have read about Heartbleed. Rest assured that the 45RPMSoftware website has been patched to remove the Heartbleed vulnerability.

Please take a moment though to change your passwords on this, and every other website that you visit, in order to ensure that your personal information remains secure.

It is worth remembering a few simple rules about passwords:

1. Make them long and complicated. Perhaps use a sentence that you can remember easily, but which cannot be easily guessed.
2. Don’t use the same password for multiple websites. Best practice should be a different password for all websites but, at the very least, ensure that your passwords for any websites that might store banking information (shopping, banking etc) are different.
3. Rotate as often as you feel is practicable.

The internet is full of oddities and wonders, from the educational to the appalling – and sometimes both educational and appalling at the same time.  Little wonder then that television is feeling the pinch – the internet has sites at least as entertaining, but with interactivity to ensure that the consumer (that’d be all of us) doesn’t become a dribbling moron in the process.  That’s the theory, anyway. Continue reading “A rather special website…”

Have you ever needed to find out what type a file really is? Perhaps the file has lost its extension – and the contents are now a mystery to you. Is it a jpeg? Is it a zip? Is it a Word document? Nobody knows – until now. Convert64, when running on Mac OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ or newer, can tell you. Continue reading “Convert64 now available on the Mac App Store”

When my old Apple Mighty mouse got gummed up, I bought an Apple Magic mouse to replace it. It wasn’t that the old mouse was completely useless, it still worked up to a point – it’s just that the scroll functionality didn’t.

Continue reading “The Raspberry Pi case designed by Apple”

What was your first Mac?
I came to the Mac quite recently. My first Mac was a MacBook Pro mid 2009. I had been making music with PCs for many years, sampling and experimenting with music, but I discovered that if I took my PC on stage and one of the USB cables fell out, perhaps because someone tripped over it, the program would crash and I’d have to reboot the entire machine. With the MacBook Pro, just the device that was unplugged stopped working – and if I plugged it back in again it would start working again without having to restart the program, let alone reboot the system.  That’s the only reason I bought the MacBook Pro – I’ve never been in favour of Macs or PCs.  It was a very practical stage reliability reason why I moved to the Macintosh. Continue reading “Creative – Bas Vellekoop”

Did you ever play FizzBuzz? If you didn’t, it’s a drinking game. That’s how I learned it, anyway.

It’s a counting game, and the rules are simple enough. Everyone sits in a circle and takes it in turn to say the next number, starting from one and ending at 100. The catch is that if the number is divisible by three the player says Fizz instead of the number, and if the number is divisible by five the player says Buzz. If the number is divisible by three and five the player says FizzBuzz. The penalty for miscounting, mis-fizzing or mis-buzzing is, predictably, a drink. Easy? Surprisingly not, and really rather hard after a skinful.

Continue reading “FizzBuzz”

It’s thirty years since the Mac first went on sale, and twenty-two years since I replaced my MS-DOS PC with one.

It wasn’t that Macs were unknown to me, my uncle had had a succession of Macs (starting with a Mac 128k) by the time I woke up to the revolution. One of my dad’s friends had a demon fast IIfx (paid for by his work, the lucky devil). My dad was firmly in the Microsoft camp though, and that informed my own computing choices.
Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Mac”

I have been following the case of Victoria McClure with interest, and I was dismayed by the CTC’s article in response to it (by Rhia Weston, here). It seems to me that the article shows a lack of joined-up thinking, and also a lack of empathy unbecoming of a campaigning organisation.

Continue reading “The Tragic Verdict of Anthony Hilson and Victoria McClure”