Backup Over The Internet

Only daily automatic backing up over the Internet in my experience is truly safe as it avoids the inherent problem of backing up to media which remains in your office, what happens if that is say stolen at the same time as your PCs?

Unbelievably it's free at mozy.com it's really easy to setup, I mean minutes!

Have You Considered Buying a Computer Franchise?

Having had very painful experiences starting several businesses I realise that there are a lot of attractions to buying a franchise, no burning up your enthusiasm and your capital just getting your business and market setup. No with a franchise you get a ready-made proven business model, a business plan laid out to the finest detail, you cannot go wrong. Well that's true at least if you choose the right franchise and that's obviously the trickiest and most important part.

Well there are Franchise Exhibitions but now there is a special website called www.franchisegator.co.uk which has hundreds of franchise opportunities . To make the search easier these are devided into many categories including computers, cars, fitness, women's opportunities, health, sports and many more. You can also search for a franchise in the UK by Town or City, Capital available, and industry or sector.

The site is aimed at people looking for a franchise UK. The site also has lots of information about finance, the legal side, and general advice on franchising.

I wish this site had been around when I started my first business 12 years ago, so take your time, choose wisely and you could find a successful credit-crunch proor business.

Franchise Gator is a subsidiary of Microsoft so is a really solid organisation.

1 Terabyte Hard Drives are Here

The first time I ever heard of a hard drive it was called a Winchester and was 10MB, which seemed an infinite amount to us. Now Terabyte Drives have arrived as internal and external. In fact the example below is 2TB I wonder how long we will think in Terabytes



A terabyte (commonly abbreviated TB) is a measurement term for data storage capacity. The value of a terabyte is defined as one trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes.

Configuring FireFox to use Vim for View Source

Unexpectedly I had trouble Googling this, remember it is not in the standard Options Menu, no you have to go into "about:config"

in FireFox Address Bar type "about:config"

in the filter bar type "view_source" and configure following options as follows
view_source.editor.external user set boolean true
view_source.editor.path user set string c:\vim\vim.bat

rem contents of vim.bat
c:\vim\vim72\gvim.exe %1 %2 %3

NOTE it would be simpler to configure view_source.editor.path to point directly to c:\vim\vim72\gvim.exe but you'd have to remember to change next time Vim is upgraded

Solution: Debugging a Difficult Progam Error

Every now and again you come across a really difficult bug where you cannot for the life of you see what's wrong, you've narrowed the bug down to just a few lines of code but still cannot solve it. How to solve it?

Well the reason you cannot debug it is because ONE FACT THAT YOU HOLD TO BE ABSOLUTELY TRUE IS ACTUALLY FALSE.

This means that you assume that a variable contains a certain value , etc or that a function you call cannot contain a bug, it doesn't matter you are turning a BLIND EYE to the problem.

The Solution: Write down your ASSUMPTIONS and then test each one

Weebly State of the Art Web Design

Weebly is a free web creation site. It uses a widget style format, allowing users to create pages with only a few clicks. The user drags and drops different page elements (such as images, text, and Google Maps) onto a page and fills in the content. Apparently it uses Ajax Technology.

As a Web Designer I was AMAZED at how simple Weebly makes it to create a website, and yet still allows you to use HTML for tricky bits.

A simple multi-page website can quickly created, choose a temple, drag & drop the widgets you require to build your page and hey-presto it's done. I've seen a lot of these automatic tools come and go over the years but this is by far the best, I guess AJAX is what makes the difference.

See my first effort here http://thesuccess.weebly.com/ but don't be put off by that have a try yourself

Webmaster's Heaven a Browser Tester

see what your website looks like in the various Browsers AND even on MAC, PC, or Linux Versions of these browsers

Click http://browsershots.org/

This is amazing because Webdesigners occasionally get client complaints that their website looks awful on say a MAC but the Webdesigner is then placed in an impossible position because they have no MAC available.