Last week, lightning struck at my parents apartment building (literaly). Other damages aside, my dad's PC also died. The guy at the PC repair shop warned my dad that "we may need to wipe the HD, do you have a backup"? Ofcourse, all data was backed up daily and "off-site" at my house so all important …

Another great example showing the differences between OSX and Windows. Bot applications synchronize your phone over bluetooth. Both applications are simple to use, but one is simpler. And contrary to expectations, this time the Windows version (left) will cost you money, and the OSX version (right) is free. Although …

I'm using a few development servers over SSH, and for that I have used myEntunnel to tunnel a few remote ports to my local machine. When I screw up my configuration or forget to start myEntunnel, Firefox is "smart enough" to change "localhost:9090" into "http://www.localhost.com:9090" when …

Google calendar is the new "Cool" in the calendar world. Or at least, the guys at work seem to think so. For me, a 100% online calendar is not always a good solution, because I can't take it with me. Getting Google calendar to sync with iCal would help, because that syncs to my phone and iPod. I tried …

In my last post, I wrote about how I got HomeZone to detect my bluetooth phone, and automatically start iSync. While I was playing with it, I noticed how HomeZone opens the Address book application and iSync, and doesn't close them. To make it more seemless, I used a script I found at The Technocrat to start and stop …

Recently, I installed "Do Something When" and use it to start rsync scripts when I plug in certain USB devices. By doing this, every time I plug in my USB memory stick containing my Password Gorilla password databases, it gets backed up (Apple style, with timestamps). Needless to say, it then gets backed up …

For those people who have had problems accessing their files today, I remind you of the very old saying: "A file does not exist until it exists in two places" Naturaly, this means on two different physical places, preferably miles apart.

Like buildings, software usually a deviation of a standard structure. The architect chooses the structure his design will be based upon. After making design adjustments to the structure to cater the requirements, the architect supervises the builders. Like a building architect, the software architect supervises while …

Last week a collegue of mine did an introductory talk about RUP (Rational Unified Process). It was an interesting talk about how RUP can be applied in projects, what the philosophy is behind RUP, and lessons learned during her first RUP workshop. After the talk, we discussed how RUP looked a lot like DSDM, Agile and …

... and other wisdom from Joel. Finally, after weeks of slightly boring posts about travel, speeches and FogBugz, Joel has an article on his blog he was so famous for: Martian Headsets. The article discusses the problems with the HTML spec, and numerous other problems developers are facing these days. That, and the …