Some programmers are also great designers, but most aren’t. Programming and human interface design are separate skills, and people good at both are rare. So it’s important for software to have dedicated designers.

I’ve been researching the use of cloud apps in education for a talk I am giving next week. I’m normally more business-focused, and it’s been interesting to uncover another area where Microsoft and Google are in hot competition. Both companies are...

Just after writing a positive review of Ubuntu Karmic Koala I noticed this piece on The Register: Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala: Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux...

Microsoft’s free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is a version of Windows Server Core dedicated to one function only: hosting virtual machines. Can you really get something worthwhile for nothing from Microsoft? The answer seems to be yes, especially when it...

I set aside today for doing a Small Business Server 2008 installation. We had the new HP box, the new HP Small Business Server 2008 Premium pack, a stack of CALs. All legal, decent and honest. Problem number one: the Microsoft-supplied Certificate of...

I have an Ubuntu server performing various important duties including serving music for Squeezebox. It was humming along with version 9.04 of Ubuntu and the latest Logitech Squeezeboxserver; but a new version of Ubuntu, 9.10 or Karmic Koala, was...