Sorry - Your Password Isn't Not Long Enough

“Your password must be at least x characters; cannot repeat any of your previous x passwords; must contain capitals, numerals or punctuation; and cannot contain your account or full name. Please type a different password. Type a password which meets these requirements in both text boxes.”

Yes, it’s that time of month again, where [...]

BabySmash

Seen over at Scott Hanselman’s site, Baby Smash:

As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen. Baby Smash will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can’t get out of the application. Pressing ALT-F4 will exit the application and [...]

On top of your game

It is truly a pleasure when the phone goes *ring* *ring* and the following occurs:

“I’ve got a problem with a printer freezing.”, says the desktop support tech (Tina Brown).

Have you tried:

reinstalling the printer driver? reinstalling the print driver? disabling all the unnecessary network protocols? locking the printer port to a particular [...]

9 Essential Rules for Writing User Documentation

Identify your audience. Identify the average person who will be using each piece of your documentation, and write for their experience level.  Not your level of experience, but theirs. The purpose Write down why your average user would need to use your documentation. User documentation is designed to help the user to do [...]

Podcast: “Sorting out Internationalization with Michael Kaplan”

Just finished listening to the Scott Hanselman Podcast with Michael Kaplan.

It seems the four good languages to test your application for Internationalisation problems are as follows:

Language Test Turkish The Turkish “i” problem. (Turkish language has four i’s) German 30% -> 40% longer than the equivalent English words. Arabic Right-to-left language Thai Good [...]

Tips for Web page & Blog graphics

Use only JPG or GIF graphics … as these are the most web friendly.

 

I heard that there’s GIF87a and 89a.  What are the differences? GIF89a allows you to do GIF animations, and interlacing.

 

 

So what’s interlacing? Simply put, the image builds up as the end user is watching the download.  [...]

List posts by category

You might have noticed a new page (Category list) when you visited today:

Category list lists the title of all my posts by Category.  Mainly put it there for my own use, but you’re welcome to use it as well

Since we are talking about pages …

Home

the front page [...]

Your computer security is just keeping honest people out.

… And just buying time you time with the dishonest ones.

Which is the great truth. Security just buys you time. If a burglar really wants to get into your place, they will.

But more often than not, they’ll move on to the easier target.

We saw this in the 1990’s, when banks installed [...]

Microsoft Office Paperclip – Do not go gentle into that good night …

Saw this at the Microsoft Office Offline blog.  The Office Offline blog

… regularly features wry observations about Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products. The characters in the comic spend much of their time discussing how they use and misuse technology, forming the basis of the humor in the comic. Other themes include [...]

Bits and Pieces – Project Management

Post Implementation Review

A lot of time, money and energy went into the "project". At times things were difficult but the result was a quality deliverable.

But at the end of the day the thing that most impressed the users bore no resemblance to their original requirements.

85 miles there, 85 miles back, a [...]