Category Archives: General


ammado v1.0 launch

June 26, 2008 – 9:46 am

My former colleagues have done a great job with the v1.0 release of ammado. I was briefly involved at the beginning of the redesign before I wandered back over to Wales. They’ve got a blog that is updated frequently and a podcast too. It’s a great redesign with plenty of very nice aspects to it. […]

By philroche | Also posted in ammado | Comments (2)

Using Wireshark

June 23, 2008 – 3:16 pm

We had a support ticket at Karova which resulted in me having to look at the http data being sent between two servers via Soap over http. I’d read about Wireshark before and had it downloaded already. I installed it - found a way to filter the captured data by IP address and logged all […]

By philroche | Also posted in software, open source | Comments (0)

I love my freekin n95

June 20, 2008 – 4:04 pm

I’ve been an ericsson/sony ericsson fanboy for as long as I can remember so it was a bit of a departure from the safe confines of my Sony when I got an n95 8GB for work (we needed a GPS phone to test on). I’m absolutely in love with it.
Pro’s

Huge screen
5MP camera with flash
8GB storage
Good […]

By philroche | Also posted in nokia, gadgets | Comments (2)

geek poll: what do you have open?

May 21, 2008 – 12:54 pm

From the Planet Ubuntu feed I saw the meme "geek poll: what do you have open?"
What do I have open?

3 instances of windows explorer
1 firefox window with 22 tabs
I instance of Filezilla
2 instances of Visual Studio 2003 command prompt
I instance of EMS’s SQL Manager Lite for SQL express
3 Skype conversations
1 AIM conversation on Pidgin
1 instance […]

By philroche | Comments (0)

Do you Really Want to Be a Development Team Leader?

May 13, 2008 – 2:19 pm

Do you Really Want to Be a Development Team Leader? When you become a DTL you work balance is up for a bit of a change.
A very good article on the differences between a developer and a Dev team leader. It’s very true.

By philroche | Also posted in karova | Comments (1)

Good v Bad Customer Service (Dell v EuropCar)

April 16, 2008 – 11:46 am

In February 2007 I bought two shiny new Dell 2007FP monitors for dual monitor love. They’re awesome and £500 well spent. I bought them from RDC and saved a bundle on the Dell prices. Since my move back to Wales one of the monitors developed a small yellow square in the top left corner. I […]

By philroche | Also posted in rant | Comments (3)

Moving Email to Gmail with Google Apps

March 11, 2008 – 9:53 am

A third party currently hosts our mail @ karova and I wanted to either host it ourselves or move to gmail with Google Apps. As a proof of concept I’ve moved the mail for the philroche.net domain to gmail. I have to say I am very impressed. I signed up for the 30 day free […]

By philroche | Also posted in karova, google | Comments (0)

IWTC 2008 - resounding success

March 4, 2008 – 12:03 pm

Last weekend I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the Irish Web Technology Conference in Dublin. I’ve only been to one other conference (@media 2005) before and I have to say that IWTC 2008 blew it out of the water. The main reason for this is the focus on technical topics. I enjoyed all of […]

By philroche | Also posted in Ireland, conference, iwtc, iwtc2008 | Comments (6)

Livigno 08

February 26, 2008 – 3:46 pm

Last week twenty two of us jetted off to Livigno in northern Italy for a ski/board holiday. It was awesome. I had great fun. Boarding all day and eating/boozing/acting the goat all night. I/We’ve got tons of photos and videos @ http://halfviking.com/livigno08 . Below are a select few to whet your appetite.

Self portrait on the […]

By philroche | Also posted in holidays, livigno | Comments (2)

Another site that annoys me - motortax.ie

February 7, 2008 – 3:37 pm

My motor tax is due for renewal so I phoned them up and requested a tax renewal form with pin number so I could renew it online. It arrived but without the pin of course. I phoned them today and asked if I could have the pin over the phone - no. She said just […]

By philroche | Also posted in Ireland, annoyances | Comments (1)