I’ve just had a go at creating my second WordPress theme. It’s not quite as customisable as Marchie Candy (my first theme), but was an interesting exercise in CSS.

Rather than splashing out on MS Office, spending on other software packages and website memberships, what are the free alternatives? It might surprise you how much you can get for free (legally!).

This is a free alternative to Microsoft Office available on PC and Mac. It includes alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It is absolutely free, developed by a community of developers offering their time without charge. It’s compatible with MS Office, so if somebody sends you a document you won’t have a problem opening it.

Go to the OpenOffice website

Rather than make calls over the phone, Skype allows you to place calls to other Skype users for free, or to landlines and mobiles for a small charge.
Go to the Skype website

As well as being free, the beauty of Google Docs is that your documents are stored online, so they’re available wherever you can access the internet from.
Go to the Google Docs website

This is a collection of free textbooks that anyone can edit. It’s a wiki so expect similarities to Includes the World History Project.
Click here to go to WikiBooks

Includes literary analysis of many classic novels. The site is a bit confusing to navigate, but does have excellent content.
Go to Novelguide.com

Not a content provider in itself, but a useful starting point for searching with Google, Wikipedia, a dictionary as well as unit conversion tools and translation facilities.
Go to the Schoolr website

Useful website for finding the online degrees available in your country.
Go to the Study2U website

This is a great tool designed to help students organise their studies and take notes during school. It’s designed to make note-taking during lectures as easy as possible.
Go to the Notely website

Price comparison website for books. Bookfinder searches both new, used and rare. Boasts the capability to search 150 million books.
Go to bookfinder.com

No list on educational resources would be complete without this fantastic (yet contraversial) encyclopaedia.
Go to Wikipedia

A great idea for a site. Live Mocha is a social networking site where you can help others speak your native tongue, whilst at the same time learn another language from other users.
Go to the Live Mocha website

As a Developer there isn’t a day that goes by without making use of a name, acronym or phrase that doesn’t have an interesting history. Whilst we’re familiar with the usage of web technologies and concepts, not everyone knows much about their respective etymologies. I’ve looked up a few of them, and listed the more interesting ones here.

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Tomorrow Never Dies – but it sure does wrinkle. Here’s a look at some of the Bond girls over the years, and how they’re faring in the present day.

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It’s kinda gloomy at the moment, hey? The big ‘R’ word being thrown around left, right and centre and companies downsizing where they can. Digital media, as an extension of the marketing industry is caught up in the growing concern about job security and the general future of advertising agencies.

Those concerns may not be as accurate as they may first appear. We haven’t seen the economy in such a downturn in nearly 30 years, so effectively this is the first time Internet industries have faced this situation (ignoring the dotcom bubble burting days, which arguably Internet businesses brought on by themselves).

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I wrote a post about backing up databases to email a while ago, but didn’t really explain what could be done.

I use a budget web hosting company for a website that collects data that’s important to me. I don’t want to rely on the hosting company to maintain this by themselves, as I’ve been burnt this way before. I also don’t want to pay for a further hosting solution to look after my backups either.

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New video from awesome Sydney band, Kid Confucius

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX5OVu4OP8Q

As the world divides over the risk versus the scientific merits of starting up the massive Hadron Collider today, I found this picture. As much faith as I instil in CERN scientists, seeing this researcher in a hoodie with his hard hat back-to-front doesn’t do much for the image of those supposedly enriching humankind with new knowledge and capabilities.

This is a rant. Just so you know.

At work it’s been a bad week for our hosting partner. We found out on Monday that they had been serving Webalizer on our server without telling us for a whole year. So that’s one year of confidential marketing reports freely available to anyone who stumbles on the URL (which was not hard to guess). After ignoring my first request (marked urgent) they replied with a snotty email telling me it stats are installed by default, but these days they don’t do that. Of course, I was overjoyed to hear that their new customers don’t suffer this embarrassing lapse in security.

No apology.

On Tuesday I chased a new account request with them that wasn’t done from the previous day. An equally unapologetic response.

On Wednesday we realised that after repeated requests to have somebody who has moved to another team in my company to be removed as a contact, it still wasn’t done. They told us to go through every individual domain registered with them and to change the contact name listed. We responded with a firm ‘hell no,’ as we’re the paying customer and will not spend hours going through our domains because of their inability to create an efficient management tool. They responded back with what was effectively flipping us the bird, saying they’re not willing to make the changes.

Today they told me that the Senior Developer at Host wasn’t an authorised contact onour account. I sent them email proof that I requested Werner has the same authorisation as I do back in January. Their response was to tell me that we’ve got two accounts, and Werner’s only authorised on one. No apology.

I understand how it can be hard to say sorry. When something goes wrong, putting a ’sorry’ in an email takes guts. Although when you don’t do it, it makes you look cowardly and a little pathetic. We don’t doubt they’re good at what they do, and an apology wouldn’t change that view but actually help us in that we’d know they understood something went wrong and will make sure it doesn’t happen again.

‘Sorry’ for the rant. See?

Last week people started talking about Cuil, a new search engine with ambitions on taking on Google’s own search service. I guess it’s about a week after the PR machine swung into action and I can’t help but feel that the public’s enthusiasm is wavering from what wasn’t exactly the warmest reception in the first place.

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