James Bell » James Bell

LibreOffice 3.5 is Launched!

James — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:39:32 +0000

The Document Foundation has launched LibreOffice 3.5! It has been hailed “The Best Free Office Suite Ever” and I, for one, completely agree. More information about this release: http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2012/02/14/the-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-3-5-the-best-free-office-suite-ever/ To download: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Cisco WAP4410N Wireless N Access Point Review

James — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:03:45 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was tasked with solving a connectivity problem between two buildings that had unfortunately lost their fibre optic connection. Due to the limited time scale to come up with a solution an initial wireless 802.11g bridge was created using a pair of Netgear WG302 APs that I managed to find …

Presenting the rear wheel drive Ford Transit

James — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:25:18 +0000

LibreOffice 3.5 RC

James — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:02:56 +0000

LibreOffice 3.5 RC3 has been released, check it out at: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/. Includes some cool new features and a host of improvements. Watch out Microsoft, you may be popular now….

Deploying Adobe Reader…. Properly!

James — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 08:43:53 +0000

Unfortunately Adobe has not made it easy to deploy their Reader software. It poses a number of challenges: Adobe only release MSI installers for major releases. Adobe release MSP installers for minor releases. MSP installers can not be deployed through a GPO. Adobe Reader had an EULA and a user update prompt by default. We …

The Need For Speed

James — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:16:23 +0000

I have working a lot this week on a VMware backup solution involving a HP vCentre server and an iSCSI NAS device. Aim The aim was to create a high performance iSCSI network and a fast link to our ESX hosts for a Veeam Backup & Replication job running overnight. Background Veeam is a product …

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

James — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:19:12 +0000

Over the past few weeks I have been testing out the latest version of Ubuntu Linux – version 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. This version was released on 13th October 2011 and includes many enhancements over previous versions. Let me go over some of my more notable observations: 1) Gnome UX – Gnome 3.2, included in this …

BTCC Season End

James — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:58:06 +0000

Last weekend saw the end of the 2011 British Touring Car Championship season on Silverstone’s national circuit. The championship provided great entertainment all season, so much so that it all came down to the last race of the season; with Team Dynamics Honda team mates Gordon Sheddon and Matt Neal battling it out for overall …

ASP to PHP – Time To Dig Out The Cross Reference!

James — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 09:32:10 +0000

Some time ago, whilst back at school, I decided to learn the Microsoft Active Server Pages server side programming language to further advance my abilities as an amateur web developer. As part of this development I built a small suite of web applications and knitted it all together around a very secure, self-built, authentication system. …

End User Migration

James — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:24:16 +0000

Having accepted a position at a large manufacturing company just north of Greater Manchester – I have recently moved to the West Yorkshire town of Halifax. Due to the short time scale to get things organised unfortunately my blog had taken a bit of a back seat over the last month. Rest assured that I …