-
How to give an IAM user access to an S3 bucket
My backup strategy for my Bitnami WordPress Multisite has been to enable hourly snapshots in the Bitnami EC2 console. Now that I have created a WordPress Multisite farm on my server this is no longer sufficient. The reason is that I need the ability to restore (and hence backup) individual websites and the server now hosts many websites.…
-
The best format for video in PowerPoint
I needed to include video shot on my mobile phone in a PowerPoint presentation. A problem with video is that the user needs to have the correct codecs installed before they can play the video. In my case Windows 7 does not come with audio codecs for the 3gp format used by my phone. Although…
-
Quirky: crowd-sourcing product development
Quirky is a remarkable company and I cannot believe that I have missed them for so long. They crowd-source product development of their products. So far they have created 299 products and have a community of 826,000 users. Ten percent of the gross revenues of a product is contributed to its Community Cash Pool (my caps). This is the invisible hand…
-
The future of Windows
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/j34uJD7Eoiw/ This is a very insightful article that shows how Microsoft could be planning to reconcile the different needs of consumers and businesses and reduce the licensing and support burden. Some key points: There will only be Windows, not Windows 9, 10, 11 … which will all require different support cycles This will be possible because…
-
10 year’s old comment during UX testing
I was doing some UX testing with my 10 year son. When testing a form I asked him how he would move from field to field. He thought about it carefully and then replied “on a horse”.
-
Creating a WordPress farm on a Bitnami server
This is a work in progress and may be updated in future. Please feel free to comment. The Bitnami stack for deployment on AWS is beautifully crafted. Ubuntu Apache2 WordPress (single instance) Other PHP applications Apache2 configuration Apache is configured so that there is a default website. /opt/bitnami/apache2/htdocs with a configuration file /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf Optimisation…
-
Understanding WordPress multisite users
— this article was updated on 4 April 2014 after a fix was identified– I have spent the whole day trying to understand WordPress users in a multisite environment. I’m not sure if it is very buggy, or I am thick or a bit of both. A multisite instance, henceforth called the “network” has its…
-
Microsoft OneDrive is better than Google Docs
I needed to share an Excel document so I investigated Microsoft OneDrive. Microsoft is late to the file syncing party Dropbox and Google Docs having got well ahead. I’ve used Dropbox a lot, because it just works; it is really effective and painless way of sharing files quickly. This is their core business and they…
-
Better than Apple Time Machine but for a PC
— Update 2016-01-03 read about my new approach to backup — Over the last month I’ve learnt a lot about backup. There had been significant structural changes over the last few years, disc is cheap, bandwidth is inexpensive and remote storage is coming down in price dramatically. It is necessary to address two different issues,…
-
Tiny 64GB usb stick is like another laptop hard drive
One problem with laptops is that that only have one drive. This limits space and data redundancy. This tiny USB drive is designed to be installed permanently in your laptop. An added bonus is that it could be bootable. Thus giving you access either to a linux machine or recovery media for the laptop while…
Dr James Bayley
Creating successful projects
Dr James Bayley 