Writing ... or Just Practicing?

According to Nintendo, the name of their family games console expresses their direction to break down the wall that separates video game players from everybody else, puts people more in touch with their games, and with each other. The two letter "i"s emphasize both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play, and the pronunciation "we" emphasizes that this console is for everyone. But I think they only called it this so people in England could make up silly jokes. Read More...

A quick note to Hyper-V users. When I installed Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2, it installed fine with no errors, but after a while I was getting NetBT errors in Event Log saying there was a duplicate name on the network, and other issues finding machines on the network. Read More...

You don't normally expect zonking amounts of current to be flying around inside a computer (unless you've packed it solid with extra disk drives), so tagging a couple of skinny wires to one end of the circuit board is probably an eminently sensible approach. Those five DC volts will eventually find their way along the copper tracks and wander into the odd chip when required, and it's fairly unlikely you'll get flash-over between the connector pins or a nasty smell as several amps of current rumble uncontrolled through the resistors and capacitors. Read More...

I endured a severe culture shock this week. And that was without meeting new people from countries afar, or travelling to distant lands. And it didn't involve a trip to some foreign eatery (such as our local Indian restaurant or Greek fish 'n' chip shop) either. No, all I did was respond to a change in the company security policy by replacing the existing well-known virus protection software with the new Forefront Client Security application. All I need to do now is work out how to configure it. Read More...

Our little documentation department here at p&p occasionally gets some odd requests. I've done the "write some fictitious stories about corporations that don't exist" bit in the past (as content for a sample application, in case you were wondering), and the "write a technical article about cloud computing but don't mention any products or technologies" thing (it was a very short article). Combine this with an emerging policy of rewriting everything four times when people keep changing their minds about what they want, and you can see why I'm usually quite busy. Read More...

Travel, they say, broadens your mind and narrows your arteries. Now back home in wonderfully green and Springing England after a couple of weeks in downtown Redmond, it looks like I survived the combined effects of altitude sickness, jet lag, and airport aggravation. Perhaps I'm becoming a "seasoned traveler". Especially as the dictionary definitions of "seasoned" include "hardened", "tested", and "weathered". I probably fit into all of those categories; and probably "soaked in alcohol" as well, though probably not "rubbed with herbs". Read More...