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DevEvening

On Thursday evening there was the most recent meeting of “DevEvening”. This is a group of developers who take turns to present on areas of interest and expertise with a pleasant meal thrown in. The most recent presentation was given by Craig Hogan.  www.chillfire.co.uk on Search Engine Optimisation. It was both insightful and amusing. Curiously the links provided in the slides http://www.devevening.co.uk/archive.aspx namely:

http://www.seomoz.org/

and

http://www.v7n.com/forums/

do NOT come on the first three pages when you Google SEO! Go figure!

However, at the bottom of the google search page are a number of links and  http://www.seomoz.org/ is the top link for “SEO guide” so all is not lost.

 For any of our customers or readers who would like to improve their search ranking, then reading the above web sites probably is the most cost effective step they can take.

Happy optimisation

Let’s face it: passwords are the Bain of modern day life, be the chip and pin, email, back account or other.

In the States this recently became more topical when Sarah Palin’s email account was “hacked”. This article talks about having secure passwords that are easy to remember and ways to remember them.   

http://lifehacker.com/5051905/how-to-protect-your-email-from-hackers

Since you are reading this, you currently have access to the Internet through the company fire wall. If you also have sound on the PC and have any interest in things scientific: here is some talented, not to say intelligent? (or should that be the other way around) doing their “thang”.  Just 3 minutes of your time... 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM 

I was recently asked how to capture windows screens for making tutorials. There are inexpensive screen capture tools available.  If you just want a screen shot to put in a word or excel document then pressing < alt + ptrnsc > and then opening windows paint and selecting edit and then paste  from the menu will do the job.

Just as inexpensive, and it allows you to capture a video is Windows Media Encoder. This is a free download from Microsoft if you have not already got it.You can get the latest version for Xp at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/default.aspx 

You can get the latest version for Vista at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/mediaplayer/default.mspx

Guidelines on getting the best results are at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/ScreenCodec.aspx

and a getting started guide is it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/screencap.aspx

If you find the Microsoft way to do this a little complex, how about having a look at the following free application:

The Jing Project

Also, if you would like a more feature rich tool,TechSmith who developed The Jing Project also have a commercial offering calledCamtasia, it looks pretty good.

Microsoft have released SQL2008 Express with advanced service, I have done this install quite a few times now. So here are some recommendations:

1. Download and install the prerequisites first

These are:

Net framework version 3.5 SP1

Windows Installer 4.5

Power shell 1.0    (There is a beta for Power shell 2.0 – do not be mislead)

2. Download the install: do not run it. The odds are you will either want to uninstall it or reinstall it.

SQL 2008 Express with Advanced Services

This process may involve a number of reboots: I seem to average about 4.

Good luck!