TechArchive

Original article date: September 1999 …write effective ones. We often hear of campaigns for ‘Real English’, from people who object to all that unnecessary jargon we find on official documents. A good thing, certainly, but we tend to think it doesn’t apply to straightforward, down-to-earth engineering types like ourselves. How wrong we are. Sometimes we [...]

Original article date: April 2001 It’s time to review some cracking new websites that have come onstream recently. The first is at www.customerfeedback.com, the website for Rantscape plc. This website is a universal complaint centre. Automated software that Rantscape has been running now for over three years has compiled a huge database of company names [...]

Original article date: February 2001 Last week I received a CD across my desk. I haven’t really played with it yet, but if it contains what it says it contains, it deserves a serious mention. At first glance it looked like just another in a long line of catalogue CDs (or coasters, as I tend [...]

This article was originally written in the period 1995-2000 Folk have said “Sometimes Griff, your column sounds like you’re ranting!”. Ah well, in for a penny, in for a Euro. Here’s this month’s warm-up rant.DYJHIW (Don’t you just hate it when) you go to a show like Manufacturing Week, trog round all day and collect [...]

Original article date: February 2002 Life as a road warrior, travelling from hotel to hotel with little more than a laptop and a modem, is supposed to have got easier from a connectivity-with-home-base point of view. But for the most part, it seems, it’s still not really sorted. If you’re part of a huge company [...]

This article was originally written in the period 1995-2000 I’m going to get called a Luddite again for this, I can see it. Funny how whenever I talk about getting on with down-to-earth stuff rather than the `bleeding’ edge, I get e-mails saying I have no sense of adventure.Anyway, on with the rant. Someone was [...]

Original article date: July 1999 Linux seems to be the hot topic of conversation amongst computer folk these days, but I believe many engineers are saying “OK, I keep reading about it, but what is it ¡ and is it relevant?”. So I’m going to attempt to explain a few things. Nothing too complex, but [...]

Original article date: September 2001 Why is industrial hardware so damned big?I keep getting suppliers walking in saying: “these are our new fieldbus valves” and in at least 50% of cases they have this monstrous great box on them that makes them almost impossible to fit in, or else there is some base station that [...]

Original article date: April 1999 Technical support is becoming more of an issue these days. With computers, this is partly because the advent of Windows 95, etc, has made computers more complex behind the scenes – while apparently more accessible to total non-techies. This is pretty apparent when you look at the new crop of [...]

Original article date: October 2001 You know you’re in Seattle when the park at the end of the street has a bandstand and the first two Sunday fixtures in the summer programme are the Boeing Employee’s Band followed a week later by the Microsoft Orchestra. No, I’m not joking. I used to work in a [...]