Remote Assistance w/Hamachi & NetmeetingIf you’ve ever provided over-the-phone computer support for a computer novice (partner, friend, relative, colleague) , you probably know how frustrating it can be when you spend 5 minutes describing where ‘the button’ is you want the other party to click.

I recently needed to provide remote assistance for someone overseas. The person was running Windows XP and had limited computer knowledge. I found out that they had Hamachi installed and so I used Netmeeting (comes installed with XP) to take control of their mouse and keyboard.

Here are the steps for anyone that wants to provide remote assistance using a secure method. (more…)

It’s ironic, that having installed and trialed so many flowcharting solutions, my tool of choice was already installed on my laptop and I didn’t even know it.

Like most people, I used to think of Excel as just a spreadsheet package. However, as I’m going to show you in this guide, it trounces other expensive flowcharting solutions and is now my favourite flowchart software. Let me tell you why; (more…)

Since patching the Secure-Admin plugin a few months back, the download count and positive feedback has been fantastic.

I’ve recently adapted it to work with PHP 5.2 and, due to popular request, also expanded the featureset to cater for Shared SSL setups.

In light of the expanding featureset I’ve decided to rename the plugin to Admin-SSL (more…)

stack.jpgManaging tasks whilst maintaining productivity can often feel like an uphill struggle. Over the years, I’ve refined the way I like to work and found I am most productive when working from a single list of tasks.

The order of my tasks depicts the priority. This means that, once my tasks are ordered correctly, all I need to do is work my way down the list from the first item.

ActiveCollab has provided me with a great set of tools to manage projects. However, I feel the current version (0.71) lacks an efficient way of managing tasks and doesn’t provide a single combined list from ALL projects. This, coupled with the fact that I’ve been yearning for a drag and drop sortable list has driven me to hack activeCollab’s My Tasks page and add a new feature that I’ve called ‘Prioritask’. (more…)

unofficial aC LogoI’ve been looking for an open source application that I can use to manage my projects and after a review of the current popular options I’ve chosen activeCollab. ActiveCollab is written by Ilija Studen who based the system on Basecamp, 37Signals’ popular project management and collaboration tool.

After I installed and became acquainted with the system I realised that it was lacking something that I needed urgently; the ability to attach a thread of comments to individual tasks for the purpose of issue tracking. (more…)