General

Recently, I was having trouble saving a PowerPoint slide deck as a set of PNG files.

The error message said:

Sorry we couldn’t find slide1.PNG. Is it possible that it was moved, renamed, or deleted?

After trying to copy the slides into another deck to replace the original deck, the same problem existed. Saving in PPTX format was fine. Curiously, saving individual slides was also fine.

I found a few blog posts online that said it might be to do with an embedded period in the filename. That wasn’t the case but it gave me the clue that I needed.

2026-11-01

I was watching a preview (but public) presentation today, and I noticed the button in Power BI for a whole new way of creating reports said Modern Report. I really hope that it doesn’t get out the door with that name.

One thing the IT industry never seems to learn is that calling anything New or Modern is a mistake.

I was recently working with a client, and they were changing the working IT environments for their staff. What struck me as odd was that they called the new environments Modern. Amazingly, Modern was actually the name of the environment. I’m sure they currently see the environments as the modern ones, but soon enough, it won’t be modern or new, and then the name looks really, really odd.

2026-10-30

Perhaps I’m getting old and philosophical but I recall the days when the IT industry prided itself on accuracy. We worried when things didn’t work properly and kept working on them till they did work.

If a customer’s system stopped in a weird way, they actually wanted to know why. They didn’t just want to reboot it and hope for the best.

When did that change?

In a previous blog post , I’ve wrote about the evil Oops something went wrong syndrome that seems to have infected many Sofware as a Service applications.

2026-09-25

There’s a UK game show that I like to watch. It’s called Lingo and it’s the standard word game turned into a full TV show. It’s based on a US game show of the same name.

While watching it, I realized that I’ve come to form an immediate opinion on the education level of the contestants, not based on their appearance, not based on their accents, not based on their assortment of tattoos, but on how they pronounce the letter H.

2026-09-07

There’s a nasty trend that I’ve seen at a number of sites in recent years. It’s the tendency to try to block and or censor anything that the company thinks could be detected as an issue. Some companies are so concerned about their IP (intellectual property) that they try to stop any potential leak of that property.

While on the surface, that all might seem to make sense, but often it ends up being not sensible and unproductive.

2026-08-28

Have you heard someone recently say Drive Safe ? If you’re my age, I’m sure that grates on you somewhat. In the end, safe is an adjective, but here it’s being used as an adverb. If I’d said that at school, I would have been corrected and told it should have been Drive Safely.

Similarly, today I was watching the UK Lingo TV show . I really like it and generally, I hear quite correct English on it, particularly from the presenter. But I then heard him say He did brilliant. And immediately I had the same guttural reaction to it.

2026-08-22

Many years back, I was invited to chair a course accreditation panel for a local TAFE (Technical and Further Education) course. They had started to offer a computing-related 3-year diploma, and the hope was that it wasn’t too far below the 3-year degrees offered at local universities. One part of that accreditation process involved me discussing the course with the staff members who were teaching it.

After talking to almost all the staff, what struck me was how similar they all were. In the requirements for the course, there was a standard that each staff member needed to meet, but there was also a requirement for the group of staff to be diverse enough to have broad knowledge of the industry. There was no individual staff member that you could identify as not being at the appropriate standard, but almost all of them had exactly the same background, career progression, etc.

2026-08-16

Intrusions into computer systems are happening all the time now. We need to address this issue as an industry, but it’s important to understand that the way we design databases plays a big role in the impacts that occur during intrusions.

If you don’t accept that you could have an intrusion, you are living in La La Land. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_prone_personality )

A bug in any one of the frameworks that you use, the code that you write, the protocols that you use, the operating system or hosting services that you use can potentially expose you to an intrusion.

2026-07-25

If I want accounting advice, it’s unlikely that I’d ask my dentist for that advice.

Accountants and IT

Many years ago, I created applications for food wholesalers. When the owners of these businesses decided to get a new or better computing system, invariably they’d speak to their accountants. I understand the reasons why that might seem logical to them at first, but what I saw when these clients did this, is that they invariably ended up with the wrong systems.

2026-07-19

Just after I was born, my mother and father called me Gregory. Ever since then, everyone has called me Greg. And that included my parents. To the day she died, my mother called me Greg and so did my dad while he was alive (miss you both).

I have friends who tell me that the only time their mothers used their full names was when they were in trouble for some reason.

2026-07-17