At the time of writing, Wikileaks has released 842 of the 251,287 US diplomatic cables that it has come into possession of by way of a leak from within the US Army. So far it has been revealed that; None of the governments involved in the conflict in Afghanistan are confident that the war can be won against the Taliban or that it can be turned into a viable democracy Both the current and previous US Secretary’s of State have authorised “spying” [...]

Now that the UK is officially in a recession, what is interesting to see is how news organisations want us to visualise economic slowdown. When the Great Depression is mentioned, a lot of us would picture people walking around, in sepia, with mouth and brows arced downwards, like a sad clown. But where did this image come from? Television, most likely. Though this isn’t a new piece of imagery, call me crazy, but this is how I’ve always pictured it. An episode of the Simpsons is one example that [...]

Pineapple Boudoir is a startup that sells lingerie, candles, sex toys and other products, aimed largely at women. The first challenge was to design an infrastructure to support the web-application and cart. Having previous experience with Windows and the .NET environment we decided to follow this route, based on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. At launch we are running SQL and IIS on this single server, although we intend to run SQL on a separate [...]