Despite my dad’s best efforts to drag me along to see Bristol Rovers play when I was a kid, football never grabbed me, but nowadays as an adult, when a hi-stakes game is on it’s (generally) an interesting watch, and the stakes have never been higher for England than their do or die match against Slovenia this Wednesday.

But with a 15:00 kick-off it’s pretty much a given that a pretty big chunk of England’s working population will be either pulling a sickie (or if their employer has any sense – watching the match in work on a supplied TV set). But what happens if you’re going to be out and about?

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If you use a Mac with multiple monitors, you’ll no doubt have noticed the distinct absence of the menubar on anything other than the main monitor.

Of course under the System Preferences you can designate on which monitor your menubar sits, but you are not able to duplicate the menu bar over multi monitors (without using a mirrored display).

However now there is a solution in the form of a promising new app called SecondBar which addresses the issue.

It’s early days for the app at the moment, but it is already stable enough for regular use, and well worth a look if you’ve been grappling around for a second menu.

Every now and then you come across a piece of software so simple and so brilliant that you can’t believe that nobody has come up with it before. Connectify is one such piece of software.

Picture the scenario: I’ve just moved into a new office and for some reason that nobody seems to be able to explain it’s going to take two weeks to get my broadband connected. To say that’s a pain is an understatement.

So as a temporary measure I went out and bought a PAYG 3G dongle from T-Mobile. I didn’t want any ongoing contract as once I get my broadband online I doubt I’ll use it, but at the same time I didn’t want to shell out over the top for PAYG top-up data fees. Shopping around I managed to get one from the high street for £39 with 90 days unlimited usage (although a fair usage policy still applies for obvious reasons).

Plugged it in and boom, instant internet, and with pretty good speeds too. Brilliant. However, I have three computers in my office (a Win 7 laptop, a Win 7 desktop, and an iMac), and I could really do with accessing the internet on more than one of them at once, otherwise my productivity over the next couple of weeks is going to be somewhat hampered.

I already had a fixed network between them using static IP addresses so I can access my network printer, so my thinking was that I could share the dongle-based network connection between the other computers. Hmm, nice idea on paper, but a day and a half later mucking about with ICS and Ad Hoc networking I gave up.

Then today, as I was browsing around for something else, I stumbled across Connectify, and within five minutes my problems were solved.

Connectify is an ingeniously clever piece of software which sets up an Ad Hoc network and shares your internet connection over it, all within a couple of clicks. All you need to do is install it, give it an SSID and a WPA2 password and you’ve got a wi-fi network, ready with internet access ready to share amongst whoever you choose. The very best bit about it however, is that it is free.

I installed it on my Win 7 laptop, configured the options and then turned on Airport on the iMac, and seconds later had full internet access on both machines. Simple and seamless.

Hat’s off to the guys over at Connectify. Go grab yourself a copy now.

http://www.connectify.me/

I’ve been doing quite a lot of Windows Mobile development lately coupled with SQL Server Compact 3.5 and the thing that struck me pretty quickly was how shabby the actual Microsoft tools for the job are.

Whilst you can open an SDF database in Management Studio, you can’t edit the data, or script it or do anything useful really. Using Visual Studio is a little better, as you can at least edit the data, but annoyingly despite telling VS to remember the database password, it never does.

One of the most infuriating things that I came across recently is the fact that you can’t change the order or the names of the columns once you have created them. So if you get something wrong, you have to delete the column and add it again. Shabby.

So after a bit of searching around I came across a whole range of tools devoted to working with SQL Compact databases. Most of them do a fair job, but the best one by far in my opinion is ExportSqlCe.

ExportSqlCe is an add-in for Management Studio 2008, which allows you to script out the schema and data from an SDF as well as viewing and editing the tables. Put simply this is what Management Studio should have been able to do from the off. The best bit about it is that it’s free and open source.

So if you work with SDF files, head over to CodePlex and grab yourself a copy.

http://exportsqlce.codeplex.com/

These days there seem to be a never-ending number of cloud-based services for stashing your data. Depending on what you need from a service, whether it’s purely backup, file syncing, or even collaborative working, chances are there’s a service to suit you.

Working as I do from more than one location, using more than one computer, it’s important for me to be able to easily access my files where ever I am that particular day, whether I’m in the office or on the road.

Over the last couple of years I’ve tried a whole range of different options. Usually they’ve been based around using SFTP or Amazon S3 space mounted as a local drive, for which I’ve tried ExpanDrive, MacFusion, JungleDisk, and ZumoDrive.

Overall they all worked pretty well, but generally suffered the same problem, and that is one of speed. This is the one big problem with cloud storage – that accessing it (in a useful way) requires a pretty fast network connection. Upload speeds are meagre in comparison to download speeds, so copying stuff onto the “drive” often meant a long standing Finder window. Clever caching helps, but you just can’t get away from the problem.

Then there’s the problem of when your connection goes down, or you just plain don’t have one. Put simply – no network, no files.

That’s where Dropbox plays its trump card. Because whilst on the face of it Dropbox is just another cloud storage service, actually it’s not. It’s a file synchronisation service that uses the cloud to keep your files in sync, provides a remote backup of them, as well as offering web and iPhone access to them at the same time.

Sure, the backup and web access are commonplace, but it’s the syncing that is the magic. What happens to your files if you’re not online? Well, nothing. They’re still on your computer and you can still work with them. When you get back online they sync up without bothering you with the details.

But there is the rub. The files are actually always on your computer. With a hosted virtual disk, once you shut down those files aren’t there as the disk is unmounted (aside maybe from being in the cache), and from a security perspective that’s a good thing, but with Dropbox that’s not an option, as all you’re doing is using the cloud to keep your files up to date.

So is there anything we can do about that? As it happens, yes there is. Enter Espionage.

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