In these pages you will find my sporadic, ill-conceived and possibly flame-able thoughts on a variety of subjects, including OH&S, future developments of Risky Business SOS, life and the world. Bad Spleeing and grammar terribul are all part of the experience. Welcome to 'Flammable Contents'...
Flammable Contents
Docabilly gig guide
Here is a link to my little Docabilly gig guide for Sydney Rockabilly, Swing and Blues gigs.
Dr Gerard Hammond
Leopards are powerful, but tricky cats
Leopard (MacOS X 10.5) is a fantastic release for developers but it has introduced some cosmetic bugs for me and you with Risky Business SOS. Apple will probably fix these in due course (eg 10.5.0+), but at the moment it is more prudent for me to work around these cosmetic issues in Risky Business SOS than wait for the Cupertino Coders (aka Apple) to release an update. So I'll be releasing a quick update v2007.112 in November 2007 to keep all you 'Leopard' Risky Business SOS cats happy.
Enjoy an OH&S safe life!
Cheers,
Dr Gerard Hammond
PS The promised the 'quick update v2007.112' is available
Scaling up
Risky Business SOS was always designed to scale from small to enterprise sized businesses. Now we are getting serious. If your organsation already has a backend database server, contact us about purchasing the database schema, stored procedures and client licenses at an unbelievably low price.
So if you are in a 5 person company or a 500 person department, talk to us about getting your OH&S systems on-line and compliant with Risky Business SOS.
Software is never finished...
Typical! Just after I released 2007.101 I found a simple optimization that dramatically reduces the time to display the text of detailed SOPs and Policies on the main register page. I'd love to release this faster version today but two versions in three days doesn't look good.
So I have checked this new and improved code into the next release, due in November 2007.
Software is never finished, it just keeps evolving and being improved all the time.
What's up Doc?
"What's coming next for Risky Business SOS Doc?"; I hear you ask...
Well the next version 2007.092 is due in late September 2007 and will be a nice tidy up of some niggly cross-platform interface quirks. Risky Business SOS is a cross-platform application and I want it to look pixel perfect for each host OS that it is running on. So, I passed the application onto some developer mates and they made some recommendations about Risky Business SOS needing to follow certain OS conventions; for example, the OK and Cancel buttons are located in different order on PCs and Macs. Risky Business SOS has 50+ dialogs so it took some time to re-code, but it is now looking great, especially on Vista.
I am very happy with the look, stability and functionality of Risky Business SOS and the next version will be the best ever.
If you haven't tried out Risky Business SOS yet, there is a 30 day free demo ready for you to take it for a spin. Why not download it and give it a go.
On another note...
We have had some great sales recently and from such a disparate range of companies! Plumbers, hardware manufacturers, pharmaceutical exporters etc. Some businesses are using Hazardous chemicals, so Risky Business SOS is a great fit, but some are just making sure that they have up to date Risk Assessments for hazards and secure Incident registers. The feedback has been fantastic!
Regards
Dr G. Hammond
Documenting Common Sense
Documenting Common sense? Isn't that an oxymoron?
Common sense shouldn't need to be documented - it should come naturally.
Well guess what! It ain't so, not least of all in the eyes of the law.
Risky Business SOS is an application designed to help you document the common sense aspects of working safely at your business.
So what do I mean? Working Safely is about common sense. You don't come to work to get seriously injured. You work carefully but what seems like obvious common safety sense for a person who built a business from scratch will not necessarily seem like common sense to a trainee.
Not every one has the same background (language skills, balance skills, eye-sight, fore-sight, body height, over bite) and so we all see the world from slightly different angles and at slightly different speeds. Risky Business SOS tries to document this common sense (and simplify) the requirements of the business owners to inform everyone in the organisation about this common sense safety aspect, at their own pace. It is a big ask. Firstly, it takes a significant commitment from busy business owners to stop and do a brain dump of their experience into a form that employees can use. Secondly, every employee deserves the right to have the capability to do the job in the same way as an experienced boss. No employer has the right to ask workers to not protect themselves at work, and Governments agree. It is an intractable and unavoidable component of modern business practices. So for busy business owners there is no option other than documenting your processes, assessing the risk of potential hazards and training you workers. Governments insist that you do this!
Risky Business SOS application was designed:
(a) to make sure that you document the minimum business logic and common sense information;
(b) to make it easy to use and accessible to every employee, from those adding the information, to the employees who need to be made aware in a timely fashion and to be able learn the information 'at their own pace'.
(c) designed to give you some protection against draconian laws.
It's a big ask Documenting Common sense.
5 Pixel Perfect MacOS X User interface Applications
What makes a great user interface? Attention to detail - that's what!
Here are 5 pixel perfect Mac OSX applications!