Sparrowtail

Back in January I treated myself to a new mobile phone. Of course I looked at the iPhone, but there were three big drawbacks: 1. the price 2. they're getting kinda common (1 million sold in the UK!) 3. you can't use it as a 3G modem

OK, this one was entirely my own fault, but it's a useful cautionary tale to anyone running any version of Ubuntu. For some time now I've been running an Ubuntu 7.04 server as my virtual development server, and it's been working out just great. The trouble started when I needed to process incoming emails using a PHP script. Now, there's a rather handy PHP IMAP library to do just this. Thanks to Ubuntu's use of the Synaptic package manager, installing it is a simple "sudo apt-get install php5-imap" command. And that's where trouble began.

I've used a nice bit of CSS to style all the buttons throughout our web site, but it all falls down a bit on the file upload button. For reasons best known only to the various browser developers, this button only has limited styling capability, if indeed any at all. There are a few solutions out there, but they are all pretty messy in terms of adding a lot of cruft to your site code. I was looking for something a bit more elegant, and which would fit neatly in with the architecture of my Drupal-based site.

I've just got myself a fancy new mouse (OK - not really all that fancy, but I like it). There's just one small hitch - it's much more sensitive than the touchpad on my laptop, so whenever I switch between the two, I have to fire up control panel, choose the mouse panel, choose the right tab, slide the slider, click the "OK" button, and it all just seems not worth all the effort.

For my sins, I am currently using Windows Vista as the OS on my main PC, and am using the build-in mail client, Windows Mail, basically a rebranded Outlook Express. It's pretty basic, but I don't need much from my email client. However, today I found a need to view the HTML source of HTML emails.

One of the things we're really eager to get going on Save A Million Shots is the idea of video conversation threads. The trouble is, commenting is a fundamentally different activity from posting. If you're posting an article, you're putting in a reasonable amount of time and effort (probably!), which could include making a video file, saving it to your computer somewhere, and uploading it when you write your post

All the hard work over the past four months has now gone live at Save A Million Shots. It's still in beta (like all good web applications!), so there'll be some more polishing and data quality work over the next few weeks, but we're getting quite a lot of traffic already. Stop on by and have a look!

Drupal includes the jQuery framework by default, which gives you easy access to a bunch of neat javascript eye-candy. I've been meaning to look into this properly for a while now, but I have at least figured out how to resolve a fairly common Drupal requirement - displaying submit buttons as text links.

Yesterday I needed to take remote control of a friend's PC over the internet. This can be a bit hairy at the best of times, but when the friend isn't exactly what you would call a power user, it can be nigh-on impossible. Fortunately, I've been a reader of Joel On Software for a while now, and was very interested in their intern project Copilot.

I have a rather old laptop which is set up to dual boot between Windows XP and Linux (Red Hat 9) using GRUB. Unfortunately this machine now needs to be fully dedicated to Windows (it only has a 10GB disk, and we have 8GB of data to be cleansed using a Windows app), so I've had to remove Linux. This proved slightly trickier than I suspected, mainly because of my own rashness. The laptop was configured with four partitions: 1. the main Windows partition (XP was installed before Red Hat) 2. a Linux boot partition 3. a Linux OS partition