http://www.callum-macdonald.com Callum's musings on the world at large... Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:43:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I bought a Huawei E220 last week. It took a week or so to arrive. Then I wanted to get myself a 3 mobile broadband account. That turned out to be a pain in the ass. You need to sign a contract, so you have to go through a credit ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/27/mobile-broadband-is-go/ Changes are afoot in UK banking. I just received an email from Smile telling me about faster payments. Dear Callum At smile we're always looking at ways we can improve the service we offer you. This is why we're pleased to tell you about Faster Payments. The Faster Payments Service will speed ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/14/smile-launch-faster-payments/ Is there any reason why one should not use the username as the password salt? Storing md5( username . password ) instead of md5( password ) in the password column. It seems like a very simple idea, so I'm sure there's a good reason why it's not in popular use. ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/13/username-as-password-salt/ In Fedora 8 when I closed my laptop lid, my screen would lock. Under Ubuntu 8.04 this doesn't happen. After a bit of digging, I found a solution. The gconf setting is "/apps/gnome-power-manager/lock/blank_screen". When set to true, closing the lid will lock the screen. Luvvvly. :) http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/11/ubuntu-lock-screen-on-laptop-close-lid/ I spent 4 long hours on public transport today. I was eager to collect my new Nokia N810 as soon as possible. I twittered some first impressions. It's a lovely device. Very tactile. It feels very solid. I was initially skeptical about the keyboard, but once I booted the device ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/09/first-impressions-of-the-nokia-n810/ Lonely planet publish books. They're a book publisher. Books, in their traditional paper form, are dying. I attended a talk by Frances Linzee Gordon on Wednesday night at Gleebooks. Frances is a travel writer for Lonely Planet. She's a great traveller. She's a good photographer. She has some fantastic stories. ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/06/a-vision-for-lonely-planet/ I'm thinking about buying a Nokia N810. Email, web out and about Music, movies, books, on the go Skype / SIP calls Instant Messaging, IRC Meeting notes instead of a laptop Instead of a laptop for short trips Anyone have any feedback? Have you got one? Does it work well? Is the keyboard easy to use? Does ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/06/considering-a-nokia-n810/ I'm always looking for alternatives to sites, for one reason or another. An alternative to Google because of their politics. An alternative to CouchSurfing.com because of it's unreliability. An alternative to RentaCoder.com because it's good to spread the reptuation. This morning, I thought it would be great to launch a simple ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/04/idea-alternativesto/ I'm pissed. Happy Cogs recently did some work on the admin upgrade for WordPress 2.5. Through them, I found the hosting company Media Template. The pitch was appealing. They seemed professional, personal, all the things you'd want from a hosting company. That is, until I started digging. One of their virtual server ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/06/03/media-template-outrageous-bandwidth-charges/ I just received an email offering me "Bacheelor, MasteerMBA, and Doctoraate diplomas". Somewhat ironic that there's spelling errors. They're probably to try and fool the spam checkers. I've always been intrigued by the idea of buying qualifications. I opened the email expecting to find a web link, but no, instead there's ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/30/degree-spam-fight-back/ Spotted this on Guy's blog. Cisco made a presentation in India. There were 3 people on stage. One in India. Two in San Jose, onstage via live, holographic, 3d, video conferencing. Awesome! Check out the explanation and video. http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/30/holographic-video-conferencing/ An assortment of photos from Sydney follows. It's quite common to see surfers strolling through the streets of Sydney. In fairness, this was just across the road from the beach though! :) The first picture was just across the road from this, Bondi Beach. Ross, master of the ocean. :) The white ladies. This ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/28/first-round-of-sydney-photos/ I'm starting to get a tiny bit ill. It's the same sort of sore throat / slight cough that I've had a few times recently. So in a bid to beat it down once and for all, I'm going to overdose on raw food for the next few days! I ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/28/breakfast-raw/ I published the Real Global Terms and the SH Global Posts plugins today. It's code I've had running for ages and have been promising to publish but never quite gotten round to it. Now it's out, let the madness ensue... :) http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/27/two-wpmu-plugins-published/ You can follow the mars landing on Twitter. Ain't that awesome? :) Twitter really has become ubiquitous technology. Everyone's on it. If only they could come out with a revenue model, make some money, hire some more brains, and sort out their reliability issues. On a plus note, they're recently blogging ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/26/follow-the-mars-landing-on-twitter/ Seth posted a request for people to send pictures of themselves for the cover of his next book. What a genius idea! So sure enough, I whipped off a headshot. You never know, I might be immortalised in print! Which begs the question, will I have to buy the book to ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/24/i-might-be-on-seths-book/ I've spent a lot of this week fighting with svn. Things that should have been simple, somehow kept failing. I was merging changes from a read-only http repo into a local working copy, which is checked out from an https repo. For some reason, that doesn't work. Normally it does, ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/23/goodbye-svn-hello-bazaar/ The budget airline Oasis Hong Kong has appointed liquidators. Technically the court appointed the liquidators, but anyway, the airline is in liquidation. My sympathies to anyone who has booked flights with them and is waiting to hear. In my experience, liquidators are absolutely ruthless and out solely to maximise their ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/23/oasis-hong-kong-in-liquidation/ I met Jason Calacanis at the blogger breakfast this morning. Duncan Riley was there, although I didn't meet him. Somebody said he (Duncan) was a big wig, so I was checking him out online after the meeting. I came across Duncan talking about Jason. Jason originally posted, 37 signals responded ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/21/meeting-jason-calacanis/ I was at a blogger's breakfast with the guys from Mahalo this morning. It was interesting to meet some Sydney tech people. There was a mix of people. Primarily fairly switched on, fairly corporate looking suits. A spattering of geeks and Jason devotees. It was quite a small affair, about ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/21/bloggers-breakfast/ I saw Iron Man tonight. It's a good movie. For some reason I'd heard it was really good. I'd say it's good, not the best movie I've seen this year, but definitely good. The effects are awesome. The story itself is great, in a cheesy, comic book sort of way. The ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/21/iron-man/ I had some challenges with Zend Studio so I'm posting this for anyone with the same problems (and for my own records). I found the solution here. The issue is related to compiz. Additionally, Sun's java5 needs to be the default java (set with `sudo update-java-alternatives`). http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/20/zend-studio-551-on-ubuntu/ I have installed Ubuntu. It all seems to be running quite smoothly. VMWare is working, which is nice. I had some initial sound issues with Skype but it looks like it was a volume issue, sorted now. Waiting for Zend studio to download, hopefully that will be an easy install. Overall, ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/20/ubuntu-is-go/ I've been thinking about switching from Fedora to Ubuntu. I downloaded the latest Ubuntu version a few weeks ago. Today I took the plunge and booted it up. First thing I noticed, no wireless networks. It detected my card and it seemed to work, but no networks were listed by NetworkManager. ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/16/early-adventures-with-ubuntu/ My brother has been having some trouble with his ZenCart powered store. Customers couldn't check out using PayPal's Website Payments Pro, or something like that. Anyway, today, he finally convinced me to look into the problem. So I dug into the code. Wow. Zen Cart is not a developer's dream. It ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/15/i-submitted-a-patch-to-zen-cart/ What is bandwidth? A quick explanation for non-techies. Think of an internet connection like a water pipe. You can choose what size of pipe to order. The bigger the pipe, the higher the water pressure. Internet is the same. But as well as the speed / size of your pipe, you ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/15/excess-bandwidth-charges-in-australia/ Henry very kindly booked me a ticket for Tim Ferris's 4 Hour Work Week session in Sydney. I haven't read the book, but I've heard about it, and I'm curious to meet the man behind the idea. I wonder if I can get hold of the book and cruise through ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/14/tim-ferris-in-sydney/ I released version 0.7 of the WP Mail SMTP plugin a couple of days ago. To make support a little more manageable I'm going to switch the comments from the plugin page to a post for each version. So please ask in the comments here for all support questions related ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/03/wp-mail-smtp-v07/ Last month I flew from Johannesburg to Bangkok, via Abu Dhabi with Etihad Airways. The flights were each relatively pleasant, the entertainment was pretty good, and the price was unbelievable, definitely unbeatable. When leaving the first plane from Jo'burg to Abu Dhabi, I left my phone on the plane. I realised ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/05/01/charles-with-etihad-airways/ Just released a new version of the WP Mail SMTP plugin. There were a stream of similar questions about one particular error message over the last few months. Hopefully this new version will provide more detailed debugging output. I'd recommend upgrading to anyone having problems. There are no bugfixes or ... http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/04/30/wp-mail-smtp-v06-released/