At the weekend I returned home after spending a couple of weeks on my hols in North Wales. After unloading the car, I gave my web server a kick. A few days into the first week we had a power cut, which wouldn't be a problem normally but the server got stuck during the BIOS check. It was complaining that the cover had been previously opened. Would it have been too much trouble to incorporate a timeout into the message so it could have booted up unattended? Cheers Dell! I took my PowerBook with me on holiday, as I needed somewhere to upload my digital photos. That's what I told my wife anyway. I stayed disconnected for a few days, then couldn't stand it any more and worked out how to connect to the net via GPRS on my mobile, over BlueTooth to the powerbook. It worked well enough, but it always took two or three tries before it connected, and the connection timed out about a minute of idle time, which was quite frustrating.

A colleague brought in a load of ogg files. Could he play them under iTunes? No problem! Here's how:

1. Go to the QT Components SourceForge page and download the plugin (there are versions for Windows and Mac
2. Inside the disk image you'll find a readme file and OggVorbis.component. Put OggVorbis.component in /Library/QuickTime (as described in the readme)
3. Restart iTunes and it will work!

Ogg files now import into iTunes, and most of the metadata works as well. If you "Get Info..." on an ogg file you'll find it listed as a QuickTime movie file. You won't be able to attach artwork.

Apple recently announced that the next version of Mac OS X (codenamed Tiger) will include the Blojsom blog package. Since I am both a Mac user, and a Java developer (Blojsom is written in Java) I decided to download the latest version and try it out. Up until now I've been using geeklog, which is fine and all that, but to be honest I've never been particularly fond of PHP. I don't like the way that the site content and logic is all crammed together in each file. I've only just started to scratch the surface of Blojsom, but it seems to use a much more favourable design, with pages built up from Velocity templates.

Got GMail? I have! :-) Cheers Rich. evans d0t jon at gmail d0t com. Has a nice ring to it.

Ho hum. It seems that in every sphere of life, there is scum. I’ve just spent 1/2 an hour deleting comment spam. Sorry if you read any of it and found it offensive. I’ve changed the site configuration so that you have to register before you can post. Another example of idiots making life difficult for everyone else.