Three are definitely putting a transparent proxy between me and the network.

I just got this error message

After an upgrade I found my 3G USB modem wasn’t loading properly.

For some reason the airprime module was connection to ttyUSB0 making it unavailable.

To fix this I just added the airprime module to the blacklisting in

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

The Drupal api module is very useful. It’s also quite strict in the formats it recognises.

If you are having trouble getting it to recognise your doc-comments make sure you are following the Drupal coding standards

http://drupal.org/coding-standards

I just created a profile for myself on linkedin - a much better designed site than facebook.

Read more about me there

I bought a Dell laptop with pre-installed Linux and it’s been just great - all the hardware just works (better than a similar laptop with Windows)

One of the great benefits of Linux is that you get far more frequent upgrades than with other systems, as a developer it pays to keep ahead of the curve.

The basic search is:

aptitude search apache

Returns all packages that match

Docbook is a great standard for technical documentation, it is easily converted into a range of formats (html, pdf etc) and while it can be styled according to taste; the layout is always familiar.

When I first started using Linux you had to read a lot of documentation - and it was mostly in docbook format so I got kind of used to it.

But it’s a rich standard - making it much harder to learn than HTML.

I just got a new gadget - a mobile internet modem.

As ever the manufactures provide little support for us Linux users - but setup was pretty easy anyway.

I plugged it in and it was detected OK with full driver support.

This has just taken me a surprisingly long time to work out …

I needed to output a file with the following as a marker in various places.

It’s easy to save an Excel file as CSV and read it in PHP with the fgetcsv function but this may not work so well if the file contains non-English characters.

Excel uses a non-standard character encoding for csv files.

You can save an Excel file as ‘unicode’ text however there are several unicode systems - Windows uses UTF-16, and PHP uses UTF-8.

To open the ‘unicode text’ file in PHP you have to convert it, in addition you may want to be able to open UTF-8 files that may be created by other systems.