Once in a while, a fantastic piece of open source software comes along. Just the other day, banshee 1.0 was released. I must say, I’m *very* impressed. It’s like a much better, really great iTunes. With the addition of video it now covers pretty much everything I wanted in a media player thingi for Linux. Check it out: Banshee 1.0!

I updated my php-clearsilver installation guide today after discovering it’s wrong in a few places. Fortunately, I don’t think anyone’s ever used it (apart from me today.) If you know what clearsilver is and you use php, you might find it interesting. Installing PHP Clearsilver module for apache on Ubuntu and Debian

The Ubuntu UK Podcast show was recently established, someone I met from HantsLUG hosts it and it’s pretty interesting for those of you who are Ubuntu users. Check it out! Ubuntu UK Podcast

Following several guides on setting up a bridge on my laptop between the wireless network interface and VirtualBox for direct networking was simply not working for me. Today after lots of head scratching I finally discovered why. Turns out that the standard bridge utils are no good for most wireless cards, but there is a workaround. Check out this guide, and read under the wireless section: Bridged Networking with VirtualBox on Linux Hosts

Unfortunately, you can’t!!! Well, not as far as I can tell, I’ve asked around and scoured the web but it seems there’s no use, there simply isn’t a way to do it on linux. The next best thing is to use DVDFab for windows via Wine (it kind of semi-officially works with Wine). As I found nothing really solid on google, I thought I’d write this post as it’s annoying when you can’t find anything.

Just a handy one for the IE6 png support: for i in `ls`; do x=`basename $i .png`; convert $i $x.gif; done

No doubt it’s been done elsewhere, but I spent quite a while trying to get this one working. Basically I wanted a horizontal css menu with decent markup and no hacks. I also wanted to have nice icons for each item correctly vertically aligned. On top of that I wanted the whole thing to be fluid so it would look right at any text size. Unfortunately because of IE6’s lack of support for :hover on anything but links I needed to use containing spans for the text on each list item (doh!

While pondering why my backup scripts weren’t working in /etc/cron.daily, I remembered that run-parts (the thing that runs stuff in that directory) doesn’t like running scripts with a .sh, or indeed probably any extension on them. Handy to remember that one!

Looks like the guys over at Innotek have been busy, probably old news to most but I just realised they’ve released version 1.5 of Virtualbox last year. Among a whole bunch of bug fixes and other improvements it seems they’ve added one cool feature that will make working with those windows only programs much easier - seamless window integration with your host OS (I think that’s linux only, but I might be wrong).

I recently got the ClearSilver PHP module working on my Ubuntu laptop as we use it on a number of our web sites and I needed to develop a site with it locally. Then this morning I stupidly upgraded PHP and of course the module had un-resolved symbols. Dohh! So I decided this time I’d write a better document on how to get it working, one which might actually help me and could perhaps help others.