In Kubuntu the default browser is Konquerer, but as a longtime Firefox user I wanted to use that as the system default browser. Googling around, I found a way to switch to the browser in Thunderbird, so that links in mails opened in Firefox, but it didn’t change in desktop links and other applications. Now another switcher found the solution. Acutally there isn’t much of a solution in it. It’s more a configuration thing, once you know where to fix it. In the /etc/alternatives/ there is a bunch of links, which points to default applications in several different areas.

The new scheduled update to Kubunu hit the net as planned a few days ago. The new release is named Edgy Eft (the previous release was called Dapper Drake). This is not a Long Term Support release, but it is a stable release, so I upgraded. While it wasn’t a completely smooth process, I was running and at full speed within an hour. Here’s how I did it. The Dapper Drake was fully patched to the newest version of all installed packages. I had earlier on removed all packages I was (absolutely) certain I wouldn’t need – not as a preparation for an upgrade – less (software) is more (stable/bug-free). It’s really no too hard to install any packages you’ve removed, should you ever discover you need them.

After finishing the redesign project on tdc.dk, I found a few hours to finish the redesign of this site. The former look never really got around to looking somewhat decent in Internet Explorer and never worked very well in general (except for some prettier colors). This look is an odd mixture of nifty cube, Yahoo User Interface Library, Movable Type and some homebrewed components. Should you find any serious issues, let me know.

So I may be slightly atypical. 18 months ago I decided to drop Windows. For a while I’ve been running OSX at home, but since it required new hardware at work, it wasn’t an option there. So I switched to Fedora (our Linux God at work was runing it, and it always nice with an expert around to save the day :-) ). Friday however I switch to KUbuntu and unassisted. KUbuntu is the KDE derivate of Ubuntu, and the installer is the coolest OS installed I’ve ever tried. A few questions, some disc spins and the system were running and usable within an hour.

I’ve been playing with XML-RPC – a remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML. If you’re interested in how to use XML-RPC in PHP, go to the lab page on XML-RPC with PHP.

How to check if the correct PHP version, the correct modules and other stuff are available, when you’re creating a PHP application, you expect other to use.

Show me

With PHP5 accessing webservices just go so much easier, and now there’s a section in the PHP Lab to prove it. If you’re PHP Developer looking for examples on how to access Google APIs or any other WebService with SOAP.

Happy 25th Birthday MTV. While I haven’t been watching much the past 25 years, so many others has worldwide. Here in the beginning of the digital millennium, I’m sure your short format series and other solid grip on constant change and renewal will keep you going another 25 years for sure.

So the Scandinavian (and BusinessWeek) papers are going at it again. Friis and Zennström (the minds behind Kazaa and skype) are supposedly working on something new call “The Venice Project”. It’s claimed to be about tv and video but not much more. I’ll be quite impressed if the mange to rock the web a third time.

It seems most software has a lot of features, that we don’t know about or don’t use. Some of these features can actually prove themselves highly valuable in the every usage of a given program, and one of the small but powerful tips is how to color code your mail. I used to have an inbox with more than a thousand messages lying around. Through some heavy vetting and through cleaning it’s rarely below a hundred messages. While a 100 messages isn’t too uncommon its still too many to conquer in a single glance and there are an easy way to break it down further.