The past months my calendar at work seems to have been a pure mayhem of meetings, seminars and other activities away from my desk and the feeling of during actual work. There are however one trick, which seems to do magic – make a meeting without inviting anyone. In modern offices with enterprise calendaring systems such as Outlook&/Exchange setting up meetings is much easier than ever before (maybe too easy but that’s a topic for another post).

Suppose you want to write a system, which requires a password to do something. Not a login system, but just a shared secret. Suppose also, that you need to show someone the source code, but you don’t want him or her, the secret password can you do that. Sure. Here’s a simple way to do it with PHP.

Long ago I installed Gallery2. It was initially just a test installation to see if it worked, as it should. Being a test install it was just placed at /g2/ on this server. Time passed. It just worked and before long, there were a large number of photos (with metadata) in the gallery. So how do you move it to a slightly more suitable location without breaking too many things? I tried it a few times before, but with very little success. Now it’s done, I can only wonder why it seemed difficult to do it in the past – it’s really quite simple. Here’s how to do it:

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.