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.

In the book the DaVinci code there’s a fun little device called a “Cryptex”. It a container for a secret message, and to open it, you need to align some dials to the correct position. In an quiz somewhere you were invited to crack such a cryptext consisting of 6 dials with 6 letters on each to find the correct combination, which would spell a word. To find the solution quickly, all you need is PHP.

If you are among the 70.000.000 users, who still use windows 98 or Windows Millennium, your operating system has reached end-of-life today and will no longer be patched for security or supported by Microsoft. If you can’t afford the update, you may consider upgrading to Ubuntu or some other free system for your computer.

… even crashes. While it shouldn’t matter too much, the eye candy (cool graphics, sweet effects and other eye pleasing stuff) on a Mac even makes me smile from time to time – and you just have a little more forgiveness to a program, which crashes with grace. Take Adium - my favourite Instant Messaging client. Being a multi language expert (and thus speaking both MSN, Jabber, GTalk, ICQ and other protocols) it does have a hard time, and some times – weeks if not months apart – a may go down in flames.

Browsing in other people code can be an interesting experience. Sometimes you learn stuff, other times you just get scared of the things you see. One recent observation I seem to make a lot, is that handling “application configuration” is often handled less gracefully as a would have wished. The plain basic configuration handling in many PHP applications seems to be creating a php-file and declare all configuration values in this file – then have all other scripts in the application include this one config file – and sure it works.