Status-Q

For anyone who, like me, has been typing ‘reset nokia 6600’ into Google…

I like my 6600, but the software does have occasional glitches. Something happened on mine which stopped it syncing reliably with my Mac using iSync, so I wanted to try and restore it to its pristine out-of-the-box state. There are lots of tips out there on the web about how to do this – see here for example – but the most thorough format I’ve found so far can be achieved by going to Tools/Settings/Phone/General and choosing ‘Orig. Phone Settings’.

Still doesn’t delete everything, though… let’s see if it works…

Bother. No. Still crashes.

Follow-up, some months later: I eventually solved this by installing FExplorer and using it to delete all sorts of files I didn’t recognize. Somebody had pointed out that the Backup utility built into the Nokia was dying with the same AppArcServerThread error, and when I had deleted enough files to make that work, sure enough, iSync was working again.

[Original Link] As Government advisors call for curbs on Caesarean sections, two mothers defend the procedure in this interesting (and somewhat amusing) article.

A catalogue that came through the door the other day is advertising the Palm Zire handheld.

“Grab the indispensable Zire 21 handheld from palmOne – it’s got as much personality as you have!”

I think I object to that…!

The PostNuke CMS was a fork from the earlier PHP-Nuke. Both of these are still active and widely used, but the PostNuke creators have split off again to do a major (and much needed) rewrite of the system, now called Xaraya.

This continual splitting process is either one of the greatest strengths or greatest weaknesses of Open Source software, depending on your point of view. Either way, Xaraya looks much better under the skin than its predecessors, and is starting to gather accolades, but is badly in need of some really nice documentation like Typo3.

[Original Link] Maybe Netscape isn’t quite dead after all…

I’ve spent most of the weekend looking at Content Management Systems. Not necessarily my first recommendation for a fun weekend, but it had to be done.

I was after an Open Source one, and there’s plenty of choice. Some are primarily oriented towards news-type sites, such as PostNuke and Slash. Others deal more with the idea of a published set of pages, and control access to them, editing, finding your way around etc. The best known at the moment seem to be OpenCMS, Mambo, Plone (base on Zope), ezPublish and Midgard. That’s the sort I needed and yes, I’ve installed and experimented with most of them, except Midgard, which looked good but whose installation instructions ran to rather too many pages.

But the one I’ve been most impressed with and I think am most likely to use is the less well-known Typo3. If you have MySQL & PHP this is pretty easy to install, but incredibly powerful. It won’t give instant results in the way some of the others might, but it has a great deal going for it, if you take the time to read the very substantial documentation. It is remarkable that such a competent piece of Open Source software is so little known. It’s also unusual in being so well documented! Recommended.

Anyway, I must get back to the 120-page ‘Quick Start Guide’ before I get down to the serious stuff…

[Original Link] Ha! Well, John may have a mini iPod, but if he wants a cup of coffee to drink while listening to it, I bet he can’t make it as easily as I can!

[Original Link] John Naughton’s turning up the heat on our competition by getting an iPod Mini. It reminds me of a friend who said something like, “Mobile phones are the only things where men argue about whose is the smallest…”

[Original Link] About a year ago, I wrote here that LaunchBar was ‘my current favourite utility’. A year on, and it still is. It’s not the most visible bit of software on my machine, and I probably only use it a couple of times a day, but it’s the thing I miss first when I use a Mac which doesn’t have it installed. It works the way my brain works, requires minimal configuration and stays out of the way when not needed. Still recommended a year on…