William's blog

Google recently released a FANTASTIC Java app which allows you to easily check you Gmail from a mobile phone. It is very fast, simple and easy to use. To get it, just point your phone's web browser to http://gmail.com/app . It will then ask permission to download and install a 100k applet.

This article will explain how to improve the call quality and reliability of Skype for users behind a firewall.

A firewall can be any type of ADSL or cable router that allows you to connect multiple computers to a single Internet connections. This typically uses a technology called NAT. (Network Address Translation)

The are several bits of information you will need:

Just quick word of warning to people who use gmail as their regular mail host.

The spam filters are going a bit crazy and wrongly tagged many legit mails as spam.

Also, the gmail SSL certificate seems to have expired, which seems surprising.

This is going to be a fairly brief article about encoding music, sound quality and how to get the most useful results.

There are three 'main' formats for encoding music in popular use today.

1. MP3
2. AAC
3. WMA

MP3 is available in nearly every gadget that can play digitised music. There are _many_ ways of encoding to MP3. Results can be awful to fantastic both in file size and sound quality depending on what is used to do the encoding. iTunes has it's own built in MP3 encoder which is really bad. Do not use.

I was reading Ivan's post in the forum about visitor activity and thought it might be a good opportunity to mention a few CLI (Command Line Interface) tips for analysing Apache Log files. I actually helped Ivan by using these same commands a few months ago....

Following on from yesterday's tip about MySQL, I thought I should mention a few tips for working with MySQL.

1 - A great MySQL admin tool, from MySQL.com, MySQL Administrator. This lets you stop/start and manage all aspects of the server. eg to enable query logging.

2 - In the development stages enable query logging and run a tail. This allows you to see exactly what is being sent to the server, and is a great tool when debugging.

This tip is a quick reminder for those people who do a bit of PHP/MySQL development. This example is from a project I am currently working on.

I have a table of author's profiles that uses a field called 'auth_name'. This is a varchar(255) type field.

On the page about authors I do:

SELECT authorid, auth_name
FROM authorp
ORDER BY auth_name

and populate a HTML SELECT box with an array of results.

A word of warning for all Gmail users.

The Gmail spam filter seems to have become a tad over-zealous recently.

I checked in there and had to pull out at least 50 emails that were wrongly tagged as spam. These included 100% legit emails from collegues that had _no_ indication of being spam, as well as automated emails.

Since then I have found several other blogs warning of the same problem.

Will

Just a quick tip for anyone here that uses Java Apps, and finds them a bit sluggish. Have you installed the latest Java 1.5 update ? Or as Sun calls it Java 5.0. It really makes them snappier!

If haven't got the update, go over to the Apple OSX Java page and grab the files from www.apple.com/macosx/features/java/

Install the package and then run the app in:
Application > Utilities > J2SE 5.0 > Java Preferences

Use the following settings:

I'm going to give a very brief article about improving the PHP setup that comes with Tiger. This is a two step operation:

1. Install Marc Liyanage's PHP
2. Install Eaccelerator

I will do some basic benchmarking using phpMyadmin and ab.