Hello again everyone!

After a nice few days enjoying a family Easter get-together in Cheshire sans internet, I’m now back at home here in Hampshire.

I’ve actually been back for some time, but I wanted to catch up on email and feeds without disturbance, so I hid for a few hours! I’m now fully up-to-date with the world (wow – a Debian release!).

I have to say, it’s really great to actually get away from the world. So much stuff happens all the time, and I’m constantly in contact with everyone, constantly being bombarded with information. Not bothering with all of that for a few days is just so refreshing, even if there is a massive torrent of stuff to read, deal with and sort out at the end of it!

The only thing I don’t like is travelling. Especially by car. We actually did pretty well (partly thanks to the M6 Toll on the way in), but I still just hate long journeys. This isn’t the route we took, but to give you an idea distance-wise, here’s a Google directions map.

Anyway, enough travel moaning. I’ll be following up all the things I’ve got in email and blog comments tomorrow, so if you’re one of the people who’s asked something of me, I’ll deal with those things tomorrow morning.

Just to let everyone know who I haven’t already told, I’ll be away from tomorrow to Tuesday. I doubt I’ll get internet access at all, so don’t expect me to be available!

Thanks to the magic of WordPress scheduled entries, I’ll still be keeping up daily posts on FOSSwire, but since I’ve already done all the hard work of actually writing the posts, I do get a sort of break from blogging!

See you all again either late on Tuesday or on Wednesday.

I’m the proud owner of a Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard. It’s a great keyboard, and it has loads of extra buttons that come in really handy. Well they do, if you can install the driver software that controls them under Linux.

Clean Keyboard Hosted on Zooomr

I have a CD that came with the keyboard which includes a Fedora Core 4 RPM, a SUSE RPM and a .deb I think. Back when this machine was running FC5, the Fedora Core 4 RPM would load fine into the system and that way I could use the cool extra keys.

However, when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, the FC4 RPM would no longer install (and it went into just a little bit of RPM hell).

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that the source code for the key utility is actually GPL’ed and is available for download from the Cherry site (found on this page).

This basically solves the problem, as once you’ve got the source code, you can build it yourself and not depend on some dodgy semi-incompatible binary package.

» Read the rest of this post…

Today it’s time for me to release another bit of open source goodness to the world. This one’s taken a little longer than expected to arrive, but it’s here.

It’s called SleekTabs, and it’s a PHP class that makes it really easy for you to create tabbed interfaces in HTML with full Ajax capabilities. With just a few lines of code, you can easily make a nice tabbed web page. Particularly useful for user preferences pages in web applications, or anywhere else that you want to emulate the tabbed interfaces of the desktop application world.

It’s released under the BSD Licence – so you can hack it to your heart’s desire and you can use it pretty much where you want without many restrictions. Of course, if you do make any particularly useful changes I’d very much appreciate that you also let others see the source code, but I’m not making it a requirement this time round.

It will be on PHP Classes within the next week hopefully (the approval process takes time), so that should also get it to a wider audience!

Without further ado, please visit the project page here on my site, where you’ll find downloads and more explanation.

As always, feedback is desired, so let me know what you think and of course what I can add for the next version when that rolls around!

(Quick unrelated update – WPGet 0.7 is also taking a bit longer than expected, but it is still in the works, so watch out for that coming pretty soon too.)

UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!

After having used Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible for quite some time now, I’m no longer uber-paranoid and now my Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible is now public.

That means you can now spy on me.

For those of you who don’t already know it, my Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible URL is http://example.com/strategyoracle.

Hmmm… so it tells me to type ‘help’ at any time for help, but then complains at me because help isn’t a menu option.

Sounds like a bug to me.

(This isn’t an April Fool trick – try it yourself.)