How to USB tether an Android phone with a Mac OS X computer

Ben Linsey-Bloom's picture Ben Linsey-Bloom - Jan 06, 2011 - 7:14pm
The process of tethering allows you to connect your computer to the internet via your phone's 3G mobile connection. This is a life saver if you are working in a location where you don't have access to other internet connections. Broadly speaking, there are two methods of tethering: plugging the phone directly into your computer via USB, or setting up the phone as a mini Wi-Fi hotspot. I prefer to plug in directly because Wi-Fi uses up battery power on the phone (and the laptop if unplugged) very quickly. Unfortunately, I have an Android phone and a Mac computer. The official Android website says that you can use a USB cable for tethering with computers running Windows or Linux but not with Mac OS X. Nevertheless I have found a way to do it with OS X, read on for more information.
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Computer security basics

Pete Donnell's picture Pete Donnell - Dec 20, 2010 - 12:53pm

Some time ago I was asked to provide some simple advice for non-technical users on protecting their data and office computer systems. Most people are aware that computer security has become a huge problem in recent years, but the sheer amount of (often conflicting) advice on the subject often drives people to ignore it - after all, if you're just trying to do your job, you don't want to have to spend a lot of time learning obscure technical information. With that in mind, this article outlines five basic things to keep in mind to stay safe online.

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Wireless with Ubuntu and Debian on the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V2000D

Ben Linsey-Bloom's picture Ben Linsey-Bloom - Sep 29, 2010 - 4:25pm

I've been setting up Ubuntu on my mother's laptop because the Windows XP system that it came with 5 years ago is grinding to a halt. With a 1.5GHz Celeron M processor it's not exactly a supercomputer but with a fresh new Linux system it can still be a decent, useful computer for several more years.

I went for Lubuntu because it's lightweight and easy to use.

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Starting of Tomcat failed, the server port 8080 is already in use.

Nick Hatter - Aug 26, 2010 - 10:32am
The Problem So you've followed all the instructions on installing Tomcat and you're almost ready to create your first JSP web app. Unfortunately, you can't seem to access the web interface for Tomcat even though it's started and Netbeans throws this error: Starting of Tomcat failed, the server port 8080 is already in use. See the server log for details. The truth is, it may not be anything to do with the port number assigned to Tomcat! The Solution
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Accessing Microsoft SQL Server from PHP on Ubuntu using PDO, ODBC and FreeTDS

Pete Donnell's picture Pete Donnell - Aug 20, 2010 - 12:05pm
Here's the scenario: you are developing a web application using PHP on an Ubuntu server. You need to pull in data from an external database as part of the app. Unfortunately, the external database is Microsoft SQL Server. Accessing a PostgreSQL or MySQL database via PHP is very easy, but as I discovered, accessing MS SQL Server is less straightforward.
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How to fix json_decode in PHP

Nick Hatter - Aug 13, 2010 - 10:14am
When you have first installed PHP, you may find that json_decode doesn't work. What will happen is you will be given no output at all. Carry on reading if you would like to know how to fix it. To determine the symptoms:
  1. Enable error messages to be shown by writing ini_set('display_errors', '1'); in your PHP code.
  2. Most likely, you will be given this error message now: Php Fatal Error Call To Undefined Function Json_decode
The solution:
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How to install Zarafa on Debian Lenny with Postfix, procmail, spamassassin, clamassassin, spam learning and SASL

Pete Donnell's picture Pete Donnell - Jul 23, 2010 - 8:27am
This is the first of two articles about configuring Zarafa to enable some extra options that aren't covered in a default install. I've talked a little about Zarafa in a previous article. It's a Linux groupware system that's almost entirely open source. There's some very good documentation, including installation instructions, on the official Zarafa website. However, while this documentation covers Zarafa in great detail, it doesn't cover many common Linux server programs you might want to combine with it.
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Zarafa password change form

Pete Donnell's picture Pete Donnell - Apr 01, 2010 - 4:36pm

Zarafa is an email groupware system that aims to provide the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange on Linux servers. It's almost entirely open source, the only exception being an Outlook compatibility layer for business users who are used to Outlook and don't want to switch away.

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PHP code to add st, nd, rd or th to a number

Pete Donnell's picture Pete Donnell - Feb 03, 2010 - 11:42am
This one's short and sweet: while working on a PHP application I needed to format some numbers as text so that, for example, '1' became '1st', '13' became '13th', '22' became '22nd' and so on. There isn't a built-in PHP function to do this (as far as I know) and none of the code snippets I came across online were very neat, so I ended up writing my own function. Since it's something that I imagine gets used a lot, I thought I'd put it up here.
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