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Well, it’s now April and many T-Mobile G2 Touch owners are waiting for the Android 2.1 update for their handsets, although all is still quiet on the news front. The last update from T-Mobile I saw was back in February when T-Mobile announced that they will be releasing “a firmware upgrade in April for the T-Mobile G2 Touch”. We’re all hoping that this will indeed be the Android 2.1 Eclair update we’ve been waiting for....

I’ve decided to give the web service, Mollom, a try since my CAPTCHA, which I kept tweaking to the point where I nearly couldn’t read it, was letting me down. The problem with CAPTCHA is it logs how many form submissions it blocks, which is great, but this doesn’t necessarily mean SPAM submissions; it could be frustrated people not being able to post a comment on your blog. Mollom works by analysing the form submission for SPAM patterns, then determining whether it is suitable or not....

The CodeIgniter framework is a secret weapon for many web developers as it allows you to quickly build complex web applications in a structured and organised way. I started using CodeIgniter over a year ago now so I’ve approached Packt’s CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upson as a way of expanding upon when I’ve already learnt from the user guide, forums and a book which I had previously read from Wrox called Professional CodeIgniter by Thomas Myer. ...

I’ve just installed the Drupal Editor app for Android and this is my first ’test post’ if you will. It’s quite a simple app that connects to your Drupal site through the core blog api module. It then shows a list of all Drupal blogs and allows you to view, edit or delete the posts. You can also post new entries and assign taxonomy terms to them. It’s simple and gets the job done!...

For some reason, even though I have the PHP Development Tools (PDT) installed in Aptana Studio (2.0), I’m not able to select ‘PHP nature’ in the ‘Project natures’ of an imported project. I can start a new PHP Project which will have the ‘PHP nature’ selected as primary nature, but this doesn’t even appear as an option in imported projects. The only two natures that are available are ‘Remote Nature’ and ‘Web Nature’. The ‘PHP nature’ adds some really useful functions, like grouping my @todos into Aptana’s Tasks view and also other handy things like auto-completing PHP docblocks. ...

Reminders, whether from calendars or todo lists, are typically time based, so they will remind you to perform an action at a desired time. However, I’ve just discovered location based reminders or ‘geo-reminders’ and this could possibly be my favourite life hack! When I say discovered, I actually had the idea when I got home from the supermarket having forgotten several necessities, but naturally this has already been thought of and many location based reminder apps already exist. ...

A friend of mine recently told me about Feedburner’s Socialize feature, where you can aggregate RSS feeds and post the links to Twitter automatically. This is quite a neat feature as Feedburner can also include some of your content in the tweet, create hashtags from the post categories and create inline hashtags from the categories and words in the title and post. Check out this feature by logging into your Feedburner account, selecting the feed you want to use, then go to the ‘publicize’ tab along the top then the ‘socialize’ tab along the side....

I was recently sent a copy of a book from Packt Publishing to read and review called CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton. I’ll be interested to see how the book compares to what I’ve learnt so far about CodeIgniter (>1 years experience CodeIgniter and >4 years php) and see what else it can offer, especially in terms of planning and managing application projects. The description on the Packt Publishing website says: ...

We’ve had a lot of snow over the past few days making for some beautiful, bright snow photos. Great Braxted Park. Stuart Axe, on Flickr Star Burst! Scootzsx, on Flickr

Here’s an edgy stand-off I find myself in the middle of every so often – Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as my default browser. From a day to day, quick browse, everything is on the web perspective I’d have to say I prefer Google Chrome. It’s fast(er), simple and gets the job done. However, from a web developer perspective Firefox has the add-ons that you so sorely need. I’ve tried designing a Drupal Zen sub-theme with Chrome’s ‘inspect element’ feature but it’s not as comprehensive as the Firebug add-on for Firefox which I couldn’t work without....