Big thanks go out to Phil A, who yesterday pointed out to me the method by which music tracks can be shuffled in the N95’s music player.

So, you go into your playlist and start playing it, then go to the menu, choose shuffle and do what comes naturally. It’s shown here..

While this wasn’t a difficult thing to figure out, per se, it wasn’t obvious, at least to me. I guess I’ve been using an iPod for too long. On the iPod, you setup shuffle before you start the playlist, not after.

Phil, good luck on your quest to find the perfect phone too. For the remainder of the population that wasn’t on the phone with the two of us yesterday, Phil’s in search of his ideal phone:

• Works well on Cingular or T-Mobile US (so it needs the 850 Mhz band)
• Good quality phone first
• 3+ MP digital cam with autofocus
• Mini or MicroSD storage
• HSDPA nice, but EDGE would be fine as well
• Wifi not needed
• Bluetooth a must, of course
• Charge/Data over Mini-USB would be ideal

That last one makes most Nokia devices a bit harder to swallow with the big, ugly, gangly Pop-Port interface. Yes, Nokia gives you the cable in the box with the phone (finally!), but it’s still yet another proprietary cable. So, to my former employer from Finland, I’ll say what I’ve been saying ever since I saw the hugeness of the 9500. Mini-USB kids! Dump the stupid proprietary connector that nobody on the planet uses. Also, while I applaud Nokia for only having two charger types (the thick & thin barrels) – and even including free adapters to convert your thick barrel into a thin barrel, it’s time, boys & girls. A single, Mini-USB port for data connection & charging is the wave of the future, at least until we’ve got super cool inductive surfaces on tables that charge devices based on proximity.

Ordinarily, I don’t go in for Opie & Anthony, but this is too funny. Completely SFW too.

Currently playing in iTunes: How to Save a Life by The Fray

I just found this post from Earl detailing a fix for the hang that ecto experiences trying to pull category info from Wordpress 2.1.

Nice job Earl. The fix isn’t hairy folks, you can do it, I promise.

Earl’s post doesn’t note it, but the fix needs to be applied at line 980 in xmlrpc.php.

Update: For those who want the official word, here it is, straight from the Wordpress Trac. Note that it references line 980.

Currently playing in iTunes: rapture riders (full version) by blondie vs the doors

I poked around online the other day looking for some PHP code that would do things like tell me whether or not a user was using IPv6. I found some code that did the job after a bit of Googling.

The code was pretty ugly, so I fixed it up. While I was at it, I updated it to optimize it a bit, as well as use conventions found in newer versions of PHP, such as the $_SERVER[] variable array, etc. Further, since I only needed to detect whether or not a user was using IPv6, I was able to cut the code that did IPv6 address compression and uncompression.

So you’ve got a shiny new Nokia E61, E70, N80 or something like that, and you want to connect it to your Asterisk server, eh? No problem. This is an update to an old blog posting. What’s updated? Now it covers the recently released PR3 software for the E-series devices.

The Modssl howto is gone.

Folks, it’s almost 2007. I can’t think of a single Linux distribution that doesn’t ship with an SSL-enabled web server. Use the one that came with your distribution. If your needs are so specific that you need to build your own, you probably already know what to do.