An outlandish vanishing assailant attacks Jonathan Fenton's beloved wife, leading him to the reaches of reality and beyond, on a journey of revenge and self-discovery.

Business legend Steve Jobs died late last night. I heard about it through that most modern of news outlets: Facebook. I read the story on my company-supplied iPhone (which, by the way, I didn't want; I'd rather use the Android that I keep in my drawer - long story).

The death of Steve Jobs follows the release of the much-anticipated iPhone 4S, the successor to the iPhone 4. Perhaps that 'S' should stand for 'swan song'?

This morning, I mentioned Jobs' death to a friend, who said, "Who's Steve Jobs?"

When last week I read about the new $199 Kindle Fire released in the States, my first thought was, "This is a loss leader for a content delivery system." Amazon has recognised it can make so much money out of selling ebooks, it doesn't need to make a profit on the reading units.

A few applications recently started failing to save photos to the iPhone camera roll. A quick dig around via SSH confirmed this; it was not that they were saving but were somehow hidden - they were not there at all.

It seems that some kind of permissions error had crept in over time. Connecting via SSH and issuing the command "chmod -R a+rwx /var/mobile/Media/DCIM" fixed this.

NB: Be aware that this grants all users/applications read/write access to the photo directory.

I've recently noticed that the keyboard layout on my Windows XP PCs is spontaneously changing from UK to US. I suspect that this is linked to a piece of software I use called Input Director (which allows you to control several PCs/monitors from one keyboard/mouse).

Whatever the cause, from time to time my UK keyboard starts operating in US mode (so, for example, the following symbols are all swapped around: ", ', #, £). This is inconvenient, to say the least.

Connecting to Microsoft SQL Express 2008 from Linux/PHP is a lot trickier than I expected. These notes are really for my own benefit so I can reproduce the setup, but maybe they'll help you too. One of the problems is that many existing PHP drivers for MS SQL have difficulty talking to SQL 2008. Here's a workaround using FreeTDS and ODBC.

As I log on, for the first time,
I see a GUI; clean, sublime.
Slightly retro, and dark and grey,
Ubuntu makes its debut today.

For some reason, the iPhone 4 (with its current iOS) has very few options for call diversion. Fortunately, it is possible to set up all the usual diverts using network codes from the keypad. To divert to voicemail, you need to know your <voicemail> number (see the section below). Press the call button after entering the codes below:

This blog entry brings together instructions from various other source on the internet, for a particular scenario:

• Compaq Evo N1015v laptop ("the Laptop") - should work on many other machines though
• CDROM drive is faulty - cannot boot or read from it
• Network card/BIOS cannot natively boot from the network
• Cannot boot from USB
• The Laptop does however have a floppy drive
• Windows is currently installed on the Laptop

Oh come on frosty mornings!
Your charms are wearing thin.
I'm weary of commuting in
a car as cold as sin.

It makes me nervous when the engine
doesn't want to start.
Its coughs and splutters are like a
rhinocerous's fart.