logic involved

Plesk ships Atmail, but the default installation has a minor problem: when you open your webmail site, all you get is a message box saying “Unable to get webmail password!”. This is not caused by the user, who might have entered wrong credentials (in fact, he hasn’t even seen the webmail page yet, let alone entered his password). It’s caused by Atmail being unable to connect to its MySQL database.
The origin of this problem is in /var/www/atmail/libs/Atmail/Config.php, line 4:

fopen("/etc/psa-webmail/atmail/.atmail.shadow")

For some reason, the fopen() call fails, but there are several ways of fixing this. The easiest is to get the database password from .atmail.shadow and hard-code it in Config.php.

Disclaimer: don’t do this if you don’t know exactly what you are doing, why you are doing it and which possible consequences might result.

Now, change your /var/www/atmail/libs/Atmail/Config.php like this:

//if (!($fd = fopen("/etc/psa-webmail/atmail/.atmail.shadow", "r"))) {
//  echo "<script>alert('Unable to get webmail password!')</script>";
//  exit();
//}
//fscanf($fd, "%s", $buff);
//fclose($fd);
$buff = 'MySQL_password';

Note that you changed an Atmail application file, and it is very likely to be reverted by the next Plesk/Atmail update. This patch will be very helpful in that situation.

Mercurial is a really nice revision control tool, but unfortunately there are no portable binary packages for Windows. They do offer msi packages, though. But retrieving their content without actually installing the software is a bit tricky.
You can just unpack them using 7-zip, but you are likely to get garbage.
Using your favorite search engine, you will find suggestions to perform an administrative installation using msiexec /a. Well, don’t. That’s just a normal installation, but without the GUI of the installer being shown.

Fortunately, there is lessmsi. It allows to open, inspect and extract Windows Installer packages.
For TortoiseHG, download the binary .msi package from the Mercurial homepage. Run lessmsi, open the .msi package and select “extract”. Mercurial will be extracted to WheretherYouExtracted\SourceDir\PFiles\TortoiseHg, and the original folder layout of Mercurial will be preserved.

Lessmsi is provided under the MIT License and does not require installation. Just download, unzip and run it.

My iCal kept crashing constantly due to a segmentation fault (EXC_BAD_ACCESS, SIGSEGV). In the short time right before it crashed, I noticed that iCal tried to sync with a corrupt external calendar. The bad data got into iCal once, and iCal didn’t stand it
If you happen to meet a failing iCal one day, and you can’t remove the mischief from within iCal, you have two options:

1. get the decent Purity app, unplug the network (so that iCal won’t sync before the culprit has been removed), and clean the iCal cache
2. have a closer look at ~/Library/Calendars/, where all the calendars are stored. Inspect the info.plist files and .ics event data to find the bad calendar and move its folder to another location. Restart iCal. If it is still crashing you got the wrong calendar – put the moved calendar back and keep on searching.

No. 2 did the trick for me.
Plain text files and simple folder layouts might not look as evolved as SQL tables and mysterious binary data files – but they work just fine in this scenario and are pretty easy to debug.

The hardware keys for adjusting brightness on a Samsung NC10 aren’t working in an out-of-the-box Kubuntu 10.04. The brightness slider in the Power Management tray application isn’t working as designed as well.

Fortunately, you can set the display brightness using the hardware keys in GRUB, the bootloader that let’s you choose what OS and/or Kernel you want to start.

Settings are lost on reboot, and you still can’t change the brightness at runtime, but it’s better than nothing.

Update:
Actually, there is a way to enable the brightness keys. And you don’t even have to edit your X.org conf manually. Just head over to ubuntu-tweak.com and install samsung-brightness

When dealing with foreign names, it is a matter of both correctness and courtesy to use the right spelling. But quite often it is also a problem of “how do I enter this darn character”.

Luckily, there is abcTajpu, a Firefox extension that allows you to select foreign characters, umlauts, … quite easily.

Free, no ads – really worth a try