I added a little Reevoo application to G-Portal (http://da.gp from your mobile phone), since they currently only provide a version of the iPhone.

It lets you search for products by keyword, shows the top 10 results or so, and allows you to get detailed information on what other people had to say about the product. It also shows the cheapest price available online through Reevoo's partners (which include Amazon, Play.com, and others, so it's likely to be a reasonable guide-price).

With business columns alluding to shocking company failures that we can expect to see in 2009, but not mentioning any names, I thought I'd list some well-known names that declare their current-liabilities as greater than 20 million UK pounds on their last published accounts, but where their declared profits are less that one million pounds. In the current financial situation, refinancing this debt may be difficult.

I recently decided that I needed a 'virtual card index' program to keep track of leads and contacts. Up until then, I'd been using Notepad across various files that I usually lost track of over time, and it wasn't working for me.

I recalled a simple database program called CardBox from years ago that worked on the principles of index cards, and while it seems still to be in production, it looked bloated in both features and in price.

My Debian installation at home has been slightly broken for a while. My /dev/lp0 device always seems to revert to root:lp with permissions 660, yet cups fails to start the parallel back-end for this. The solution has been to change the permissions of either the lp0 device (manually) or the parallel backend binary. Neither solution survives both reboots and system upgrades.

The error 'Unable to open parallel port device file "/dev/lp0": Permission, denied"' always surfaced eventually.

There's a lot going on in the world of banking and finance, and that's an understatement. Whether it's just a blip of readjustment following an overpriced housing crash, or whether it's the collapse of the precarious Fractional Reserve Banking model is yet to be seen. In any case, it makes interesting reading, so here are some of the guys who are keeping their fingers on this sizeable pulse!

Robert Preston

Having toyed with Joomla! and Drupal for content management for the past 9 months, I settled on Drupal and have never looked back (okay, maybe a couple of times just to make sure).

In an attempt to stay in the headlines, Apple seem to have leaked news that the world already suspected; that they want to license the ARM Core themselves, and take the business away from Samsung. This makes sense simply on the scale of development they anticipate, since their audio players and PDAs seem to be converging.

The Mighty Boosh are one of the most original acts from our great British comedy scene, so it was really annoying to see their work completely plagiarised by Big Bear Limited, in order to promote their Sugar Puffs breakfast cerial.

Watching some old footage of the Isle of Man TT Races reminded me of a time when aggresive and highly competitive people took risks to push their bikes to their limits in an environment that fostered a thrilling race.

I had a discussion with a couple of people who believed that the immutability of Java strings related only to the fact that they can't be manipulated once created, but that they could be different objects. While it's possible to have individual String objects, the strings themselves only ever exist once within the String class. Here's why.