This is one for googlability (yes, I just made that word up).

If you’re running MythTV and wonder about how to get it to correctly use ALSA (it’s not in the list of sound devices, so you think maybe your build was compiled without ALSA support?), here’s a big tip: the dropdown box for the sound device (showing /dev/dsp and /dev/adsp) isn’t really just a dropdown, but a combobox. You can just as well type stuff in there, and if you type ALSA:default and it’ll use your default ALSA device just fine. Reasoning behind this is they can’t/don’t want to enumerate all possible ALSA devices in a dropdown, so they just put the standard ones and let you type the rest yourself. I’d think ALSA has a way of detecting the present devices and just show those but anyway, this is how it should be done if you want to use ALSA.

I recently installed SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (don’t ask) and wanted to get it to listen on a TCP/IP socket as well (this is by default off, go Microsoft!). I enabled TCP/IP sockets in the configuration editor, but it didn’t work. There was a listener on 1026/tcp (?) but not on 1433/tcp. Google’s first few hits only told me what I had already done, but the Microsoft Knowledge Base item on the second results page pointed me in the right direction: the "SQL Browser Service" must be enabled and running. It seems to be disabled in the default (Express Edition at least) install.

Time for another rant… when writing PHP code, PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE use <?php instead of the short-sucky <? tag to start your PHP code. This is disabled on many machines, including all of mine. This means whenever I find such an application I want to use, I install it on my server and it goes bork. Sometimes, everywhere <?php is used except in 1 or 2 places, making the thing fail when you’re least expecting it.

This  implies you have to use <?php echo instead of <?= too, and yes, that is more work, but it’s certainly much nicer, as I don’t have to open each and every .php and .inc and .whatever file, replacing <?= by <?php echo, <? by <?php and then <?phpphp by <?php, right?

Yes PowerAdmin , RackTables , ZenPhoto , I’m looking at you. 

Edit: Oh look, WordPress doesn’t make &lt; out of < in the post title – bug reported. I think.

Google’s mapping service produces… well, interesting results. Check step 20 🙂