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This is the first of two articles about configuring Zarafa to enable some extra options that aren't covered in a default install. I've talked a little about Zarafa in a previous article. It's a Linux groupware system that's almost entirely open source. There's some very good documentation, including installation instructions, on the official Zarafa website. However, while this documentation covers Zarafa in great detail, it doesn't cover many common Linux server programs you might want to combine with it.

Zarafa is an email groupware system that aims to provide the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange on Linux servers. It's almost entirely open source, the only exception being an Outlook compatibility layer for business users who are used to Outlook and don't want to switch away.

This one's short and sweet: while working on a PHP application I needed to format some numbers as text so that, for example, '1' became '1st', '13' became '13th', '22' became '22nd' and so on. There isn't a built-in PHP function to do this (as far as I know) and none of the code snippets I came across online were very neat, so I ended up writing my own function. Since it's something that I imagine gets used a lot, I thought I'd put it up here.

As the lack of recent updates might suggest, things have been quite busy work-wise recently! Since I've been working a lot, and since it's Christmas, I thought I'd write something a bit different for this article. While I haven't had much free time lately, I've spent a bit of it playing a game by the name of Trine. It's promoted as a physics based platform/puzzle game, so there is a vague science angle to tie in with the rest of the site!

A friend was having some trouble with the Netgear wireless router he was given by Virgin Media, which I fixed by replacing the Virgin-supplied firmware with the latest Netgear firmware. Doing this required a bit of digging around, so I thought I'd write a quick guide to sum up the information I found online.

Like many people, I rely heavily on ssh to maintain and configure computers remotely. However, doing so usually requires making an outbound ssh connection from the computer you're working on, which isn't always convenient. For example, if you're using someone else's computer, the chances are they're using Windows and don't have an ssh client program installed.

If you're a science postgrad student, the chances are you've heard of LaTeX. It's very commonly used to write scientific papers, largely because it's very good for typesetting equations. A lot of science postgrads also write their theses using LaTeX, but very few of them seem to be given any training in how to use it. I know I didn't get any while writing mine!

For the last few months I've been using Ubuntu 8.04 on a laptop for work, and a couple of days ago while working from home I hit an issue that I couldn't find mentioned anywhere. When opening Nautilus (the default GNOME file manager), it wouldn't display the contents of my home directory.

Recently I developed a web application for a client using PHP and SQLite. As you might expect, I did the development on a Linux system, and all seemed well. When the time came to move to the client's production system, which runs IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003, I naïvely assumed that it would be a simple transition - after all, PHP has been supported on Windows for quite some time. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case.

Recently, I've taken on more consulting work outside my own immediate area. http://www.eigenfactor.org, a free impact factor tool, has been incredibly handy. Here's why.

Getting to grips (well on some level, at least) with a new system is a bit exciting and not a little empowering, too - like the first time you really understood crystalization as a kid (remember those copper sulphate crystals in the jar?)

The problem is that journals always fall into four categories in my book;