For some reason broadband from O2 and Orange both block SMTP access on the default port (25) to anything apart from their servers. You need to switch on the submission port on your server 587 and connect using that instead!

Had a little bit of a falling out with my PC yesterday (perhaps a later post), but today, I found that I could no longer save for web in Photoshop (CS2).

I was getting the following error “Could not complete Export command because of a program error”.

After searching for a while, I found that you can get Photoshop to wipe its’ preferences. To do this, once you’ve clicked on the icon, hold ctrl+shift+alt as Photoshop boots. You should get a message asking you to confirm.

This didn’t cure the problem, but was a useful note.

What DID cure the problem was removing “the Save for Web” options.

These can be found here:

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Adobe\Save For Web\9.0

Simply shut down Photoshop, delete the contents of the folder and restart Photoshop. Job’s a good ‘un.

I had a weird problem at work (going back quite a while now as I haven’t touched this block in months/years!).

We have a 750gb Freeagent Pro External Hard Drive (USB) which was connected and mounted correctly on our linux server. I tried, and failed, to run backups to the drive for a couple of days until I figured that for some reason after about 15 minutes of it being powered up, it would go dead, unmount itself and fall over.

Eventually I decided to have a hunt around on the internet and found that this specific drive has a sleep feature. Basically, after 15 minutes (i seem to recall) of no-use, it would go to sleep. It seems to have been configured to work on a windows based machine that may feed it some information or some such, as apparently when attaced to Linux, it didn’t care whether or not it was doing anything, it would just go to sleep!

After a while I found (stumbled upon) this article – http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html and sdparam – http://packages.sw.be/sdparm/

Basically, all credit to Diane from there on. You use sdparam to change the standby flag on the drive, basically disabling the feature entirely.

Problem solved.