Regardless of your opinions about .mac, Apple's recent upgrade includes a slick new photo gallery that the iPhone can post to very easily. Any image on your phone can be posted to one of your galleries with a tap of your finger. Since the galleries export "Photocast" XML feeds, it's easy to grab the feeds and do whatever we want with them. And what we want to do is display thumbnails of the most recent posts, and have a lightbox popup to display the full size images when the thumbs are clicked.

The end result is a way to post photos from your iPhone to your site with a minimum amount of effort. My example uses PHP and Smarty, but it's easy enough to adapt to any setup.

After setting up a recent tracks widget for my homepage with Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, I came to the disappointing realization many people have lamented. There is no album information in the recent tracks feed, and no easy way to get it through other means. I don't really understand why the album info is not provided in the feed - the album listening stats are available, so it's being stored in the scrobbler database somewhere. I'm sure there's a good reason for this omission, since there have been a number of requests for this feature on the last.fm forums.

Since album detail feeds are available (with track listings!), it's possible to correlate the artist and track names in the recent tracks feed to the albums. It's not an easy task, and it's not 100% accurate, but with a little effort, you can put together a system that can match album info to your recent tracks list, complete with cover art, URLs to the album pages on last.fm, the whole enchilada.

Have you ever wanted to display your last.fm recent tracks (or any other last.fm info for that matter) on your own site? If you're using the Zend Framework, it's amazingly easy. The Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler class provides an easy way of using the Audioscrobbler web services.

I was given the unfortunate task of securing an ancient Exchange server behind a pair of Sendmail gateways. While this is a great way to use Exchange without the security problems that go with hosting a Windows server in the open, there is no easy way to make Sendmail aware of what email addresses are valid on the Exchange server. This results in a ton of messages to invalid addresses that the Exchange server has to process. Since most spam comes from bogus addresses, each bounce can generate a lot of overhead. On a busy server, this gets out of control very quickly. It's a nightmare.

The solution is to dump a list of the valid adresses from Exchange's LDAP server, and translate them into a format that Sendmail can load. Sendmail can then turf invalid addresses before they are accepted for processing. Exchange Snarf is a  set of scripts to do this. It saved my life.