Mind Circus

Instead of wasting money on greetings cards which will, ultimately, end up in the bin, Matrix Communications sent out Merry Christmas e-mails and donated the money they would have spent on cards to MacMillan Cancer Support.

Brilliant, and also quite ‘Green’

To get OpenOffice to Save in Microsoft Word .doc format by default, follow these steps:

• Tools > Options
• Load/Save > General
• In the bottom right of the window, look for “Always save as” and pick your poison

I know that saving in a proprietary format over an open standard is bad practice, but sometimes in Business you need to maintain interoperability with the de facto standard; in this case: Microsoft Word.

Two great resources for IT Professionals from two of the largest IT companies in the world: Intel and Cisco.

IT@Intel and Cisco on Cisco are mini-sites designed to showcase how each company handles and deploys their IT internally, with emphasis on best practises and Return On Investment. Check them out:

• Cisco on Cisco
• IT@Intel

In a business environment, people who switch from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird often miss having the calendar/task features in Outlook. Fortunately, you can add Calendar and Task functionality to Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on.

• Go to the Lightning download page
• Right click on the download link and Save As… (If you don’t, Firefox might try to install the add-on itself.)
• Open up Thunderbird and click on Tools > Add-ons
• Install the Lightning file you just downloaded
• Once you’re done, restart Thunderbird, and start using your new Calendar feature!
• If you need Holiday calendars, you can get them here

If you’ve ever tried to enter a 16 digit credit card number all in one blob, you’ll know it’s hard. To make life easier for the person responsible for processing online credit card orders, I needed to split up the credit card number and insert a space every 4 characters.

I’m not very schooled up on RegEx, and after spending ages searching for how to do it, I came across this:

<?php
echo implode(' ',str_split($credit_card_number,4));
?>

Hopefully it saves someone else some time!