For reasons that are too long and tedious to recount here, I have had cause to rebuild my Lenovo T61 laptop many times over the last month, using a bewildering range of operating systems, Linux distributions, live CDs and dual boot configurations.

During this time, gparted and an external USB 500GB disk drive have become very close and reliable friends. In fact, I have only lost data once and, inevitably, that was due to my own stupidity.

Here are the invaluable Firefox plugins that I always install first:

• DownloadThemAll! - download manager featuring multi-threaded, lightning fast, resumable downloads.
• is.gd - URL shortener.
• Diigo - Great bookmarking service.
• Google Notebook - Useful for random thoughts, reminders, lists of people who have crossed you, transient bookmarks and, well, notes.
• Firebug - HTML and CSS diagnostics

Rejoice ! After 18 months, Rupert and Richard have ended their standoff and the Sky channels will be returning to Virgin Media.

Now, I wonder if some kind soul could fill me in on the last 18 months of 'Lost'.

Occasionally, I commute into London on South West Trains. I normally listen to music or podcasts during the half hour commute into Waterloo.

Whenever I buy a ticket at the station, I always pause the music and remove my earphones. This is for two reasons:

1. I need to be able to communicate with the person to purchase my ticket.
2. People behind me in the queue may not want to hear 'Serve the Servants' by Nirvana.

Last Monday morning, I joined a short queue to buy my Travelcard and removed my earphones as usual.

The lady immediately in front of me was talking on a mobile phone and moved forward to the ticket booth. Much to my surprise, she continued her obviously unimportant conversation with a friend while conducting the entire transaction.

'Yeah so then we went on to the Slug - weekly Travelcard, zones 1-5 - No, no, he wasn't there - he was drinking in Putney with his mates...'

'£41.40 please.'

'...but we met them later - Sorry - what did you say - someone just interrupted me - Anyway, what about tonight ?

'Please can you enter your PIN ?'

'Sorry - she just interrupted me again - What ? - there you go - Yeah - well I'll get back about half-six - then we can go for a drink and then get - sorry what - oh my ticket.'

I then approached the ticket desk, waited for the young lady to move out of earshot and said:

'Honestly, I can't believe what she just did. I think that is incredibly rude and disrespectful.'

The lady smiled ruefully: 'Yes. We used to have a polite notice but most people simply ignored it.'

So, if and when Jonathan Beckett secures the domain name 'ignorati.com', I'll be an avid reader.

Surrey Traffic Police should run a recruitment campaign with the tagline

Join Surrey Traffic Police and see the world.

This would appeal to young men who fancy the glamour and travel traditionally associated with the Armed Forces but are slightly wary of losing their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In August, I hired a car mid-way through my holiday in Venice to drive to the foot of the Dolomite mountains and also took the opportunity to visit Lake Garda.

So that explains why, on the hot, sunny, blissfully lazy afternoon of Sunday 10th August, I was driving slowly through the lovely small Italian town of Spresiano.

To save money and increase fuel economy, the Brightside family were crammed in to a rather underpowered Fiat Panda as we explored churches and Italian villages using the delightfully, quiet country roads.

Imagine my surprise, as I left the sleepy town heading for Treviso, I was flagged over by two Carabinieri (not Italian police - Carabinieri) who were obviously not merely equipped with radar guns but real guns.

The official approached my window and made a polite request in rapid-fire Italian. I looked blank and replied 'Sorry - Inglese - do you want to see my driving licence and documents ?' He looked perplexed and a little disappointed: 'Oh so you are English, yes ?. What are you doing here ?'

'We're on holiday and hired a car to come to see your beautiful mountains and Lake Garda'. I pointed at my family who were listening to iPods, reviewing sunburn and consulting the map studiously in an effort to reinforce my argument.

I got out of the car and opened the boot to locate the hire car documents and dig out my driving licence. A pile of wet towels, a rucksack, some beach shells and a large bottle of Fanta Orange fell out. The military official looked dismissively at me.

'So - why are you having a pink driving licence ?'

A multitude of witty answers immediately sprang to mind but I contented myself with 'Well - that's what the English Government gave me.'

His colleague, irritated and curious about the delay on a routine traffic stop, wandered over and the mood lightened. 'Oh you are coming from London. I have been to London in 2005 - do you know Li-ches-ter Square ?' followed by 'I have always wanted to visit Ed-een-burro'.

Finally, their checks complete, I was free to continue my journey. I summoned up the courage and whispered: 'Excuse me but was I travelling too fast ?'.

The two Carabinieri looked at each other and said 'Oh no - no problem - it is just a routine stop. This is normal in Italia.'

And then, in a scene reminiscent of the Great Escape where Gordon Jackson has his papers checked by the Gestapo and the German officer quietly says 'Good Luck' as he goes to board the bus to which Jackson replies 'Thanks', the Italian policeman muttered 'See you in London'.

This closing comment perplexed me and I assumed I had misheard the Italian accent. That was until today when I received another letter from my friends at Surrey Traffic Police. The letter formally notified me that, on 23 October 2008, 3 further points have now been cleared from my driving licence (leaving an outstanding total of just 3).

Chillingly, the official letter closed with:

PS. Hope you all enjoyed your holiday in Venice

Although I will always associate Paul Ince with the phrase big time Charlie, I do think the Blackburn manager talks a lot of sense.

In particular, I think he was correct in his assessment of Celtic's display at Old Trafford on Wednesday night in the Champions League. Apart from a few early promising moments, I think the gulf between the two sides was embarrassing.

In fact, when I first tuned in to watch the game, initially I thought I had got the dates mixed up and I was watching United playing Norwich City in the Carling Cup.

18 months ago, I reviewed the online editions of the leading UK newspapers and the various syndication options.

At that time, all the newspapers only offered partial text feeds which, in my opinion, is understandable but unsatisfactory.

So I was pleasantly surprised to read in ReadWriteWeb that The Guardian has broken ranks and now offers full text RSS feeds. It will be interesting to see whether this increases subscribers for The Guardian and whether the competition will be persuaded to follow suit.

During a ritual purge of Inbox, I just discovered the following email

Years ago, in a different life. I worked as an Oracle DBA for a dot com in deepest Clapham.

For reasons that now escape me, the CEO managed to get a discounted rate so we could all lie in complete darkness in a flotation chamber listening to whale music with joss sticks burning.

Performance was pretty bad and the backups never got done but we were all completely relaxed about it.

From the desk of Mr. Ashley. Good day. Private message to you.

I know you dont mind me contacting you by this means since we have not met before this time. My name is Lord King Glorious Michael Haway the Lads' Ashley.

Recently, my Uncle's (Sir Robert Robson of Gateshead) will was read and to our joy and relief, he has kept the sum of $8 milion USD in trust for the upkeep of the beloved Newcastle Footballing Club.

With divine intervention, we have already secured the assistance of the Cockney Mafia and I humbly seek your financial aid to restore Newcastle Barcodes FC to their rightful place (in the Championship).

However, you must act fast to take advantage of this opportunity. In the last week, we have already hired a leading, proven, experienced, respected manager to lead the team. His name is Joseph ('Kinnell') Kinnear and he has already made great strides in making friends with the local news media in order to obtain additional funding.

Newcastle Footballing Club already has some world class international footballing stars who are household names (in Geordie households) - England centre-forward Saint Michael Owen of Chester, Clown Prince Danny Guthrie and undoubtedly you will have a poster of your countryman, Shola Amoeba, on your bedroom wall.

Newcastle Racing Club Santander are a massive football club - in fact, every single English person who lives in Newcastle will tell you that Nudecastle are a sleeping giant. Newcastle play in a superb stadium - St Jimmy Five Bellies Park - which has an unbelievable capacity of 55,000 people. Once, back in 1996, when we were chasing the Premiership title, under the majestic leadership of the Messiah King Kevin of Scunthorpe, we even managed to fill it for the visit of Manchester United.

Please wire $24.6 million dollars immediately into account 7649820 - sort code 23-65-91 and we will proceed with Phase 2. This will require the appointment of a fifth interim manager - the self-appointed Royal Holiness Alan Shearer of Durham - to lift the club from the relegation places and a subsequent under the counter payment to hire the chosen one - a man appointed by God and equipped to save Newcastle - his name is the Special One and will be joining us in June 2009 once the Cockney Mafia has completed dealings with their Italian counterparts.

This will be a joint venture arrangement that will demand the utmost trust and sincerity which you will benefit immensely from this project, as I will rely on you for it's success. Please do indicate your willingness to assist me through my email 'nonalcoholicpintinsixseconds@hotmail.com'

Thanks once again for your kindness may God guide and reward you in all your endeavours as you make me realise my last dreams and wishes.

May you be blessed - Michael J. Ashley.

Introduction

Habari is a blogging platform, created back in January 2007 and in the subsequent 18 months, the software has matured and version 0.5.1 was recently released.

Originally, I downloaded and experimented with Habari late in 2007 but it wasn't until February 2008 that I finally took the plunge and migrated my blog from WordPress.

Installation

Habari requires PHP 5.2 (or higher) and PHP Data Objects (PDO). If your hosting company can't meet these requirements, think about switching to one that can. Habari also supports multiple database types:

• MySQL
• SQLite
• PostgreSQL

Installation is very simple. You simply create the appropriate database, enter the details of the database configuration together with the user credentials for the administration account.

Hit 'Submit' and you're finished.

The Habari interface

Habari has a single menu structure and the main dashboard is fully configurable. For example, if you don't want to see 'Latest Log Activity' simply remove that tab. You can also drag and drop elements to position the various elements of the dashboard to suit yourself.

Obviously, bloggers spend most of their time composing posts and the Habari article editor is beautifully simple, clean and uncluttered.

There are two separate tabs which expand to reveal the basic configuration options (timestamp, slug, comments) and another to define and add tags to the newly created post.

Searching for content in Habari is also refreshingly different. There is a timeline which can be dragged and resized, for example to focus on all posts made during 2007, supplemented by conventional searching.

Migration

Importers exist to import WordPress and Serendipity data into Habari. There is no native support for the (non standard) WXR format favoured by WordPress.com but staging the content into a local WordPress installation and then into Habari is possible.

The WordPress importer is fast and robust. I imported over 700 posts and 1,000 comments without errors in less than 2 minutes. In fact, it was so fast, I had to double-check that the import had actually worked ! All my existing WordPress categories were correctly converted to tags.

Themes

Habari is still a relatively young project (albeit growing rapidly) so the number of themes available for Habari isn't as wide ranging as, say Wordpress. Nor is there a browsable theme directory. However, there is an increasing number of attractive, well designed themes available.

Plugins

Plugins are installed by uploading the to server and unpacking in the '/user/plugins' directory. Then the plugin is then activated and configured from the Administration-Plugins screen.

Like themes, the number of plugins available for Habari is nowhere near as vast (or overwhelming) as other longer established blogging platforms. You can review the list of plugins in the Habari-extras repository.

However, the key functionality that most bloggers want and need are all supported. Hardly surprisingly, as all the Habari developers eat their own dog food and maintain Habari powered blogs.

• metaWeblog - enable blogging clients like ScribeFire
• Contact form
• Google Analytics
• Adsense
• Feedburner
• Scheduled posts
• LiveHelp - easy access to IRC embedded in Habari
• Defensio - superior anti-spam solution
• Media silos for Flickr, Viddler and YouTube
• Sitemaps
• Podcast
• Related Posts
• Plugins to integrate Diigo, Jaiku, Twitter into your blog

There are also a couple of WYSIWYG editors to choose from (NicEdit, jwysiwyg) although I now use the excellent MarkUp plugin which adds shortcuts for common tags to the article editor but leaves you in full control of the HTML.

Documentation

The Habari documentation is available in Wiki format. The release documentation is also distilled into TiddlyWiki and is included with the Habari distribution. This is useful if you are working in a disconnected environment.

Why is Habari different ?

People often ask 'What makes Habari better than XYZ ?' And, of course, that's hard to answer and also very subjective. I always reply; 'Habari isn't better - it's just different'.

Having used the software for six months now, these are a few of the reasons I like Habari:

• Ease of use.
• Admin interface.
• Media silos.
• Actively developed.
• The 'community'.
• The article editor.
• Ease of use
• Small, active and responsive developer community.
• The automatic schema upgrade process works seamlessly.
• The LiveHelp plugin.
• Proper timezone support built into core.
• Minor edits - ability to fix typos without updating the Atom feed.
• Ease of use.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly - Habari is fun - the project is developing rapidly. It's fun to run the latest SVN code. It's fun to review the latest set of changes in trac. It's exciting to type 'svn update'. It's fun to lurk in the IRC channel and eavesdrop on developer discussions.

Of course, there are some areas of functionality (access control lists) that are incomplete or 'planned' but I can honestly say that the absence of the following features doesn't really affect my normal, daily use of Habari.

• No Fantastico or SimpleScripts installations available.
• No centralised theme or plugin repository.
• No widget support - you currently have to modify PHP templates to modify your sidebar.
• No automatic upgrade of core software, themes or plugins.
• Tags are supported but not categories.
• The plugin configuration forms are pretty basic.
• Documentation for plugins is sparse.

Community

The word 'community' is used a lot in the Habari community. I think it's because those guys like recursion. Before I got involved, I was fairly sceptical to be honest. However, having lurked, watched from the sidelines and occasionally contributed, I can say that there is a genuine sense of community on the Habari project. Contributions from anyone and everyone are positively welcomed and encouraged. There's a couple of mailing lists, an IRC channel, a Wiki and subversion repository.

As just one example, I was staggered when I was initially playing with Habari and mentioned in passing that the lack of a WYSIWYG editor was an issue. Within 12 hours, Michael Harris had provided me with a TinyMCE plugin !

Although I'm not a expert Web developer - I can't spell PHP or OO - I must say, that everyone has been very helpful. There is no elitist developer clique - Habari is very transparent and open and everyone's contribution (no matter how seemingly small) is welcomed.

Once awake, Habari developers can also move fast. For example, yesterday, the Cisco Web site was hacked and every single occurrence of the letter 't' was lost. By the end of the day, Habari had a hilarious plugin that also filtered every single 't' from a Habari blog.

Summary

Don't take my word for it. Why not download Habari and try it for yourself ? You might be surprised.

• +1 for a friend
• +5 for a follower
• +10 for a blog comment
• +25 for a blog contact
• +50 for an email
• +100 for a photo
• +250 for a NSFW photo
• +400 for an audio conversation
• +99,999 for a hot steamy IM session
• +1,000,000 for sharing a pint