This isn’t as straight forward as one might hope if you use VDM’s. Now, before I go on, I’m not going to go through the initial NDMP setup. Both EMC and Symantec have good documentation on this. However if you werent the person who initially configured all of this, you may still be tasked with backing up a new share.

First you need to figure out the root vdm that your share sits on, so putty to your celerra control station and run the following command:

nas_server –l –v

This will list all the VDM’s sitting on your Celerra. So the ID is the important part as it makes up the first part of the backup selection. So if the vdm you need to back up has an ID of 16 then the first part of your backup selection becomes:

/root_vdm_16/

Then, you will want to see what file systems are mounted on this VDM. To see this you need to run:

server_mount [name of VDM]

This will give you a list of the file systems and the mount points. Its this mount point that makes up the second part of your backup selection. So if you file system is called homes_fs on /homes_fs_1 then your full backup selection (including vdm from above) would be

/root_vdm_16/homes_fs_1

This is further expandable depending on how you’ve configured your CIFS Shares, but normally you should just be able to follow the path straight to the folder you need to backup, e.g:

/root_vdm_16/homes_fs_1/danoneill/mustbebackedup

As John points out in the comments below… It really is quite simple… One command:

server_df

This lists all the file systems and their VDM’s.

One thing that I’ve come across recently from a bit of a odd situation is the Bypass traverse checking group policy object.

Basically, what this allows users to do, is traverse folders that they should have no access to…

This is how it is explained in Microsoft’s technet article about it…

This user right determines which users can traverse directory trees even though the user may not have permissions on the traversed directory. This privilege does not allow the user to list the contents of a directory, only to traverse directories.

This normally would bother anyone, unless during a very sensitive data move that requires you leave the permissions of the underlying data alone. In this case, you have a top level folder with a certain set of permissions but because of an audit rule you have to leave the permissions on the lower level folders alone for a period of time.

You would expect the users not to be able to get to the data below the top level folder – why should they? You’ve set the permissions correctly on the top of the folder and then the Bypass traverse checking group policy object steps in. And ruins your day.

Slight exaggeration, and easily dealt with since we don’t knowingly use this GPO for anything else in the server. This is the default user set that can, by default, gain access via this group policy:

• Administrators
• Backup Operators
• Power Users
• Users
• Everyone

Out comes the “everyone” group, and now we’re nicely audit compliant.

Normally this would not be a problem as most of you will force replication after a folder move, thus inherit the permissions of the top level folder and block the user from traversing the folder as they will have no access to the folder below the top level.

Daily Star News App

On first looks this app seems to be very basic. And after using it for a bit, it doesn’t really get any better. The design is quite simple, and the interface is quite underwhelming. Though that said – its easy to get where you need to go and the application is also fast to load and to move between articles.  There also doesn’t seem to be any way to refresh the current stories manually – You have to go into a story and then come back out again. Not ideal but not a show stopper. The news is English focused like the paper but if you like the Irish print version(with the token Irish stories) you may like this application as well.

They’ve kept the headlines a bit short but there’s an image with every story which is always good. The article length is often very short though. There’s also isn’t a lot of choice… you get News, Gossip, Babes, and Sport. That’s it… There’s also an information button for more information about the company that made the app… not very professional but people need publicity I suppose. I’ve also noticed some weird bugs… If you click to go into an article the toolbar at the bottom changed to a loading icon(left) and a refresh button(right). Pressing that refresh button takes you straight to the Babes section… A pleasant surprise but a surprise indeed. Interface buttons should always do what you think they will… and the refresh button is one of the best well known symbols around. Changing what it does in your application will only confuse people. (Although in this case I can hardly say I was upset…)

NYTimes News App

This application from the New York Times is one of the first news applications that I ever used. I also have previously recommended because it is very good. The quality of the writing seems to be excellent and some of the editorial pieces have had me reading for whole commutes. The interfaces is very nice, and very detailed. You have a huge amount of choice if you need it, but the latest news is right there in front of you straight away. The popular stories are also just one click away. The rest of the categories are only 2. Its an excellent interface and one that lets you get where you need to. Its also one that iPhone, iPod users will be used to as its very similar to how you get to podcasts for example from the music app. It’s good to see they’ve done some research.

There are a few nice features within the articles too – the top and bottom toolbars visible in the second screenshot, disappear when you start scrolling through the article. It takes the interface out of the way while you’re reading. Nice. And its easy to get it back – one click on the article and they pop back. Also when you read all the way down to the bottom of the article it knows when you’ve reached the bottom and it pops back. The ability to resize the text is there too – which is important as I find that the default text size is much too big. Back on the homepage the refresh button does what you expect of it, and articles seem to be fairly regularly uploaded.

Although this app has very few problems(and many positives), it does have one or two… – its quite slow, and after a bit of use the app crashed a few times – not a huge deal but hopefully would be resolved in later releases.

On a side note, this is also the only application to use right aligned thumbnails for the articles… hmmm.

Sky News

One of my favourite of the newer news apps that I’ve downloaded, this app has a lot going for it. The interface is simple enough, but shows you a lot of information straight away. As soon as you load the application you get the 6 top stories straight away. A feat only matched by one other application in this list. However, there does seem to be a little ad bar that opens down at the bottom but I can’t work out when it opens – it seems to be entirely random. The application is fully featured, and a lot of the stories also have video included and its easy to see which ones. The app is reasonably fast to load, with a nice little headline by headline loading mechanism. 

If I could give out about one thing, however, is that the article functionality is very basic. There’s no resizing of text, and no landscape view. Also, oddly, there’s no ability to share that interesting news story that you’ve just come across. This is surprising as almost every other app here lets you email, or twitter a link to the story.

One interesting part of this application is the “Your Report” section. I can see this having many benefits for Sky News as it enables you to send them news of an event that you might be witnessing! I can see this being a big thing – especially with the proliferation of iPhones around these days.

Time Mobile

There are a few Time magazine subscribers in my family and I came across this app advertised at the back of the magazine so a good while ago I checked it out. The first time I loaded it I was nicely surprised by the design of the interface, nice big pictures with a coverflow-like ability to flick across from one story to the next. However, for those of you without perfect 3G coverage there is also the ability to press a button in the top right had corner and to change it to a list view that some people might be more comfortable with. Apart from the default coverflow-like picture interface the rest of the interface is very similar to a lot of the other major news site apps. As I talk about in the conclusion later – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The article pages have a few nice features too – you are able to zoom in on the article and you can also change the font size. However the stand out very nice feature is in the bottom left corner of the article pages – the ability to turn off the accelerometer so that it doesn’t accidently shift to landscape view in the middle of you reading something! I absolutely loved this, and found myself looking for this feature in every other IPhone application I use! Back to the app though the news and editorials tend to be of good quality and if you’re used to the magazine or the website then you should be well looked after by this application.

ITN News

The ITN iphone application is one of a couple of applications on this list that provides Videos as well as more traditional text based news. And it has to be said that it does it very well. It’s very easy to see which story have associated videos attached, with a small “v” in the thumbnail. Once in the article and the quality is pretty good. The ads at athe top maybe take up a bit too much room but with excellent images and video this more than makes up for it. 

Within the articles it’s actually a little confusing where the videos are – until you click around a bit. Up in the Nav bar, you’ve got a copuple of buttons – Headlines(essentially the back button), Share and Videos.

This Videos button display a list of the associated videos and gives you the ability to play them. The loading of the videos is pretty quick and the quality pretty good.

The Share button gives you the ability to email and twitter a link to the article, however that sharing window that pops up is a bit weird. The cancel button doesn’t seem to work, and the others seem to take a long time to open. That could just be my phone though

Msnbc.com

The interface on this iPhone application caught me by surprise. The first, and I must say only, genuinely unique design out of this entire list comes from a news site that is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC. They integrated their logo (or maybe took inspiration from it) and turned it into a slick circular interface that is very nice to look at. Its also easy to use. When you click on one of the topics you’re taken through to a page that on first using is a little off-putting. The news itself flows by from the top downwards. This caught me out until I realised what it was doing. There is a pause button down at the bottom of the screen and I hit that as soon as I could!

The application is nicely fully featured and has literally hundreds of articles and blogs to read. They’ve also congregated all of their various twitter feeds under the twitter button. Once in there you can choose from any of their twitter accounts to see their recent updates. A nice feature indeed, as you can check out the feeds all in one place first before you decide to follow them later! I like this application a lot, from the Zumobi Network which seem to do a number of other nice applications.

Unfortunately, its not all rosy in the garden. To read the full articles, takes too many clicks and also loads the Msnbc webpage within a frame. If you just want the first half of the article you don’t have to go further but if you want to read the whole thing you must load the website. This website can be slow to load and kind of negates the data saving from using the application. I don’t understand this unless the object of the app is to get more visitors to their website? And maybe this would be acceptable if it didn’t have ads in the application, but it does – so you get ads in both places. Not ideal, but if you just want to do some casual news reading with a very nice interface then this application will suit you.

The Munster

The only free Irish web app in the top 50 listed in the Irish App Store, the Munster Express’s News iPhone app was a pleasantly surprisingly good application. This, I have to say caught me by surprise. I didn’t expect a regional Irish news paper to be able to produce such an app. And even if that does say more about me then it really should have, I then thought about it for a little while and I realized that of course it was possible. Ireland has an excellent community of developers who are easily capable of producing such an application. However why don’t we see more of this? The regional paper in my area – the Leinster Leader – does not have any iPhone app. But on to the application!

The application itself is pretty good. The number of articles on the main page is nice, as it allows you to scan headlines very quickly and easily. Especially when a brief excerpt is included. The application is pretty basic looking, but I suppose its better to stick to the default Apple styling than do some messy job yourself.

The news stories tend to be provincial but that’s exactly what you need from this type of application. If you’re from the south of Ireland and live away from home this is perfect to keep up to date.

Couple of weird things going on with the ads currently used by the app but I cant see that affecting you’re overall use of this application. The app is on the basic side but I dont think anyone expects anything else from a news sourfce of this size.  

France 24

A very simple application but the only one of its kind on this list. The France 24 new app is primarily a video application. The application loads and then you click on one of the options below and you get video news of that topic. They seem to be updated regularly enough. That said the design of the application could be a little better and if you weren’t in a 3G covered area then this application is really of no use to you.

The videos themselves once you let them buffer for a while are of an acceptable level of quality. The app also has the nice distinction of being available in 3 languages – English, and as its primarily aimed at the French market, Arabic and French. Unfortunately when the app is changing to the video, it goes completely black and it looks like the application has crashed when in fact it hasn’t. Not the first time we’ve seen this on the list but this black loading screen seems to last a good bit longer. The application itself is a case of sticking to what they know but the design could use a little sprucing up.

XKCD – Legendary. This web comic is absolutely hilarious and definitely worth a regular read!

So normally, I’d open up a console RDP session to the win2003 server using mstsc /v: servername /console. This connects to session 0 on the box and allows me to disconnect the session and leave it running overnight and not have my session time out and cause the job to fail. However recently I updated mstsc.exe on my machine to version 6.0 to resolve another problem I was having remoting to my XP machine from my Vista PC at home. However it appeared that the /console switch no longer worked. Also when the /? switch was used, it wasn’t even mentioned.

This creates a problem in that I couldn’t connect to console sessions to complete long tasks. However, while looking at the above instructions I noticed the /admin switch. Did they just rename it? I tried it and excellently I was able to log on to a console session created with the old mstsc application using the /console switch. Brilliant news. So to connect to any console session on a win2003 box all I had to do was mstsc /v: servername /admin. I decided to follow it up however to see why the change was made and if indeed if any change was made. I came across the following article http://blog.shijaz.com/2008/01/no-more-mstscexe-console.html which explained the situation with the application and why the change was made. Also, this is going to come up even more with the increased uptake of windows server 2008, as explained in the above article. It makes for an interesting read and explains Microsofts thinking about how console sessions will work in future (i.e. not at all ).

P.S. Scobleizer, always uses very high quality videos for his interviews. Although they look great it also means they are a bit on the slow side to load if you don’t have FiOS running to your door! However, his site also has a pretty big pipe and the vids below are hosted there so you hopefully wont have a problem. 

Part 1

Part 2

Or you can get to the vids on the following pages. Part 1 – http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/part-i-king-tech-talk and Part 2 – http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/leo-laporte-part-ii-king-tech-talk

I don’t know where people who are interested in technology get the time to keep abreast of all the developments that happen in this industry. Unfortunately for me, my interests cover a huge swath of categories so I’m constantly hearing about stuff about 2 weeks after it happens and by then its old news! Also since there is a huge number of people and websites aiming to keep me informed, its hard to know who to listen to for good quality stuff. So where do I get my news? And who from? Being a hilariously busy Sysadmin and with my long commute in and out of work it makes sense for me to use podcasts as my tech news medium of choice, especially here in Ireland where no radio channel would dare touch on a subject that didn’t involve mainstream music, and or celebrities news! I jest, but still there is no technology news on the radio in Ireland so I get it all pretty much from the US. So what podcasts do I listen to and who in particular do I pay attention to?

Leo Laporte

The undisputed but sadly uncrowned king of technology news and chat has to be the great Leo Laporte and his amazing setup that he has over at twit.tv. I know I’ve joked about paying for stuff before but this time I really mean it when I say it. I would pay to listen and or watch his shows. So much so that I actually kind of went through with it and have a monthly donation setup through PayPal! The shows/netcasts/podcasts that run over at twit.tv really are some of the best technology broadcasts out there. The tag line of twit.tv is “netcasts you love from people you trust” and its true! In fact if Leo came out and told me on a show that the sky was green and the grass was blue, I would have to check! Anyway, enough of my idol worshipping… Leo has introduced some amazing people to me through the podcasts over the time I’ve been listening and always enlightens me on any subject that the shows happen to be covering. My RSS feed is full of blogs and websites from people that Leo has introduced me to from John C. Dvorak, all the way over to Molly Wood and Wil Harris, to name but a very few! Every week has me waiting for the next instalment of “This week in Tech” or “Windows Weekly“. He also blogs semi-regularly over at leoville.com and is a regular twitter..er. If you head over to twit.tv there are are some really interesting podcasts but, in particular, check out how twit was founded! Although a regular listener, I haven’t yet made the leap over to watching the shows live, as my schedule doesn’t allow for it, or watching the video podcasts because the battery life on my iPod touch doesn’t really allow for it! On a final note – although I really know that he’s not the only person talking about tech and gathering great minds together, he is the best at it.

John C. Dvorak

Where would twit be without John C. Dvorak? Who knows but it wouldn’t be where it is today. A legend in his own right, I look forward to the shows that he participates in. Although at the start I didn’t like him at all! I found him rude, brash and patronising but I have grown to respect and enjoy what he has to say – because he’s normally right! As a regular on twit he really does bring his considerable insight to the tech news world and always has something to say so it shows his considerable knowledge on the world of technology. Apart from twit, John also has a number of other projects like cranky geeks, which is another show that I religiously download and enjoy every time I can. You can also check out his personal blog at http://www.dvorak.org/blog/ which covers a huge broad spectrum of subjects… check out http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=31819, http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=31765 for example!

Paul Thurotte

A legend that I really discovered through Leo’s netcasts, I catch all my MS news from this man. It can’t be easy being the sole pro-Microsoft person (or so its seems from time to time) in the tech news industry, but I believe he always explains his arguments well and always gets to the point. However he would also be the first screaming when Microsoft gets it wrong so you can be sure he is quite… well I wont say unbiased but pretty close all the same. Insightful and funny, he really does make the shows with Leo really interesting and I find him very easy to listen to. His very low tone of voice helps a lot too! Aside from the podcasts, Paul is the news editor at Windows ITPro magazine, and runs the supersite for Windows. As work get the former, I get a chance to read some of the stuff, and the latter has to be, in my opinion, the greatest windows resource out there – bar none(although I don’t like the site re-design…)! I have used it for many things from finding out the latest Windows Vista news to learning how to create a slipstreamed XP disk! Paul has an inside line to the good stuff at Microsoft so he’s really worth listening to if you want to keep up to date with all that’s going on at the minute over at Redmond.

Conclusion

So there you have it, not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination but hopefully enough to get anyone started. The above people really are who I go to first for all of my tech news and analysis as they’re trustworthy and intelligent, funny and witty, and always keep my morning commute entertained. My hat comes off to Leo Laporte especially for bringing all these great people together at Twit.tv.

Twinkle. Still at the top of the list and still one of the best iphone applications out there. Brought to us by Tapulous, it’s a great twitter app with a little bit more on top. Anything more to add to my original post? Not really, its still a great app and one that I use every day.

The Google App is, of course, still there. And still very useful even if more semantic information is not hugely available around Ireland. Handy for Dublin, not so much for everywhere else.

The NY Times iPhone application is still my source for American news when I’m on the move and there still isn’t a better news application on the iPhone in terms of usabilty and functionality. The news stories aren’t bad either…

Another news application but one a little closer to home – the BBCReader from “New Way to See News“(The website is pretty dreadful by the way). A handy application that I use to read my favorite news site. It’s very handy and once opened will download all the headline stories in the background so you can read any news story even if you are out of signal or in a EDGE(instead of 3G) area. And as this happens more you would like his is very handy.

Eirtext from Vinny Coyne’s “Lack of Concept” software. It’s a very handy piece of software and very useful. Unfortunately, you have to move back and forward between the iPhone text and this software and for that reason I don’t use it an awful lot. However with many people now on “Pay as you go” iPhones this will become even more useful for those people.

All in all, There’s a very healthy iPhone application market out there, especially on the free apps side of things. The above apps are just the ones that I think Irish users will most appreciate. However, I have been known to have been wrong in the past… so let me know if there are any apps that you think should be in the list?

Eric Meyer

I’m pretty certain it would be impossible to exclude Eric Meyer from any list on CSS. Any list at all, because he is probably the best, most world renowned CSS expert there is. Having practically eaten two of his many books on CSS (“Eric Meyer on CSS” and “More Eric Meyer on CSS“) I can’t recommend them enough. Presumably does not suffer from stage fright as he speaks regularly (indeed founded) a travelling web design conference called “An Event Apart“ and most recently at this event in San Francisco and Chicago, along side a number of other names on this list. You can find Eric blogging at http://meyerweb.com/ and otherwise dolling out his genius in the form or amazing tips and helpful hints there too.

Andy Budd

I first found Andy Budd when I bought CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. It quickly became one of my favourite books on CSS and has become a excellent and well used reference. His website has also become an excellent resource – especially his extensive bookmarks at http://www.andybudd.com/links/. He can also be found blogging at http://www.andybudd.com/ too, a popular weblog where he writes about his personal hobbies and also about web design and web standards. Another branch in Andy’s CSS work is also his efforts at http://clearleft.com/ (btw they also have a ridiculous trademarked tag line – “We make Websites Better™”). Clearleft have a good few web applications and web sites under their belt and one very interesting project that they have is http://www.silverbackapp.com/.

Dan Cederholm

from http://www.simplebits.com/ – One of the books I’m reading right now, “Bulletproof Web Design” was written by Dan Cederholm, and from what I’ve read – he uses techniques and has a style of code that I really admire and now aim for myself with my projects. He is a big proponent of lean markup and CSS, and apparently in every project looks to “minimize markup and embrace the flexibility of CSS”. This is something that I’d like to be able to do and his book seemed like the obvious place to start. Having said that, “Transcending CSS” is also pointing me in this direction as its mantra of content being king is helping me see the benefits of avoiding unnessary divs, and other markup that adds nothing to the semantic value of the page.

Jonathan Snook

at http://snook.ca/jonathan/ – Having heard of Jonathan over the years and having read a couple of his articles and things, when I first found out that he’d written a book, I pretty much had to buy it. The book was “The Art and Science of CSS“, and what a book it was. It was a book that really made me turn a corner, that made me realise how much I could do with CSS and good markup. I enjoyed this book immensely and learnt a great many things from it. He does the big web and development conferences too and has graced SXSW, Webmaster Jam Sessions, and Future of WebDesign. His personal website http://snook.ca/jonathan/ is where he shares his “tips, tricks and bookmarks on web development” and I often venture there for inspiration ideas and excellent ideas. One of the handiest tools on his website is also one of my favorites – The Colour Contrast Checker at http://snook.ca/archives/accessibility_and_usability/colour_color_co/. His list of accomplishments is long and they are many, check at the about section on his website to find out more.

Andy Clarke

from http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ – Another recent addition to my list of really really good people is Andy Clarke. In fact I hadn’t really heard of him properly until I read Transcending CSS – A book that has literally changed how I look at new projects, and really got me thinking about the way I design websites. And although I only found him recently, it would appear that the man is a bit of a legend! He also speaks at the big conferences (like An event apart this year in Chicago…) and runs his own business from a studio in North Wales. But his book is becoming my most read book on web design(over and over again ). I really enjoyed reading it and appreciate all the work that went into it. Hopefully, I get to put many of the techniques and things learnt from this book to good use in the future.

Dave Shea

at http://mezzoblue.com/ – I first started to read Dave Shea’s website a good while ago after it was brought to my attention as a really good example of a website design, and although its changed quite a bit since then, it still holds true as a really good example of professional website design. Good use of changing themes/colours, great layout and interesting content. Also the creator of CSS Zen Garden, arguable one of the best known places for web designers to show off excellent CSS designs. Not always my cup of tea (I prefer less graphics intensive designs personally), its hard to ignore some of the really excellent things that sometimes appear here. As for Dave himself, I think he says it best himself(from the about section of http://mezzoblue.com/) – “If you’re looking for the professional bio it’s over here. In short, I do a bit of speaking, a bit of writing, but mostly it’s about the design.” He links to a differen site here and its one you should take a look at as its really excellent – http://brightcreative.com/.

Conclusions

In reality while writing this piece I could have listed about 50 more people. In fact I started off with three and it grew after looking at the books on my shelves. However I feel like these are the people that I really look to for CSS stuff and think most people will find it useful. At the very least your should be adding these people’s websites to your RSS feeds, however, then you lose one of the most important aspects of going to these websites and that’s for the great work that they’ve done on their own websites!

The next article should come soon enough on the same topic of voices that matter to me… but with a slightly different subject.

Twinkle

One of the best applications out there. Brought to us by Tapulous. It is the best twitter application that I’ve come across but with the added benefit of location aware twittering. Really useful for finding local interesting people to follow – especially now that so many people are twittering. It can be quite daunting to watch that “everyone” feed on the twitter website, so many people… so many people saying not a whole lot. This cuts down on the noise while still allowing you to find very interesting people. It has a nice filter ability so that you can change the range that you allow tweets to come from. Unfortunately the recently changed to local distance measurements. It used to be 100 miles, which allowed me to see updates from Belfast and a couple of other places (I’m in Dublin). Now, however, its changed to 100km which doesn’t reach that far. Not that much of an issue though as a good few Dublin iPhone users have found this great application. I should also point out that you can change it to 500 or 1000 or everyone but out that far and you’re back to the noise of the unintelligible crowd.

Palringo

The App that saves me a fortune in text messaging bills. It allows you to log into a number of chat applications(like gchat and msn to name but a few.) and instant message your friends. An easy to use interface, and native to the iPhone so you don’t have to have the browser open to use it. Apparently it will stay active even if the screen turns off, as long as its the only third party app running(This is an Apple limitation – linkage). I can’t exactly vouch for that as I’ve only used it for short periods of time to get a good few IM’s out.

Google App

Let Google help you find the nearest hotel. Or pizza place. Or bar. The possibilities are really endless. Location aware searching along with all the normal google goodness. Need I say more?

Facebook Application

As much as I lothe it, most of my friends spend their entire days on this website. The application has a very good messaging system and its for that reason that i recommend this one as its very handy for talking to users on facebook. And the messages appear in the profile chat box so you can add multiple facebook users to the chat. Something that no other chat app does on the iPhone as far as I can tell. I have a very brief profile for this very reason. And even though Bebo still owns the lion share of users in Ireland, Facebook is growing here and most people have both so it wont be hard to convert anyone that doesn’t over to it.

NY Times App

This is going to be a controversial pick for 5th place as its for a American newspaper. However, as a regular user of this application its great for those of us here with an eye to the Americas as well as those with interests closer to home. It covers international news and sports as well as editorial features which having read a few are quite interesting and entertaining. I have used this app to get through my fairly boring commutes on the train. Easiest way to catch the world news if you don’t mind missing the local stories.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Have I missed anything? Probably. Actually – Definitely. I’d love to be able to add the Pandora iPhone app to the above list but it isn’t available here(Either is the website, technically). Which is a real pity as its one of the greatest internet applications that I’ve ever come across. Post a comment if there’s anything that you think that Irish iPhone users would be interested in or if there’s anything hugely glaringly obvious that I’ve left out.

Edit 17/08/2008: As pointed out in the comments (Thanks Michael), I should have included EirText in here. Silly me. What a nice little application. Very handy if you want to text a number of people at the same time For Free. Very handy. However i don’t believe it is a replacement for then in built iPhone SMS application as it… well… just doesn’t look as good. And you have to go back and forward between the iPhone’s messaging application and the Eirtext application. Which, although would save you quite a bit of money, would get quite annoying. However I definitely feel I should be mentioning it here after using it to organise a night out on Saturday…