Travis Goes to a Business Lecture – Unvarnished – Travis Smith

Travis Goes to a Business Lecture – Unvarnished – Travis Smith
This blog post works for me on 3 levels:

1. it’s cute
2. it suggests “Drupal” is a buzzword”
3. I always knew a horizontal layout was good for something, and this post is it

major coolio.

Luna Gardener:Co-Creating a Community Garden

It is always interesting to run into someone online that you could easily bump into in real life as well. The connection between the Luna Gardener and myself is the Leola Street Garden project. Here are my greetings, and hopes for an early spring.

By Far the Best Blonde Joke Ever

Who would have ever thought that I would find what has to be the best blonde joke ever while reading a Drupal site? It is a very new Drupal site as well. Probably run by a blonde. Or a former blonde.

Trackback Testing | Your Own Drupal

Trying it from the other direction. Trackback Testing | Your Own Drupal

Ubuntu Progress

Last night I was able to set up an account in Evolution, send myself an e-mail, and receive the message! It really shouldn’t be that much to write home about, considering all the different ways I have read my mail in the past: e-mail clients, browsers, RSS, my Zaurus, etc., etc… but this was more special because it turns out there are lots of TLAs that I have never dealt with. I was pretty sure I was dealing with POP and SMPT, and I also know I have a password. Usually this is enough knowledge but there were enough options available for me to make some bad choices. Lucky for me there is also an auto-detect button and it worked really nice.

Is Linux Ready For The Desktop?

Kairos Computer Solutions » Blog Archive » Is Linux Ready For The Desktop?
Larry Hamilton seems to share my opinion of the state of Linux right at the moment. I regard myself as something of a power user, I have no formal education at all but I can usually find and configure a solution on Windows to do whatever tak is at hand most efficiently. Over the three years that I have been on the Internet, I have honed my program list down to three daily use biggies: Firefox with all the plugins that allow me to leap tall buildings with a single click, PocoMail for retriving, sorting, some really amazing sending options, and NoteTab Pro for everything and I do mean everything else. Oh and I will upon occasion crack open Photoshop.

As a break from my day to day efficiency as web super star, on Tuesday nights I become Scout Mom with a laptop, and hit the coffee shops with my wireless card. I use Linux without fail on these fun nights out, and everything goes without a hitch even down to the occasional use of FTP to take advantage of faster connection speeds.

The trick will be to make the switch to Linux at home in my ‘work environment’.

I have found two Linux distros that will potentially work on my desktop. I am handicapped when compared to over half of all Americans because I am unwilling to invest in a broadband connection. I did spring for a serial (external) modem which in theory will allow a Linux box to connect to the Internet. I have had good luck with both Ubuntu which is installed on my desktop and Puppy, which is a pseudo-live CD. By the way, I have had no trouble with either of these distros when I tried to use my printer. Maybe I just have good taste in printers.

Now all I need is to get an efficient software roster so I can get to work. Ubuntu comes with Firefox out of the box so all I need is to spend a day or three aquiring all the extensions that make my life worthwhile. Hopefully I can import my bookmarks from Windows. The Puppy distro comes with it’s own unique system of installing programs. Perhaps Firefox is something they have already configured. The Puppy guys have done a great amount of work on their distro and the casual user could do worse than to give their effort a serious spin. It will work for me only as far as their particular focus coincides with my needs. As an aside, I have installed programs sucessfully on my laptop under Mandrake, Opera browser went painlessly well, but I could only figger out how to install Firefox in my temp folder, something to do with permissions. Sure don’t want to spend any time configuring that.

As far as the e-mail goes, I could work something out or boot into Windows once a week or so to keep things going, the possibilities are great.

Now on to my right hand, I have communicated with Larry and he has assured me that NoteTab will run under WINE. Now I am pretty sure that Wine Is Not an Emulator but otherwise I am clueless. Do you think I have that? Does it have to be turned on somewhere? Now my biggest complaint with Ubuntu so far is that it does not see my Win partition so I have to experiment elsewhere. My Knoppix disk is fairly old so I tried SBIE, Slax, and the aforementioned Puppy. I saw no reference to WINE, or even K-wine or X-WINE or anything lke that. I tried clicking on a Windows program with no joy. Seems to me I need to either figure out how to mount windows under Ubuntu or maybe install WINE in Puppy multisession or even try something else like Mandriva or Kubuntu. This will have to be resolved before I even think of moving my 34 (count em) e-mail addresses into Evolution or K-something or perhaps Thunderbird.

I have not even touched on the other thing, local webservers. My websites run on Linux and I know it is goodness, but what do you have to do to run it locally? Compile PHP? I want to do it, I just don’t know how. With Windows it is only a download, someone has done all the work.

The times, they are a changing, and I want to be in on it. In a couple of years, we will look back an wonder why this was even an issue.

Newness

So I got the new (to me) computer, IBM IntelliStation MPro 700MHz 512MB 20GB, a big, black heavy monster. So far I have installed W98 at least twice. For the dual-boot option I have tried Mepis, Mandrake, and the newest Ubunto. I don’t really care which one stays but so far the Breezy Badger plays well with the dialup. Not sure if any of my friends will make use of the other disks that were sent me, the live CD boots very slowly compared to other distros. I do think there is a ‘market’ for this sort of thing.

Web2.0

Everywhere I look, people are touting the virtues of AJAX. Imagine that. Javascript can do cool things. I do know the feeling, folks, I remember browsing around and checking out all the animated cursers that left a trail of letters or background colors that changed every 30 seconds or so. Now the powers that be have decided to write JavaScript to actually make things appear to be easier to use. I am so totally into it, I even have a little hide/show text script on one of my websites. Had it for years. Still love it.

 The thing about it is, only a handful of folks (comparitively speaking) have ever heard the term Web 2.0 and if they did it would scare them into a frenzy. Honestly, most of my friends do well to use e-mail on a good day and some would be hard put to find yahoo.com if someone hadn’t put them up a bookmark. If any of my clients ever asked me about Web 2.0 I would reassure them that I will take care of it, no extra charge, and they will never know the difference. Really folks, it is just a natural thing, in 5 years they will look back and say “well duh”.

The thing I really care about is interoperatability.  I want to upload my calendar and my contact list from my PDA so that I can access it from my laptop, edit it and embed it in my website for my friends to access. We are almost there, XML or similar should be able to do the job. The overriding factor is that all this stuff is so very brand spanking new. My hardware is all  outdated but I can’t feel bad because the fresh new overpriced systems are no better. When my son is as old as I am now the inconspicious networking will make what we have today seem like shots in the dark.

 

 

Night Life

Well folks, nobody would accuse me of being anything but an introvert, but it is still nice to get out now and again. Even if it is work related. Sometimes, too, you assume the worst but get surprised with the best. It might mean extra work but you do it anyway. Somehow.

 

 

Cool Domains

I like buying domain names, they are like real estate except that God keeps making more. Thanks to the benevolence of the country of Western Samoa, we have the TLD of .ws which up until a short time I thought meant website. Duh. Anyway, I was able to pick up the somewhat clever barro.ws and the even more special stra.ws . Now I have a pretty cool e-mal address:

grasping at stra dot ws

and some more like that.  I am fairly pleased.

 

I am also happy to report that I have ordered a computer, one that is solidly in the 21st century. This one is an IBM 733Mhz, 512mb, 20GB,  no operating system piece of art that is no longer available from retrobox.com. Sorry folks.