David Dyess .com

After the USB startup disk was a success, I decided to try installing Ubuntu directly on the USB thumb drive, like any other HDD. It works! All you have to do to have your own portable version of Ubuntu is click ‘Advanced’ on step 7 of 7 (of the installation) and choose the USB thumb drive to save the MBR.

I installed Ubuntu on the thumb drive from my desktop and then booted it with the laptop. It booted perfectly. I do have to say Windows 7 does run faster than Ubuntu on this laptop, which my wife was quick to point out (she’s already a die hard 7 fan). There are also some hangups using Firefox, but that may be temporary considering I just installed 135 updates to Ubuntu. Overall, I think it’s usable enough for what I need and will allow me to move forward with some network experiments I’m planning (without worrying about doing any damage to my wife’s beloved laptop).

Side notes: I have a theory ext4 may not have been the best format for the partition, considering it is a flash drive (perhaps ReiserFS would be better?). This is probably also not the fastest thumb drive, which could be part of the reason for the hangups (along with the format). All things considered, this has been a successful experiment and appears to be a promising, if not viable, solution for computing on the go. Don’t be surprised if this experiment isn’t over yet

I play around on my wife’s laptop from time to time, but hardly ever use it for anything constructive. This is mainly because I don’t want to load it down with a bunch of development tools and things that she’ll never use. I bought the laptop for her, so the fewer things I can use it for the better for my sake

With that said, I have been curious how well Ubuntu 9.10 would work on it. I was going to try the LiveCD, but that is kind of an unfair way to judge performance. I have a 250Gb portable hard drive I use as a secondary backup for files. It also normally acts as my save folder on my desktop for anything I would rather not lose. I’d considered installing Ubuntu on it as a USB startup drive, but was reluctant because of some problems I’ve read about Ubuntu killing USB drives (although I’m fairly certain those were flash drives and this portable drive actually uses a laptop hdd).

Once I had finally given up on trying Ubuntu on the laptop, my mother-in-law sent us one of her care packages and it had a 16Gb thumb drive in it (Thanks!). She does that sometimes, which is cool. She normally, knowing I’m a geek, puts something techy in there for me (she actually sent the 250Gb portable in a previous package). Once I had finally given up on trying Ubuntu on the laptop, I had a way to safely test it without worry about killing my drive!

So, here I am, typing this blog on my wife’s laptop, running Ubuntu from a flash drive, connected to my wireless network, and no worry of doing any damage when I’m finished. The performance, you ask? Awesome. This is a cheap laptop, which runs Windows 7 Home Premium flawlessly, and I like the way Ubuntu runs on it even better. The sound is actually louder and clearer, the touch pad mouse is extremely sensitive (in comparison), and I’ve noticed a flaw in the laptop I’d hadn’t noticed on Windows: the touch pad is little too far to the left. They centered the touch pad to the QWERTY section of the keyboard, which means the way my left hand normally sits over the keyboard the edge of the my left thumb taps the touch pad and moves the mouse. On Windows the touch pad isn’t as sensitive, so I never realized the position of the touch pad wasn’t centered to the entire keyboard. Perhaps that is a standard which I never noticed before, I haven’t used laptops very often without a touchscreen (which is at work).

Clay is still coming along. I’m in the planning stages of setting up a Git repo on SourceForge. I’m trying to decide the best way to start it out, considering I plan to spawn several projects from the framework. My main concern is to setup the repos so I can move along in development without leaving users behind. I will likely manage 2 repos, stable and unstable, and only do work in the unstable repos. Each repo will have branches that make them run parallel, which will end up being merged into the main branches and eventually into the stable repo for release. I will likely create more permanent branches for the offshoot projects, such as a CMS and perhaps some specialized suites. That way I can merge changes into the offshoot projects, without building up the framework itself.

I’ve already played around with a few ideas for 2.0, so I will likely have an experimental branch for it that will eventually be merged into the unstable branch and it starts all over. My main thing with the development process is to make sure everything runs parallel up to a certain point. I feel if I make clear distinctions between what versions mean and actually give them meaning, then we wont have to worry about maintaining full backward compatibility. We can move forward and make progress without having to worry about leaving developers behind. For instance, I plan to release a 0.4.x as an alpha, move to beta at 0.5, and keep going toward 1.0. 1.x will run through 1.3 and 2.x development will open as 1.4 alpha. 1.3 would remain the supported version until 2.0 became ready for release.

I’m still working on the “Framework for the 10’s” series and will hopefully publish part 1 this weekend. I’ve been working on a whitepaper for it, I just have to decide how to break it up into articles. Once the series is published I’ll publish the whitepaper as a whole.

I had been wanting to get my wife a laptop for a while so I decided to get her one for her birthday. I wasn’t looking for anything powerful, just something she could use for browsing the web and the usual things she does.  After looking around for a few months, I decided to get this Toshiba from BestBuy.  It’s a great deal to be under $400 and we’ve been more than satisfied with it. If you are looking for a cheap laptop that can still hold its own, I recommend it for sure.

It is a bare minimum laptop: no web cam, decent sound, decent mouse pad, decent screen size/resolution. The ram is upgradable to 4GB, though, which was a selling point for me.  I’ll probably get a 2nd one for myself, should make a nice dev pc with Ubuntu.

It’s strange to say 10’s, but we’re less than a couple of months away from those 10’s (2010’s). As my work and focuses on Clay have shifted from one thing to the other, I’ve wondered what I can build into it to make Clay the “next big thing. ” I still don’t know, to be honest, I do have a few ideas though.

I will be writing a series of blogs that focus on what I think the ideal framework for 2010 and beyond could look like. I’ll be exploring various frameworks and their functionalities that have made them a success or created a following. I’m hoping the series will help me build a road map for Clay and spark some conversation about the future of PHP frameworks/Content Management Systems.

The series isn’t about Clay, per se, but about the direction I think the modern framework should be going. It’s kind of a way for me to open up, to share some ideas I have for Clay, and to give myself a break from development.

I’d been considering registering daviddyess.com for a couple of months, but I’ve been using tangant.com for my domain since 2001. I finally decided to go ahead and get it, if nothing else I thought I should do it before another David Dyess came along and grabbed it. You probably got here via tangant.com, which will continue to point here for the time being. I will either keep both pointing here or find something else to use tangant.com for.

October was a fairly decent month for Clay development. It now has an almost complete alpha installer…  heh.  I call it an alpha installer because it is currently the only administrative GUI to Clay. The way Clay is wired makes it somewhat complex on the administrative side; it uses a fully configurable/strict approach. The installer is intended to give you a logical approach to configuring the sites, while handling the strict configuration requirements on the backend. So, yeah, the installer is at about 80%, I’d say, and I’ve begun sending it out to some other people that have requested to join in development of Clay.

The ‘core’ APIs of Clay grew a little this month. I was comparing the current version with older versions and it looks like Clay grew from about 500 lines to just over 900 lines.  That of course is counting comments and probably some commented blocks of test code here and there. My goal in the beginning was to keep it under 1000 lines, which is obviously not going to happen. To be fair, this is only the number of lines in clay.php, which currently contains most of the core APIs needed to run a web site. ClayDB, Creole, and some other APIs are divided into their own folders.

I’ve updated Sculpt, Clay’s template engine, to allow tiered template overrides, perform template includes (without using the application engine), and centralized template rendering within a single function. Sculpt now behaves a lot like Xaraya’s blocklayout, with the exception of the special tags in templates.

November is going to be a busy month for me, not including what I want to do with Clay. I’m hoping, over the next couple of months, to round out the installer, setup a development web site specifically for Clay development, and have atleast an Alpha release ready for New Year’s.

It took a while, but I finally have Ubuntu 9.10 installed. I had been considering swapping to Fedora, when 12 comes out, but now I’m not so sure.  Ubuntu keeps getting better and better. I could dual boot Fedora and Ubuntu, I guess, but it would have to be temporary.

I’m still trying some new stuff out on here and trying to find a new theme to go with the new install. I’ll let ya know how it goes.