Padlock SVN Opened
A few days ago I posted about a little project that I have been working on called Padlock and how soon it would be online for viewing. So I went ahead and opened up the SVN repo to Padlock for anonymous checkouts.
Getting Padlock
svn co http://www.everahprojects.com/svn/Padlock/trunk
Whew, glad all those instructions are over with. 
Anyway, it is far from complete. I still need to integrate the DB stuff into it and try to remove the fingerprint of Solar from it (oops, did I write that out loud?). But at the moment it works in my dev environment. It will get better, but it still has a long road to hoe.
EclipsePDT – A tool for the pro PHP developer
I have always been a fan of the Eclipse IDE. That is since I have found it and learned to use it. And recently there was an announcement that a new Eclipse PHP project was released.
Formerly I used the Eclipse IDE with the PHPEclipse plugin. It was nice, but at times was a bit heavy and slow. So I thought I'd give EclipsePDT a try. I downloaded it (the stable build with all the plugins already included), unpacked it to C:\EcliopsePDT and launched it.
I liked this thing from the go. It loaded quickly, worked flawlessly and was exactly what I remember from Eclipse without all the hangups. But I felt as though something were missing.
Not wanting to be left out of the cool PHP coders club, I decided I'd enhance my Eclipse. So I followed a tutorial I found on how to add in some fundamental Eclipse plugins to make my coding life a little bit better. And I have not looked back since. I am no longer using Eclipse with PHPEclipse plugin as it just does not work as flawlessly as EclipsePDT.
And, as a side note, loaded it on my Linux box and was coding within minutes.
So if you are in need a very good, high quality, rock solid PHP IDE that costs nothing, is widely supported and is downright cool, look no farther than EclipsePDT. It will do just about everything you want it to.
Amazed again by my children
Last night I was in my room when I heard the piano. Recognizing the tune being played as one that my 2 year old son sings after church, I went to the front room to see where my daughter had gotten the music from and how long she'd been playing it.
Me: "How long have you been practicing that song Sarah?"
She: "Practicing?"
Me: "Yes, when did you start to play that song?"
She: "Just now."
Me: "You mean you just taught yourself the notes to that song?"
She: (smiling) "Yes. I just sat down and started playing it."
!?!?!?!?!?!?!
How do they (yes, all four of my daughters have this ability) do that. She sat there and actually began playing three different songs just from memory. Then my other daughter sat down and did the same thing!
I tell you, sometimes being amazed is unavoidable. Last night it sure was.
WinXP and Fedora Dual Boot
So I spent a little time today setting up my WinXP machine at work to be a dual boot Linux/WinXP computer. And I gotta tell you, what I went through before finding a good tutorial was less than easy to use.
Then I ran across a tutorial from How To Forge. This tutorial, Installing Ubuntu Or Fedora From A Windows Or Linux System With UNetbootin, mentions in a very clear way, how to set up a dual boot environment on an already existing install of Windows XP.
I followed the steps (actually pages 3 to 6 since I wanted Fedora, not Ubuntu) and everything worked for me exactly as the tutorial said it would. The entire setup of the install, from partitioning to booting the first time, took about 30 minutes. There were no hiccups, no issues and now I am happily enjoying my new Fedora 7 Linux environment.
So if you were thinking of setting up a dual boot with Win XP and Ubuntu/Fedora/Any other UNetbootin distro, give the app a shot. It worked great for me.
I *heart* Linux
Man, I love Linux.
As I write this I am booted to the Live Fedora 7 CD. And I have to say this is an awesome experience. Everything about this OS rocks. I am seriously considering dumping Winblows altogether in favor of this OS.
There really isn't much else to say about it other than I love it. And I will be testing it out more and more today. But I cannot wait to get it on this system.
This was a fun weekend
So I did almost exactly what I wanted to do this weekend: nothing. And it was awesome.
We did end up leaving the house yesterday. We had to pick up a prescription for my wife and we needed to get to the mall to pick up some shoes for the kids.
Brief Note: The more kids you have the more expensive clothing becomes for them. Keep this in mind as you build your family. Don't let it deter you from having throngs of children. Just don't let it surprise you that when you buys your kids some shoes, that even though the shoes are 40% off, you still spend over $150 on them. So goes it when you have a lot of kids.
Anyway, it was good for us. I got to watch some football, we got to eat pretzels. We ran in to an old friend I haven't talked to in years. It was a good time.
Then at night we had family movie night and watched The Chronicles of Narnia at the request of Adriannah. Afterward we had a brief Bible study on the similarities of the story and Christianity. It was good.
Today we didn't really do too much either. We went to Church then came home and relaxed. We cleaned up the kitchen for dinner, then for a short time I played catch with my three older daughters. Then we relaxed some more.
So as I sit and ponder what really took place this weekend I have to think that relaxing has become a completely unrecognized occurrence to me. And I have tell you that if you are in the same boat, plan some relaxation time. You will not really know how much you need it until you have it. Then you may not want to let it go 
.
Having nothing to do is nice
Yesterday my wife called me and mentioned to me that we have absolutely no commitments this weekend at all. None. That means that we can literally sit around and do nothing all weekend long. Do you know how foreign that is to me?
I have had something going on during the weekend for as long as I can remember. It seems like the weekends are the time when I can actually get things done. Spend time with the kids. Relax while not relaxing. But this weekend we can actually relax without doing anything.
I am still having a hard time wrapping my mind around all this. But I can say this... if I do anything this weekend I will still be happy knowing that my weekend started out with having to do nothing. In fact, I can say that if I choose to do anything this weekend it will be because of just that: my choice.
So I am going to go about my doing nothing. Until I decide to do something, I shall be doing nothing. And you know where to find me doing it.
Linux is supposed to be easier than this
The last time I installed Linux on a computer it was Fedora Core 4 on a PII 833Mhz laptop with 192Mb of ram and a 12GB hard drive. It went smooth. it was a little slow loading, but overall it was smooth.
A few weeks ago my brother called me and told me his Win XP laptop was hosed (again) and that he wanted me to try to rescue his computer. Now I am not a computer doctor by any stretch of the imagination, but since I do know how to write web pages, it makes perfect sense that I would also be able to fill the role as family help desk.
After a few days of attempting to reload Win XP onto his laptop I decided that to really prevent him from having errors like corrupted system deep in his Windows install or registry issues because of virus attacks, I would eliminate the entire Windows environment corruption potential and install what I consider to be the best OS around outside of the Mac OS: Ubuntu Linux.
From past experience I knew that installing Linux was not really a rocket science type of job. Basically get a recent version of some distribution and install it. Linux has long been known as the OS that fits just about anywhere, so I went with Ubuntu for its native support for wireless networking and its clean UI.
SIDEBAR: Before I get into this really deep let me tell you that my brother's laptop is a Celeron 2.8Ghz machine with a 40GB hard drive and 192MB of RAM. It is not by any means a powerhouse, but it satisfies almost all system requirements for installing Linux.
I thought.
I started the purification process with an attempt to load Ubunut 7.04 from the live CD. That was a massive mistake. After reading the Interwebs for almost three straight days I found out somewhere (not on the Ubuntu web site) that you need to have a minimum of 256Mb of RAM in order to boot from and install from the live CD. Well, carp.
So I attempted to load Ubuntu 6.10 from the live CD. Same result. Feeling like Ubuntu wasn't in the cards for this machine, I turned to my good old friend Fedora Core. This time it was version 5 since that is that last distro that I have the CDs for. It started out like I remember it before, but a short while into the start of the install I was told that the machine did not have enough RAM to install using the GUI and that I would be using the text installer now.
This wasn't a major problem. Except for the fact that when I finally got it installed and I rebooted I had no GUI at all. I, personally, am OK with that because I am comfortable at the CLI. My brother... not so much. So I had to look for something else.
After more interwebs searching I found out that Xubuntu is the distro of choice for people that have low end or old systems. So I set out to download that version and install it. I loaded the CD, got to the live desktop, played around a bit to make sure it worked and then chose to install it. The install got all the way to the part where it is searching the filesystem. Then it stopped installing and opening a /boot directory file viewer and that was that. No actual install took place, although the filesystem partitioning have been done so now my CLI install of Fedora Core was now hosed.
Not to be outwitted, again, by a stinking OS install, I pressed on and did more Interwebs searchification until I ran across a little thing known as the Xubuntu Alternate Install CD. This is not a live CD. It is an actual straight to the hizzie installer. And it worked great.
The entire OS was installed in abou 20 minutes. The desktop environment, xfce, is a little stripped down for my taste, but I think when it comes to using a computer this install will do.
The one thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that, as much as I hate Winblows, the basic XP Home install on this machine was a lot more feature rich than Xubuntu. It has a cleaner interface, it was extensible, it was somewhat fast loading and its wireless networking worked out of the box without a whole of intervention. And it did all this with the same hardware resources. I wonder why Linux cannot match that on this old of a system?
Anyway, I am happy. I can now boot the machine. I can write documents, make pretty drawrings, do all sorts of stuff. I am not sure it is going to work for my brother though. But it will work as a nice personal computer.
