Bert Garcia^2.0

Needed a wider external display for my laptop.

Most of my web development happens on a Windows XP laptop, it was hooked up to a 19 inch Samsung 930B LCD as it’s external display.

On the laptop’s screen I run my web browser, the external display is used mostly for coding, with either Komodo IDE or Notepad++ running. With the Samsung at 1280 pixels wide, I felt cramped.

Perusing the Net turned up a 20 inch Acer H203H LCD at Best Buy for $99. Did the usual reading of online reviews and they were mostly positive, no mention of dead pixels or dead on arrival scenarios. So I headed over to my local brick and mortar electronics store and made a visual comparison of the Acer alongside more expensive LG and Samsung displays. I bought the Acer.

So far I’m pleased with the new display, I really like having 1600 pixels of width so I can display sidebars in Komodo and not have the code window shrink too much. My only concern was going from 1024 to 900 pixels in length, but I don’t miss the 124 pixels I lost. The display also has a matte finish, which I prefer over the glossy displays that are so common today.

Last night I fired up VLC and watched a movie on the Acer, the living room TV will miss me ;)

She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes

During the 1980’s, Jerry Pournelle wrote a column for Byte magazine entitled The View From Chaos Manor. The column followed Jerry’s trials and tribulations with hardware and software. Back then you were lucky to have one home computer, Jerry had many, all with cute names.

In 1983, I bought my first personal computer, a Compaq portable. Hooked it up to an Okidata parallel printer and started my own a family of computers and peripherals. The Compaq and Oki are still with me, along with every piece of hardware and software I’ve ever acquired.

Pictured above is my current home office layout, the two laptops I use, an external monitor, an LCD TV and wireless laser printer on the right. Scattered around the house are more laptops and desktop computers, the back storage has the museum of 386, 486 and Pentium computers.

The view from geek manor, because I wanted to be like Jerry.

Ooh-bi-doo, I wan’na be like you
I want to walk like you, talk like you, too
You see it’s true, an ape like me
Can learn to be like you, too

Think different!

Apple slogans remind me of doublespeak, those phrases made popular in George Orwell’s novel 1984, like war is peace and freedom is slavery.

Steve and company want you think different, yet Apple fans all think alike. Should Apple make an iToaster, you can bet their morning bagels would be placed into one of them, and come out branded with a nice little Apple logo on it’s side.

The I’m a Mac and you’re a PC commercials make me laugh, because a Mac nowadays is just a freaking PC inside. I’ll give them credit though, they’ve taken a Unix operating system and made it user friendly. I can’t see myself paying double the price for a laptop just because it has a giant glowing Apple logo on the back of it, your mileage may vary.

Mind you, I’m not a bigot, I’d love to get my hands on a used Mac mini and throw Debian on it for a low-power web server. I do own a 5th generation iPod, but I ditched iTunes for foobar2000 with the foo_dop plugin. My son owns an iPhone, it’s a neat wireless device, though I got my eyes on an Android phone because I want full control over my devices.

Now, for you fans of the Cupertino based company, I give you iHype, a neat little web page showing the latest Apple news from different outlets. The slogan, Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Someday they won’t let you, now you must agree
The times they are a-telling, and the changing isn’t free

Gone are the days of Microsoft Frontpage.

At the dawn of the Internet, we had to hand code HTML pages by hand, Notepad was our friend. For personal use it was alright, but having to maintain clients this way was mucho cumbersome. Should anything change in their world, like a product price, we had to do the answer phone call, edit said HTML file, then ftp it up to the server dance.

Then came Frontpage, the answer to all our dreams, we thought. Code said website, upload it to the server, then hand it over to the client and they’ll handle the updating from that point on for the small details. We soon came to realize that Frontpage gobbled up our beautifully crafted code and spit out Redmond’s own brand of what the web should look like, ActiveX, VBScript, et al.

On June 8, 1995 came the message to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi newsgroup from Rasmus Lerdorf. Personal Home Page Tools, or PHP for short, was born. Fast forward to July of 2010 and PHP is the most widely used Apache module on the over 100 million servers that the Apache web server is running on. Microsoft is in second place with 53 million servers.

PHP served these words to you, I filled out a form on the backend of Textpattern CMS, the content management system that controls this site. Now we can design sites and hand them over to clients for their updates, our design code left untouched, nicely adorning the content.

Textpattern, like PHP and Apache are Open Source applications. They are free to download and utilize as we see fit. We’ve gained control of the most important medium since the printing press, and I’m so appreciative. As a tip of my hat to the many developers who give of their free time, I maintain PHPXref, a cross referenced code library of PHP applications.

You have held us down for so long
Everything you said, it was wrong
You can’t even look us in the eyes
While your headlines scream out pompous lies

Giga, my trusty Debian Linux server for the last six years needed a break.

When summer hit the Carolinas, extreme heat followed. Keeping my large tower server on all day was producing even more heat, constant fan noise and drawing more electricity. Keeping the home office’s room air conditioner on all day to compensate the central air, made more noise and drew even more electricity.

This prompted me to turn a five year old laptop into Lenny, the portable server. This laptop has a dead battery and last year needed the internal power jack connector to be replaced, so it was a prime candidate to sit on a desk, wired to power and our internal network.

First off, I needed to repartition the 60GB drive with GParted. I removed the Windows XP partition since there was a Gateway recovery partition, created a 1GB swap partition and a 50GB ext3 partition for Debian. Next up was a net install of Debian Lenny, chose only the base system, I would apt-get what I needed after I had a working operating system.

The laptop booted up just fine, using very little of it’s 768MB of ram. Did an apt-get of the usual suspects, Apache, PHP and MySQL. With very little tweaking I had a nicely working LAMP machine where I can work on my websites. I use XAMPP on my main laptop, and it works rather well, but having a true LAMP stack for testing is worth the dedicated machine.

Though I’m comfortable with editing config files in the /etc directory, Webmin does an excellent job. A few more tweaks, some more apt-gets and the laptop was flying along serving web pages just as fast as my huge tower server. Seeing how well the laptop was running, I decided to install Xfce from backports. I don’t really need a GUI, but it’s nice to be able to load up Firefox for testing sites on a Linux platform.

Four days into running Lenny on the laptop, I decided to repartition. I removed the 5GB Gateway recovery partition, moved the swap partition to the front of the drive, shrunk the /root partition down to 5GB and created a /home partition of 50GB. The laptop would run Debian for the remainder of it’s life, it felt like the right thing to do.

If the sun refused to shine
I don’t mind, no baby I don’t mind
And If the mountains fell in the sea
It ain’t me, you know you’ve got to be free