blog | CreateSean Web Design

Linux: not for me

Friday January 08 2010

I’m a satisfied Windows user. However I’ve wanted to try out linux for some time to see what it is all about and whether it’s ready for the mainstream.

Over the past couple of years I’ve tried and failed to install linux 5 times prior to this past weekend. I tried ubuntu on my 2nd desktop a couple of times and then on my primary desktop i tried ubuntu, mint and suse. Each of these wouldn’t install—the install would start to run but never finish. I couldn’t figure out why as neither of my computers was particularly cutting edge at the time of the attempt.

This past Sunday after about 6 months since the last try I decided to give it another go and it finally installed. However after rebooting the computer went strait to Windows Vista. There was no option to choose my o/s and every guide I had looked at said that grub should automagically be there giving me the option to choose Ubuntu or Vista.

So I installed again and had the same problem. At this point I posted on the ubuntu forums and tweeted about the problem. The response on the ubuntu forum was pretty quick—better than most open source projects that I have used in the past (I’m looking at you Wordpress and Moodle). However the best help came from twitter from one guy I didn’t know gnimsha and also from another of my twitter followers Jason of InvokedProjects. Both were helpful, but Jason went Above and Beyond.

We went to a chat room where he gave me some things to try. Eventually it got so he wanted to see my computer screen as I did yet another install of ubuntu—at this point I had installed ubuntu about 4 times in one day—so I set up my laptop with my web cam pointed at the monitor of my desktop and moved to skype.

The solution it turned out to my problem of not being able to dual boot was to disconnect two of my hard drives and only have the drive with Vista and Ubuntu on there. Once I installed it again it would allow me to dual boot. I watched the install carefully and when grub is installed it goes directly to HD0 but my o/s is on HD2. Why grub doesn’t get installed on the same disk as the o/s is beyond me. I then connected my other two drives and was still able to dual boot. Yeah, success. But a lot of wasted time.

Playing with Ubuntu

Now I got into Ubuntu and was pleased to note that my audio and internet was working strait away—something that I heard didn’t always happen. After a couple of minutes I managed to get dual monitors working however was unable to rotate my right monitor to a vertical profile. Searching turned up several results for nvidia graphic cards but nothing for ATI which left me frustrated.

I then did something which I don’t remember the result of which was that I hosed Ubuntu and had to reinstall, yet again. At least the install for Ubuntu is very quick 12 minutes start to finish. Once again back into Ubuntu and I get dual monitors installed faster this time and even find out that I need the ATI drivers—install, reboot and it’s great—rotating fine.

Now I want to use a twitter app but none of the ones in the application directory are any good. I find out that tweetdeck and adobe air run on ubuntu. Great that’s what I use in Windows. I tried over and over to install air, but it won’t install—keeps failing. On twitter I asked about it and was told to go to adobe and install it there—nope, that’s what I did.

I also wanted to install a couple of other programs of which I cannot remember their name. Anyhow when I downloaded them and double clicked nothing happened or I was told that the correct application to install it wasn’t installed or I needed to use command line. So now to install programs, I need to learn a bunch of archaic shell commands. How does that make a computer easy to use? it doesn’t.

At this point, I’ve spent about 10-12 hours trying to use ubuntu—it’s not worth it. I have much better things to do with my time. I honestly don’t understand PC users who move to linux and claim it’s better. How is it better. It doesn’t “just work”, in fact it’s a major PITA to get it to work at all. Worried about viruses? I haven’t had a virus in 8 years on Windows.

Windows just works. I’m looking forward to installing Windows 7 this weekend because I know it will install without a hassle and just work just like every other version of Windows I’ve installed.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Jan 8, 2010 at 08:04 AM
(6)

| tags: windows, linux, win7, vista, ubuntu, |

PHP - typos not welcome

Tuesday January 05 2010

After a few days away from PHP I’m back to reading PHP for Absolute Beginners I’m on page 85 right now. I’m going slow because I’m actually typing out all the exercises. Why type it out? Well I learn best by doing and by actually typing It’ll actually help me to remember the syntax.

One thing I’ve learned is that PHP is very finicky when it comes to syntax. One little typo and the whole script blows up and fails to execute properly. One of the most common typos I’m making is failing to type in the underscore for superglobals like $_POST and $_SERVER. Am also wondering if it’s okay to type those in lowercase or is PHP case sensitive?

update

turns out superglobals are case sensitive from @designchuchi via twitter .

One thing that PHP for Absolute Beginners recommends is to use an IDE. I am using the recommended one—Eclipse For the most part I like it as it has code highlighting. However one thing I’m not so keen on is the auto closing of tags, brackets, braces and quotes. In particular I don’t like auto closing quotes and brackets as it slows down my typing. inside quotes and brackets for the most part it seems I’m typing single words and at the end of the word I then have to look to the keyboard to find the arrow keys to move to the end of the auto closed bracket or quote. Is there a hot key command to skip to the end or a way to turn the auto closing off?

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Jan 5, 2010 at 02:47 PM
(3)

| tags: code, editor, php, ide, eclipse, |

Search Box - auto disappear/reappear text

Sunday January 03 2010

I was doing a couple of minor adjustments to my blog Repatriate Me! and found a very easy way to have a search box have text that will disappear on focus and then reappear when unfocused provided there is no user submitted text there.

I have to admit that I found this on another site, but it’s been removed from my browser history and I can’t remember the name of the site so am unable to provide proper credit at this time. If I can find it I will give credit—that’ll teach me to not document my code with finds.

Anyhow here is the ExpressionEngine code for the search box:

{exp:search:simple_form search_in="everywhere" weblog="BLOGNAME" id="search-form" name="search"}
    <input type="text" name="keywords" class="txt" size="18" maxlength="100" value="Search Here" title="" />
{/exp:search:simple_form} 

and the Javascript

<scr*pt type="text/javascript">
$('input').focus(function(){
   var defaultText = $(this).val();
    $(this).val('');

    $("input").blur( function () {
     var userInput = $(this).val();

            if (userInput == ''){
                  $(this).val(defaultText);
                }
        });
 });
</scr*pt> 

I will definitely be using this on all of my future client sites.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Jan 3, 2010 at 06:51 PM
(0)

| tags: expressionengine, code, javascript, jquery, |

The End of 2009

Thursday December 31 2009

Today is the last day of 2009. Personally I have had a pretty good year. From a business perspective it hasn’t been very successful. Only two clients, one of which flaked out on me mid contract. My second client site of the year should be finished as very soon. I’m just waiting on access to the the hosting server to transfer files and then complete testing on paypal integration. For some reason I’ve never been able to get the paypal sandbox to work when using localhost—even with a no-ip internet address set up.

For my current client I switched designers and have a kick ass design to show off once the site goes live. I will additionally be using this same designer to redesign this site and blog.

Now on to 2010. I really need to figure out a way to attract clients. Here in Korea, due to my limited Korean language skills, I’m really limited to the English speaking expat community. This makes it extremely difficult to get local clients. My current client is also looking for a redesign of a magazine site which I will be taking on. I’m also waiting to hear back in the first week of January from a designer about doing the development for one of her clients.

Ideally I would love to regularly do development for other designers. I find development interesting and fun to do and have little talent for design.

During 2010 I’ll be ramping up my plans to move back to Canada. You can read more about that over at Repatriate Me! where I blog my plans to move as well as pictures and videos of life in Korea. It’s all about transitioning—what I’ll miss about Korea, what I’m looking forward to in Canada and all the paperwork involved in moving a family back to Canada including getting a visa for my wife and ensuring that my Kids have their Canadian citizenship and are ready for English schools. In summer 2010 I’m making a scouting trip to Ottawa to look at housing, schools, business regulations, talk to banks and a bunch of other things I haven’t even thought of yet.

I’m also going to let EEforums4You expire due to a lack of business. I launched last April or so and have only received two jobs in that time. Clearly there isn’t as large a market as I had thought. I was expecting to get 1-2 forums a month but that never materialized so I’m going to let it go.

This past week I started reading PHP for Absolute Beginners and am now in chapter 3. There is a lot of jargon and concepts that I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around. But I am planning on working my way through the book and doing all of the exercises. Once I’ve finished that I would like to learn some basic CodeIgniter so that I can start developing add-ons for ExpressionEngine. My first add-on will likely be a subscribe to comments without commenting plug-in/extension. I think that’ll be a plugin but at this point am not exactly sure.

Also with PHP I figure I need to come up with a couple of projects so that I can continue to practice and not forget anything that I have learned. My only plan at this point is the “subscribe w/o commenting” add-on. Maybe I’ll start scouring the forums looking for add-on requests that haven’t been filled and build a couple of those. But first I need to get the basics down.

Looking back on my 2009 goals I achieved 1, 4 and to a point 6. I did redesign this site, but did it myself and while it looks better than the first version I recognize that it is a little flat looking. Anyhow as soon as I get the final payment from my current client I’ll be paying my designer to make a smoking hot design for CreateSean.