So I downloaded the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and set about installing it as a dual-boot option. It was very simple, following the instructions took around 40 minutes for the entire process and it all seemed to be going fine. But when I came to reboot, there was no sign of Ubuntu.

Now, the Eee PC 1000 has a 40GB SSD (Solid State Drive) — which is in fact two drives, one of 8GB and one of 32GB. The 8GB is the ‘primary’ drive, and that’s where Windows is installed, but there wasn’t space for me to install Ubuntu alongside it so I created a small partition for it on the ’secondary’ drive.

I guessed that the problem was probably related to this fact so I had a poke around to see what could be done. Checking the Eee’s BIOS, there’s no distinction between the two drives so you can’t choose to boot from the secondary drive. I was tempted to give up at this point (I didn’t seem to be able to find any useful info on the web), but since the install process is so quick I decided to have another go and see if I could spot anything along the way that might be of use.

Sure enough, right near the end of the setup process (after creating/assigning partitions) there’s a little button labelled ‘Advanced’. Clicking on it popped up a dialog window with a drop-down list that allowed me to assign the boot loader to the primary drive (/dev/sda) instead of the secondary drive (/dev/sdb) that it had defaulted to. So I let it go ahead and install, and one reboot later there it was: a list of boot options. Success!

So, is it any good? Well, it certainly looks good and I like the ‘remixed’ desktop/interface which organises applications in a sensible and easy-to-find way. Boot time isn’t noticeably quicker than WinXP, which is disappointing but could be explained in part by the fact that it’s running on the slower secondary drive. From what I can tell after one day’s use, once started it runs very smoothly with apps launching very quickly and no unexplained ‘freezes’.

As far as compatibility is concerned the wireless, sound, touchpad, camera, display, USB and SD ports all worked out-of-the-box with no configuration required. I have my doubts that Bluetooth is working but haven’t had a chance to test it yet. The one serious gripe is the time it takes for the wireless to establish a connection — it suffers here even in comparison to Windows, which would (re)connect almost instantly where Ubuntu can take 40 seconds or more. I often use the netbook for a very short time (say, to do a quick web search) and then put it into hibernate, so a slow restart is a definite annoyance.

If you’re interested in checking out the Ubuntu Netbook Remix but don’t want to go to the trouble of installing it, then you can run it from a USB stick (1GB or bigger) without any installation. Startup is slow but once it’s going it’s fine and if you decide you do want to keep it, then you can install it from the same USB stick.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get bogged down in all the nostalgia stuff. But looking at Flash now — with streaming audio and video, built-in 3D effects, advanced text manipulation and on and on — and thinking about some of the ‘amazing’ techniques that I (and others) experimented with back in the the day, makes me feel very old.

The basic process was relatively painless: I created a temporary subdomain and installed a fresh copy of WordPress, then used its built-in export/import facilities to transfer all the existing articles and comments over. Then I had to install all the various plugins I’d accumulated over the years (Akismet, Bad Behavior, Code Markup, Google XML Sitemaps, OpenID Registration) and configure them appropriately. I couldn’t find an up-to-date version of the old theme I was using, so I spent a while browsing before finding this one, which I’m fairly happy with although I might tweak here and there as time goes on.

Finally I had to do some work to re-integrate the various ad spots and a few other bits and bobs (e.g. point the RSS links to FeedBurner) before the installation was complete. All in all, it was probably half a day’s work, which I think is acceptable for a complete restart.

So I hope you like the new look. If you spot any problems then please let me know via the comments form below.

After a dalliance with jEdit, I decided that I wanted an editor that would fit in with my ongoing quest to use only portable applications. For quite a while I stuck with Notepad++, which is an excellent all-rounder with plenty of great features. But as has so often been the case in the past, it just didn’t quite feel right, so then I moved on to PSPad, which I had tried for an extended period a while ago. Again I stuck with it for a while but some little niggles (mainly unexplained crashes) prevented me from falling in love with it.

Yesterday I came across an article on ArsTechnica that introduced me to Komodo Edit, an open-source (‘community’) version of the popular Komodo IDE from ActiveState. I did in fact try — and like — Komodo some years ago but I was never able to justify shelling out for it. But this free version fits quite neatly with my requirements: it’s stable and simple, but extensible (it’s built on the Mozilla platform so if you’ve used Firefox or Thunderbird then you’ll find the add-on management rather familiar). There’s a simple code explorer add-on which meets my basic needs and I’ve also installed the TODO Helper extension to help me keep track of all those FIXME notes I’ve left dotted around our codebase.

It’s not portable by default, but with a little tweaking (thanks to this forum thread) I was able to get it to run quite happily from a USB key. And I have to admit that I’m already getting used to the code-completion (which I rely on quite heavily when writing C#, but was never really bothered about in PHP) and the search feature in the project tab, which helps find class files quickly. Check out the full feature list for more on its capabilities.

The company I work for is currently in the process of hiring web developers. An ad on Monster attracted a fair few responses, some of which were more interesting than others and so I and a colleague sat down to review the candidates and narrow down those we would ask in for an interview.

I was interested to note that one CV included not one but two web site URLs, and so out of curiosity I took a look. The first didn’t work at all (no response whatsoever) and the second was a Flash-based portfolio that was not only horribly dated-looking, but also badly broken.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the first impression you make is when you walk through the door of the interview room in your freshly dry-cleaned suit.

Anyway I just wanted to add my twopenny-worth to the rising flood of verbiage about Ubuntu, the Linux distro that finally seems to be bringing the open source operating system into the mainstream.

I’ve dabbled with desktop Linux a few times in the past, but was never able to make the switch because I was so tied-in to Windows software (mainly Flash). But I rarely touch Flash these days and since then I’ve switched almost entirely to open source software: I develop web sites on PHP/MySQL in Firefox using jEdit. I use OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheet etc. and Thunderbird for email.

So out of curiosity, last night I downloaded the latest Ubuntu release (Fiesty Fawn at time of writing) and tried running it as a live CD, i.e. booting from CD without installing to the hard drive. On my (Dell Inspiron 6400) laptop, it ran out-of-the-box without a hitch (although it did take a couple of goes to pick up my wireless network). Very slick.

Then I tried it on my (homebrew AMD Athlon) desktop. Now I should point out that I tried installing Ubuntu on this machine last year and it chewed up the master boot record, resulting in a dead Linux partition and a complete re-install of Windows. And a vow by me never to touch Linux again.

However, this time it ran flawlessly out-of-the-box, having auto-detected all my hardware without blinking. Colour me impressed. It’s fast, looks very good (I love the orange/brown interface style) and comes pre-installed with plenty of handy software.

So, am I going to switch? Sadly, no.

I’d like to, I really would. But as luck would have it, I’ve just begun getting myself up to speed with C# and .Net 2.0, which means I’m tied to Windows. Yes, Mono is getting there but it’s a ways off yet and I don’t know if it’s ever really going to be a drop-in replacement for the .Net framework itself.

So, for now at least, I’m stuck with Windows. I might well end up trying a dual-boot setup but I can’t see that I’m likely to want to spend time switching back and forth between the two. Virtualisation is another option, but in my experience it’s so slow as to be practically unusable for all but the most basic of tasks.

So I guess it’s back to restarting Explorer every ten minutes or so…*sigh*

I was surprised and flattered because, in spite of the traffic stats for this site that suggest otherwise, my innate pessimism has me convinced that no-one actually reads this blog — I’m sure the comments are all put there by my mother trying to cheer me up (thanks mum!). I was unnerved because the article had been live for barely a day: does Microsoft have some sort of blog radar, constantly checking the ‘net for references to its products? OK probably not, but I’m wearing my tinfoil underpants as I type this, just in case…

Anyway the email was very positive, addressing some of the points I’d made in the article and supplying some useful further info. Indeed I thought it might be of interest (if you’re still reading, mum) to reproduce some of the mail here, so here goes:

Microsoft is going through a Hobbyist Renaissance where we come back to our roots with recently launched tools and frameworks for hobbyists ranging from Robotics using Robotics Studio to homebrew Xbox games using XNA Game Studio Express, or the newly announced Windows Home Server for self-hosting your own Web site. Coding4Fun is our community for fun, cool projects ranging from productivity features like writing your own desktop search to hardware projects using web cams and motion detection to game development like Unreal Tournament or arcade clones like Space Invaders or Pong.

…We try to provide a balance between developers that want to look under the covers and understand how things work to non-developers that just want to create *something*. It can be difficult deciding what the right level of abstraction is to appease both of these audiences, but that’s always a work in progress. [...]

In reading some of your comments, you should also be aware that there is a thriving community of open-source .NET developers on SourceForge (over 5K C# projects) and CodePlex (www.codeplex.com).

OK so some of it inevitably reads rather like a press release, but I was impressed that someone at Microsoft had taken the time to respond to the points that I’d made. And from other comments that Dan made in the mail, it does seem that Microsoft — or at the very least, this part of it — is genuinely interested in creating good, free tools for small-scale developers.

It’s a smart move: I for one would never have paid for the retail version of Visual Studio for the sake of a side-project like this, but having tried out the Express edition I’m now thinking seriously about spending more time getting familiar with C# — which might even lead me to spend my cash, too. And the more people who — like me — are tempted to develop on the .Net platform the more of a standard it will become, which has to be good for Microsoft.

I don’t know how much further I will go with Visual Studio/C#. It’s not applicable to my current job; then again, another skill is always handy. But I applaud Microsoft for its pro-active approach and for what really is an impressively slick product.

I’ve mentioned before how cool I think AutoIt is, and how suitable for the rapid development of small Windows utilities and applications. Well as time went on and the app grew in complexity, I began to struggle. The problem stemmed mainly from my inability to adjust my thinking to cope with AutoIt’s BASIC-style procedural syntax. I’ve been thinking in an Object-Oriented way for so long now, that I tried to organise the code in a way that was as close to OO as AutoIt could manage. The result was a mess of global variables, tortuously long variable names, and complex and inconvenient hash arrays. Development was slowing to a halt and I was rapidly losing interest in the project.

Back when I was first planning my approach, I’d briefly considered writing the app in either C# or Java. I quickly gave up on the idea because, frankly, I was scared off by all the extra faff that comes along with these ‘grown up’ frameworks — i.e. having to learn all about strong typing, managing dependencies, building executables from source and so on. It’s just not what I’m used to: this was supposed to be a bit of fun, not a massive project where I would need to learn to be a real programmer. 

But about two weeks ago I was getting a bit desperate and I decided to reassess my options. I considered Java for a brief interval (mainly for cross-platform support, which I don’t really need in this case), but then I found that Microsoft is giving away various ‘cut-down’ versions of Visual Studio for free. Just out of curiosity I downloaded the snappily-titled ‘Visual Studio C# 2005 Express Edition‘ and was sucked in almost instantly.

Not being a programmer by training, I’ve never encountered Visual Studio (or the like) before. And I was genuinely surprised by just how…tight it is. Yes I knew vaguely that it allowed you to create GUIs with drag-and-drop. But then I clicked on a new button and it built a stub event handler for me. I dragged a table from an SQLite data source onto the GUI and it created a data grid, and populated it. I decided to change a class name and it instantly refactored the code to update all references. I clicked another button and it compiled and launched the app, with the debugger in the background so I could look at the code, peer into objects, fiddle with variables and even make code changes while it was still running. And finally, when I come to package up the final product, it will automate the whole process.

Again, I had a vague notion that this stuff was possible but I’d never really come into contact with it before and certainly wasn’t aware of how slick it had become. I feel like a kid in a candy store. No, scratch that: I feel like a country bumpkin who’s just visited the big city for the first time. In the (less than) two weeks since first downloading the software, I’ve caught up with all the work I’d done in AutoIt over several months (this is a spare-time project, mostly evenings) and then some.

It’s not all roses, of course. For a start, although I have succeeded in building a very solid and professional-looking bit of software, for the most part I have little idea how it works: the vast majority of the underlying code was automatically generated and I’ve only looked at it in passing. You might think that’s an advantage — why would I need to know how it works, if it’s all done for me? — which is fair enough, but I don’t feel like I know much more about C# than I did when I started. When the project is completed I might be able to say that I’m competent in Visual Studio, but I won’t by any means be a C# programmer.

Also, the app I’ve been working on is really little more than a glorified database front-end, so it plays to the strengths of the framework. Clearly if the demands of the task were more complex, I’d need to be spending a lot more time and effort digging around in the guts of C# and the whole .Net platform. And while the reference documentation for the language is nigh-on perfect, I’ve yet to come across the sort of tight-knit, responsive community that surrounds AutoIt: somewhere I can go and be sure either to find my question already answered, or someone willing to work through it with me. That said, I’ve yet to come up against a problem that a Google search didn’t answer within the first page or two.

So I’m not sure I’d want to do this sort of thing for a living: while my productivity is relatively high for this project I don’t think I’ll have the same sense of achievement when it’s finished as I would if I’d built it from the ground up. Where, on a good day, writing a good piece of software can feel like craftsmanship (pretentious, moi?) this feels more like assembling flat-pack furniture. And, having been an Open Source devotee for years, I can’t help feeling the odd pang of guilt for succumbing to the lure of the Dark Side. But it’s just so effortless…

Right, now to get back to the real world: hacking out PHP. By hand. Hmm…”Visual Studio PHP“, maybe?

UPDATE: I had a response to this article from Microsoft.

UPDATE #2: Looks like there’s more than one contender in the ‘Visual PHP’ market: check out the upcoming Delphi for PHP from CodeGear (Borland). Interesting…

I’ve been using TextPad for years — so long that I can’t even remember, but certainly since the late 90s. I love it because it’s super-fast, handles large files with ease, and doesn’t put a whole load of ‘handy’ features (which I’d never use) between me and the code. By now — after eight hours a day, five days a week usage — the keyboard shortcuts have become hard-coded into my consciousness.

Having said all that, for some time now I’ve been trying to find a replacement. There is a small number of additional features that I’ve been hankering for, for some time. Most notably, a code browser — i.e. an overview of (say) a class with all the methods listed. Many of the classes that we’ve written for our publishing framework are quite long now, with sometimes dozens of methods, and navigating the code quickly can be a chore.

I’ve tried more alternatives than I could possibly remember, from simple text editors to fully-fledged IDEs. There’s some really quite impressive free software out there (TSWebEditor, PSPad, Scite…) but I couldn’t get on with any of them for more than a few hours before going back to my beloved TextPad. And as for the commercial options (Zend Studio, Komodo, PHPEdit, UltraEdit and the like), none of them offered sufficient attractions to warrant investing my hard-earned cash.   

I was briefly lured by the whole ‘real men use Emacs‘ schtick, but the vertical learning curve quickly convinced me (as if I needed convincing) that I’m not a real man. I want to use my editor to write code, not write code to use my editor.

I even flirted with Eclipse for a while (and its PHP incarnation), but quite apart from the (lack of) speed I just couldn’t get on with all the baggage that it carries. I’m sure it’s great if you’re working in some monumentally complex development environment with build processes and strict source control procedures and whatnot. But for hacking a bit of PHP it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

So I’d all but given up on ever finding a successor to TextPad, clinging instead to the apparently vain hope that someday there might be a new version:  although the developers insist that work is continuing on the software, the last update was released well over two years ago.

Then a couple of days ago I downloaded jEdit. I’d seen mention of it before, but ignored it because it’s Java-based: using Eclipse had convinced me that any Java software would be horribly resource-intensive and slow. But it seems that the newest version of the JRE (1.6 at the time of writing) has improved this situation significantly, so I decided to give it a go.

Now jEdit doesn’t do anything radically different from the many other editors/IDEs that I’ve auditioned in the past. But what I’ve come to realise is that I never really wanted to replace TextPad at all: what I wanted was TextPad plus one or two nice extra features. So when I’ve been trying all these other contenders, I’ve spent most of my time trying (and failing) to make them work the way I’m accustomed to — i.e. to make them look and act like TextPad. And the thing that jEdit offers in spades is configurability (if that’s even a word…).

For a start, every command in jEdit can be bound to whichever key combination you like. Then there’s a great big list of plugins that add all sorts of handy features — e.g. the code browser I’ve been after for so long — which can be browsed/installed/removed using the built-in plugin manager. And the macros, which can be recorded in real-time and then edited (they use the BeanShell scripting language) which gives you tremendous power. And I love playing with the code-folding (takes me back to my days coding AMOS ).

It took some effort (reconfiguring keys, downloading plugins and editing macros), but finally I’ve got what I really wanted: something that looks and works almost exactly like TextPad, but better. It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far.

Now if I could just convince my esteemed colleague to turn off AOL Radio, I’d be a really happy bunny.

PS. One other component in my perfect editing environment is Profont. It’s a monospaced font designed specifically for coding: it’s small (meaning you can get more code on the screen at a time) yet very legible.