I got a question from my brother the other day about why Mandriva wasn’t as well received as a distro.  It’s his primary distro, and was mine for about 2 years.  I don’t think there’s all that much ‘wrong’ with it, but I went to ubuntu about 2 years ago, mostly to ride the momentum [...]

Posted in Development, Java, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, Software, Web, linux, opensource 1 Comment »

I had a quick interview with Prashant Deva from Placid Systems, talking about the upcoming Virtual Ant product.  Hopefully I will have this up on webdevradio.com in the next week.  It was about 15 minutes, with a couple fluff/testing minutes at the beginning  :)  Prashant was a pretty cool guy, and I wish we’d had [...]

Posted in Development, Java, Microsoft, Podcasts, Software, Testing, Tools, Web, linux No Comments »

I’ve been using different editors for PHP work over the years.  From Notepad, UltraEdit and PFE on Windows to Scite, QuantaPlus, Kate and others on Linux, most have never been more than glorified text editors.  Having earlier come from VB environments years before, it was a bit sparse to say the least.  The early Zend [...]

Posted in Development, Java, Language, PHP, Software, Web, linux, opensource 3 Comments »

I’m posting a quick wrap up of the codemash conference I attended last week. This is mostly because I’ll forget things if I don’t, but also to let anyone reading know what they missed and they should look to attend next year.
The pros:
There was an enormous amount of talent in that one main ballroom. [...]

Posted in Codemash, Conferences, Development, Microsoft, Software, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

Stories on the use of captchas and new captcha developments have been cropping up lately.  A few of the more clever ideas I’ve seen recently include:
Encoding a captcha image as an HTML table, with each cell representing one pixel (huge file size, but neat trick, if likely easy to break)
Creating animated captchas -  (there’s also [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Ideas, Software, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

I was brainstorming with the guys at work the other day and came up with three variations on an original idea, and thought I’d post them here as food for thought.  If I can flesh any of these out, I may develop it/them.
Centralized reviews
A site where people post reviews of things - anything from the [...]

Posted in Business, Design, Development, Ideas, PHP, Software, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

I keep wanting to like GNOME.  Every time a new version comes out, I give it a shot.  It’s never really any better.  Some new tweaks to the desktop, perhaps, but the fundamentals are still as weird/crappy/whatever as ever.  So I go back to KDE, which has always felt more natural/powerful/whatever (comfortable?).  GNOME people have [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Software, linux, opensource No Comments »

I upgraded my laptop from kubuntu dapper to kubuntu edgy last night.  The problem I ran in to was with the wireless setup - my system wouldn’t work wirelessly after the upgrade.  The *odd* thing was/is that I reboot once, and the wireless worked that time, but then didn’t work again after another reboot (really!).
So, [...]

Posted in linux No Comments »

I recently got a VPN key for access to the office from home. I’d installed it (cisco vpn), installed my key, and all was well. I should write that I’m doing this from a laptop running kubuntu, meaning I’m doing everything with KDE (3.5) running. About 3 weeks I decided [...]

Posted in linux No Comments »

Using Linux is, at different times, both frustrating and freeing. My experiences over the years switching between OSX, Windows and Linux have been numerous, and I still tend to find myself coming back to Linux. It’s often because much of the work I do ends up running on LAMP based servers, so running [...]

Posted in Microsoft, Software, Speech, linux No Comments »