Entries Tagged 'Review' ↓

I had the pleasure experience to work with Windows Vista a bit the other day. Let me tell you all now. It’s a stopgap release. It seems to work well enough, if you don’t mind the screwy approval dialog boxes and the lack of hardware and software vendor support… It’s the new ME. Windows ME, that is… Continue reading →

Look, this isn’t a pride issue, but it is an issue of standardization! I don’t care if people use British or American spelling conventions in general. However, in programming, it is well established that everyone uses American English spellings for code. Not because it’s better or any other silly reason, but because it’s a de facto standard that simply prevents errors. Most of the world doesn’t use English every day, but in code they do. Even in Allegro’s Xcode template, which has a simple “hello world” I see centre. Any other time that would be great and fine and I wouldn’t care at all. But in code, it should be center. Especially in C!! Unless you have an alias for a method or function in code that provides for different languages, don’t do it. It’s just asking for error-ridden code by others. I’m not liking Allegro one bit so far.

SDL, I miss you already…

I’m interested in learning a bit about game programming. So I decided to pick up a book and work through it in either C or C++ as necessary to get the concepts down. I may have picked a lemon. I browsed the books today, and I think I chose wrong. I picked up Game Programming All In One. I never trust book titles, they’re unreliable because they’re usually determined by marketing jerks. Unfortunately publishers can’t be trusted either. I’ve only seen one publisher (pragmatic programmers) that consistently aims for quality, knowing that quality sells better than quantity. The others are all hit and miss, but mostly miss. Continue reading →

Yoda would say, “Persistent are you! Mmm!” And he’d be right. (she?) I finally seem to have found a way to get the Ubuntu installer to run on this old iBook! I tried all the easily available ISO’s. Burned them at slow speeds. But the one thing I hadn’t really done was try for the ‘text-based’ install. Trouble is, it’s not available on their current crop of live CD’s as an option at yaboot’s boot prompt. Through random trial and error and lots of semi-successful Googling, I found an answer that works (so far, installer is still going).

Download the “ubuntu-6.10-alternate-powerpc.iso”. Put it in the CD tray of the clamshell iBook, press the power button to turn it on and hold the C key on the keyboard until you see the often intimidating text screen! Don’t be afraid. At the prompt that says “boot” you just type install-powerpc !!!
And press enter!

You may still see this error at some point: PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 0 of device 0001:10:18.0 Others ask about it online, nobody seems to have an answer that shows up on Google.

Either way the installation will take place, with plenty useable colored text screens that look more like BIOS screens on windows, but nicer.

We’ll see in a while what happens with it…

I got YDL (Yellow Dog Linux) installed on the old clamshell iBook. It’s the first Linux to install on there successfully. But I have to say, their E17 ‘enlightenment’ GUI is horrible.

It looks like something that would’ve come from the early 90’s almost. What’s shocking is that the system doesn’t automatically recognize the proper hardware in a Mac! I mean talk about a finite number of hardware configuration possibilities: an iBook! This is all pretty disappointing. But what’s worse is, there seems to be no GUI method of setting the monitor gama, which means everything is washed out to hell. And then there is no mouse/keyboard control panel !!

I’d like to use the working install and switch to KDE or Gnome, but I’d prefer even more to just run one of the Ubuntus on that thing.

The greatest irony of all thus far: OS X Panther is far snappier on that iBook than YDL! Not to mention it just works right all the time. Still I was hoping for a chance to explore Linux on that thing a bit more, but this just seems ridiculous.

If you’re thinking about running Linux on an older PPC machine, think twice.

After many go rounds with various Linux distros and failed installs on the old clamshell iBook, it seems I may have found a winning solution. Continue reading →

I’ve been playing with Linux on two machines the past two days. An old clamshell iBook (whose noisy HD irritates the hell out of me) and an old Dell Latitude (whose overall lack of quality just irritates me). Continue reading →

I recently purchased the book, Beginning Ruby on Rails E-commerce : From Novice to Professional, from Apress publishing. I’ve been working through it and I have some good and bad to say about it.

First off, it is mostly well written. They style is clear and down-to-earth. That’s great. However, it spends a little too much time on test-driven development a little too early in the book, unfortunately with tests that do not all work. This is starting to be a trend too, which is disconcerting. Apress seems to have a habit of poor technical reviewing before publishing. Not as bad as WROX, but not as good as Pragmatic Programmers (who is?).

All in all, it’s not a bad book, but I still think the SitePoint book is best for beginners. This book seems to assume beginners to web development but quickly does things that are fairly tricky in Ruby. Not good for beginners, at least not without explanation.

The biggest problem with the book is it’s inconsistencies. They begin by saying Ubuntu Linux is their baseline installation for the book, and even mention using the Trail command-line tool (though not really practical or useful) and then all web-browser screenshots are Safari (os x). The inconsistencies don’t stop there, but I don’t want to go on in much detail.

What is important about this book? There are some nice chapters on hooking up your online store to a checkout/payment system! Pretty important and left out of most Rails books.

I’m finally really starting to get things in Rails. It takes time and doing. So here are my thoughts and I hope these are useful for others just starting out. Continue reading →

Safari 3 does have one bug I’ve started to see regularly. Favicons will sometimes hang around from the previous site visited. Result: you get to see the wrong favicon attached to a URI in the address bar. Hardly a big deal, but not cool.