Actually I’m not, because I’m doing it on my brand new Apple MacBook Air and it’s keyboard is the easiest to type on in all the world. I am the happiest person typing on a laptop right now, with maybe the exception of fat American kids playing Warcraft in their dark basements. Or kids not doing homework sniggering on MSN to other procrastinating kids.

Buying an Apple product is a sin. I’ve never owned an iPod, I only use iPhone clones and I’ve always hated Mac OS X. There are hundreds of reasons why that I’ve never been shy about telling people. But by some miracle I forgot to care.

I needed a computer to build websites. This is my occupation. A guy that builds websites without a computer is like a builder that builds houses without their arms.

The criteria was simple. I needed a portable machine because I share my living space. Not seventeen inch wide 20 kilograms heavy only works near a wall portable, but actually portable. I needed a high resolution screen to do actual work on. I didn’t want silly things like DVD/BluRay drives, a gazillion petabytes of HDD space or anything else that really doesn’t matter in life. But I did need it not to be shit.

I’m a Linux user. I am so because I was a Windows user. Windows today is resource hungry, slow and sluggish, and works horribly. I wouldn’t be satisfied with any of today’s Windows laptops because they wouldn’t be portable or not shit. They crash all the time, catch viruses, slow down to a halt for no reason and only last 30 seconds without being charged. They use fans that are so powerful the things could levitate.

I would’ve gone for Linux on a laptop, but over the last few years I’ve spent more time setting up my environment on a silly steep learning curve than I have actually using the thing. When time is money this isn’t acceptable.

So I set about looking into the state of Macs five years since my last horrible and painful experiences with them.

Thankfully Steve Jobs makes this easy. He’s a minimalist, and this is good. You get a minimal amount of choice. For laptops, the options were Pro, Standard or Gimmick.

Goldilocks had the same problem with porridge. The Standard was too cold and just wouldn’t cut it. The Pro was too hot and overkill, plus it touches on the portability and efficiency points. But the Gimmick model looked just right.

The MacBook Air is a thin underpowered laptop. It’s such a blatant marketing gimmick. Apple is all about branding, so it makes sense that they would try to sell this thing. Marketing bullshit.

But it is an efficient and portable laptop. The screen space is really good and it’s by far the most powerful computer that I’ve ever owned, portable or desktop. It is minimalistic to a fault. And OS X today is unanimously the only good graphical operating system. Price was never an issue because it’s for business.

So now I’ve got one. And it’s beautiful.

Since owning it I think my life has changed. People in the office that I’ve literally never spoken to before because of my anti-social nature will come up to me and start talking “Apple-speak” at me. It’s horrible. I can feel that as my girlfriend stares at it when I use it, she doesn’t trust it anymore than a slutty whore.

But I couldn’t give a shit. It’s a decent piece of kit and it’s made me really happy. The hardware is excellent and I can run programs on very modest specs without having a fit. I’m not ageing waiting for things to work anymore.

The evil has overthrown me but I’m still not buying into the brand. I’m not picking up an iPod or iPhone. The MacBook Air is just a tool that I use. So far, it has been amazing. I’ve done shed loads of web design work on it, and maybe one day I can use it for music recording and performing.

So Steve, I’ll give you this one. It’s really good. Don’t get too smarmy about it though.

Initially I worked with four applications tiled vertically across the workspace. This was very efficient. However, I do a lot of work just using the browser. So a few Firefox extensions and a vertical re-haul later and I’m in business :D

So here’s what I’m doing. First thing I did was switch the Windows task-bar vertically to the left-hand side of the workspace. Because I’ve got so much width, I can easily afford a generous sized task-bar now. I’ve got the task-bar at approximately 96px wide. I can clearly read the titles of at least 24 application tabs with 18 32px icons attached as well. It’s daunting at first, and I still look at the bottom right for the time, but it’s certainly much more efficient. My only gripe is the start menu doesn’t invert with the task-bar, so when you press it you have to navigate to the bottom to find “All programs”.

Setting up Firefox wide was pleasurable. I use Personal Menu to eliminate the menu-bar from the top, essentially hiding the menu-bar (like Internet Explorer and Chrome). Although I’ve got a good height, applications and websites will always scroll down, so having a few extra pixels really helps. (Don’t get me started on stupid side scrolling website :P)

For the tabs, I use Tree Style Tabs. It’s a beautiful add-on that sorts out tabs in a hierarchy, making them easily manageable. By default, it groups them and collapses the tree when out of focus, but I’ve disabled this as it would take me about 60 tabs to get that far :P

I can see the title of each tab very clearly. Because I’ve got sooo much width (brag brag brag eh?) I also keep the bookmarks side-bar always open.

So to conclude: when I’m working, because I’ve got so much width, I have adjusted my desktop and Firefox to use vertical menus and tool-bars, instead of the horizontal by default. At home, I’ll still use Chrome, because I haven’t got the width and I can always scroll for more height. The point is I still don’t have to side-scroll.

Vertical tool-bars and wide screens – it’s the future :P

Rather than do the bi-annual Windows XP clean install, I ripped a disc and jammed in the latest Ubuntu. Karmic Koala it’s called.

This is the first time I’ve installed Ubuntu as opposed to Ubuntu Studio. Installation was a bit daunting. It does it all through the Live CD but it has to boot up like that first, and it took a while. I left it with a black screen for a few hours, came back to it, and selected “Install” off of the desktop.

After that it went okay. There were a few issues.

Look ma, no wires!

Getting the wireless working was the same as on my garage PC. I go through this NDIS Broadcom wireless walk-through and it works like a charm. NDIS is Windows driver and I’d rather use native Linux ones, but it works and that’s ultimately all I care about :P

I can see clearly now!

After all the trouble getting nVidia binaries working on Ubuntu Studio Jaunty (with the real-time kernel) I wasn’t looking forward to any graphics driver installation. As with the wireless, the graphics are also very similar (Gefore 5 and 6 series). However, the binaries in Ubuntu Studio Karmic worked fine straight away fresh out of the Hardware Drivers GUI (a tool for installing 3rd party binaries). Thankfully, it was the same on Ant’s PC. Nice one Karmic :)

Notifications kept popping up down a bit too far. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but I found an Ubuntu forums post to sort it out (again, still searching for that link :P).

What did you say?

Then we had sound issues. I tried multiple Ubuntu forum tutorials trying to get it working but no luck. The first problem was how distant the sound was. I wasn’t getting the right frequencies, any stereo field and MP3 compression sounded crap. Turns out I’d dislodged the speaker’s mini-jack :P

My bro tried out Battle for Wesnoth, having played it on an openSUSE distro I’d tried out years ago. No sound though. I followed a simple Ubuntu forums tutorial linking to a blog post, fired up a deb file and got it up and working in seconds! (I’ve misplaced the link for now but I’ll keep searching for it!)

Jerk, jerk, jerk!

So with the sound almost fixed, there was one last issue. On my machine, Ubuntu Studio Karmic with Compiz and the works, is damn smooth (far smoother than Jaunty). Yet this machine was clunky as hell. The log-on sounds we’re stuttered. They still are, but they’re a lot better and I’m putting it down to low spec and filing it under I-don’t-care.

Spending some time in the terminal, I was getting error messages spat out at me left right and centre over and over again at a fierce rate of repetition. They went like this:

Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.512447] ata4.01: configured for PIO4
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.513091] ata4: EH complete
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.516020] ata4: drained 32768 bytes to clear DRQ.
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584267] ata4.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584275] ata4.01: ST_FIRST: DRQ=1 with device error, dev_stat 0x59
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584289] ata4.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 pio 36 in
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584291] cdb 12 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584293] res 59/00:01:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584298] ata4.01: status: { DRDY DRQ ERR }
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584332] ata4: soft resetting link

Daunting, eh?

The logs kept growing, and I couldn’t open the Log File Viewer because it couldn’t take it (as expected). I begged for help on the forums but because the query was so hardware specific and such a generic error the cry was in vein.

Now I don’t know much of what those errors mean at all. A bit of Google’ing led me to stories of duff hard-drives, but I wasn’t buying any of that! I fiddled around with the insides and fixed it by un-plugging the CD/DVD-ROM drive. So it must’ve been a dodgy cable or unit. But again, I don’t care why, it works. Yay :D

There, Perfect!

It’s sweet. From all that error checking, I’ve beaten the first level of lagno (GNOME game, Reversi clone) which I’m very happy about. Even Rhythmbox doesn’t jerk (haven’t tried it in the garage properly yet – far too cold :P). I love it, and my brother can now study his A-levels, play on Wesnoth and browse with Chrome.

Also, I hate to admit it, but it’s not bad looking. The brown kind of glows, the fonts are bubbly. It makes me smile when I use it. (I feel like I should be telling this to a shrink!) I’ve got no proper gripes and it’s helping me use my PC in the greatest ways possible.

I haven’t got down to any major road testing with Ubuntu Studio Karmic yet, mainly because it’s so damn cold in that garage. I’ve got band demos to record and websites to build. Studio Karmic will get a thrashing. But for now, I’m very happy with what I’ve got. Thank you Ubuntu :D

Before I would use Apache2 with mod_rewrite using a lengthy variation of this script:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET (.*).php HTTP
RewriteRule (.*).php$ $1 [R=301]
...

At the end I would hide server side files that I wouldn’t want accessible from the outside, such as templates and “spit out” scripts. The actual script I used would search for a PHP file with the requested name in it, and if it existed would spit it out else throwing up a 404.

I’ve thought of doing things differently this time around. I’m gonna do this – just use extensionless files. So for example, /httpdocs/home is now a PHP file that Apache will spit out to the user as HTML parsed from PHP. I just need to tell Apache this. The above code can be changed to this:

DefaultType application/x-httpd-php
...

I’d still need to hide some files but this approach means I don’t have to have as many files to catch the queries. I’ll have the content in the extensionless file with an include to the main script. That catches the content and brings in the templates.

On a different note

When I next get time I’m going to convert a Mac Mini into an Ubuntu server. I’m not sure if it’s PPC yet so it could be interesting. Currently I’m testing everything on the same machine I’m writing the stuff on, an old P4 Presario machine with Ubuntu Studio Jaunty on it, having no problems.

With a dedicated machine I could use another PC in the house, say a Windows one, SSH in and do my thing. I’ll be keeping things consistent. An actual testing server has many more advantages.

I’m busy with my band at the minute. Should really blog more about gigs and bands. Ah well, maybe soon ;-)

I used to use Windows XP as my main OS. I used Internet Explorer 7 to browse the net and was very happy doing so. It was sleek, the interface was good and performance wasn’t a problem. I tried Firefox 3 and like it’s approach to things.

But in no way would I dream of using it for casual browsing because it was slow to load up had a clumsy user experience (I wont get into why I think it does). I thought that the slow Firefox start was Microsoft’s fault but since migrating to Ubuntu Linux I’ve found this not to be the case and I’ve no idea who let the Ubuntu version look like that. I’m using a PC that I consider to have a reasonable spec – a Pentium 4 3GHz with a gig of RAM. I think it’s a shame (but I’m sure I could optimise my system a lot more).

However, at work I need to analyse web pages. Firebug is a dream. You’ve also got the Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick that can do anything you can think of. I wish the functions and interfaces weren’t so fragmented but that’s what you get with an open customisable application like Firefox. As for doing the job it’s good. Aside from the 5 minute startup wait it’s a seamless experience (and this is at work with a Dual Core Xeon and twice the RAM!).

I’ve got my list of add-ons. Each one helps me almost daily. As you can probably see from the window-shot above I’ve made the interface as minimal as I can.

Then there was Google’s Chrome. As you may know Chrome makes me happy. I can develop with it but not as well as with Firefox. Once Firebug and Web Developer work for it it’s goodbye Firefox. Until then, I’m more than happy working with websites using Firefox. In my eyes it’s not a browser, it’s a powerful tool.

I downloaded and installed a theme called Dust. It’s about the only okay looking theme that comes with and probably exists for Jaunty. However, those browns and oranges try to creep back in again. I hope Karmic cuts that scheme and looks half decent.

Animation is something that Windows has never excelled in. Aero has fades and a bit of movement here and there and that crappy shuffle Mac rip-off thing with the Super-Tab, but from my experience it jerks too much and happens to swiftly to notice. Macs have always done well with animation. But Compiz is the beast! :D

At first Compiz was full with a load of crap that distracted and hurt me. Going through it’s options opened up tonnes of possibility. There are some things on there that I just don’t understand but I tweaked and trialled and errored and got my desired effects. They’re fast and smooth and subtle enough. I actually hate to say it, but some of them are handy too. ;-)

So, the fonts

Windows has put me in a world where all rasterised fonts are seamless. I’ve never given it much thought before. When changing from no-aliasing to aliasing to ClearType I noticed what was happening but not once did I get truly appalled at any one of those settings. When I used Macs I’d be aware the fonts were rather soft but it added to the sleek interface. Fonts were still always beautiful. Linux has smashed that vision for me.

I mean what is that? The default font set-up that I’m sure has been optimised for a blind person. I stumbled across some tutorials that let you change them to the default old-style Windows fonts. Wicked. I’m back in 1995!

Installing the TrueType Microsoft fonts helps a lot. I’m using Arial for the most of my interface and after tweaking around with the settings I’m actually slightly fond of FreeType2. I would go as far as to say it shows the Mac up. I did a side on comparison and it’s obvious Microsoft has left Linux in the dust. Guess what OS owns what font?

Close up here

Don’t get me started on that excuse for a rasterisation that GIMP uses, or how difficult the interface was to a Photoshop user (I couldn’t even align the text elements!). It’s obvious that Windows XP looks clear and aesthetically pleasing. The Ubuntu fonts don’t look too bad. I’d be interested to compare it to how Mac renders stuff and I’ll give it a go later.

So Microsoft, you’ve made me think my life’s been held back by your operating system but in truth, you’ve hidden the ugly potential that is font rendering from me for so many years and for it I thank you. Just looking at the comparison makes me laugh. Still, one probably cost near billions of dollars to develop while other was free. :-)

Not too fast Microsoft…

On a side note there is evidence to suggest Microsoft has been getting lazy of recent with their UI. I’d expect that from Linux because it’s made up like Frankenstein but from an expensive OS at the top of it’s field I figure that’s taking the piss. Reading that blog did make me think how bollocks Internet Explorer’s interface is. Using Google Chrome has put me in a new state of expectation where before I just put up with it. Saying that IE6 has a nice interface. Maybe Bill should’ve stopped trying to be a fox. :-P