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My Tech Reading List for May

I got a number of books for free this past week:

Books I\'m reviewing in May 2008

  • Head First PMP – When my friend Leigh Honeywell heard that I was taking a project management course later this month, she told me that she got this book for free at a conference and had no use for it. So she gave this book to me, and I’ll be reading it so that when the course comes around — it’s May 21st through 23rd — I’ll be at least familiar with the material.

And four books from Apress, courtesy of Julie Miller:

I’ll be reading them this month and posting my reviews here in Global Nerdy. Watch this space!

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Wubi: Peaceful Coexistence between Vista and Ubuntu “Hardy Heron”

Switching Machines

The place where I work, b5media, is a business built on WordPress, which is based on the LAMP stack (where the “P” means “PHP”). Although my formal job title at b5 is “Technical Project Manager” and not “Developer”, the job titles aren’t rigidly defined, and I’d like to contribute my own developer skills at some point. Furthermore, I think that if you manage developers, you really should have some development skills and keep them sharp.

My preferred LAMP development platform is Mac OS X, which I feel delivers the best of both worlds: the functionality of a Unix-y operating system and the user experience — and dare I say, tasteful design — for which Apple is known and loved. In my former life at Tucows, I used my own PowerBook G4 as my primary machine, which is now my wife’s. Later, when I went to TSOT, they provided me with a 15″ MacBook Pro. When I left TSOT to join b5, the machine waiting for me was a Toshiba P200. For the first time since early 2003, my primary work machine was a PC running Vista.

It is possible to get work done in Vista, using it as a LAMP development machine feels a little awkward. While I’ve had no trouble setting up PHP under previous versions of IIS (in fact, I think my no-longer-existent docs for doing so on a Tucows site are pretty good), I have yet to successfully do it on the current version. I’ve had some success with installable LAMP stacks like Bitnami and WAMP, but somehow they still felt clunky. I also kept typing Unix commands at the DOS command line.

What I needed was a Unix I could run on my Toshiba.

A First Attempt at Ubuntu: Gutsy Gibbon

Installing Ubuntu on a desktop machine, even a “white label” one built in the dingy discount computer shop with lots of off-brand peripherals hanging on the walls, generally runs without a hitch. Getting Ubuntu to work on a laptop has typically been a completely different matter: there are generally incompatibilities galore and you have to do a lot of yak shaving in order to get a working system.

I first tried to install Ubuntu 7.10, a.k.a. “Gutsy Gibbon”, on the Toshiba. My experiences:

  • The video card worked, although it wouldn’t go to the maximum resolution (1440 by 900) without installing xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.1.9.94, which is explained here.
  • Sound didn’t work in the beginning, but once again, a little Googling found the fix. Since I use Skype voice chat in regular meetings with remote b5 developers, working audio is important. One downside: the speakers output audio even though headphones were plugged in.
  • The webcam and card reader didn’t work at all. These weren’t dealbreakers, but they were annoying.
  • My model doesn’t have it, but some versions of the Toshiba P200 come with a fingerprint reader. True to the stereotypes of the priorities of Linux people, the fingerprint reader is reported to work without any tweaking required.

I decided that I was doing more tweaking than working, so I decided to wait until Hardy Heron’s release, as it promised greater compatibility and a feature called “Wubi” that might meet my needs.

Installing Hardy Heron via Wubi

Wubi stands for Windows-based Ubuntu Installer that lets you install Ubuntu as if it were a Windows application. It doesn’t require any disk formatting or partitioning; the Ubuntu filesystem lives in a disk image within Windows’ filesystem. This setup allows Windows users to “try before they buy”, letting them take Ubuntu for a spin while still keeping their Windows applications and data.

Installation is dirt simple. You simply download the Wubi installer and double-click on it…

Wubi icon

…which takes you to this window, where you enter just enough data to start the installation process:

Wubi setup app - first screen

You need only enter these six pieces of information to install Ubuntu using Wubi:

  • The drive on which Ubuntu is to be installed
  • The amount of disk space to allot to Ubuntu (up to a maximum of 30GB)
  • Which desktop environment to use
  • Which language to use
  • A username
  • A password

Once you’ve provided this information, click Install…and that’s it. The installer does the rest:

Wubi setup app - second screen

And soon afterwards, you’re greeted by this window, which prompts you to reboot your computer:

Wubi setup app - third screen

And soon afterwards, you’re greeted with this screen:

Boot screen menu for Windows / Ubuntu

You’ll see this screen every time you boot up from now (or at least until you uninstall Wubi, which you do from within Windows; uninstalling Wubi is as simple as uninstalling any other Windows app).

Finally, you’ll see this:

Ubuntu login screen

I logged in and started checking to see if Ubuntu recognized devices on my laptop:

  • Video: check! All resolutions right up to the maximum of 1440 by 900 were supported.
  • Sound: check!
  • Card reader: check!
  • Wireless: check!
  • Webcam: once I installed Skype, check!
  • Volume dial: (It’s a hardware dial that sends volume-change messages to the system) check!
  • Screen brighten/dim buttons: check!

I checked the filesystem and found that the Windows filesystem was accessible via the host directory, meaning that I could access any files on the Windows portion of the system. I set things up so that my home directory in Ubuntu had links to some of the folders in my user directory in Windows.

All in all, it was the least complex Linux installation experience I’ve ever had. If you’re a Windows user thinking about giving Linux a try, I highly recommend taking Wubi out for a spin.

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Portal Meets Walken

Here’s the only way that the game Portal could be improved: by adding Chrostopher Walken to the mix!


Click the picture to see an even larger version!

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The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet distills the best tips for improving your site’s findability by search engines down to two sides of a letter-sized sheet in PDF format. Download it, print it, design your sites by it!

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Speeder Dogs!

As both a dog person and an aficionado of science fiction action flicks, this photo amuses me to no end:

\"Star Wars\" Stromtroopers riding dogs like speeder bikes
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

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Websites You Shouldn’t Have Missed in April 2008

Websites You Shouldn’t Have Missed in April 2008 is a collection of 52 links featuring graphic design tutorials, Ajax, CSS, tips for freelance workers, free fonts, icons and graphics, tools and generators, WordPress themes, typography sites and sites to inspire you. Well worth perusing.

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GTA IV Grab Bag #1

Here’s a first in a series of regular updates on the just-released and much-awaited Grand Theft Auto IV

A Hint for Those of You Who Can’t Speak Niko’s Language

In some of the dialogue between Niko and Roman, they switch between English and (I’m assuming here) Serbian. The bits in Serbian are asides that aren’t crucial to the story and can be inferred from context, but if you really want to feel like Niko, you’d like to know what they’re saying, right?

The solution is simple: just turn on subtitles (you can do this from the Game menu). When they speak in Serbian, the English translation will appear in grey text.

Another 10 Minutes of Gameplay

For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to try out GTA IV, here’s another video showing the next 10 minutes of gameplay (the video showing the first ten minutes is here), featuring:

  • A little exploration of Roman’s apartment,
  • a carjacking (which isn’t as easy as it used to be),
  • exploring the hood,
  • abusing a sportscar until it explodes (with Niko in it),
  • respawning outside a hospital,
  • noodling with Niko’s appearance,
  • and fun in multiplayer mode (including a rocket launcher mishap and gunning foos down with a pistol and fully-automatic weaponry).

An Observation from GameSpy

Here’s something from Fargo’s Thought for the Day, which is included in GameSpy Daily, an email newsletter from GameSpy:

Thoughts on Sandbox Games

Since around the time that Grand Theft Auto 3 and The Sims came out, the phrase “sandbox game” or “open world” has seeped into gaming literature and even into marketing speak. It kinda drives me nuts, because a “sandbox” in and of itself isn’t very fun. It’s easy to screw it up.

Ask any game designer and they’ll tell you: if you put a person in an open world, where they can do anything they want, they spend a few minutes testing the limits and then he or she will get bored. The real trick to these games is to provide a lot of directed gameplay even if people don’t realize it. The object of an open world is to let the player set his or her own agenda, and then to provide tons of cool gameplay once they decide what to do. Sims 2 is a great example: you can do whatever you want, but no matter what decisions you make for your characters, you’ll always run across interesting mini-games or tough decisions to make in order to accomplish your goal.

Of course the Grand Theft Auto games have an overall story that you can work through via a series of directed missions, but even when you go “off the rails” and start freestyling in the sandbox world, you’re never far from the guiding hand of a designer encouraging you to collect something, discover something, set a new record, kick off a minigame, etc. Few design teams can do an open world right — but when they get it right, the experience is spectacular.