I already had Eclipse installed, so I decided to install all the dependencies and then install PDT. Ben Ramsey has put together a nice list of urls. After getting all the deps installed through Eclipse, I installed PDT and started a new project. I quickly ran into some problems – the PHP Explorer was not working and sometimes the auto complete would fail to work.

I'm not sure what was causing the problems (I have Sun's Java installed, as I know other versions of the Java VM can cause problems), but I un-installed Eclipse through apt-get and downloaded the PDT all-in-one package. I unzipped the file, fired up Eclipse, and it worked fine.

Next on my list was Subclipse. Installing it was a breeze. It took a little while to figure out how to use it, but I was able to connect to the repository on my dev server and checkout a project in a short amount of time. After making a token change, I attempted to commit the changed file back to the repo, That's where the fun started. I kept getting various error messages about “Option Expected” in the svnserve.conf. I changed the svnserve.conf numerous times to no avail. After almost an hour, I finally figured out the problem. I was uncommenting the lines in svnserve.conf and NOT removing the extra whitespace before the declaration. I finally removed the whitespace and viola, it worked...

It can't be so, yet it appears to be, at least on my box running Ubuntu Edgy Eft... In trying to use Google Docs, Firefox repeatedly freezes and or takes forever to respond when using spreadsheets online. This could be a problem with the JS on Google Docs, but it runs fine on Firefox and IE on Windows. I have also experienced this problem on other sites that make use of Javascript. On a site that I developed which uses Thickbox, Friefox on Linux takes its sweet time bringing up the images, but runs smoothly for FF on Wndows. I experienced the same problem on this site with a different Linux box that was running Fedora Core 4, so its not just this distro or version of Firefox. There is mention over at O'Reilly about FF crashing on Linux, but that isn't the problem I am having. It's simply a matter of Firefox taking forever for certain sites with JavaScript.

I received my new Dell desktop and server on Wednesday, and spent the last couple of days installing Ubuntu on them. For my server, I have two 250 gig hard drives, and wanted to set up RAID 1. I can’t say I know a lot about RAID controllers, but from what I have read a lot of the supposed RAID controllers that ship with servers are not real hardware controllers and therefore do not always work out of the box with Linux.

For that reason, and cost, I decided to go with software RAID 1. Following the directions, it worked like a charm. I had to download the alternate install in order get the options to set up RAID, and I decided to go with 6.06 server edition. Everything was up and running in a short amount of time. Using this site as a guide, I began installing the software I needed, like Apache, MySQL and PHP5. I ran into an interesting issue on my desktop, while trying to install Ubuntu 6.10 along with Windows Vista, but I’ll save that for another post….

When I first installed Internet Explorer, I could not figure out where the File menu was. I thought, " I'll just check the help menu". Well, the help menu is hidden too, so no luck there. It didn't take long to find an answer on the internet - Alt + F toggles on the File menu. I'm surprised MS decided to have it hidden by default?

I am enjoying KDE and Kubuntu - the ability to customize anything and everything is kind of fun. I admit, it is almost excessive, but it is nice. I took me awhile to figure out how to add a show desktop icon to my KDE toolbar, as there are so many different options and ways to customize the Kicker. Turns out, all I needed to do was:

• right click the the toolbar


• Choose "Add Applet to Panel"


• Scroll through the list of icons until you find Show Desktop

Next on my list of things to do to waste time, is to browse through all the content on KDE-Look and find something to spice up my desktop...

I am bought a couple of Linux distros to install on my desktop. I currently have Fedora Core 4 on it, and use it a decent amount for development. But I have never been completely satisfied with it, mostly due to lack of time to fine-tune it and lack of experience with Linux. I decided to do a fresh install and try out both Fedora Core 6 or Ubuntu Edgy Eft. I played around with Ubunutu using the live CD to get a feel for it, and was amazed that everyting just worked - browsing the web, playing a CD, etc…

I decided I would partition my hard drive and install both, but ran into problems. I had to pick one distro to try first, so I went with Fedora because I was familiar with it. After installing Fedora, I ran into some problems with it recognizing my Ethernet card, something that had happened before with Fedora 4. While I was able to resolve the problem before, I knew it would work out of the box with Ubuntu, so I shut down and installed Ubuntu. I have not used Ubuntu much, but I am impressed with how it just works. I decided to install KDE (I guess turning it into Kubuntu?), and used synaptic to search for "kubuntu-desktop"

Ten minutes later I was logging in with KDE. Next, I needed to install PHP5 and Apache2. Going from
this webpage, I used apt-get for Apache and PHP5 and had a working version. The real test came when I viewed a webpage with the compile info of PHP5. On Fedora Core 4, I was forced to compile PHP5, as the default install lacked a lot of things I needed, like SOAP. PHP5 with Ubuntu has SOAP thankfully, no worrying about compiling PHP again. To be fair, I haven't tested Fedora Core 6, but my initial impression is that Ubuntu is just a lot easier to use for someone with limited Linux skills like myself. I am looking forward to playing around with it some more!

I am using EzPublish 3.8 as a content management system for a website. It’s been quite awhile since I last looked at EzPublish and I bought a book to help me along. After limited research, I settled on Pakt Publishing’s Learning eZ Publish 3.



All in all, I am not very happy with the book. I wanted something that I could read and hit the ground running. Something that would run me through an install and setup for a basic website. Instead, it seems to be a rehash of the documentation found online, focusing on the structure of the system and not providing many useful examples for what I am trying to accomplish. In fact, I have used the documentation exclusively while customizing the website I am working on, letting the pdf gather virtual dust.

For example, chapter 2 gives a detailed overview of the system, covering the logical structure of the system, displaying content, workflows, and a whole slew of other things, which was too much info for me to take in. It also provides an example website at the end with brief specifications (photo galleries, personalization, discussion forms, etc), but leaves it up to you to figure out how to create it all and make it work together.



I guess I would have liked to see an example with a very basic website, and have a detailed walk through on creating a couple of sections, creating one object and assigning the sections, and applying templates to each section. Or something simple like that. While workflows and translations are important, I didn’t see the need for those in the second chapter. I tried to jump to chapter 8, where there was a case study. But the vast majority of the chapter was focused on requirements, specifications and pre-planning.

The other factor is 3.8 is obviously different than 3.0. I can’t blame the book for that, but it didn’t help. Take my review with a grain of salt, but if you are brand new to eZPublish and looking for examples on how to set up a basic website, stick to the documentation, which is quite well done in my opinion (and free).

I flew out to Vermont in October on Delta, and for some reason did not get frequent flyer miles for one leg of the trip. After filling out an online contact form with the info, I received the dreaded cut and paste response that I needed the send my flight info by fax or mail.



Not wanting to waste paper, I opted for a fax. And since I had an electronic E-ticket, I simply copy and pasted the info from the confirmation email into a word doc, put in a cover sheet I had saved in word and converted it to a pdf with Adobe Acrobat. Now I just needed to send the darn thing through my Dell All-In-One Photo 964 printer.

I opened up the software, but couldn't find the right option. It had links to scan an image, and then fax, but nothing to open an existing document. After some searching in the help documents, I realized all I needed to do was open the document, select print, and then select Fax Dell Printer as pictured below.





It then popped up a window where I put in the number and info, and viola, the fax was sent. Make sure to just put in the fax number without any other characters. I copied the fax from an email, and it had parentheses around the area code. Needless to say, the fax didn't make it through...

For windows installations of PHP, PEAR does NOT come installed. Reading through the documentation, it looks like you can just click go-pear batch file in the directory where PHP is installed. However, I have come across errors with this both times I have tried to use it. The method I found successful is to open a windows command prompt and move into the directory where php is installed (that's assuming you know the change directory command "cd" to move through directories).



Once there, issue "php -r "readfile('http://pear.php.net/go-pear');" > go-pear" to grab the latest instructions and save the file to go-pear. Then, issue "php go-pear" to install PEAR on your windows box. It will ask you a series of questions, which should be fairly easy to answer. Finally, it will create a file in your php directory to update your environment variables. Double click on this file to add PEAR to your path, and you can start using it!

I bought the Dell Photo 964 Printer last February, as my old printer was, well, getting old. I have been pleased with it. It sends and receives faxes without a problem, and scanning and printing documents has been easy. It is nice to have the top loader when scanning multiple documents, and it also works for faxes. On an old scanner I had at a previous job, you had to lay each document on the scanner, scan it and then rinse and repeat, which was very time consuming for large quantities.

I am not a heavy user, preferring to stick to the digital world, so I have not explored some of the other features of the printer, such as managing fax lists, the OCR reader that lets you manipulate text from scanned documents, or printing images directly from memory cards. But all in all, I am very happy with the purchase – it is amazing that you can get a printer, scanner and fax for a little over $100 dollars!