Josh-Kerr.com

Yeah…that about sums it up.

Today Stephanie and I booted up our Dell 5150 for the last time. The screen flashed white while booting up and then blacked out completely. I’m honestly surprised it’s lasted this long with its heating problems and the all the “abuse” I’ve done to it. So to honor the life of Dell 5150 I’ve written a eulogy.

Dell 5150, better known to his loved ones as Lappy, was brought into the world in December of 2003. Lappy was always full of life and always ready for his next challenge. Despite his rather large size and over-heating issues, Lappy found his way into the hearts of the Kerr family. Running not only Windows but Gentoo Linux and Ubuntu Linux, Lappy truly had a diverse life.

In the spring of 2006, Lappy was sent to the emergency room due to a bad hard drive. Though the times were tough, Lappy managed to pull through with flying colors. Regrettably though, Lappy’s heating problem worsen. He lived a fruitful life for another year until the Good Lord called him home. Lappy was not just ’some laptop’ he was a ‘big-lug’ that you grew to love. Lappy, you will be missed *though probably replaced by a Macbook Pro*.

Love

Josh and Steph

Since I’ve pretty much stopped playing video games I’ve been tinkering around with Ruby On Rails and other development platforms/languages. While tinkering I stumbled across Aptana which is a web-developer IDE built off of the Eclipse project. So far, I’ve been impressed with Aptana as a web-developer IDE however it’s lacking in some areas. Mainly, it’s a HTML, CSS, and Javascript IDE with RoR support available as a plug-in and PHP support in the works. Not bad considering it’s still in beta :) Aptana is everything I could want in an IDE except for the lack of ASP support. My current company programs solely in ASP despite how old it is and my numerous attempts to move to .NET. Which brings me to my next project, and ASP editor for Aptana. I don’t know how long it will take or how much time I’ll be able to put into it but it should be fun. Not just because I have a new project but also because it will be nice to get back into Java again.

The Dell and Ubuntu deal was announced a while back and to be honest I’m pumped about it yet a little scared at the same time. I’ve been using Ubuntu for some time now and I’ve said many in the past it’s the most user-friendly Linux distribution out there. My sentiment is shared by a lot of other people too so that it’s a comforting to know that an easy to use Linux distribution will be the guinea pig.

To better understand my fear we have to break down users into categories. While there is no official break down, these are mine:

• Grandma
• Teenager
• Adult
• Geek

The Grandma knows what a computer is but if she has to spend more than 5 minutes doing something she’s going to get flustered and give up. Grandmas check their email, write a document, and like to see photos of their kids via the “interweb”. Grandmas will go to the “not so” Best Buy or Dell and get the biggest piece of crap that is way too much computer for them. Ask them how big their hard drive is and they’ll give you a blank stare and eventually make a shape of an ‘L’ with both hands and hold them up to make a rectangle.

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Yeah… so after I stopped playing World Of Warcraft I decided to redo my setup at home. The long and the short of it, I backed up all my files and installed Ubuntu Linux. I’ve used Ubuntu in the past and loved it so much more than most other Linux distros and it’s nice to see that it has only gotten better with time. The LiveCD installer works so much better than others that I’ve used and it’s just so easy to use. If you ever wanted to try Linux, go with Ubuntu.

I also installed Gentoo Linux on a second computer. I’ve run Gentoo in the past, much like Ubuntu, however Gentoo has always been more of an in depth distro.  Even now as I write this I cry as I get yet “library cannot be linked” error when I know that the library is in fact there.  Thankfully, Gentoo’s forums and wiki are the best I’ve seen with their in depth and up-to-date information which makes just about any problem easy enough to fix.  Now if Ubuntu’s wiki and forums were this good they would rule the world but it’s not.  So while it doesn’t rule the world, its still the most user-friendly distro out there.