Tim Child

I have grabbed this from a forum I frequent often, but it was too good not to post.

It has been talked about before but according to beta.news.com.com the $100 is getting closer to launch.

The reasons for creation are obvious, and the main one – bridging the poor rich information divide a good one, but its the design of the thing that really impresses and I think it even betters the design of Apples best products. Of course it will probably run a version of Linux (I hope Debian of course but then I am slighty biased towards that distro), and have all the basics a Laptop needs. They are trying to get the display price down – one of the most expensive parts for a laptop, and also its power consumption right down – cutting down the need for big expensive and hard to dispose of lithium batteries.

They have also gone for the combination of 500Mhz, and 1Gb RAM – lots of apps can run in that particularly on a lightweight Linux distro, but will be speedy enough if they don’t run Gnome or KDE.

The external design is excellent, even the power cord doubles as the carry strap.

I actually want one of these more than a PSP at the moment!

Well I am still on this tip, and the more that I am doing with it the more that I think its a good idea. Afterall, can I really spend the time I have at the moment reinventing the wheel, or instead getting ready for other things.

So WordPress it is, and I have so far found the RSS import of past data really easy, particularly after making sure that the RSS was valid – watch those ampersands basically, which often means making sure they are correct in any links that you might have embedded into your site.

Since then I have sorted out the categories, put in the old links – which look quite out of date now, and of course installed all the plugins such as Spam protectors, image galleries, contact forms, adsense bits and pieces and automatic keyword detection – all of which would have taken a while for me to code up myself in PHP.

I am hoping to have this live next week, but I need to do the design – yes for once I have started with that because I wanted to get the content sorted first of all.

This is a test post to see what the new blog will perform like. I have imported all the entries from my old blog, which is still up and running for now – at least until I can get my CSS done! I think that I am going to make it more inline with timc3.com for the look and feel. Then of course I will just finish off my share and that should be it!

I have just installed Subversion on my Apple Mac Powerbook laptop.

I needed a system that would allow me to work on files on the road, and at home on my PC and transferring between the two was becoming a pain in the neck so installing Subversion on the Mac helps with a central storage place, a way of backing up all my media and also of course a versioning system so no more hundreds of files all over the place.

In fact it got me thinking, why don’t computers come with a versioning system to begin with? It would help in all sorts of situations, people working on files losing data through their own changes, no more hundreds of files all over the place, just branched files, a central store – it goes on and on.

I am going to investigate further the use in a Production/Recording studio as one of the biggest bugbears at the moment for most users is where to store all the project files, audio files and their associated versions and then of course on how to back them up. Although I don’t like Subversions choice of database (in the future it will support more, hopefully including Postgres) its about the only negative thing I can say about it.

For information on how to install Subversion on OSX see the tutorials at:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/08/10/subversion.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/08/10/subversion.html

And get all the precompiled binaries from:
Wilfredo S�nchez But what isn’t mentioned in the tutorial above or in the Readme on the iDisk is the fact that Berkeley DB wasn’t their, so I downloaded it from http://www.sleepycat.com/ and compiled it myself.

For a client on Mac I used synX which isn’t bad, not quite as good as tortoiseSVN for the PC but usable nonetheless.

Just testing with PHP5.