Friday, August 29, 2008

Brasil


One of the great things about working for a big-name web company is that you get big opportunities. I'll be speaking at PHP Conference Brasil '08 about how we use PHP at SourceForge.net. Needless to say, I'm very excited and planning some vacation time around the conference.

Open source is big in Brazil. And even more pertinent, Brazil is our 3rd-highest nation in terms of site traffic - after U.S.A. and Germany.

Hopefully I can try to overcome the language gap and present some informative material for everyone. One of the things that struck me when I joined SourceForge.net was that the site code isn't super-magic - it's really quite ordinary PHP, it's just very highly used.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Ubuntu FTW; Boot Camp FTL?

quick update on my ubuntu experience ...

webex went fine. linux client seamlessly downloaded and allowed me to join a webex conference. joined the teleconference via skype with just a small hiccup - took me a couple minutes of tweaking with various sound levels to get my mac's built-in mic going. but iSight camera was working with Skype straight away, so that was nice.

but, near the start of my first full day, I needed to investigate an IE bug, so I tried booting up into my Windows partition. epic fail. blue screen immediately upon boot. :( tried fixing my mbr via the Windows XP install CD, but no luck with that either.

I remembered that the ubuntu instructions for triple-booting suggested installing GRUB on the partition with ubuntu, and I also remembered that I had missed that step. so, I decided to reset and start all over again. I booted into Mac OS (no probs there - in all of this experimentation I never once had a problem booting into Mac OS), and used disk utility to destroy both my ubuntu and windows partitions.

this time, I tried the other (easy) approach and after installing Windows, I ran ubuntu installer. this time I remembered to install GRUB on the ubuntu partition, rather than defaulting to the mbr. however, when I booted up again, I had the same experience - Mac and Ubuntu would start up fine, but Windows failed to start again. :(

because I constantly need to test in IE every day, I sadly decided that I needed to stop with all the experimentation and just resign to using Ubuntu on my secondary computers. :(

it's too bad - I would love to have a triple-booting MacBook Pro, especially if I could fire up both my Windows and my Ubuntu systems inside a parallels or fusion vm.