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Dual Booting Windows and Linux

Quick lesson learned while installing Edubuntu: If you install Edubuntu then Windows, Windows will eat the boot manager and Linux will not boot. Use these steps:

  1. Partition your drive for Windows, Linux and boot mgr/swap. I personally divided the bulk of the harddrive evenly with an ext3 partition and an ntfs partition. The remaining space (roughly 1.5mb) I left for the Linux installer to play with.
  2. Install Windows into the ntfs partition. Doing this first will give the Linux installer the ability to see that Windows exists and it will do two things. One, it will add a link to the desktop to allow browsing of the Windows partition from Edubuntu, and two, it will add Windows into the grub boot manager.
  3. Install Edubuntu making sure to not format the ntfs partition (manually edit the partition table when it gives you the chance!) and you are done!
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Kill a programmer – ask them a question

A little disclaimer. My wife is going to take this personally and make it about her. But it’s not about her. Or the kids. It’s about the cat that constantly tries to crawl onto my keyboard. It’s about the incessant phone calls from nasty people. It’s about my mind that wants to wander to finishing projects on the house. It is about emails and computer glitches (right now my linux server doesn’t see the network..that’s an interruption). Client emergencies and angry instant messages. Angst. Yes. It is also about the thuds on the floor. The crying. Little people learning through physics, ye ol’ school of hard knocks. It’s about life’s necessary appointments and cooking dinner. Flooded bathrooms and washing machines.

All that said, a good friend of mine use to keep a piece of paper taped to the wall of his cubicle. It read:

No success at work can compensate for failure in the home.

That said, if I fail at work, I cannot provide for my family. There must be a balance. I will continue to bound up the stairs when I hear a thud following by a painful scream. I will drop everything to answer my wife’s whims. But I must keep a balance whereby work is not hindered. The cat is on notice though. Keep watching the video to see if it continues to land on all fours as I cat-apult it from my desk.

For years I have tried to explain, without success, to various non-programmers that a small interruption costs me 15 minutes of time. "But it will only take a second of your time." That second might be for a phone call, an office joke, move the laundry from the washer to the dryer, a technical question on a non-related project…the topic does not really matter, the interruption is the problem.

Logan Koester of Skin Deep writes about Overcoming Coder’s Block with some excellent advice and references none other than Joel on Software with Just a 60 second distraction can cost a programmer 15 minutes. Once again, I connect with Joel Spolsky very well! If you have a programmer in your life as his/her employer, spouse, or friend, please read this article; it’s the last paragraphs that are important.

Here’s the simple algebra. Let’s say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we’re really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can’t remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he’s sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

Now let’s move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can’t remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff.

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Every programmer has their magic equation for creative productivity. For instance, I need a warm beverage in hand, my day has to begin early, an uncluttered work environment, a computer that moves as fast as I do, minimal white noise, and a well defined goal.

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Blogger – the gateway to WordPress

Blogger with its minimal barrier to entering the world of self-publishing helps people understand the pleasures of blogging. Then it frustrates us with service outages, bad customer service, and the inability to backup data and years of work. Then we discover there is a world of highly configurable, open source content management systems freely available. We learn about a wiki and that they too abound in open source but wikis serve a different a purpose than CMS.

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. …

WikiWikiWeb was the first such software to be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called “Wiki Wiki” Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport’s terminals. According to Cunningham, “I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for ‘quick’ and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.” “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication of “wiki”, a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for “what I know is”, which describes the knowledge contribution, storage, and the exchange function.

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A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to websites.

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I am a WordPress fan. WordPress has a shared solution similar to Blogger at WordPress.com and provides an open source solution at WordPress.org. The open source solution will give you more control but you will need to have a place to put your website which means paying for some hosting (which is cheap these days!).

On January 2nd I mentioned that Latte Man moved to WordPress. I should have also mentioned that Newscoma has moved to WordPress! Update your marks. Find Newscoma at http://newscoma.com/. Jon is still trying to get Katie to make the move away from Blogger.

There are other solutions. For great examples of Drupal installations, look at any of Tim’s sites. Anghus suggests that we take a look at Joomla.

Btw, if you are a programmer writing CMS systems, like I do, then this link to compare wysiwyg editors will be invaluable to you. I personally almost always end up with Xinha.