Archive for August 19th, 2005

Posted on August 19, 2005 - by jono

Eh?

Finished up the PHP and MySQL course today and the feedback was good. I enjoyed this one – the group was enthusiastic, fun and encouraged each other.

The other day I saw PIDA and I am quite intrigued by it. Before the course started this morning, I was chatting to one of the core PIDA developers, and I was trying to encourage him to push the IDE’s dependence on vim back a little. Sure, vim is great for many people, but having vim as the editor by default seems nuts. Mind you, it seems there is no generic GEdit type generic editor widget for GTK/GNOME. Implementing something akin to GEdit will require reimplementing the functionality. Nevertheless, the project looks interesting, and Gazpacho integration is a good thing. Python has so much opportunity at being the VB for Open Source systems…

While investigating PIDA I tried to install the PIDA deb from the website. The site says it is compatible with Ubuntu, so I tried to install it on my Hoary laptop. It said that the package required vim-gtk, so I tried to install it. I was then greeted with a big fat dependency error. I thought I would remove vim and re-install, but removing it gave me this astonishing reaction:

jono@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get remove vim
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  ubuntu-base vim vim-common
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 15.2MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.
jono@ubuntu:~$

Removing vim will remove ubuntu-base?? What?

In other news, an article I wrote for the O’Reilly Network entitled Linux for Video Production. The article talks about how multimedia and video production on Linux is getting so much better with GStreamer and PiTiVi. Go check it out.

Posted on August 19, 2005 - by jono

Teacher teacher

Today I was teaching seven people the relative joys of PHP and MySQL. They are a good group and it is a joy to see people getting excited about Open Source. There is a particular moment when all the different pieces just fit together and the student knows exactly how they can do some really cool things with the technology. Little things like being able to create PDF files and images in PHP are big boons and the Web Developer Toolbar definitely hit the spot. Oh, and of course, they learn’t some of the special Bacon Ninja Magic (this will only make sense if you have actually been on one my courses).

Finished off todays session and then legged it back to go to Karate with Sooz. After Karate I cooked dinner and we spent the evening relaxing. I am going to try and take things a little easier over the next few months. I think I have been doing a bit too much and need to relax some more. Next week I have booked three days off to sit back, chill out, jam some tunes, hack some code and eat some donuts. Yes please.