Paul McNally’s Blog

Since apple’s keynote the other day announcing their new iPad tablet PC
I must admit that I am quite taken by it. Performance aside, it ’s just beautiful. Attracting me to it like a crow to milk bottle tops. It basically looks like someone zapped an iPhone with an enlargement ray. But this is not unnecessarily a bad thing, given the iPhone is also a thing of beauty. That’s one area where apple have always excelled. Creating beautiful, high-end items.

Being a consumer and high-usage computer user who has never (yet) delved into the
apple computer market (although like many people I have an iPod, and it’s not my first, and I use an iMac at work) I am extremely taken by this new tablet and very tempted to fork out the £700 or so
for one of my own.

The iPad looks like it can handle those everyday requirements such as web browsing, photo’s, email
and video with ease and as a bonus it is also compatible with the 14,000 apps designed for the iPhone
out of the box. Also, it’s ebook reading application looks great and easy to read, possibly
making devices such as the Amazon kindle already obsolete.

Being a linux user, Im wondering of I could get it to control my Linux media centre. I would certainly
have fun trying! However, I think if I was to buy another apple device, as I have been tempted to do on so many occasions due to their extraordinarily good functionality aswell as their great looks then I would still have to buy an iPhone. Because, lets face it, the iPad is just an iPhone that you can’t fit in your pocket.
That doesn’t stop me wanting one though. Bravo apple on creating another excellent device!

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After a year of no academic study, I have once again reached the point where I need to quench my thirst for knowledge. For what is life if it is boring? and attaining new knowledge and new skills is rarely boring.

So here I find myself back on that education train with The Open University. One of the best education establishments that I have had the pleasure to be a part of.

This time I find myself studying for the undergraduate Certificate in Information Technology and Computing. which comprises of the two level 1 (translate: first year of University) courses Data, computing and information (M150) and Networked living: exploring information and communication technologies (T175).

I have decided to study these two courses for two reasons. Firstly because they make up the Cert IT & Comp (open) certification, and secondly because they are the two compulsory level one courses in the BSc (Honours) Information Technology and Computing. So not only will I have started working towards a new degree, but I will also obtain an interim qualification along the way!

Originally I decided to study just M150, but after receiving the course materials the other day, which I must say, after studying 6 OU courses in the past, has the highest quality of course materials so far. I really was impressed when I opened the box delivered to me. Contained inside are 3 DVD’s containing all the software that I would need to complete the course (unfortunately most of it is for Windows users, whereas I’m a Linux user), detailed course outline and guide, a glossary, but most of all 16 high quality glossy booklets with all the course material enclosed.

What more could you ask for? Well if that was not enough, there was also the online resources, which include a series of podcasts, tutorials and student/tutor conferencing. Brilliant.

Looking through the booklets correcting the errata that was emailed to me from the University I did notice however that the content was rather basic. The M150 course is more for beginners than someone at my level, and although the course was a compulsory course as part of the degree, I realised that this course would be very easy for me and I would not learn very much from the course that I did not already know. It was at this point that I started to consider studying the other of the two courses at the same time. But, given that I work full time and have other commitments, would I have the time to study both courses concurrently? Well I have decided to give it a go.

However, the deadline for signing up to the T175 course is today and I have not managed to sign up successfully yet as the online registration is currently down. Fortunately, my office is just round the corner from an OU regional office and maybe I can pop in there on my lunch and sign up.

I’m quite eager to see if the course materials for T175 will be as high quality as M150, but no matter what, these courses will give me something to write about here on here!

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As a professional web developer, the benefits of using a Linux platform for development
have been quite obvious to me for quite some time. Not only is there a vast range of
open source tools at your disposal to help you in the development process, such as IDE’s
and graphics editor’s but the community support for certain distro’s such as Ubuntu
is extraordinarily good.

As a Linux user, like many other I take advantage of the Linux man pages. When I’m unsure
how to use a particular command line tool or command simply typing man <commandname>
will display the manual page for that command.

A few months ago I decided that it would be good for my career if I was to study for the Linux
LPIC-1 (Linux Professional Institute) certification. I have bought several books to help me, however
I thought it would be a nice resource to have either a paper copy (or even a pdf) of the Linux MAN pages.
So far, to my dismay, I have been unsuccessful in locating either format of this handy resource, All I
have been able to find is the software version. There must be a PDF somewhere, I’ll have to keep looking…

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My programmer’s editor of choice for quite a while now has been Zend Studio 5.5, it has many useful tools like built-in function reference and code completion. It allows you to create your own colour schemes (unlike the new Zend Studio 6) and debug code.

As a secondary editor i would use Gedit on linux and Context on Windows. Every now and again i take a look at what editors are available as oftern the editor a developer uses is a matter of personal taste.

Not long ago I came across the open-komodo project, which provides a free multi-platform version of the Komodo IDE as the text editor Komodo Edit, and I love it.

Komodo Edit has dynamic language support for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML, it also supports template languages like RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django.

Komodo Edit has many of the tools that I like about Zend Studio, such as code auto-completion and calltips, multi-language file support (great!), syntax coloring and syntax checking, Vi emulation, Emacs key bindings!

What more could you as from an open source editor? What’s that? you want more? How about firefox like extensability? The open komodo community has a wealth of extensions for the editor from Mootools API to jQuery tools. Check it out, I hope you likeit as much as I do.

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Working within a development team on applications usually requires some sort of version control. Version control software such as the newer Subversion (SVN), and older Concurrent Versions System (CVS) store a version of the developmental code internally in a “repository” and allow as many people as required to “check out” or obtain a copy for themselves. These applications have many uses, but the main uses are the distribution of code, and the subsequent saving of updated code once a developer has finished working on it. All version control software have this functionality. Plus the ability to lock files that are being worked on and  prevent or merge multiple modifications to the same code. In short, they are an indispensable tool for multi-developer applications.

Developers who use Microsoft Windows and need access to an SVN ro CVS repository have the option of using an extremely good, open source GUI client called TortoiseSVN (or TortoiseCVS as required).

TortoiseSVN won the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Tool or Utility for Developers. Using this GUI client means that the user can perform many actions that would require a more in depth knowledge from the command line.

Unix and Linux users do not have the luxury of the TortoiseSVN GUI client to perform actions on a CVS/SVN repository. There are alternatives, such as RapidCVN which is cross platform but I’ve never tried it so can’t comment. Maybe I will at some point.

Whichever Operating system that you use, it’s always useful to be able to get by without a GUI client from the command line. So here’s just a few useful commands…

SVN Checkout

svn co url [destination_directory]

or

svn checkout url [destination_directory]

Ignore a directory

svn propset svn:ignore directory ‘dir_name’

Show status of files and dirs

svn status

Add a file

svn add file_name

Commit

svn commit [file_name] [-m "some comment"]

If you require more, there is a useful resource of commands here.

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