Rui CarmoUntil I can get my iBook fixed, I'm trying to get a minimal work environment going on my aging Toshiba 8100, and catching up on non-Mac stuff.
The experience is humbling, since the only Linux this laptop ever ran at what I would consider a decent pace was Fedora Core 1. And since I can't wait until Core 4 comes out (it was supposed to be tomorrow, but it's been delayed a week), I decided to try something different and went with Xfld, which is the Xfce live demo.
It turned out to be a reasonable choice: it installed with minimal fuss, and despite some Wi-Fi tussles and the usual lack of power management, I am getting to like Xfce. The "Agualemon" theme can be tweaked to use the same window widget placement as Mac OS X (i.e., on the top left corner), and the overall look is clean and efficient (except the hideous default filemanager, which looks like an usability nightmare).
Still, since I'm mostly using the laptop as a wireless display (thanks to X, VNC and Remote Desktop), it's good (and just about fast) enough.
Having Another Slice
On the development front, since my Python setup was mostly in my iBook and I'd rather wait until I'm sure about being able to bring back the hard disk before trying to re-write "missing" code, I'm now taking a closer look at Cake, the Rails-like PHP framework.
In case you've been living under a rock, it now has Ajax support, which is being merged into its Subversion trunk. Plus, at least on first glance, it feels uncannily like my own coding style.
Things started off a bit badly (the default setup assumes you have mod_rewrite and that you're running off the site root, which are two things I never do unless I absolutely have to), but it looks like something I can get into easily.
After all, I've written a lot of structured PHP code, and nearly all of the stuff I've done fits the MVC pattern quite nicely...