my so-called blog (redux)

So I made the jump back to a regular desktop at home today. The difference in screen brightness between my actual monitor and the screen on my old TiBook was getting to me so I slapped Slackware Linux on my Athlon and set it up. I now have another computer without any music on it. I spent a good hour fucking around with sound on it so I can listen to something (at least Rhythmbox has some decent net radio stuff in it.. btw, Now It’s Overhead is good and indie). All the menu text and stuff is Too Big. Evolution doesn’t connect to my fricking Exchange server at work. But I’ll get used to it. If it keeps working tomorrow. On the plus side, XFCE is nice. Liking that better than I like Gnome or KDE. X did at least kinda figure out that I had 2 monitors (to be fair I added the 2nd after the fact - Slackware’s xf86setup is the way to go there).

In other news, at the recommendation of a friend I started checking out Ferret/Gerwin for doing entity relationship diagrams. Gerwin lets you graphically lay out the database, then make relationships. It’ll spit out a SQL script in SQL92 format or PostgreSQL-specific or MySQL-specific formats. It’s handy and gets all the FK stuff done easily and amazingly is more stable than trying to deal with phpMyAdmin (which I think is getting too “smart” with the Web features for its own good) or MySQL Administrator (which only really works right on windows). It’s a little rough around the edges - there’s no provision for setting random fields to not null, for example, and MySQL auto increment fields I have to do by hand - but even those minor niggling points are, well, minor.

Also, Qcodo’s 0.2 preview beta came out today. The new examples include a nice bit of AJAXy goodness, and you seem to get it For Free(tm) when you use the Qforms thing it comes with. Looking forward to using that more now that I’m a bit more comfortable with the framework.

Finally - good luck to Will on his move to California!