I installed Mandriva Linux on an extra drive I put into my big server machine. Could not get the US Robotics wireless card to fly at all. Found some stuff on source forge but it didn’t work for me (needed kernel source to build it – way too hard).
Went through the list of supported devices and bought an 11a one from ebay. Failed the idiot test, it was a mini PCI card for a laptop. Went through the list of supported devices on the Mandriva website. All bar the USB ones were laptop gear.
Looked at getting a Siemens thingy but the only people on ebay that had ‘em were in Germany and they don’t seem to use paypal. I like paypal because I can get my credit card company to refund me if there are any problems. Bank transfers to a German bank? No thanks.
Got bored with this card stuff and bought a D-Link 11g access point with switch. Nice piece of kit with a web-based interface to control it.
Several hours later I found the right combination of things for the USR Access Point (which has been demoted to a client) and everything works. I am typing this blog on Mozzila on the linux environment. Allegedly I can make this 11g with a firmware upgrade according to their website.
All I need to do now is get the games installed and Jonathan will be happy and so will I.
Then sell off the USR stuff (which works very well indeed on XP).
This will then put me in a position where I can get Oracle Portal working on a supported platform (as in the LDAP and everything else). I can then offer my services to people who want portlets writing, Java or PL/SQL, I don’t care.
PHP
I’m on holiday for a couple of weeks and we have decided not to go away as part of an economy drive. Been working on my PHP project and it’s coming on pretty well. It amazes me how much faster this is than Oracle or any of the million Java frameworks. I think it’s a function of Java being general-purpose, whereas PHP is designed for building web-based stuff from the beginning.
I’m using the object model a lot, mainly to promote reuse. However you can then put a page together that just uses the objects without having to create a class, then go through a steaming pile of XML config files to make sure it all works, then deploy it. I can develop from the command line and only use the browser when I need to check look and feel. I recon it’s 10 times faster and the learning curve is very shallow, at least if you know Java reasonably well.
I will need to create some kind of error message management system so that translation is easy. But I mean, that’s very trivial and then write some python to do a bulk edit (or just a VIM macro).