Upgrading Dell Mini to Ubuntu 8.10 + Netbook Remix

Since I want to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 and install the Netbook Remix, the first hurdle to overcome was the lack of a built-in optical. The folks at the Ubuntu Mini blog have a great post about upgrading the mini to Ubuntu 8.10 and provide details on installing Ubuntu from a USB Drive.

Unfortunatley, their instructions on using the built-in "Create a USB startup disk" resulted in a "Missing Operating System" error when trying to boot from the USB Drive. I think the USB Drive I bought was subject to this error. However, after a bit of searching, I came across the most excellent UNetBootin.

UNetBootin is not is the official Ubuntu repositories but the instructions on the site are easy to follow. In order to get UNetBootin to work I had to use synaptic to install the p7zip-full package. Other than that, the instructions on the site worked as expected and I ended up with a bootable USB Drive in minutes. And as an added bonus, I didn't have to fix the USB mounting problem after install.

I neglected to disable compiz in Preferences > Appearance > Visual Affects so when it came time to installing the Netbook Remix packages, the display was acting really wonky. Disabling Visual Affects after the fact made everything work fine but I would still recommend disabling them in advance. If the lack of visual affects is a turn-off, then you'll be pleasantly surprised with the nice visuals the Netbook Remix employs.

Dell Inspiron Mini Has Arrived

The Dell Inspiron Mini I ordered back in mid-September (over 2 months ago) finally arrived. The wait time was atrocious and I don't really believe Dell's excuse about a global shortage of components causing the delay (other orders for the mini were still shipping much faster) but its water under the bridge. Plus I can vent in the customer satisfaction survey they sent me.

The size of the unit surprised me. Since it has a higher resolution display than the original Eee PC I played with about a year ago, I assumed the mini would be a little larger too. Not so, the mini is roughly the same size. The track pad is much easier to use, however, and the keyboard isn't nearly as bad as reviews make it out to be (but I haven't tried out every netbook either).

The next step is upgrade from Dell's version of the Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10 and install the Netbook Remix packages. More posts on this to come.

Nice JavaScript Animation

I just popped over to Ubuntu's site to download the Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) and saw a very well produced animation made entirely out of JavaScript. I'm not at all surprised to see that Flash was snubbed (given that Ubuntu is Open Source) but was impressed with the smoothness and quality of the animation.

Nicely done!

Enumerating Objects in JavaScript

Enumerating through objects is something I only occassionally do in JavaScript, but when it does come up, I always find it a bit unintuitive. Here's some sample code for the future me that is faced with this task again:

var dataObject = {
    foo: "bar",
    one: "fish",
    hello: "world"
};

var key;
for (key in dataObject)
{
    document.write("Key: " + key ", Value: " + dataObject[key]);
    document.write("\n");
}

This code will produce the following lines:

Key: foo, Value: bar
Key: one, Value: fish
Key: hello, Value: world

Victoria Open Web

The Victoria Open Ajax & Web 2.0 group held its first hack night earlier this month. Not a bad start and we figured out how to proceed with this loosely coupled group. In November we will be having another hack night and tackling Greasemonkey scripts. Hopefully we'll actually write some code and learn a bit at the same time. Meeting details coming soon-ish.

What is the purpose of the group? I suppose that is different for each member, but my main goals are to:

• Expose myself to new technologies and techniques
• Meet other Web nerds in Victoria

Also, since some participants are not Facebook users, we decided to use Google Groups instead. You can find us on google at, Victoria Open Web. The group is public so feel free to sign up.

Why Lenient Browsers are Evil

Evil might be a strong word, but it accurately conveys my frustration with web browsers and how their overly forgiving parsing rules can lead to a lot of wasted time.

The particular browser leniency I am talking about is the auto-insertion of the <tbody> element into an HTML table. Given that I try to use semantic markup whenever possible, I rarely use tables and therefore my knowledge of table markup goes back to pre-web 2.0 to when every part of a page resided in a table cell. At that time, table markup typically looked like:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0">
  <tr>
    <td>Foo</td>
    <td>Bar</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Yes, this is really simple and in reality would contain a table within table within table and nasty shims, but I think you get the point. However, what isn't apparent from this markup (and you are excused from forgetting) is that this is an invalid table because of the missing <tbody> tags around the table row. Instead of breaking the page though, the browser will just auto-insert the missing tags into its internal version of the page (a.k.a the DOM).

This doesn't seem all that evil yet and really just makes writing the HTML easier. However, fast forward this browser trait to the world of Ajax and manipulating the DOM and it becomes rather annoying. For example, take the same table and add some ids:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" id="parent">
  <tr id="child">
    <td>Foo</td>
    <td>Bar</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Then run some simple JavaScript to delete the table row:

var parent = document.getElementById("parent");
var child = document.getElementById("child");
parent.removeChild(child);

And boom! This doesn't work because the child element is not a child of the <table> element, but of the magically inserted <tbody> element. The DOM would actually look like this:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" id="parent">
  <tbody>
    <tr id="child">
      <td>Foo</td>
      <td>Bar</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

The terrible thing is you would not know this unless you used a tool like Firebug to inspect the DOM and see that the browser inserted the <tbody> tag to "help" you.

Victoria Open Ajax & Web 2.0 Developers

A new group of geeks is forming in Victoria known as the Victoria Open Ajax & Web 2.0 Developers. For some time now, there has been a Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 Developers group that would participate in regular "Hackathons" and organize other events for learning and information sharing. Being based in Victoria makes it difficult to participate in these events, but it turns out there are enough like-minded people here to create our own group.

The Victoria group is just getting started and we're using Facebook to get the word out. If you are interested, feel free to join the Victoria Open Ajax & Web 2.0 Developers group on Facebook and find out about soon-to-be-scheduled events.

Netbook Blogs

Netbook is the latest term for the growing variety of small and inexpensive notebook computers that are taking the computer industry by storm. Naturally, as a web developer that beleives Web Applications will be the most common type of application a computer user interacts with, I'm interested in these gadgets too. So much so that I wanted to share two blogs that cover the industry and its products quite well:

• Liliputing 
• EeePC.net (Not just about the eee pc)
  

Currently, I'm considering the new Dell Inspiron Mini as it has most of the features I want and looks sharp too. One feature that none of the current Netbooks have is a rotating screen (tablet style, like the OLPC). To me this seems like an obvious feature as these small machines could then double as ebook readers. Personally, I would pay an additional $50.00 to $100.00 for this features.

Update: Naturally, a day after lamenting over the lack of a tablet mode in in Netbooks, Intel makes shows-off the Classmate PC Tablet.