Berry Langerak

I’m a VIM kinda guy. I like love VIM for everything it is. I write e-mails in VIM, I write presentations and blogposts in VIM, I write todo-lists in VIM and I also write my software using VIM. VIM does have downsides in that respect though, and those downsides are well-known. For starters, VIM doesn’t have smart, context-aware auto-completion. I write a heck of a lot of classes and interfaces, and it’s not always easy to keep track of the names of classes and methods. I’ve always lived with that, as VIM has a lot of upsides as well: I can write and manipulate text in VIM faster than most people can manipulate text in any other editor I’ve seen. It’s also highly customizable, so if there’s anything VIM doesn’t do, I make it do that anyway.

Netbeans is a new kid in town of IDE’s suitable for PHP. In the past, I’ve used Eclipse for PHP development, but that always felt slow and too big for writing PHP. I’ve used the first beta of Netbeans for PHP, but that had issues with quotes, linefeeds and other stuff so I ditched it within half an hour. It seems that Netbeans got a lot better since that first beta, so I figured I should give it another try to see if it can fulfill my (absurdly high) demands when it comes to writing code. I had to install it first, obviously.

Installing Netbeans on Ubuntu really is easy enough, if you have an understanding of how Ubuntu works. For the people who don’t, I’ve kept a short log of how I’ve installed it, hopefully someone will benefit from this. There are a few different methods of installing Netbeans in Ubuntu, which all have there up- and downsides. The way of installing I chose has the downside of being slightly more complex, but you get the last version anyway.

The first, and probably easiest way of installing Netbeans on Ubuntu, is to download and install the Java JDK and Netbeans bundle. To be fair, I’ve never tried it and it seems easy enough, but I’m not sure if you’ll always have the latest version of Netbeans in the bundle. At this time, it seems it does indeed include the latest version.

The second easy way to install Netbeans, is using Ubuntu’s software distribution: simply typing “sudo apt-get install netbeans-ide” will install Netbeans, including all of it’s dependencies. Again, there is the downside that you may not have the most current version in the distribution channels.

The third way, slightly more complicated, ensures you have the latest version of Netbeans installed. Open a terminal and type “which java”. If the command returns a response, you have Java, so you can skip the following. If it doesn’t return anything, Java SDK is not installed on your system, so you have to install it. Luckily, that is easy enough: type “sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jdk”, and agree to the license. To prepare you: the download is 160Mb, but that shouldn’t be a problem in this day and age.

After installing Java, it’s time to download the Netbeans installer from the Netbeans download page. I write PHP mostly, so the PHP version seems to be the most decent option. Start the download and save it to a location of your choice. If you’re done downloading, go back to the terminal and cd into the directory you’ve just saved the installer to. Execute the following commands, and enjoy while Netbeans presents you with an installation wizard:

chmod +x netbeans* && ./netbeans-*

That’s it, you’re done. Netbeans should now have an icon on your desktop. Start the application, and start writing code. I’ll give Netbeans an honest chance for about a month and will give an update of it later. Obviously, I won’t abandon VIM for anything but writing code.

I’ve upgraded my Ubuntu install from 9.04 to 9.10, even though version 10.04 seems to be on the way. After the upgrade though, it seemed my preferred resolution of 1440×900 wasn’t available any longer. As the title states, I have an Acer Aspire One 751 which I’ve been using for quite a while and am quite happy about. Before the upgrade, I installed some drivers to accommodate the 1440×900 resolution, but I couldn’t remember which one. I fixed it, eventually.

The Acer Aspire One 751 packs an integrated Intel GMA 500 video card, and it appeared it needs the Poulsbo driver to operate decently. On the Ubuntu Wiki, I found a page describing how to install it for Ubuntu 10.04. To make this blog post a bit more complete, here’s what I did: first of all, open a Terminal screen if you didn’t have one open already. Type (or copy and paste) the following:

wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1338581/Gma500/scripts/poulsbo.sh \
&& sh ./poulsbo.sh

After that I rebooted the netbook and chose a recovery shell, which gave me a few options to choose from. I then picked to boot dpkg, which eventually led me to a shell. The only command I issued were the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure psb-kernel-source && reboot

Type in your password, let the netbook rattle and hum a little and by the time it rebooted, you should be seeing the Ubuntu login screen with 1440×900. It did in my case anyway

Yesterday afternoon, I was called by my mother, requesting me to go home for the day and take care of our Felis catus, Kiki. She told me that our cat had started labour, and that the kittens might appear every minute. After a quick drive home from the office, I arrived at home to see our cat interestingly calm and simply stretching out on the floor. I started giving a live broadcast on IRC, but nothing ever happened before I left to go out for dinner.

When I came back from dinner though, the contractions had started and not before long, a little red-ish kitten was lying on the floor, and some disgusting ritual started. Anyhow, when the new kitten was kind of clean, breathing and looking for a nipple, contractions started again and another kitten popped out, a black one, this time. After cleaning that kitten and everything that accompanied her in the womb, it became silent for a while. Ten minutes later, the contractions started again, and yet another black kitten appeared.

Figuring that’d be it, I left to have a good night at my local pub, as there was a live band (Enrico Crivellaro, a guitar and blues-legend). Later that night, when I came back home (don’t worry, the cats weren’t alone), the score had remained on three, but there was a nice surprise anyway: the first black one wasn’t actually completely black, but it has got stripes on it.

Anyway, pictures are here, the eewww-pictures are in the eewww directory, and some old pictures of the happy mom are in the mama directory. Have fun.

PS: Some of the pictures suck, I know, but it’s not like you can tell a kitten to stay put and stop moving (-: