Technology

Where did all the Linux netbooks go?

Adam Williamson asks the question after doing a bit of research across several major vendors and online shops.

where the hell did all the Linux netbooks go? In 2007 you couldn’t buy a netbook with Windows; in 2008 to 2009 you could still walk into a big box store just about anywhere and pick from a few with Linux; now, you can buy one from one store in England with an Android dual boot, one from a hidden page on Ubuntu’s site with an inferior configuration to its equally-priced Windows equivalent, and one from a very well hidden bit of HP’s site with a $132 premium over its identically-specified Windows equivalent.

I am not a big expert in this matter, but I tend to agree with some of his conclusions:

the cynical side of me can come up with a lot of explanations as to where all those pre-loads went, and all of them involve large amounts of money going out of Microsoft bank accounts

And I think that’s pretty reasonable. After the netbook market is different from the desktop one. In the desktop world, Linux has a number of ongoing problems, such as office applications, games, and so on and so forth. But most netbooks aren’t powerful enough to run those applications. Their primary use is of a simple Internet device – browsing the web, reading email, chatting, etc. And for this purpose, the operating system is pretty much irrelevant. Most of these tasks are done in the browser. And browser-wise Linux is rich – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and more.

So, how come all these netbooks are now selling with Windows and not Linux. It can’t be just Microsoft Internet Explorer. After all, most end users don’t even know what the browser is. There must be another reason. And probably it’s not a technical reason. And as Adam says, it must be some of those reasons that involve large amounts of money going out of Microsoft bank accounts.

If you have any other ideas, please do share via comments.

Shell keyboard shortcuts

I came across a very useful post with the listing of many shell keyboard shortcuts. The article covers a mix of bash, csh, zsh, and Cisco shell keyboard shortcuts. The article is in Russian, but I think it will be helpful for more people, so I took the liberty to translate it. Continue reading for the translation.

Continue reading Shell keyboard shortcuts

AgentPress – WordPress theme for real estate websites

Some time ago I mentioned StayPress plugin for WordPress, for those people who need such functionality on their real estate web sites. Today I have something else to talk about – AgentPress theme for WordPress designed and implemented by awesome people at StudioPress (too much Press in this sentense, isn’t it?).

AgentPress is a commercial theme, but at a reasonable price of $99.95 USD. StudioPress themes are built on top of their own Genesis theme framework, which provides a nice separation of code into a parent and child themes. Child themes are small and manageable. Genesis, by the way, is included with your AgentPress theme purchase.

What I liked about AgentPress theme was that it doesn’t only provide the design for a real estates website, but also an administration interface to manage the properties. It uses standard WordPress posts for properties, with some additional fields. You can control which fields you want to have and in which order. There is a way to have both public and private fields, in case you don’t want to display everything. It’s also easy to expand the functionality using the WordPress categories and tags.

The front page of AgentPress theme is awesome. You have options to provide navigation either via pages or categories or both. There is a nice looking slider with selected properties. There are featured properties. And you can even have featured articles there as well. AgentPress theme supports multi-agent web sites, but I haven’t tried it, so I won’t say much about it. There is a simplistic property search, which is good enough if you have up to a hundred properties or so. The theme has a number of widget areas, so it is pretty easy to control what goes where.

I tried the theme before a much improved WordPress 3.0 came out. So I hope StudioPress will update this theme to utilize a number of the new features in WordPress, such as customizable menus and custom post types. If they do, it will be much easier to extend the theme to your liking, with, for example, advanced search. You can do things now as well, but some of them are no trivial.

Overall, if you are looking for a solution to a real estates website, I suggest you have a closer look at AgentPress theme. There are plenty of options in both Genesis framework and in the theme itself. It does the job and it takes seconds to setup. At least you can buy yourself some time to build a more customized solution.

Convert WordPress tag to existing category

By now most people have figured out what is the difference between categories and tags, and which ones to use where. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the problems are over. Once in a while there is a need to convert from one to another.

WordPress provides the tool to convert from categories to tags. But I needed something for the reverse process. In fact, I had a slightly more complicated situation – I already had both a tag and category with exactly the same name, and a whole lot of posts which were tagged, or categorized, or both. Messy! I was looking for a quick way to add all posts tagged with specific tag to the category with the same name. Once that is done, I could easily delete the tag. After a few Google searches, nothing straight-forward came up, so I decided to not waste anymore time and wrote my own little script.

Below are the pros and cons of my approach.

Pros:

Standalone script, not a WordPress plugin. It is not utilizing any of the WordPress configuration or functionality, but raw PHP and direct connection to the database. You can do a dump of your database, restore it on a totally different machine and play with this script until you are sure you are getting the expected results. No worries about screwing up the live database.
Requires both the tag and the category to be present. It will not proceed unless it will find both.
Safe. While there is no undo for the effects of the script, it still works pretty safe. Nothing is ever deleted or updated in the database. Only the new records are added – for posts to appear under the selected category. Nothing else!

Cons:

Standalone script, not a WordPress plugin. It is not utilizing any of the WordPress configuration or functionality. You will have to specify your database credentials by editing the script. You will also might need to change SQL queries to reflect your WordPress tables prefix.
Runs from the command line. If you don’t have access to or don’t know how to use the command line – tough luck!
Code quality. I wrote this as a very quick and dirty solution to my problem. It is not intended to be executed frequently. Neither it is not intended to be executed by someone other than myself. Yeah, I know, this will probably change, but I don’t care at this stage.

Now, you’ve been warned, so I won’t be holding you off from the source code any longer.

Continue reading Convert WordPress tag to existing category

On Linux philosophy

Here is a brilliant passage from an article “Too Smart for Git“:

Git follows Linux’s philosophy of refusing to protect you from yourself. Much like Linux, Git will sit back and watch you f*ck your sh*t right up, and then laugh at you as you try to get your world back to a state where up is up and down is down. As far as source control goes, not a lot of people are used to this kind of free love.

Excellent!