I followed this excellent guide for setting up my laptop to dual boot.  I ran into a problem almost immediately while following the instructions to shrink my windows partition.  I had a 120GB HD, all on one partition, with about 20GB used, but could not shrink the volume by more than 10GB.  Huh?  It didn’t take long to find this excellent resource on how to deal with this known issue.  What took a long time was following these instructions, what a hassle.

boot zone fubar

In the end it worked, but not without the use of the free trial version of Perfect Disk 2008 which is actually a very nice program.  Fianlly, I squished windows back down into the correct part of the disk and shrunk it using the aforementioned guide.  I split that sucker 50/50 and went to fetch my Ubuntu install disc.

I have been working a lot recently on setting up my local development environment.  I had a hardware issue that required me to send my laptop in for repair last month.  I decided that upon receiving my machine back I was going to start setting it up from scratch, this is going to be a post about that process.

Some of the reasons I wanted to do this:

1. I want to be in a *nix environment, namely Ubuntu.  With a fresh start I will set up a dual boot system.
2. I needed to seriously unclutter my machine.  I want to start new file management practices and wanted a fresh slate.
3. Vista needed it…  hence #1.
4. I have had an unstable sandbox due to a funky Drupal multi-site setup I was working on and it drove me mad for most the summer, this was because of windows.

While my computer was away I backed up my entire laptop drive to another drive so that I had everything on my home desktop.  I made sure I had my OS install discs that I had previously requested from Dell (everyone with a Dell should call and request install discs of their OS(link), using the backup image on your hard drive is hard to do if you want to format the drive).  Once I received the computer back I installed Vista via the DVD and reformatted the drive.  I did not set up a separate partition at this time as the Ubuntu installer will do that when I install from the live CD(or so I thought).  Once Windows was installed I set about disabling and tweaking Vista to get my settings set up to my preferences.  Then it was off to installing all the applications that I use.

I am going to do a run down here of the apps I installed:

• Firefox.  The single most important application on my computer.
  • Firebug.  The single most important Firefox extension, life changing.
  • MeasureIt.  A great Firefox extension for measuring pixels on the screen.
  • ColorZilla.  A great Firefox extension for selecting colors on the screen.
  • Delicious Bookmarks.  A nice way to create bookmarks for sharing and accessing from anywhere.
• Xampp.  My local server of choice, I recently switched from WAMP.
• Adobe Creative Suite.  Tools of the trade.
  • Dreamweaver. My text editor of choice, supplemented with Subweaver for SVN from the GUI.
  • Photoshop. I use this to slice, dice and resize.
• Tortoise SVN and CVS.  Graphical source control clients that ROCK!
• Thunderbird.  I am a Gmail guy, but for sending and receiving top secret stuff I use Enigmail with GnuPG.
• Launchy.  I am officially addicted to this quick launch tool.
• PuTTy.  A great SSH client.
• PuTTYgen.  RSA and DSA key generation utility I use to make the keys for logging into servers securely.
• Pageant.  SSH authentication agent for PuTTY so that I don’t have to organize my keys.
• Skype.  So I can talk and video chat with people.
• eyeBeam.  A good windows SIP client.
• SequoiaView.  A great tool that shows a visual picture of the data on your hard drive, helps me figure out where all that space went..
• VLC.  The best media player.
• VMware.  Critical tool for debugging, installed the free player with an XP install to get a real IE6 testing browser.
• Safari.  For cross-browser testing.
• Chrome. For cross-browser testing.

Those are the things I installed that relate to web work, or course there are other things like iTunes, but these are the parts that make up my work machine.

Now it was on to actually setting up my sandbox.  Most of this takes place in Dreamweaver.

• First edit->preferences (ctrl U) under code format change indent to 2 spaces as well as Tab size to 2.  If you don’t do this a developer may pick a fight with you.
• Then I like to adjust the code coloring.  This is actually pretty tedious.  If you like you can grab a copy of my color config file here - it is a dark theme.  You can always adjust it in the code coloring tab of the preferences dialog.

My new method for setting up local sites is to use virtual hosts in Apache to create URLs that are like siteName.local in my browser.  This makes it easier for my to not mistake a live site for my local one.  Thanks to Robin I got this down pat- look here for great info.  Of course I also need to enable mod rewrite in the apache httpd.conf file so I can run clean URLs.

Setting up my VMware player was a little tricky.  First I downloaded the player.  Then I went here and grabbed a 4GB virtual hard drive.  After a little fiddling (see comments on that page) I got the player running and changed the screen resolution (see this link).  The whole point of me installing a virtual XP machine is to get IE6 so I can do cross browser testing of me CSS work, so I need to be able to hit my local server on the host while in the guest OS.  This gave me some trouble.  I can hit another local server on another computer on my local network and can connect to the internet fine, but I could not hit the server on the host.  I finally found that if I ping the guest from the host and then try to hit the server it works fine.  Weird.  It works this way consistently now, but I wish I didn’t have that hassle.  That said I absolutely love it.  I have been using IE6 and IE7 on the same machine for a couple years now via emulators and hacks and it does not work well.  Windows does not like having two IE’s around, this is the real deal(even though it is a rotten deal).

Now my windows box is all setup.  Whew.  Vista loves being a new installation and is humming along much better than it was before I reinstalled. All this plus some personal apps took about 40GB.  That seems huge to me.  I have about 70GB left on my drive and I think I am going to give Ubuntu about 50GB of that.  Now it is time to install Ubuntu and begin to learn my new OS- terminal here I come!

This is posted with the Scribefire FireFox plugin.

Whoa, that was easy!  Today my esteemed colleague Kendall pointed out that he had just finally upgraded his site from Wordpress 2.3 to the newest version, 2.6 in this case.  I mentioned that I should do they same to this site and thought out loud how cool it would be if there was a SVN repository I could checkout so upgrading was easier…  “There is!” he said.  Nice!  With the help of great docs here and here I had my site backed up and upgraded to the newest version in less than half an hour.  Now to update a simple svn up and I am in business.  Easy Cheesy.

I just returned from my first Drupal Camp- Drupal Camp Vancouver 2008.

Drupal camp is a place for people who use Drupal to get together and learn, mingle and get to know each other. As a person who works for a virtual company I find that one of the things I miss the most about my previous career was the camaraderie and relationships that develop with coworkers. I think that is why I enjoyed Drupal camp so much. It was great to be around a lot of people who do the same things and all be in the same physical space. There are a lot of super talented Drupaleers in the Northwest and it was fun to learn from them and hear what is on their minds about Drupal and it’s future.

I thought I would just write a quick bit about things I specifically liked about the camp…

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I have begun working on my new site: capitolhillwithkids.com

I like to think of this site as a hyper-localized parent resource, check out the about page.

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One of my favorite things about the new release, 2.5, of Wordpress is the design of the dashboard. I think that it is more intuitive and easier to navigate. One of the new design features is the ability to add your own RSS feeds in the boxes at the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately I think those boxes often are unnecessary and make the dashboard look cluttered. Let’s take a look at how to slim down the page by removing some of the boxes.

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I have moved Stonebergdesign.com over to Wordpress. This decision was made for a number of reasons.

• I want to be able to change content on my site without changing XHTML/CSS every time
• I wanted to practice theming Wordpress(this is my second custom theme)
• I want to make SEO easier

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I made a little tutorial about how to make the switch to Firefox.
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