This is a random topic but I figured it may be of interest to anyone with a similar problem.

I got an Asus EEE PC 900 from my friend, and I installed a Ubuntu variant called Easy Peasy.  It lives over at http://www.geteasypeasy.com/

In general, it's quite awesome and I was by and large quite happy with it.  However, the wifi performance was terrible.  It was showing me at like 30% strength in the same room as the wifi router -- even less elsewhere.  It didn't exhibit any of these problems when it had Windows XP on it meer moments before.

So I looked around, and followed a fix that I can't find again -- it's similar to the backport driver fix here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes

It worked a lot better -- now the signal strength is right, but I find it still drops a lot.  My workaround -- ping a local machine.  If you constently ping a local machine it seems to keep the wireless from cutting out!  However, I'm going to try the NDIS solution on the link above just for fun.

(EDIT: The NDIS solution makes it work perfectly!  :) )

I have been working diligently this weekend to migrate my crufty svnserver SVN setup to a more friendly and public http based setup.  I have moved several projects into it and will start linking them into their project pages in short order.

This will allow me to start releasing the various projects I've said I would release (such as this site!).  TinyMVC is going to be the first to get released.  It is complete and just needs a sample / test site along with some documentation.  I don't expect to have the documentation ready to my satisfaction in the near future, but I hope to at least get enough going to make it easy enough to figure out.  It really isn't a very complicated system.

More to come soon!

It has been awhile since I've posted, I know.  I'm not dead yet; far from it.  I've been increadibly busy!  I'd like to announce something new that's going to be released here hopefully in the next few days.

I call it TinyMVC.  Some back story first; Tanabicom was contracted to do a WAP version of a customer's site.  The WAP version of this site was to be really small; only three actual pages.  However, these three pages needed to support reduced HTML, WAP 1.0, and WAP 2.0.  The obvious choice then is a Model View Controller structure.

The usual choice for MVC (for me anyway) has been the Zend Framework.  However, this was such a small site and Zend Framework has a pretty large footprint even if it's reduced to just the things you need.  That, and I was working with a new developer who hadn't worked with Zend Framework -- I had a deadline in a week and I didn't have time for learning curves.

Enter TinyMVC.

In a night, I wrote the first version of TinyMVC.  It is similar to Zend Framework (and someday I'd like to make it more "compatible" with ZF) but it is really basic.  It uses a single controller, multiple view layout and it is designed to work in a sub directory without a rewrite rule. (it will also work in a web root of course, and probably will work with a rewrite rule as well).

It has everything you need to very, very quickly make a simple MVC app with minimal overhead.  The learning curve is minimal because you can actually read through all the code in a couple hours if you wanted to; however I intend to thoroughly document it.  It doesn't come with a lot of components -- things like DB module and the like are up to the user to pick (Use PEAR, Zend, whatever you want).  It isn't made for a team of 20 developrs to make a big application; it's made for one or two guys to fire something small out as fast as possible.

It doesn't seek to abstract away PHP, which means it's not as unit-testible as ZF but TinyMVC is built for speed and ease.  A clean, succinct framework to build upon.  It also means that anyone can jump in and develop with just the extremely well documented www.php.net as their guide.  No need to learn a new thing.

It's by no means a replacement for ZF, it's just an alternative.  It's another tool in the toolbox; you can use that crazy saw with lasers and ten different speeds to slice a piece of paper, but sometimes a pair of scissors is just easier and faster and (almost) as precise.

More to come, soon! (I say that often, but this time I mean it!)

I have finally got my blog software editing and creating journals without me having to go into the MySQL database and manually tweaking it.

It isn't that it has been hard, mind you.  I just haven't had the time to finish it.  Deadlines and such -- never fun.  Anyway.  The one thing left to do with the blog software is to get pagination working, along with "google friendly" pagination so I can make sure all my stuff gets crawled.

At some point, I should work on graceful degredation -- this side won't work very well without javascript.  Fortunately, it's not actually very hard to add it -- however I will still finish what I'm doing and release the site before bothering with it.  Just to get it finally done.

I'm sorry I haven't updated this recently -- unfortunately I have a release date on Monday and therefore have not had a lot of spare time. The spare time I do have, I am usually spending chilling out and taking a break. Pretty rough stuff!

But it's almost over and I will be on my way to finishing more fun projects, like this web site. I am still manually typing in entries into SQL, which requires a great deal of attentiveness to apostraphies. It also means that if I misspell something, I am quite unlikely to try and fix it. So I am also attentive towards avoiding words that I habitually misspell.

Needless to say, my free projects have ground to a halt while a deadline looms. Not for long, though!