Kristof.Willen.be

Netbooks are laptops done right. I had no idea how true this was before I actually bought a netbook myself. While only being slightly larger than a DVD-cover, my eeePC-900 was so portable, I've taken it with me around the world, both for work and holiday trips. My eeePC has been indeed so successful, it has completely wiped out my need for my laptop, which has been mostly gathering dust since the netbook purchase.

However, a (first generation) netbook still has some serious disadvantages :

• disk is mostly a combination of SSD and SD, and very limited in space.
• the keyboard is way too small to type comfortably
• the battery is very limited in life expectancy.

My new netbook had to overcome those three limitations. Not a big deal, since most current netbooks deal with this already. In addition, I wanted a minimum of 2GB RAM and a CPU with virtualization possibilities. As I was very happy with the eeePC line, I almost opted for a eeePC-1201HA, which sports the Z520 CPU, which had Intel-V support. Unfortunately, the netbook got slaughtered in every review because of its slow performance.

My final choice was the Samsung N220 Premium Plus, a N450 based laptop with 2GB RAM and a 350GB hard disk. As the laptop is red, I feared a bit for too much of hardware bling, but the color is nicely darkish red, so it doesn't scream out in a meeting room. So far, I've been really happy with the netbook itself. The following are only (very) minor annoyances, but indeed are things that could have been better :

• If some netbook manufacturer brands a netbook with a Premium label, I expect the least they can do, is to include a pouch with it. As a netbook gets carried along everywhere, you want a cover for it to avoid excessive scratching, unless it is not made in plastic. No pouch with my edition, though I've heard that latest Samsung netbooks come again with this addition.
• The Power button comes in some sort of a slide button, which is on the front of the netbook. A true button would have been better, and would have been better if been protected by the lid.
• If the lid is closed, it is very hard to see if the netbook has been suspended, as the LEDs are hidden by the lid itself.

What is exellent is that netbook is completely silent : the hard disk is perfectly mute, and the fan makes only a slight noise under high stress. The netbook comes with Windows 7 Home Premium Edition, which starts its installation when you power on for the first time. The good thing is that it lets you choose the partitioning, so the hard disk is split by default into 3 partitions :

• first partition carries the Windows7 OS
• the second partition is a 14GB restore partition
• the third is an empty D-drive, which can be used for data & installed programs.

In a next post, I'll describe what tweaks were necessary to install & use a 64bits Ubuntu on the 3rd partition.

Squidspot, a web and print design group, has created a table representing a list of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today, in a format we are all so familiar with – the Periodic Table.

Looks like Google is serious about Android : it's not only meant for your mobile, cause Google plans Android-based netbooks by 2010.

I discovered the taxonomy_image_node_display module, where a site admin can specify through the admin menu of the taxonomy_image module if he wants to display taxonomy images while displaying a node. This results in Slashdot like appearance, without having to manually modify the theme files. This is a great add-on for people who want to tweak the layout of their Drupal powered sites, but who aren't php professionals : Drupal themeing still remains a technical domain.

However, the image is specified as

< img src=...>

, resulting in an image, followed by a line break, and then the node text. This results in many whitespaces in the page, certainly if the used taxonomy images are starting to get a little big. It would be nice if an alignment attribute is added, (even better yet, though the taxonomy_image module settings menu), resulting in code like

< img src=... align=left >

(or align=right for that matter).

So I entered a feature request for this module, but that got rejected, because the module provides a div wrapper for image display. Tried that, but for some reason I never got the css working. So I digged into the code, and found a way of doing this, by adding an extra tag to the taxonomy_image_display API :

      $my_attrs = array(
        'width' => $current->width,
        'height' => $current->height,
        'align' => "right",
        );

As you can see, taxonomy_image behaves cleanly again with this code snippet.

I've just upgraded the site to Drupal6. Seems that there is already a Drupal 6.1 security release, so you might upgrade too. Or you might have seen the upgrade notice, cause Drupal now alerts the admin in case of an available upgrade (as it is the case in eg Pivot).

The upgrade self was quite fast & very user-friendly, I just had one issue where after the upgrade is performed, I was invited to go to the Administration pages, but only to find a message that the site was under maintenance. Going to http://mysite/?q=user offered me a login window again.

Drupal 6 seems quite like version 5, but the large part of the modifications is under the hood. I had to remove some modules as the 6-compatible modules are not yet all available. Views is still in experimental stage, so I had to disable the Calendar on the right frame. Same thing for the spam module, but image based CAPTCHA is doing a great job. I still need to check the needed modifications in the theme files for the taxonomy_image module, but that's for later. The Search function may give unpredictable results, as this site is slowly being reindexed, but I think everything will be fine after some hours.