Eugene asked me today via email how things were going. I figured I should post the response here too so that other people can know what’s up too:
It’s going alright. Low efficiency though since I’m constantly distracted by stuff. Also, since I want to do it the “right way” sometimes it’s a lot slower (as opposed to building it in Rails at the loss of some extensibility and compatibility since I’m trying to make it so that other people can run it on their own server). If it was just an app running on one server with no one else using it, then rails would probably be the best way.
I’m hoping to get a really basic version released (nothing really special) next week so other people can play around with it too. At the same time, I’m going to try to set up the commercial side of it (but not release it to the public yet) so that I can try focusing on security and speed.
But in all, it’s more difficult than I imagined. Most of the time is spent debating what’s the best way to do it and by looking at how other scripts do it.
There are also some setbacks….like these past days, windows suddenly began corrupting my files after each reboot or hibernation for no good reason. Actually, I think it’s this program called RollBack Rx which is supposed to be a data recovery software that runs in the background (yeah, what irony). So I went to uninstall the program, but after I uninstalled it, the program took with it a chunk of core windows files which rendered windows useless.
So I used a Feisty live cd to mount the C drive over samba and used my other computer to copy over files from the windows cd. Unfortunately, that didn’t help at all.
So I went to reinstall windows. But I discovered that my DVD/CD drive suddenly couldn’t read CD-Rs (I’m working with Toshiba to get it exchanged although they want me to send my whole laptop in). My two windows CDs were both CD-Rs (legit versions, might I add).
Finally, I decided to install Feisty since it was a hard-pressed CD (I got it from the Ship-It service) and my CD/DVD drive could read that. Since I don’t use tablet functionality a lot when I’m at home, I figured I could live with Ubuntu for a while until I get my DVD/CD drive fixed.
It’s surprisingly good. It actually set up my digitizer pen out of the box (although right click doesn’t work). Wireless also works out of the box. Video and audio are good (although I had to tweak video a bit). It even tells me that the battery life on the logitech wireless mice is only at 14%!
Well, in truth, it’s not like I didn’t know that Feisty was good. Three of Avery’s computers run Ubuntu so I had quite some experience with it. But compared to two years ago when I tried out Ubuntu, Feisty does very good hardware detection. So I’ll probably be using Ubuntu for a while until I can get windows back on (mainly for MS OneNote).