I once posted something about ‘why the fuss about the iPhone‘ - I still don’t get it.

We’re a few months away from having the thing released here, but in the mean time there’s the iPod Touch which is most of the iPhone without the phone. Since the bit I’m interested in is the web browser and the Internet features - it’s ideal so I got one for the team for R&D.

I pointed it at one of the sites I’d optimised for mobile devices following recognised best practice (e.g. Luca Passani’s Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web) and was not hugely surprised that it rendered the desktop version as my mobile detection didn’t pick up the User Agent.

A quick tweak to get it to spot that ‘iPod’ is a mobile device and … Safari throws an error.

It turns out that Safari Mobile doesn’t support xhtml-mp!

So to get an iPhone friendly version of a site you can’t use your mobile version and keep it xhtml-mp. I see Facebook have a mobile version using xhtml-mp, and a special iphone version without a doctype.

Do I feel a return to the bad old days of browser sniffing and multiple versions of sites? Oh dear!

Why do Apple always have to be different?

I’ve used Joomla! a few times in the past to deliver community based sites that need a CMS but can’t justify having huge amounts of time spent on developing the site. It’s taken a few goes, getting more comfortable every time (I’m too lazy to RTFM) but I might be starting to get it.

As with many things on the web, it’s not quite like anything else and there’s a critical mass of knowledge you have to accumulate before you really understand what’s going on and make good decisions.

I’ve been asked to help out with a site for a school - in theory Joomla! should be ideal.

My biggest challenge is deciding when to use static content and when to use the section/category com_content or whatever-it’s called. Ideal for blogging, news stories etc., but not so good for more brochureware type sites.

And then there’s the menu (navigation) - there seems to be a very tenuous link between the menu and the content - often you have to duplicate a content object with a menu item, then sort it, and if you want to change the type of object a menu item links to (Link - category item for instance) or the specific object - you have to delete it and make a new one.

It’s also a shame that the core user functionality can’t restrict users to specific areas of the site - you can’t have one group edit one area and another group manage a different one.

Anyway, I’m sure there are mods and bots that can address this, but I’ve been too lazy to find them - I’m managing to get it doing what I want now.

Flushed with my success at home with Ubuntu, and needing a clean reliable SVN/Trac install at work, taking courage in both hands I go to install Ubuntu on a brand spanking new Dell Dual Core Xeon beasty.

Using an install CD that had been previously (recently) used by our sys admin - reportedly Fiesty Fawn - off I went. All seemed to go well, apart from a long pause at the php/MySQL install stage, until I came to put OpenSSH on - I swear blind when I was doing it at home the package was openssh, but this machine wasn’t recognising it. Onwards - install ssh seemed to work and I got shell access.

Further on and I’ve got svn working, not yet authenticating with LDAP but that’s not a show stopper yet, but it is when apt-get install trac says there a corruption in a package index or something. A fair amount of updating, upgrading and googling doesn’t do anything until eventually I give up.

Two options - use the installer CD from home which was working well for me, or download the spangly Giggling Goat. What the hell, if it doesn’t work I can always go back to plan A…

So I download it, burn it, reboot the machine and start the process again - and it sails through.

The only discernable differences so far (other than the install was by far the smoothest Linux install ever!) are the addition of Mail, Database, Samba, OpenSSH and a couple of others I can’t remember in the choices for pre-installed packages, and it prompts for a MySQL root password.

Anyway, I’m about to try putting svn and trac on this virgin Giggly Goose machine so fingers crossed!

Postscript - everything else went well - apart from a tiny bit of fun as the way Apache config was split into smaller files - it’s very neat with all the mods_available and mods_enabled linking to them, but if you’ve not seen it before it’s a tad confusing. In any case, Gutsy Gibbon rocks!

I’ve been off on holiday for almost two weeks now - last week was ‘real’ holiday - totally disconnected. I didn’t even have my phone on! This week I had to succumb and have been tinkering.

I’ve got some plans coming up that need me to have my Linux skills a bit more polished than they are currently so I thought I’d take the opportunity of some playtime to get back in practice.I dug out my various old boxes to see if I could get one or two working, and then started thinking about what flavour Linux to go for.

Historically, I’ve always used whatever I’ve been using in production environments. Firstly FreeBSD many (many) moons ago when I was hosted with Donhost, more recently Red Hat Fedora as most boxes I look after are with Rackspace (love them!) and run Red Hat ES3. But neither distro has really clicked with me as they’re both a bit of a pain.

In my own tinkerings I got heavily into Debian based distros when I was trying to set up a wireless network mesh before it was announced that my village would get Broadband in a sensible period of time (hence all the boxes I have kicking around) and I’ve blogged previously about trials with Gentoo. This time, I thought I’d give Ubuntu a go and so downloaded the 7.04 Server CD (I thought support would be better than Gutsy Gibbon) .

I’ve got two systems installed fine - one to play with as a dev box and one as something more stable. I want another one as I want to play with clustering, but I’m running out of decent spec hardware - I’m currently fighting to install on a K6-2 machine with 96MB RAM (all I can scrounge!) but it keeps constantly rebooting after the install but I know why - I’m writing this while I wait for ’sudo apt-get install linux-image-386′ to finish whirring. [Postscript - can't do this with only 96MB RAM - but 128MB is enough! Oh, I wish I knew where all those SIMMs I'd been keeping are!]

What else is new - thanks to Mat’s suggestion in a comment on an earlier posting I tried installing Xubuntu on a retired laptop, but I fear the spec is a bit too lowly - again I can only scrape 96MB of RAM together and even trying to install off the Alternate CD it ends up stalling. I did get a command line install running (took a couple of hours to install!) but it’s not much fun. Back to Win Me methinks.

And one of the reasons for all this - my realisation that as good as the NSLU2 might be for acting as a backup filesystem, it’s not up to much for network services - it’s sooooo slooooow!

Anyway, I can see why many people who’s opinion I trust rave about Ubuntu - it’s slick, straightforward, and … works!

I’ve lived in Norfolk most of my life, and in North Norfolk for the last 10 years. So why is it that I’ve only just had my first real experience of the Norfolk Broads?

Yes I’ve been on a couple of boat trips from Norwich, and in my hazy memory I recall an 18th birthday party held on a Wherry out of Wroxham, but I’ve no real appreciation of the Broads and why so many people come here on holiday. I do know that it’s difficult to get from A to B by road sometimes if there’s a river in the way, and there are big chunks of the region I’ve never been to because there’s no useful through route (by road)

I needed a break, big time, and really fancied the idea of a boating holiday - a good reason to do nothing, with a bit of changing scenery. Peace, relaxation, and a great chance to unwind. I did quite fancy the idea of a canal holiday, but Mellie felt more comfortable being closer to home so we settled for a week on the Broads.Last Saturday, we joined the throngs at Richardson’s Boat Yard at Stalham Staithe to collect our cruiser and get our quick bit of tuition. ‘How hard can it be’ I thought? Well it wasn’t rocket science, but it did take a bit of getting used to.The boat wasn’t keen to go in a straight line, and didn’t hardly steer at all going backwards, and visibility behind was very poor it made mooring etc.quite ‘exciting’.

Apart from one day that rained heavily almost constantly we were very fortunate with the weather. Pootling along was indeed very relaxing, with plenty to look at - I was pleasantly surprised how much variety there is along the Broads - every section has its own personality. We deciding against trying to cross Breydon Water our first time out so were restricted to the Northern Broads, and given the high waters we couldn’t get through Wayford, Potter Heigham or Wroxham bridges further reducing the area we could investigate, but that still left an awful lot to see and do, and I think we had a fair stab at doing as much as we could. Neither the dog or the wife were perhaps quite as enamoured as I was with the whole experience, but they both seemed to enjoy bits of it - some wonderful walks, and some stunning scenery.

Living on a boat I imagine is much like caravanning (no exeperience of that either, but I don’t feel an urge to rectify the situation) in that you’re in relatively cramped environment with limited comforts and amenities. It’s all a bit of a fiddle, especially if you’re 6′6″ in a boat that was onviously not desined for six footers - peeing standing up is a bit of a challenge, and having a shower almost an impossibility. Waking up in the morning and everything is cold and damp … well actually I really enjoyed it - brought back memories of camping in the garden when we were kids.

We were worried about morring, and had it not been for the dog it would have been no problem at all, but having to find somewhere to stop with a bit of a path to walk along limited things a degree - you couldn’t just drop a mudweight in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere were we unable to moor, but some popular locations e.g. Neatishead and Horning got a bit ‘interesting’. If you didn’t want pubs etc, there were some fantastic moorings out in the middle of nowhere.

All in all a toally enjoyable week, and I’m hoping that we will do it again some time. More photos on Flickr

But it does make you appreciate the comforts of home.