ubuntu, it just works

had a play with booting ubuntu from the cd last night. went really well, everything i tried just worked. only issue was american keyboard and the brightness on my laptop screen was set to "burn the fuckers eyes out" tried rdcing to my work pc (windows xp) and that worked fine, although oddly all the l's were converted to j's (jog in rather than login for example) bit weird but still useable.

the original reason i started looking at ubuntu was after readin a couple of articles about amazons elastic cloud (ec3) web services where you can provision linux servers via a webservice. this got my mind racing about possible applications that could be run, but since (at the mo) its only linux based it got me thinking about learning how to use/administrate linux. A while back i had a job that involved admin of apache on some aix servers, never really got into the whole command line thing, but i guess its never too late.

So the plan is to clear some space on my laptop and attempt (gulp) to get ubuntu running a a dual boot, for my home needs the excercise last night proved that i could do nearly 100% of what i use my pc for on linux as opposed to windows web browsing, instant messenging, rdc to work, all work out of the box. the only other thing i do is code. There are obviously numerous options open to me in this area, i mainly code in c# so the mono project on linux looks like a cool option if i want to code c# on linux. the other obvious option (because of its similarities to c#, and portability) is java. If i manage to get a dual boot working, i think getting a dev environment for each of these set up will be the number one priority.

more to come.

whats in a name?

I've been racking my brain recently for a name for the web ide. my first thought was w.i.d.e.
as in web ide, but thats already taken. then i thought about "collide" (collaborative ide) but al those domains are taken. Last night i was thinking along the lines of using a non word as the name of the app. i was flicking thru "boo hoo" the story of boo.com and read the bit where the swedish entrepeneurs ran an online book seller in sweden called "bokus" which is'nt a swedish word but is spelt nearly like the swedish word for book.
Following this tangent i thought of "coodaa" as the name for the app not quite sure whether i like it yet or not but it definitel has an advantage over all the other names i've thought of in that nearly all the domains are available for it (i guess thats the benefit of making up a word).

update

i've been concentrating on sorting out a proper data and business layer for my app and every so often get myself in a muddle. if i have an class called File and a class called Project and i want to add a create a file in a project, should the method be in the File or the Project class.

To start with i put it the method in the File class, but then i changed my mind and put it in Project
I reckon that is right, but its little things like that, that i';ve been fiddling with recently.

Also discovered the ObjectDataSource which i think is really cool. so you can binder a control to a business object and still maintain a tiered structure.

The membership/roles functionality is pretty much sorted and working properly with the asp.net providers has changed my opinion of the new provider model. its perfect what i want to do for this site. quickly and easily add basic membership and roles. However if i ever wanted to query and personalisation info i'd be a bit fooked, but i don't so its perfect.

I'm just going through a hitlist at the moment now users can create a project, add developers to a project, hopefully later on today they'll be able to add files to a project. next i'll need to add delete/archive/view history on files in a project. I haven't quite decided whether to let all develoers add a file to a project or just let the admin do it.

For the main code window the next big thing to do is sort out the file and developer tabs. i plan to have a webservice that returns a collection of file objects and then in javascript create the html for entries in the "file" accordion pane. rather than get bogged down with generating html on the server side. I plan to use a similar approach to this when populating the list of developers code to view.

One big thing i've yet to decide on is how to deal with developers working concurrently on a file
should i implenebnt a check in, check out system where anyone can get a copy but only the person with the file checked out can commit his changes, or should i allow anyone to save a copy of the file and rely on the ability to resurrect and archived file to resolve issues of source being overwritten?