Dreaming About Bytes

There are plenty of web site that aren’t taken advantage of wide screen LCD monitors that are becoming standard.  Typically, these websites are using a fixed-pixel-width layout that doesn’t expand with a larger browser window size.  My current WordPress theme is a great example of a fixed-width layout design.  Expand the browser to full screen on a 1920×1080 monitor and over half of the page is empty white space.  This reminds me of watching older 4:3 aspect TV shows on a wide screen TV.  The problem will only get worse as the resolution of monitors increase.

Dan Cederholm has written an excellent book named Bulletproof Web Design, that advocates improving the flexibility of web designs.  From his book, I’ve learn to design a more flexible web site.  A flexible website avoids defining sizes by pixels and instead uses percentage.  The CSS code below is an example of basic layout that can grow to fit the browser window expands.  Notice that the min-width is set so the layout will look correct if the window is reduced to a small size.

.wrapper
{
    margin: 0 auto;
    min-width: 800px;
    overflow: hidden;
    width: 95%;
}
.wrapper-left
{
    float: left;
    width: 30%;
}
.wrapper-right
{
    float: right;
    width: 70%;
}

I started to play with the on-demand cloud service offered by Rackspace.  A few years back they started a venture called Mosso to develop cloud technologies.  Earlier this year, Rackspace incorporated Mosso cloud services into their standard offerings.  I was able to have a web-accessible dedicated server within minutes.  You can have any OS preloaded, as long it is a major Linux distribution.  Customer accounts are charged on a hourly basis for each server that is online.  It does not cost much to load some servers for experimentation.  I would encourage you to give it a try at http://www.rackspacecloud.com.

Over the summer, I tried loading MySQL and Java on a Ubuntu 9.04 server install.  After a clean boot, most of the 256MB of memory was already allocated.  In the upcoming week, I will load a complete open source LAMP stack with PHP.    The objective to see if a dedicated web application server can operate effectively on the cheapest configuration.

Windows is no longer my platform of choice.  Since the days of Windows 3.1 back in the early 90′s,  I have been a loyal Windows user.  As of this week, I’m using Ubuntu as the primary OS for my home computer.  Vista is still installed on a second hard drive.  Very soon this will be overwritten by Ubuntu, and Windows will be history.  So why is Windows no longer my OS of choice?  Below are my top reasons for giving the Microsoft OS the boot in favour of Linux.

Vista

Being a long time Microsoft user, I dutifully upgraded to Vista when it was released.  Moving to Vista seemed to be more of a downgrade then an upgrade.  The new UI did not impress me much.  It seem more of the same with minor improvements.  I have two desktop computers at my house.  The second is used as a server to store music, videos and backups.  For the server, remote desktop was no longer included in Vista.  This made remote management from my primary desktop difficult.  I had to hack Vista for remote desktop to work correctly. There is absolutely no reason for this extra work for a expected feature in Windows.  The hard drive would continually churn on my computer.  It was amazing the how much the light would flicker when the computer was sitting idle.  I  figured that the constant thrashing of the drive would shorten its life span.

VMWare

I was able to simultaneously use both Vista and Ubuntu at the same time with VMWare server software.  No longer did I have to dual boot to play with a Linux distro.  This allowed me to become more comfortable with Linux over time.  I soon realized that the only reason I had Vista was to start the Linux VM.

64-Bit

My last computer purchase a couple of years back included the 32-bit version of Vista.  This computer had a dual-core AMD 64-bit processor with 3GB of memory.  There should have been no reason not have the 64-bit version of Vista pre-loaded.  Being the first consumer desktop computer that I purchased new in many years, I decided to stick with the installed OS.   I am now ready to increase the number of bits in my operating system.  I decided that obtaining the 64-bit version of Vista was not worth the effort.   It was easy to download the 64-bit Ubuntu distro and install it on a second hard drive.  It was amazing that all of hardware devices worked without any issues with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu.

Games

Windows was kept so I could play my favorite games that I have collected over the years, however they did not work well with Vista.  They would not load or would randomly crash.  Most of these games are many years old, and I don’t spend much time playing them much anymore.  Having a Xbox 360 and Wii further reduces the need to play games on my computer.

Earlier this week there was an announcement for Chrome OS posted on the Google blog.    It was good to hear that there will be fresh new OS in the mix.   The blog indicates that the web browser would be the central software platform for Chrome.  The increasingly popular netbooks will be the targeted hardware platform.  It is not clear how native applications will be developed.  Obviously, standard web-based html/javascript apps will run with no problems.  The blog indicates the new application can be written using “your favorite web technologies.”  I would assume that Java would be on the short list of languages that would be used to create native applications.

The new OS is not planned to be released until the second half of 2010.  Much can happen over the next year before the release of Chrome OS.  It is surprising that Google would give us this much notice regarding their future plans.  It would appear that Google needs assistance from the open source community in order to fulfill their vision.  That must be the reasoning for the early announcement.  Could we see a public beta before the end of the year?

Chrome OS may completely change how users interact with their OS.  The days of a large OS install could be nearing their end, as web based apps take over.  The web browser has become where I spend most of my time when on the computer.  With each passing year, there seems to be fewer native OS applications required.  One has to wonder if native desktop applications are becoming obsolete.