I recently uninstalled Windows from all my machines and installed Ubuntu on them. There are two reasons for this,

1. I don’t want to buy a new Windows license whenever I buy a new machine. I already have spent over Rs. 10K on Windows licenses and is not ready to pay again!

2. Ubuntu supports all my hardware out of the box! Even WiFi cards(NetGear) and WiFi adaptors (Dlink DWL-G122)  are supported when you boot Ubuntu.

It has been a smooth transition. One of the things that I enjoy a lot is the Pidgin IM client. Now I can login to all my IM accounts at once. Hence I got in touch with old friends on some of my old IM accounts!

Here is quick re-cap of what I did,

• Booted using the latest ubuntu release - 7.10.
• Deleted all existing partitions on my 80GB disk.
• Created a root partition of 6.5GB and a swap partition of 1GB. I kept these partitions below 8GB since on M2N-MX motherboard, grub is having problems booting from a partition over 8GB!
• Installed the following software using apt-get - Java 1.6, Aptana IDE, unrar, Lyx, Ruby1.8.6 and Rails2.

It is almost 3 months since I wrote anything on this blog! I almost forgot that I had this blog It is another year and let me restart this blog. You see, that is my new year resolution

I have been exploring couple of new stuff recently. I have been neck deep in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a very compact and expressive language. More importantly, the code you write in Ruby style automatically appears elegant.

On the rails, I have mixed feelings. From the initial look, rails looks a lot more productive than say J2EE. But when it comes to a large project development, I don’t see much of a difference. The productivity in Web applications is more dependent on your team than the technology you choose!

Talking about productivity, another tool I have been exploring is the Yahoo’s User Interface toolkit (YUI). This is a great way to add AJAX capabilities to your Web application. I have been developing server side components based on these and it turned out be real good. The documentation is pretty good but there is still scope for improvement.

On the J2EE front, the new Struts framework (Struts2) is getting stable. I think the upcoming version 2.1 is perfectly suited for any Web application you are planning in future. One feature of Struts2 is the out of the box support for portlets. If you are planning on a large enterprise application suite, portlets is the way to go.