My laptop is now reaching old age. It’s over 3 years old and it’s starting to get a bit clunky. Time for a new one this year sometime.

I want a 13″ laptop as portability is an issue. So I started to look at the usual laptop vendors, Toshiba (which I currently have) and HP* were the two I checked out. As well as Mac.

You can get some reasonable 15″ laptops for around $1,200 which would suit my needs… if they were 13″. But as soon as you go with the smaller model it adds at least $1,000 to the price (often $2,000) and the processor significantly deteriorates in speed (almost halves in some cases).

Which leaves me with the MacBook. 13″ at around $1,200 with an Education discount.

There’s no denying the quality of the Mac hardware. The screens are nicer, they have the multi-touch touch pad, they are thin etc. But I just don’t was to run the MacOS. I prefer Linux.

There are a range of reasons but the primary one is that Mac locks you into Mac stuff, Linux just doesn’t. I hate iTunes and I hate iPhoto. If you want to take full advantage of the MacOS then you need to use these two programs and once you’ve done that you’re locked into them. You can’t reclaim your music (without significant hassle) once it’s in the iTunes library. Anything else just feels like a perpetual workaround.

I’ve got a huge personal commitment to Open Source Software and data longevity is a big reason for this.

So i’m going to buy a MacBook in the next 12 months, and I’m going to install Linux on it so that all my data is free forever, not locked into am over-hyped OS that could well go out of fashion one day and leave you with a bunch of music you’ll never be able to listen to again.

(Cue Mac Fanboys who are the second biggest reason I hate Macs. Actually, I don’t hate Macs (I use one at work) I just prefer Linux.)

*If you know of a laptop brand that matches a 13″ MacBook please let me know.

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve just launched the first of my updates for Sommelier.net.au.

You can now give a bottle an overall rating, the cellar displays regions and you can now order your cellar by both regions and varieties.

There have also been a range of backend changes which should make the site run a little smoother.

Finally, I’ve started recording barcodes. While I’m using it for anything, it is useful as a unique identifier of a wine and will mean additional features in the future.

I’ve launched a new website which I’m pretty excited about.

In case you hadn’t guessed, you can find it at: http://sommelier.net.au.

It’s is a free website that allows you to keep track of your wine cellar, add tasting notes and watch bottles as they age.

It is designed to accomodate all wine lovers without the wank that is too often associated with wine.

I hope you like it – get in there and use it!

As you may have noticed, the first time you visit my site this week you will get a blanked out page with a message about the proposed internet filter.

It’s just a little protest and hopefully an awareness raising campaign. It’s run by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation who I recommend throwing a few dollars to.

We’ll resume normal service next week.

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A few months back I had the good fortune to come across JQuery. It change my life and made AJAX a breeze. In fact I simply don’t use straight Javascript any more, I only use JQuery.

About a month or two ago I also discovered the CakePHP development framework. Similarly, it seems to have changed my life (watch this space for my first CakePHP-based website).

Can you see where I’m going with this?

I wanted to be able to add JQuery to the CakePHP site that I am working on. It’s quite simple to do but I couldn’t really find anywhere that told me how to do it explicitly and I thought it might be worth explaining what I did here.

The first step is to have a functioning installation of CakePHP and a copy of JQuery.

You’ll need to put your JQuery file somewhere that CakePHP will be able to find it. As it turns out the best place would be /app/webroot/js/

Incidentally, this is also where you should include any external Javascript files. In the first instance I usually create a file called ‘javascript.js’ which includes all my Javascript calls.

So this leaves us with a directory structure that looks something like:
app/webroot/js/
    jquery.js/
    javascript.js/


Next, we need to include this file in the appropriate layout. If you haven’t done so already, it is most likely that this file will be called default.ctp and will live in app/views/layouts/. Now all you need to do is include the $javascript::link() method in your layout file.

In this case I’ve included the following line in my head tag:

< ?php echo $javascript->link(array('jquery.js', 'javascript.js')); ?>

And you’re done (of course it wouldn’t hurt you to go and read about the CakePHP Javascript Helper here). You can now proceed as usual and with the help of the HTML helper things might get easier yet.

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