Quinn

This is the screenshot from my Gnome Desktop on Gentoo Linux system, which I recently set up on Dell C640 laptop. Doesn't this look very much like Mac OS X?

I am even able to watch Flash movies at YouTube and also mov videos. But those are just for fun. What I need the most is to be able to choose Japanese inputs while running apps/system in English. That's what I do with Mac OS X, and I was successful with this one too!

I am using Glossy P theme with Gorilla icons. I am sure there are more Mac OS X like themes and icons. I like the top bar of window which just looks like Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). However, these blue scroll bars are too bright for me. I prefer gray or something else but I don't know how to change it at this moment.

I used Gnome's Configuration Editor to change the buttons on top bar of window. I chose Applications >> System Tools >> Configuration Editor, then it will launch the app. In the Configuration Editor window, I chose app >> metacity >> general, which finaly led me to edit button_layout to the value "close,minimize,maximize:menu", which will layout the buttons to just like Mac OS X.

I haven't really used Bluefish Editor or gPHPedit yet, so I don't know what's like to be using this environment as my web developing work, but it doesn't look bad at all.

So, am I going to switch my primary environment to this? Only probem at this moment for me is the hardware. I never liked any PC machines. So, it seems the chances are depend on this question - when will I able to buy a MacBook? Then, again I probably never can leave Mac OS X.. Anyway, I think it's good to have more choices and choose one over the others on whatever needed, right?

Yes, they are blueberries! We live in the mountain and suppose this place is good for rasing blueberries. Our relatives living in the same town have blueberry farm. One day, our kids and my wife went early in the morning to harvest them and this was the result.

I remember blueberry muffines are very common to see in California ( not here in Japan ), though I don't recall seeing fresh ones. I first met those fresh blueberries and the trees when I moved here in Kumamoto. I think it's kind of ironic since blueberries are not Japan native.

I like living in the rural part of Japan since we have more oppertunities to get these ripe farm products and even some plants from nature. I think, coming from this kind of experiences, we have more appreciation to the nature, seasons, and our own lives.

I am in the middle of setting up Gentoo on my PC laptop. It was taking over 6 hours compiling gnome. Oh man, this is looong. I've been using FreeBSD for my servers ( including this blog ). While FreeBSD isn't so good for desktop use, in my opinion, I thought Gentoo would be good for many uses, like desktop client, developer, server, etc.. Anyways, I made a list of open source OSes that I should give a try and some already gave a try. I wonder if anyone can tell me which one is for what and so.

I am very happy with FreeBSD as my server use. Debian is easy to use and fairly good in many way. Somehow, I don't like much of Fedra Core. I think it's good using SELinux as default and binary packages are mostly in good shape. I think it's probably too easy to use. ( Is this a compliment, a complaint or what? ) I am going to have fun to try them all!

PC-BSD

FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org

NetBSD http://www.netbsd.org

OpenBSD http://www.openbsd.org

DragonFlyBSD http://www.dragonflybsd.org

Linux

Debian http://www.debian.org

Fedra Core http://fedora.redhat.com

Slackware http://www.slackware.com

Gentoo http://www.gentoo.org

openSUSE http://en.opensuse.org

Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com

UNIX

OpenSolaris http://www.opensolaris.org

Japanese Distro

Vine Linux http://www.vinelinux.org

Plamo Linux http://www.linet.gr.jp/~kojima/Plamo/

TOMOYO Linux http://tomoyo.sourceforge.jp

If you wonder how to control visibiliy of the blocks in Drupal, and especially at the front page of the website, you might want to continue reading this. Otherwise, it's probably boring.

I am using Drupal for the project I am developing at this moment. I wanted the front page to be unique as the most websites out there, I suppose. I thought built-in features in Drupal would give me easy to configure a block to be shown at only the front page. But it didn't. at least, not the way I planned.

Environment: Drupal 4.7.3 with MySQL and Apache

Drupal has admin -> block section to configure blocks individually. At the page to configure a sigle block, there is a section under “Page specific visibility settings”. I thought I just have to put

<front>

in there and everything would be fine.

Well, this surely makes the block to be shown at the front page but also paged front page too. This is not something I had in mind. This kind of configuration might work in many cases but not every time though.

Then, I chose to use “Show if the following PHP code returns TRUE” and PHP code to control the block visibility. What I came to at the first is like below.

<?php
$thisisthefrontpage = FALSE;
if(($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == '/')
 ){
	$thisisthefrontpage = TRUE;
}
return $thisisthefrontpage;
?>

Then, I found another little thing that pager link will give the first page to be this url.

http://mywebsite/node

This page shows only the list of nodes and not the block I want to show in the front page. I first thought this is not the big deal, but then I figured this probably confuse many people who are using this website. I think the url in the above should show the page exactly the same as the front page. So, I changed the block configurations again like below.

<?php
$thisisthefrontpage = FALSE;
if(($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == '/')
  || ($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == '/node')
){
	$thisisthefrontpage = TRUE;
}
return $thisisthefrontpage;
?>

I think this is not really good coding. I wanted to do like

  || ($is_font && !is_numeric($_REQUEST["page"]))

or something like that. But none of them actually worked. I don't know why. Anyway, this is what I came to as the solution at this moment. It may work for you too when you come to similar situations. It would be nice to hear suggestions if you have something in mind. Thanks for reading.

References:

• Overview-approach to block visibility [Drupal.org]

Quinn's Photo [Zooomr]