Update: I settled on Ubuntu Hardy Heron with the Xfce Desktop manager (Xubuntu) and the Eee PC has loved it.  The majority of my use is with a monitor attached.  I use the small screen on the Eee PC for a terminal window (ssh connection) to my servers.  The monitor I use for everything else, Skype, web browsing and even some coding with VIM.  I also always have the usb mouse and a Deck usb keyboard attached.  I have only used the Eee PC by itself a few times.  I wanted a small form factor machine for my desk to go along with the Mac Mini I use. 

I have been playing around with an Asus Eee PC.  Originally I planned to leave the default Xandros Operating System on the machine.  After further experimentation as well as recompiling the kernel to support 2 GB of memory and discovering minor issues following the recompile I decided to try some other Linux flavors on the machine.  The machine is incredibly small, a little larger than a typical DVD case, the keyboard takes some getting used to.  I am trying to decide between Puppy Linux and Ubuntu based GOS. 

I have been thinking whether excerpts of my posts might be a better option.  This of course would require a click thru, which seems bad.  Though the excerpt seems to be gaining popularity.  I could move a recent posting list and recent forum topics on Nitevilla to the footer, which would likely appear without scrolling. 

Now that I turned on excerpts here, I am unsure if I want to go this route on Nitevilla.  It will require some thinking as well as a slight redesign.  What I really need to improve the most about my blogging engine is the search.  I think now that I am running PHP 5 I could easily write a better search feature, but instead I keep tinkering with other things. 

If anyone that thoughts on post excerpts over full posts delivered on the main page, let me know.

UPDATE 1/18/2008 - I will be updating the script further this evening.   My method of computing the day of the week with future and past dates was flaky.  I rewrote it and simplified that function and it seems to work perfectly now.  I also added some simple error checking that seems to steer folks down the right path.  I might have to give the error checking more brains, it reports on dates that do not exist for example.  Meaning if someone enters February 31 as a date it breaks the last date of month check and just counts up.  Not really breaks it, but obviously the date entered is greater than the last day of the month, so it does not wrap to the next month.  Still, I really think my script is more useful and robust than the todo.sh scripts that were popular from Lifehacker.  I just revisited the the todo.sh script last night and I really like my method better.  Give it a try, but not until after 1/19/2008 so that I have a chance to apply these latest fixes and updates.

I have been experimenting with more features for BuffSched recently.  Although a little rough, as in no error checking I included the ability to pull your schedule from any given date past or future.  After downloading the latest scripts, if you simply pass a date to BuffSched in the following format dd/mm/ccyy it will return the schedule for that timeframe.  An example would be - buffsched 14/8/2008 and your schedule from that date and the next seven days is returned.  The feature works, as long as you enter the correct date format.  I do want to add some basic error checking to at least assist a user, but I thought this feature was so useful it was worth releasing as is for now.

Expect another update soon with the error checking added.  I am considering adding an additional function to the buffadd part of BuffSched which will allow you to add an item over a specified amount of days.  As needs arise for myself, I am beginning to get fresh ideas for features.  Feedback is appreciated, would love to hear ideas or ways you are using BuffSched.

The version of HP-UX running at my shop does not have human readable output from the df command.  For that matter I am not even sure the latest release of HP-UX has a human readable flag.  This does not matter to me so much, but we have a lot of folks that do not understand how to do the conversion using the server.  So I provided this script that produces human readable output.  Perhaps others will find it useful, follow the link to CPUUG.

Human Readable Output of df Command for HP-UX

I coded up a neat spinner to replace the ticker function I had within the buffadd utility of BuffSched.  The spinner is a lot cleaner and it truly monitors the biweekly function.  I had to kill the ticker to get it to stop and quite frankly it was crappy code.  The spinner is something I originally wrote in C, I commonly use it to keep my ssh sessions active over VPN.  This morning I went to work on writing a shell script spinner and it works GREAT!  The new function was successfully tested on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX and OS X 10.5.  Give BuffSched a try!

BuffSched is fixed and should work on all your various UNIX and unix-like flavours.  If you encounter any bugs, please let me know. 

There is a bug with the translate command in Solaris 10 that is causing me to alter the BuffSched scripts.  In turn this means I also had to alter the way I was doing something else, as the change in translate caused problems on HP-UX.  So do not download BuffSched until I update the scripts.  I will update tonight or early tomorrow morning. 

This is a test of relocating Smilies. 

I successfully implemented all the changes I wanted into Buff and it is working wonderfully.  The fix for the issues I mentioned regarding nl2br was quite simple and I did just as I mentioned in the previous post, removed all newline characters on each new post.  This enabled me to continue to use nl2br when retrieving  database entries, retain the layout of the original posts while correctly displaying the new posts.  I have also updated the Buffsched application, which now will work on AIX.  Basically if you use a UNIX or Unix-like operating system and want to try Buffsched, it should work.  If not, let me know and I will see what I can do.

The ultimate test of the changes I made to Buff will be when I roll the new release out on Nitevilla.  Nitevilla has been running under Buff since I first started to build the application.  The initial goal I had when writing Buff was that I wanted to learn PHP.  With the ease that I was able to work through the updates on the recent mass changes, I would say that I have learned to at least use PHP to meet my needs.