I don’t like much Adobe, but their commitment to Linux is above average. Flash for Linux never was great, but at least was close to their pairs on Windows.

The problem was with Flash videos, which is now the vast majority of its usage. The problem relies on pure CPU processing. The Linux version does not use the video card to decode the highly compressed videos used today. The result was a slow computer when seeing videos. The situation was really dire when you attempt to see more than one. The crash is almost certain.

But finally my days of browsing YouTube or porn sites only on Windows (which is a quite risky) are over! The new beta version of Flash (10.3) finally uses the GPU and is several times more stable. On KUbuntu, I added the repository ppa:sevenmachines/flash and installed the flashplugin64-nonfree package.

Hallelujah

I just bought a Zenithink ePAD tablet. It’s a generic iPad tablet made in China that runs Android as the OS. Please, consider from now on that it costs less than half of the price of the original.

I must say that despite the whole “generic” label, its quite a nice piece of machine. It has a 10 inches screen with resistive touch sensor, which is great to navigate through internet and reader ebooks and pdf. The processor and memory don’t rival Apple but i don’t feel it is big lack, except, of course, games.

The Android used is the 2.1, which is good one. With Google Market fully enabled, its possible to transform it into a quite comprehensive computer. Zenithink US, the american distributor are releasing often versions of its firmware, so its possible that 2.2 “Froyo"or even 2.3 “Gingerbread”.

The only two things that I was disappointed (which I should not be because I knew about them before buying) are the short battery life (4 hours if WiFi is off) and the ridiculous short range of its internal WiFi. If the tablet is not less than 2 meters, it simply not work! It’s better to connect the net cable at this distance! There are several minor things here and there, but hey, as I said at the very beginning: it cost me less than half of the iPad price*. I really believe that tablets are going to be the next world desired toy. Apple is in grand advantage, but this time their advantage for being the first in the market is not to last long. Chinese companies are going to flood the market with generic inexpensive hardware until they acquire experience, scale and courage to face these big guys. This is what takes in trying to create simple and copyable products with a premium status. Apple woke the dragon.

After creating several sites using several CMSes, one single thing still annoys me: the lack of a proper export settings feature. Putting a local testing site in the official online server is always a nightmare, since we have basically try one of the options:

• Copy the whole database: it also copies several testing data we used.
• Step-by-step replication: After 3 days, you will still discovery several options that were not copied
• Manually select DB table-by-table to copy: unless you really know of are you doing, its quite crazy

In Drupal world, one of my most admired companies, Development Seed, created both Features and Strong Arm that try to address this, but the lack of broad and ubiquitous support we still feel that we will miss something.

There are 3 types of data that a computer program might have:

• External: the spreadsheet for Excel, html to a browser, the image for Photoshop… its the reason why the program exists.
• Internal: the data that makes the program works. It’s the settings.
• Temporary: stuff that the program creates in order to gain performance. It, by definition, don’t need to be backed up because the program can recreate everything

Every program that is a platform should provide a Settings API. It would help on 4 big scenarios

Local / Production

There are several situations that we need to maintain a testing site for development new features without testing in the real production site. But time to time, we are satisfied with the test results and we and to apply the modification into the production site. For some business, like 3rd party site development, its the daily job, so its a must to make this workflow faster and painless.

Debug

After installing several plugins, its each to get a very unstable site, because they are changing same data. It would be much easier to monitor modifications and find solutions. A settings comparison tool would be great, so we could see what were overwritten.

Distribution / Template

Platforms, by definition, allow us to build stuff over it. But quite often projects are similar. So why not create a template for other people to use it? For a site builder like Drupal, we could create eCommerce, Blog, Forum templates for an easy deployment. It’s an extraordinary feature for newcomers.

Stack

If the program is settings aware, a good extra feature is to apply in a stack. It’s a similar concept of CSS, cascading settings based on specific variables. Imagine, for example, a site about football teams. While the site has a main theme, each team’s page can have one and the users can have a personal one. We could enabled this cascaded settings for each setting.

Multidimensional settings

If we have different content types in a site (ex: static pages, forum pages and news pages), we could have a page to change all settings related to each content type and have a page to change a specific setting of all content types.

As we can see, settings is a very important part in a program. We have to think it with more care to leverage its potentials.