Well, about three months ago I jumped on the ultraportable/netbook bandwagon. This meant smaller notebook PC's with substantially less power but decent enough to do the basic tasks. Looking at the prices and the config's, I picked up the Acer Aspire One - Windows XP Edition. The following is my honest take on it and my usage typically varies from a general net surfer to an occasional coder since most of my work is done on my Dell workstation. My previous notebook experience includes a short 5 month stint with the Dell Latitude D400.

Firstly, what's good about it - it looks great. I got the blue version and it seems to be one of the better looking netbooks on the market. The RAM is 1GB which is not too shabby for a netbook. The keyboard is comfortable and the screen is clear enough for most tasks. The machine as a whole has solid build quality, good port connectivity options and even includes an SD card reader. Combine all this with great value for money and you get a sureshot winner.

Its not without its flaws however. The trackpad is small and the button placement on it is unintuitive being tucked away in its sidecorners. The Intel Atom processor feels kinda sluggish even though its purpose is to save on power. The battery life is at best decent and if you buy the Windows XP version - be ready for some pre-installed crapware like the McAfee VirusScan trial and MS Office 2007 trial. People may find these useful, however in my personal opinion I was better off with ClamWin and OO.org.

On the whole, the Aspire One is a good buy if you're looking for a not-too-crippled netbook for a decent price (you'll have to check its latest prices on any shopping site). Its 1GB RAM and 120GB HDD gives you enough room to play around but don't expect any sort of gaming or graphic crunching. As long as you're sticking to either the basics or the uber-geek low memory usage stuff like running Mutt or playing with the newest CommonLisp interpreter, you should do fine with this good looking ultraportable.

Yahoo!'s 3rd quarter financial results have been dismal and this has gone on for quite some time now. People are calling for the head of CEO and founder Jerry Yang, stocks are down and almost everybody thinks the company is doomed. I, for one, wish Yahoo! remains, even grows stronger and reclaim atleast a part of the glory it once had.

Yahoo! is unerasable when people start thinking about Internet history. There is something about the 95-00 era which makes the old skoolers remember those days, and remember Yahoo! and how it was. It'll be a sad, sad day when Yahoo! goes bust or is gobbled up. It'll be like watching Netscape Navigator go down again. On a less sentimental note, Yahoo! is the only competitor Google has got. You can argue about whether its a worthy enough competitor - but let's face it, there is no one else that can even hope to match up with Google right now. Microsoft may have loads of money and talent, but they do jack when it comes to online business. Facebook is a different niche altogether, Amazon has gone in its own direction and nobody should mention Ask.com as it stands today.

Bare fact - when it comes to online wars, its Yahoo! vs Google with the latter winning the majority. But think about it, how would an online world with only Google as a solo player look like. Monopoly is never too good for the consumer. And in a hurting economy like today - if a giant like Yahoo! breaks down, it'll cause more economic worries than I care to list right now.

All is not bleak, Yahoo! has major, major talent in its ranks. Its got two of the best Web2.0 apps out there - Flickr and del.icio.us. It is one portal that truly has its hands in everything, whether this is good or bad - I have little clue about. It has the 2nd most popular search engine and the most popular webmail application out there. For almost all (notice I said "almost) of its properties, I sincerely wish Yahoo! jumps back on its feet. Without our trusted, age-old companion, the internet will be a lonelier place. So if any Yahoo!'s are listening, for all the memories, the hopes and for a saner internet - don't give up.

Disclaimer - I don't work for Yahoo! or have any affiliation with them, except having a webmail account

Being a regular reader of programming.reddit and Dzone, I could not help but notice people arguing over PHP vs Lisp as a web development language. While I am fond of Scheme, Lisp and its various cousins - I could not help but see the practical side of it. One major point that is made everytime in one form or another is that what is easy must be dumb and nobody in their right mind should use it.

Take PHP for example, PHP4 and a great improvement over PHP3 and PHP5 was huge compared to PHP4. Granted the language can promote bad practices and yada yada - however you can use a framework to solve quite a few of these problems. Anything having a lower barrier to entry is going to be plagued by people who just want to get a quick result, but there is good stuff out there, yes in PHP. You can take Drupal as a good example.

People scoff at Visual Basic and VB.NET, but can anybody deny what it did for RAD. VB.NET 2008 has generic data types. It even has full 'lambda' support giving rise of higher order functions. So why the elitist attitude against it? I'm not against using purer languages, infact I like to tinker with Scheme, but on the other hand I'm not against anything else either which can solve the problem at hand.

Just because getting things done in these languages is easier, does not mean they are incapable of ever producing any good for any problem.

If there's a golden tenet in here, its this - if there is a nail waiting, use the hammer you know which can hit the nail hard. Sometimes its just better to use the 'right tool for the job' rather than getting tech religion into everything.

I'm not sure whether its uber-cool to say I like Linux or not, but actually I do. And because I do, I wish Linux had more shareware/trialware. Let me explain this blasphemy (in the eyes of RMS anyways).

Linux in general has better text mode support than windows. A better shell (many better shells), better command line utils, better out-of-the-box scripting, data munging languages etc. etc. In the recent years, its got a pretty nifty UI too. I'm very impressed with almost every new Ubuntu, Mandriva and Fedora release to see how far they have come. However, I still feel Linux could use better multimedia support compared to Windows. But you know that this is an age old topic and a work in progress, I'll skip the usual routine. Consider for a second that people actually developed software for Linux that sold for green. And not the odd editor/IDE, but tons and tons of applications in all categories.

What I'd like to see
- A paid for (not too expensive) video player that takes care of everything, including nasty driver compatibilities. VLC's pretty cool but there is a possibility someone could earn a decent sum coding something like this.

- A good text editor with CUA key bindings and which has a stable version on Windows. Scite is nice, but more choice is always better.

- A good archiving + backup solution, something like Powerarchiver for Linux.

Now many people will rightly point out that there are some FOSS packages that are excellent in this regard, but my basic point is this - I want more choice. I want small software shops to build paid software for Linux. I want the FOSS packages to compete with them. I want a software ecosystem comparable to any other OS. And most importantly, I want the stuff to work out of the box even if it means shelling out a few bucks. The docs and support for Linux is excellent but would it really hurt to have some cool utils which we have grown to love on Windows having a native version on Linux? I think not, and maybe I'm wrong here - but maybe, just maybe it tips the balance a little more to the tux's side.

As all good software engineering text's say - build one to throw away! A prototype!!

And so in my long hard journey to mediocrity in programming, I stumbled upon a decent enough idea to get working on it right away. I started out with C, pure ANSI C. And then gradually and ashamedly added some GNU specific stuff. And oh it was a joy, till I realized I had coded two simple operations in a week. The good thing was - the code was good (after all its C), the bad thing was - it took so much time to do stuff alone that my interest started to fade. That's when I picked up my old friend - Perl.

Humor me if you will (specially the purist kinds) but I actually built what I had coded in a week in C in a day of Perl. Of course I used modules, but all of them came from the standard Perl distribution on Linux. So here's my plan - I build my prototype in the highest level language I can find and know well (Perl in this case) and if it all turns out purrfect, maybe I can get a couple of smart guys to work with me on this in C/C++/whatever. This maybe a flawed reasoning but here's mine.

1. If you're working alone on a hobby project and you have no real work pressures - build a prototype first. If you get too bogged down in the details, you'll lose interest.

2. Pick a high (preferably the highest) level programming language you can find - like Perl in my case. The language should be quick in churning out code for your ideas.

3. The prototype should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. (Thanks Albert!)

4. Write code comments on observations you think will be important when you code "the real thing".

5. Get some (smart) people interested in your idea and start working on it.

6. As far as possible, phase out the prototype code one at a time looking at the comments you wrote following point 4.

Note that its possible that after you code the prototype, you realize your idea is stupid (happens to me a lot) - but hey, good thing you didn't spend a year writing something that you don't believe in anymore. In all cases, the learning will pay for itself.