From Wikipedia.org:

"...The term propeller head...appears to derive from a "head in the clouds" type stereotyping of more technically aware people (compare with geek, nerd, absent-minded professor, etc.) or possibly from the propeller beanie. The term may be meant or taken as slightly pejorative but is usually meant with some respect."

I was planning on buying a new PC for a while now.  As I thought about just what hardware and software configuration I wanted, it occurred to me that there was one important decision that I had to make.  The decision wasn't about the PC hardware as this stuff is pretty much commoditized these days.  Rather it was regarding the operating system.  I'm well-versed in both Windows and Linux, but truth be told, most of the applications and tools I use on a day-to-day basis are Windows-centric.  I'm still not convinced that Linux is ready for prime time as my desktop operating environment.

That left me with the choice of continuing on with Win XP or finally dealing with Win Vista.  In the past I had been an "early adopter" of the various incarnations of Windows through the years, starting with the first semi-decent release (Win 95) way back when.  But I was really hesitant to migrate to Vista.  It wasn't due to all the negative press and Vista bashing on forums and blogs.  Those of us who have been around for a while heard many of the same complaints about Win XP.

I recently attempted to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 on my vintage 2003 Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop.  And for the first time ever, I encountered a problem which I could not fix myself, or find a solution for out there on Google.

The problem I had was that the SP3 install would go belly up about 2/3 of the way in with a cryptic "Failed to install catalog files" error message.

I tried for the better part of a week to isolate and resolve the problem with no success.  I found some articles regarding this error and suggested fixes in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, but none solved my problem.  I also found a few suggested fixes via Google, but again they did not solve the problem.

I just finished updating my laptop from Ubuntu 7.10 to the new Ubuntu 8.04 release.  All went well except for one thing.  In addition to many other improvements, Ubuntu 8.04 installed a new version (2.6.24-16) of the Linux kernel.  Now this would seem to be a good thing.  But, once again a Linux distribution failed my "Ready for Prime Time" test...which is to provide me with a working 802.11b/g, or "Wi-Fi," interface with little or no pain my part.

Drupal 6 RC2 was released yesterday.  And, I must also say that the more familiar I have become with Drupal 6, my previous opinion that building Drupal themes is not as straightforward as building Joomla! templates has mellowed quite a bit.

Why the change of heart, you ask?  Read on to find out...

Drupal 6 RC1 was released on 21 December.  The last Beta (4) was fairly stable so maybe it won't be too long until a Drupal 6 stable release hits the streets.  I think there's a good chance that the Drupal 6 and Joomla! 1.5 stable releases might occur within weeks (or maybe days) of each other.

I've been fooling with both Joomla! 1.5 and Drupal 6 for quite a while now.  Both are significant improvements over their predecessors.  For example, Joomla! 1.5 has made significant improvements in their SEF implementation and intoduced template overrides; Drupal has made significant improvements in caching and has also simplified theming.  Buildng Drupal themes is still not as straight forward as templating in Joomla!, but this lastest release takes a big step in the right direction.

Congrats to both the Drupal and Joomla! core teams for making my two favorite CMS's even better!

Today, Packt Publishing announced that Drupal was the winner of its annual Overall Open Source Content Management System Award for 2007.  

Joomla!, which was last year's winner in this category, placed second in the voting and also won the Best PHP Open Source Content Management System category award.  Drupal garnered second place in that one.

I've been a Joomla! user since the project's inception and have been using Drupal now for the better part of a year.   It's nice to see both of them recognized for their contributions to the open source community and to the IT community at large.

This site has been around the Internet forever.  P. Lutus runs the site and has developed a number of Careware/Freeware/GPL software packages over the years.  He has authored a number of articles over the years that are quite interesting and thought provoking.  He is the author of a popular freeware HTML editor called Arachnophilia.  The current version of Arachnophilia is Java-based and has been around since 2002.  Arachnophilia itself has been around just about forever in terms of Internet time.

On the date this article was published, this site was, according to the W3C CSS Validation Service, using Invalid CSS.  Or was it?  Read on...

The Joomla! Forum hit a milestone today.  It now has over 1,000,000 posts.  Not bad for a project that has only been around since the Fall of 2005.

If you are not familiar with Joomla!, you might want to take the time to check it out.  It is a really good CMS, especially the new 1.5 version, which is now in the release candidate state.