Today I made the step up or out to 64 bit Ubuntu. I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 alternate-iso, Jaunty Jackalope and got it running as a virtual machine inside VMWare ESX. A couple of months ago I successfully virtualized Ubuntu 8.10 as a Linux terminal server and that machine has been serving DHCP and functioning as a great terminal server on our LAN. In times like these, every penny saved is very important.

As I gained more familiarity with Drupal I began to wonder whether I could use Drupal to manage an existing inventory of our technology equipment at Frankllinville Central School. Like most school districts we are called upon to keep a tab on our growing list of computers, cameras, printers and other peripherals. It's a daunting task and in the past few years I've been tryring to move towards web based solutions that allow those of us charged with deploying new equipment to enter new inventory from wherever we find ourselves on the campus.

Yesterday I received the first of two Dell netbooks I recently purchased. It'a fabulous little unit and it's got a great battery. It just seems to run and run some more. This unit came with Windows XP Home. The other one I ordered is coming with Ubuntu 8.04. I got it out of the box minutes after it arrived in Franklinville and took it to Franklinville Central School where I demonstrated it to a dozen or so colleagues and even a couple students. This particular unit came from Dell's refurbished section and it only cost me $339 plus tax and shipping.

Last week I wrote about the my frustration at finding a solution to the clean URLs on a site I am developing for Franklinville Central School. Yesterday I found the solution to that problem in an extremely well written how to from 2Bits.com which  I will link here.

Last night while reading RSS feeds in Google Reader I happened upon an article which is share in my "Shared Items" block. Top Notch Themes blog provided the link to a program which I purchased last night. It's called Artisteer 2.0. It provides some very good choices for custom theming for people like me and maybe you. It is not open source, but it's not all that expensive either. I know that eventually I'll begin to get better at editing and creating my own themes, but until then I can use Artisteer.

This week fresh from last week's trip to Washington for DrupalCon I was anxious to rebuild our intranet server at Franklinville Central School. I was also building this new machine inside our VMWare ESX server. I decided to use Ubuntu 8.10 server.  I've built a number of Ubuntu servers, but only a couple with Ubuntu Server edition and none of those were production servers. I decided that I wanted to use the server edition because I thought it would take up less resources in our virtual center.

This weekend following DrupalCon DC I traveled south to Glen Allen, VA to visit my brother and his family.  My sister-in-law has designed a nice site for  a dance marathon. In the past she had used FrontPage but she'd been developing a site for a local charity that used Joomla. She'd not heard of Drupal until my visit.  Content management systems are really putting pressure on software like Dreamweaver, FrontPage and GoLive.

One of the sessions I attended this past week at Drupalcon DC was a very interesting presentation by representatives of three major media outlets. Their presentation was very thoughtful and thought provoking. Having had a long standing discussion with some in K-12 education that are very hooked training students to use application like Microsoft Word it was interesting to hear a presentation where that particular application was not mentioned.