A couple of months ago, I stated my laptop upgrade policy, which pretty much had me in a holding pattern until acted upon by a change in either the technology marketplace or in my situation.

Well, a slight nudge in both has resulted in me ordering a new primary laptop from Dell today. It's a thin, light 13" notebook from Dell's XPS lineup with the white shell (though mostly because I don't want red and have never really liked black laptops). With my changed specs, it came in just over $2000, which is more than I wanted to spend, but I won't do it again for 2 years, so I'm willing to rationalize it.

So, what changed to prompt this purchase?

First, the keyboard on the laptop I've been using has been causing problems. Multiple keys aren't working consistently. In fact, you may have noticed that words with "d", "y", "n" and "u" have been increasingly spelled wrong over the last couple of weeks. Plus, I picked up a bit more work in June than I expected and can afford to be in the market.

Then, I noticed that Dell, HP and the MacBook Pro's crossed a critical line recently, making 4GB the maximum RAM instead of the 2GB we've been stuck with for something like 3 years now. While actually *putting* 4GB in today isn't cheap enough for me to bother with, in 6 months, a year or 18 months, I can drop the couple of hundred bucks it will cost to bump the RAM. That was the prime factor I'd been waiting for before buying again.

More maximum RAM and relatively fast hard drives being available lifted the tech barriers, a bit of extra pre-tax cash lifted the financial barriers and having to re-type half of the words in everything I write lifted the psychological ones.

So, dug around for the options that would meet my needs and ended up at the 13" XPS options from Dell. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB (the other 2GB would have added $850: definitely across the peak), the hard drives to 160GB 7200RPM drives (though was intrigued by the 32GB solid-state option), the maximum battery, a docking station, bluetooth built-in, real video card, Wireless-N card, etc. to enable this thing to be a nice, powerful 4 pound package. My intent is to dual boot (or more) with Ubuntu as primary and Vista as a secondary OS. I could virtualize, but want native 3D graphics capability in both Vista and Ubuntu.

As for the existing laptop, I'll probably put it up for auction (with something like a $50 starting bid) in case anyone here would be interested in picking up a Linux laptop on the cheap. Someone who's willing to either disassemble and clean the keyboard or replace it would have a very nice little laptop with long battery life. I still regularly get 4-5 hours out of a charge.

Running Linux, it's rock stable, with upwards of 30 days uptime since last reboot. I just put it into hibernation mode and re-animate later. It's a/got:

• Dell 700m
• 1.6Ghz Pentium M processor
• 1.25GB RAM. There's 256MB under the keyboard that could be swapped out to make it 2GB.
• 60GB hard drive
• DVD-ROM/CDRW drive
• 9 cell battery
• 12" widescreen (one of the first with the glossy laptop screens instead of matte)
• The nearly worthless distinction of being the machine I did much of the writing for this site and nearly every bit of digital "stuff" I did for the last 3 years or so.

I'll reset the Ubuntu setup to new, so it will be ready to go when it arrives. Whatever I get for it will probably go to pick up a Mac mini to put on the KVM switch in my office. That'd give me a Mac again for the only real purpose I have for one: to play with it.

At any rate, I'll add a note on this post when the old Dell's actually up for bid somewhere.

For quite a while, I used the Mint stats package. However, as updates came out, I fell behind in doing the upgrades.

They often required multiple steps to upgrade things and, well, I am not particularly fond of that much of that kind of work. Then, when the major version upgrade came out a couple of months ago, and required an upgrade fee, I kind of lost interest.

At $30 a domain, it slid below the value line for me and I went back to SlimStat, which I'd used previously. However, it's bothered me that it only works in PHP pages, which apparently has now been fixed.

I'll be putting that new version in place for the domains where I am most interested in ongoing stats tracking.

Photo: Alexia

While June is nearly over, it's still worth noting that June is National Iced Tea Month. I didn't know that a few weeks ago when I started my quest for better iced tea (or I would have written this up sooner).

Personally, my quest started from a different set of motivations.

• I like tea, but 200°F beverages and 90°F temperatures don't really mix well.
• I enjoy a good meal, but can't stand wine and don't drink alcohol. The complexities in fine tea offer the possibilities of matching high quality tea to food in the same ways that wine usually is matched. In short, I think it can offer a way to have a more sophisticated beverage with my meals than soda, water or milk while staying away from alcohol.
• Nearly every iced tea "recipe" I find pretty much disqualifies itself from contributing to the conversation by using Lipton tea bags as their gold standard against which "good" iced tea should be measured. Given that fans of coffee don't hold Folgers up as a benchmark, or $2 wine or McDonald's as the pinnacle of hamburger cuisine, the pulverized bits of tea that are in Lipton bags are the starting point, not the end.

So, I've started on a journey to come up with better iced teas for myself. Like I said, I started with the standard "Lipton recipe" and process, which goes something like this:

1. Boil 4 cups of water.
2. Put a couple of tea bags into it and let them brew for about twice as long as "normal".
3. Pour that into a 2 quart pitcher.
4. Fill the pitcher with ice.
5. Pour into glass with ice.

Sweet tea adds anywhere from 1/2 to a cup of sugar to step 3. I generally do like my tea sweetened, but often, the sugar is pumped too high because the tea is really astringent and needs the sweetening in order to smooth over that flavor.

I dropped into my local tea shop and they actually had a little flyer making recommendations of varieties that make good iced tea. Taking that as a good starting point, I bought half a dozen varieties, some from the list and some I just wanted to try and have been drinking the resulting teas over the last couple of weeks. I'll be buying more from the list as I get through the first batch.

I bought:

• Hunan Black
• Formosa Choicest Oolong (which I drink regularly as a hot tea)
• Mauritius Black, which has a lovely vanilla note to it.
• China Black Special, which might be a bit too smoky for me.
• Big Red Robe Oolong
• Longevity Oolong

Along with messing with the starting teas, I've been trying varying levels of sugar and using other sweeteners as well. It's clear that some teas need far less sweetening, even to taste like "sweet tea", like the Mauritius, for which 3/4 cup was so overly sweet it made me want to gag. It was much better when I dialed the sugar way back.

The downside to iced tea as wine substitute is that iced tea doesn't keep very well. A day or so later, it's pretty nasty, but you can make a fresh pitcher really quickly, so I don't have a problem with that. The fact that this is true when iced tea is made from scratch, is why bottled iced tea kind of creeps me out. Exactly what stabilizing chemicals and preservatives are necessary to keep it in exactly the same state for months on end?

At any rate, I know that there are a lot of people out there who either stay away from alcohol for ethical reasons, personal reasons, or just for taste reasons, but really want to have a nice drink with their meals. Between Seven Cups, The Tea Source and Adagio Teas alone, there are hundreds of different varieties worth trying out as part of my quest. From deep earthy puerh's to light white teas, there's surely as much rich complexity there as there is in wine and iced tea can be elevated from just another nozzle on the soda fountain to a beverage suitable as part of any gourmet meal.

Photo: kris krüg

Over the last couple of years, I feel like I've become a broken record. On project after project I find myself hearing about a particular problem. And, shortly thereafter, I find myself calling a meeting wherein I explain what I am about to share with you. It's something that I've always thought obvious and thought it was already well-covered in articles, books, classes, etc. However, experience says otherwise. Quite simply, projects have way too much tightly-coupled development process and they need to decouple the bits and things will run much more smoothly.

While "loosely coupled" often refers to service-oriented architecture and web-specific things, this approach to decoupling is not limited to that sphere. The concepts are certainly related, but you can still have a project that's building loosely couple technology but the team is working in a tightly coupled way.

It usually comes up when I'm being asked to deliver a huge amount of work in a staggeringly short amount of time. That, by itself, isn't a direct indicator. However, shortly after asking that I leap over a tall building in a single bound, the requester usually indicates that the reason for the giant jump is because an upstream or downstream member of the project "can't" move on with their work unless I can succeed.

Fortunately, rather than finding the nearest phone booth to change into blue and red spandex (the world does NOT need to see that), I've learned to push back on such requests.

A prime example is when I'm building the AJAX or client-side screen designs for a JSP/ASP/PHP server-side application. I'll be told that they "can't" build the server-side components until they have the actual screens.

Now, given that all HTML or AJAX actually does to interact with server-side scripts is make HTTP requests, you can completely decouple that dependency by defining those messages. You can usually whip up "fake" forms that will make all of the appropriate requests and those can be used to build and test the server-side components.

The reverse is also true. If the database design and sample data aren't ready to populate the JSP script that will deliver data requested by AJAX, you can define the middle again and have the JSP endpoint deliver a fake set of data.

Then, both people or teams can work toward the middle. As each side works on their own area, they may find things that aren't supported in the agreed-upon middle, but you only need to re-negotiate that bit and each side can adjust. As long as everyone codes to *that* specification, things line up as code gets finished.

This results in the very things that everyone says they want. You've got code that's easier to unit test, an elimination of roadblocks for nearly every person on the project and things move forward much more smoothly. Whenever I've worked on a project where we started by defining the connections between layers and then all went off to do the stuff we're best at, we delivered functionality faster, it worked better and we had fewer bugs.

Again, this probably seems obvious to lots of you. However, reality seems to indicate that it's not as obvious as it should be, because I keep having to explain it. You've got lots of pieces that need to communicate with each other, but people seem to ignore the contents of that communication when doing their initial design. Yet, if you did nothing BUT define those bits, nearly everything else would pretty much work itself out. The reverse isn't true.

Of course, in an ideal world, we'd all do things according to the book (whether that's the Agile book or another one). However, as long as I have to live in the real world instead of Utopia, defining the middle and working toward it is a fantastic compromise that keeps things moving forward and lets me go home at night and have my weekends off as well.

A couple of months ago, I ran across a link to a light electric vehicle called the BugE. It was notable not only because it's just a cool little bit of transportation technology that'll do 40mph, but because it was going to be far cheaper than the $25,000 to $100,000 that other electric vehicles capable of that speed tend to cost.

Today I got a note indicating that these things are finally shipping and you can order one. While they're a bit more expensive when all is said and done (about $5000 plus shipping) than the $3000 ballpark number thrown out when it was first mentioned, we're still talking about a very reasonable price for a slick little vehicle. The $5000 number is what it takes when you buy the kit, plus the lighting bits and the motor/controller/etc kit in addition.

I really like that his design specifically set out to be simple, using fewer parts than his previous designs. This makes the kits easier to build and cheaper to manufacture, which are critical to pushing stuff like this into the public consciousness. Even at $5000, it's in the price range of a snowmobile, ATV, boat, etc. That makes it a do-able project for a dedicated enthusiast (though it'll be a year or 2 before I'm up for it yet), instead of only for the die hards out there.

Given some of the recent total-cost-of-ownership I've seen for the iPhone, this would be a much more interesting way to spend that same money, as far as I'm concerned.