Announcing the Modesto Scripting Language Meetup

Over on my professional blog I announced the new Modesto Scripting Language Meetup. It doesn't seem right to have to drive 60 miles to find a developer oriented meetup - so I started one myself! See all the details on the Modesto Scripting Languages meetup page and come join us for our first meetup!

I Can't Believe This Worked

My Brother HL 2040 printer stopped loading paper from the tray. I regard printers with the disdain non-techies regard computers in general: mercurial, tempestuous creatures without rhyme or reason. So I did a little googling but without much hope, was amused to discover instructions for covering a tiny rubber pad with scotch tape on a pc repair forum and was amazed to discover it works!

So - if your Brother 2040 makes annoying clicking sounds and refuses to feed paper from the tray check out this helpful post at fixya (be sure to look at the linked pictures). I still can't believe it worked...

Side Projects

I hadn't done a satisfying side project in a long time. The last one that springs to mind was some simple PyGame typing games I made for my daughter when she wanted to play a computer game but couldn't get the hang of a mouse.

She's a little older now and is in first grade. We have a great home-school/tutoring co-op setup going and really only have to worry about the curriculum for first grade social studies. Recently my wife asked me to put together some worksheets for the "Symbols, Icons, and traditions of the US" portion of the California State Standards for 1st grade social studies.

True to my usual form I took the opportunity to play with software - I wrote a little script that takes directories of YAML files and runs them through some Jinja2 templates to produce a little website. You can see the resulting educational website and check out the code on github.

I took the opportunity to play with some html5 and css3 and didn't even try to shoehorn support in for IE - Chrome and Firefox both support the <audio> element, CSS gradients, CSS transitions and rotations, etc so the site looks quite spiffy in modern browsers but results may vary dramatically in older and less standards compliant browsers.

PDB Howto

Thanks to the good folks at Marakana for whom I am doing some teaching I have some videos posted. See Max's awesome video editing skills render my pdb howto relatively stumble free!

More than 4Gb RAM on Ubuntu 32 bit

I recently grabbed some more RAM since my desktop PC had only 3Gb. I'm running the most recent LTS release by Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx 10.04.

I removed a 1 Gig stick and added two 2 Gig sticks I bought from Newegg. My bootup POST showed 6 gigs recognized but when I got back into Ubuntu top and `cat /proc/meminfo` agreed that I had less than 4 gigs.

Of course I immediately figured out that this was because of the 4 gig limitation on addressing memory common to 32bit operating systems. I wasn't up for updating to 64bit Ubuntu over my lunch break so I googled to see if there were any other options and Ubuntu's own documentation pointed me in the direction of Physical Address Extension - a different kernel that would allow addressing more than 4 gigs of memory. There are various limitation so I may yet go x64 but this sounded like something I could still get done on my lunch break. A quick

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-pae

and a reboot and I had a new kernel that recognized all 6 gigs of my RAM. Of course... now my Nvidia drivers didn't work. I didn't discover till later that there's an easier way to solve this (see this thread) but what I ended up doing was manually downloading the drivers from Nvidia and recompiling them (see this post for instructions on compiling the Nvidia drivers). For future reference it apparently works to remove the linux-headers-generic package and install linux-headers-generic-pae, than use System -> Administration -> Hardware drivers to reinstall the Nvidia packages. Either way - it is possible to end up with more than 4 Gigs of RAM on a working 32bit Ubuntu