They dropped spidermonkey from Ubuntu with the Lucid release. This broke my jslint script.

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For testing on our UOW project I needed two virtual machines each running Ubuntu and nginx to be able to talk to one another and the outside world without interfering with the server already running on port 80 on my machine.

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I've started using Lightning for my calendar and I really like it except for the stupid balloon tips that pop up and get stuck every time my mouse passes over the Thunderbird window, even when it is below another window. I turned them off with Edit->Preferences->Advanced Tab->Config Editor... and setting browser.chrome.toolbar_tips to false. Much better now.

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Outfox is a Firefox extension that allows in-page JavaScript to access local platform services and devices such as text-to-speech synthesis, sound playback and game controllers. You can read all about it at its Google Code page and discuss it in its Google Group .

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For the Tar Heel Reader project I needed to convert very simple multi-page WordPress posts into PowerPoint slide shows. I chose the circuitous route of making an OpenOffice Impress show by bashing XML and then converting it to PowerPoint. I manually created a prototype slide show with a title page and a single book page in Impress and saved it in their native .odp format. These files are simply zip archives containing several XML documents and the images. Why they didn't include the sounds, I don't understand. The important file is content.xml . Examining it in Firefox revealed the bits I'd have to change on the title page and for each page of the book. I found several useful hints in a Linux Journal article by Collin Park . I used the PHP DOM module to read in the prototype, update it for the current book (retrieved with the WordPress get_post function), and write it out along with the images. Zipping this result up produces a new Impress presentation for the book.

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I recently upgraded my D800 to Ubuntu Hardy. Things seem to be working fine. Looking through the packages available I saw that I could get sensors-applet to monitor internal temperature sensors. This showed that my GPU was running near 75 degrees C.The nvidia-settings tool showed I was running at Performance Level 2 and appeared to be stuck there. I searched a bit and found other people looking for the same info and got a few hints. After some fooling around I found the following commands would cool things off. They may reduce performance but I don't need it.

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For some if my Windows testing VMware, sadly, won't do the job. For example, I can't get my USB webcam's to work on an XP guest running on VMware on my Ubuntu machine. For testing these things I have to use my laptop. Unfortunately that requires copying files over. So I wanted to share my Ubuntu files with my laptop.

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I just noticed that the clock on my guest Windows XP system was running way too fast on my host Ubuntu Gutsy system. I had also noticed that double clicking seemed really difficult and there were a few anomalies with sound.

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Our games and tools for kids with disabilities should run on whatever computer they have at the school (typically an old PC running some version of Windows or a Mac). One alternative to cross-platform testing might be a LiveCD that boots some OS (say Linux) and runs our software. Then our development environment is fixed and we're relying on the OS to cover over hardware differences. Pete and I spent a bit of time this last weekend trying our various LiveCDs to see how little memory they could be made to use.

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Today Gutsy automatic update brought in a new kernel and required a reboot. The reboot failed with a scary message after the grub prompt. After a few moments of panic, I remembered the command prompt available from grub and typed find /boot/grub/menu.lst

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