I just ran across another educational tool—Scratch—for teaching programming to kids. I love the idea behind these simplified programming environments because they make getting started very easy, show you results instantly, and remove all the frustration of setting up a programming environment. If you want to introduce your kids to programming, you might start with [...]

Running an Apache server on Debian? Suddenly find you can’t access any files in /javascript? As part of a maintenance upgrade, somehow the javascript-common package was selected for me. It quietly installs a symlink javascript-common.conf in /etc/apache2/conf.d that globally aliases all /javascript URLs to /usr/share/javascript. Why? Who knows. I’m sure whoever did it meant well. [...]

I keep flipping between Chrome and Firefox. I’m currently back on Chrome (the speed!). One of the things I love about Firefox is the ability to create application shortcuts (using the Prism plugin). The cool thing about those shortcuts is that each one had it’s own user profile. I have multiple Google accounts and it [...]

Uploading media to WordPress using the built-in Flash uploader has been broken on Ubuntu for a long time (Karmic 9.10 + Flash 10.0 r42). The problem seems to be in Flash itself since I can upload fine to the same blog from a Windows machine. But I just installed the Flash Plugin 10.1 beta 2 and [...]

I recently had a hard drive go bad on me which actually turned out to be a motherboard going bad. The hard drive may be fine but I don’t want to take any chances, and anyway, you can buy 1 terabyte now for about $70 US. There was definitely something goofy going on with access [...]

Information on changing the default Gnome terminal size is out there but it is scattered and scarce. I have two 20 inch monitors. The default size (80×24) is too small. Here’s how you can change the default. This applies to all launchers, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts: Run gconf-editor Open desktop → gnome → applications [...]

I use an automated deployment script for BigHugeLabs.com. I’ll regularly do around 10 deployments every day so it’s important that the system has as much automation as possible. The deploy script builds CSS and JS files, updates shared libraries, deploys files to several locations, and does some testing. One test I recently added was an [...]

If you are using the expire_logs_days setting for automatic binary log removal in MySQL and your binary logs are not automatically deleting themselves (SHOW MASTER LOGS), it’s probably because the index is out of sync with the actual log folder. Manually remove the logs (/var/log/mysql) and then do RESET MASTER to get things back in [...]

I’ve been using the web-based version of Evernote in earnest ever since Google announced their intention to abandon Notebook. It’s nice overall but has some quirks that I do not like. The upload quota for one. The fact that I have to login all the time. Also the pop-up upgrade ads. And I don’t like [...]

So I thought I was losing my mind when a simple LEFT JOIN on a new table was taking forever to complete: SELECT email FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON b.email=a.email WHERE b.email is null That’s about the simplest LEFT JOIN you can write to get all rows in a that are not in b. [...]