As the development I’m doing gets more and more serious, I find myself missing the hideous nature of my old Alienware laptop, its dedicated RAID card was a real boon to multiple vmware images running at once, when the memory ran thin.

However with my latest machine (a badly butchered Compal FL92 which I’m normally very very happy with), there is no dedicated RAID card and the internal space and voltage won’t stand the double/triple height of the raptor 2.5 inch drive, sooo, i have to keep it away from the drive (the processor is fine), but I’m at 4Gb already, surely the little devil will take the latest 8Gb cards, a trip round the forums comes up with a guy with proof that the FL92 will take the Crucial 8Gb set, it’s £258 which is about what I was expecting. Clutching a credit card in my sweaty hands, I make my rash purchase.

Now that I’m committed (Crucial had it delivered to my hand by 9am on Saturday, when I ordered it Friday afternoon and I picked the slow, free postage), time to make it work with the old software EEEEK!, Linux Generic can’t cope with more than 3Gb, and 64 bit is not to be considered, as there is no flash player and lots of other software won’t work Update Vaughan Rivett’s has since corrected me that the 64bit version is just fine and not missing any of the good stuff, so ignore my drivelling End Update, hmmmm, but Linux servers have been running more than 4Gb for ages on 32bit, and indeed they can, using something called Physical Address Extension so I just have to swap out my kernel and it will be OK.

In Linux this is easy – just do the following in the nearest terminal:

$sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-server

$sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server

$sudo apt-get install linux-image-server linux-server

I then had to go into “/boot/grub/menu.lst

and add

title Ubuntu 8.04.2, kernel 2.6.24-24-server
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-server root=UUID=24bcaa1c-2860-4171-b760-e1129947958e ro quiet splash acpi_os_name=”Windows 2001 SP2”
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-24-server

at the top of the “## ## End Default Options ##” section (I just copied the 4 lines that were previously at the top of that section and changed the “initrd.img-2.6.24-24-server” and “vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-server” values so that they matched the latest changed files in the “/boot/” folder
then restarted.

and LOOK!!!

But would that new memory be passed on to the applications?

Well I’m happy!! (Where’s me copy of WAS??)

In these day of firefox’s built in spell checker, why do we need an extra spell checker, well frankly for me its because Flex does not have one built in, enter

Spelling Plus by http://gskinner.com

Its the best spell checker i have found for flex, you do have to remember to manually ‘refresh’ the checker with code if you change text boxes via back end code (not the apps fault), but otherwise an excellent checker, and one I’m very happy with (be warned its not free)

At first sight this is just 3 cool games that run in flash silvergames games doom triple pack, for the young uns out there, the three games it lets you play “DOOM, Hexen and Heretic” were once top flight games (in the land of the 386/486), but now the are free bees that compress into a 10meg swf file (just download the page, then run the doom-triple-pack.swf on the stand alone flash player if you want to play off line), all very nice but after a few mins playing you start to think, “how the hell did one bloke do this as a hobby project” the answer lies with Adobe Alchemy a beta adobe project “that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).” ie reuse lots and lots of existing C and C++ code, HOW COOL IS THAT!!!!

We all know that Domino should been good at calendar apps but sucks balls in reality, so i quietly poo’ed my self when a manger says “could we have something a bit like google calendar”, however flex comes to my rescue, now i cant claim any of this is mine its just gluing other people work together so first take Quietly Scheming’s Calendar UPDATE: the app is much newer than the blog posting would indicate, as it keeps being updated
sexy isent it?, now this takes an ical format as its data source, which in case anyone was wondering is just a vcalander file with some extra bits stuffed in (which we wont need), so to get to that data source, enter Jake Howlett’s excellent series of articles, in particular Flex with Domino Quick start, go pinch his example database for the ‘simple view’ stuff, you will want to butcher that to output your data as a ical text file (the download for Quietly Schemings flex apps has examples of what they should look like in the “data” directory of the zip file.),

One snag here is that the Adobe parser for icals is REALLY picky, there must be no extra white space in your file, and every line must finish with a proper Carriage return and a proper line feed (i ended up with computed text of “@Char(13)” at the end of every line in the view template and “@Char(13)+ @Char(10)” after every field in the view, so be careful, but other than that it works like a charm!!, and my manager thinks im a coding god (well he doesn’t because he knows me, but never mind)

there you go, if this dosent make sense just put a comment and i will explain more

Just a quick note to the people out there taking advantage of the one click update from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, make sure you don’t have “auto logon” enabled, if you do, you stand a huge chance of happily screwing up your install (you will get lots of permission denied errors against /dev/null when you launch a xsession, even if your ctrl-Alt-F1 in and reset the security to “666” from “600” the darn thing resets on reboot (and anyway you just get a blank screen even if you get it (ie by ctrl-Alt-f7) to get back to xsession login,

….so careful careful party people

.. P.S. to the Mac boys out there laughing, i rebuilt in 14 mins (after backup), and i did not have to go to a “genius bar” to fix my problem…so RASSSSSSP!!