Author: jeff

comment_notify for Drupal 7

I’ve been doing a little work with Drupal for a personal project. Since I can code and have the time to work with it, I chose to go with the latest and greatest version, instead of the older stable release. Poking around in the innards of Drupal has been an interesting experience, to say the least.

I wish Drupal’s repositories were hosted on github. Sometimes module maintainers can’t keep up with all the patches submitted (I don’t blame them, it’s a ton of work), so fixes are very slow to make it into the source base. github would allow people to fork and send their patches back upstream, instead of having to hunt around on the Drupal bug reporting system.

I’ve been eager to get the comment_notify module working better for Drupal 7. I found fixes for some known issues, and also created, tested, and submitted patches of my own. I decided to make available my own fork of the module on github, for those who want to grab a patched version for their own use:

https://github.com/codeforkjeff/comment_notify

It’s meant to be a temporary solution until the fixes make it into the official module, but it’s better than nothing!

In and Out

I’ve taken a hiatus from programming work the last few months in order to do some other things, both paying and non-paying. I did some teaching, spent a lot of time at the bicycle co-op, published some articles in a local periodical, and started a few side projects. It has felt very gratifying and healthy.

My erratic life nowadays makes me think back to the starry-eyed aspirations to be a professional programmer that I had, say, ten years ago. I have a much more casual relationship to computers these days. Gone is the anxiety of having to prove, both to myself and to the world (including employers), that I am skilled and capable. I don’t care much anymore for the company of obsessive coders who enjoy religious debates about languages, tools, and best practices. They don’t seem to realize that in their pursuit of mastery and professionalism, technology is actually controlling them, and not the other way around.

Technology has become truly “technical” for me, in the fundamental sense of being a means to an end. I’ve been writing and tweaking Javascript and PHP recently. I don’t like them much, but they are decent tools for the specific tasks I am trying to accomplish. And so it goes. Getting back into code has been a Zen-like experience: when I am doing it, I am fully engaged in all the particularities. But when I’m finished with it, that’s it. Programming, and software more generally, is instrumental. I dive into it; then I come out. And there is nothing more to it than that.

It is silly to fetishize a hammer when you should be focusing on building the house, but that’s exactly what a lot of the culture of coding often feels like on blogs, message forums, mailing lists, conference agendas, etc. How silly and ridiculous. One should, of course, be thoughtful about tools, when and how to best use them, and how they can be improved. I do appreciate and value that. But at the end of the day, code is simply code. There is just so much more to life. Remembering that helps us keep sight of the things that code is for in the first place.

Bigger! Faster! Stronger! 3 GB in the 2.0 Ghz Macbook

The official Apple specs say that the 2.0Ghz Macbook can take up to 2 GB of memory. There’s a bit of information on the web–like this forum posting, for example–that says you can go up to 3 GB. The system board can address slightly more than 3 GB, so the 2 GB limit is reportedly lower than what the hardware is capable of. By chance, I noticed a 2 GB chip for a reasonable $40 on my local craigslist, so I decided to see for myself whether the stories were true.

It seems they are! I’ve been running the computer for a little over a week now with two chips: a 1 GB module, which had been in there before, and the new 2 GB module. It’s been put through its paces: on a given work day, I run Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird, Colloquy (an irc client), Adium (instant messaging client), Skype (a VoIP client), a java application server in development mode, a mysql server, and emacs, all at once.

The swap size has still been high, typically around ~500 MB, but there are no longer the delays that I used to experience with 2 GB of memory when I had a lot of apps open and switched between them. So far, there have been no problems with stability.

Here’s a screenshot from System Profiler:

Note that Apple released two different models with the 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor. You can find your machine’s model in System Profiler on the Hardware Overview screen. The 2 GB official limit applies to “Macbook2,1.” The later version, “Macbook3,1” can take up to 4 GB.

With the additional memory, this machine will hopefully last me another two years.

Monitoring DSL diagnostics on a ZyXEL P-600 Series modem

The DSL at the house has been really flakey the past 3 days. The line seems to periodically drop and I also noticed that the voice line had a lot of static.

I suspected a line problem so I called Earthlink support last night to try to get it straightened out. Surprisingly, the line tested good up until the point where it came into the house. But the diagnostics on the DSL modem were showing low noise margin (signal-to-noise ratio) and high attenuation (degradation), so there was definitely a problem somewhere. The trouble had to be inside the house: either the DSL modem or some wiring somewhere had gone bad or both.

I tried changing out some cables and tweaking the way the phone and fax (my housemate runs her own business) were all hooked up into the line. That seems to have fixed the problem. The line’s been steady for almost 24 hours now. I’ve been watching the diagnostics and researching what the numbers mean, and they seem to be within acceptable-to-good ranges. So far so good.

It was annoying to have to load the web interface on the ZyXEL P-600 Series modem (it’s a P-660R-ELNK) and continually refresh the page to watch the diagnostics. Plus I had to remember if any of the numbers changed and by how much. So I whipped up a little python script to fetch the data from the web interface and do some logging.

There were some interesting peculiarities in the ZyXEL web interface. After authenticating with a password, only that computer’s IP can use the interface, apparently; requests from other hosts get locked out until a few minutes of inactivity. Also, the way the interface refreshed the diagnostics page was a bit odd: it used a form submission to set some state that would cause another page to update its contents.

The script output looks like this:

Sun Jan 17 19:15:37 2010 noise = 16 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:16:37 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:17:38 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:18:38 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:19:38 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:20:39 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:21:39 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:22:39 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:23:39 2010 noise = 18 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)
Sun Jan 17 19:24:39 2010 noise = 17 (good) outputPower = 11 attenuation = 31 (very good)

A copy of the script is available here. You may need to do some tweaking to get it to work with your setup. It works with python 2.5 and 2.6.

I’m Back

I’m way overdue for an update!

It’s been nearly a year since I wrote about returning to grad school. So what’s happened? Well, I didn’t finish my dissertation. It felt nice to work on my research project again, but after a few months, I fell into the same depressive slump. I don’t want to go into it here, but it should suffice to say that, for me, the various burdens of academic life far outweigh its advantages. Though it would have been wonderful to get the psychological closure of finishing my degree before moving on to other things, that just hasn’t been possible. So “ABD” I will have to be….

There have been a lot of other changes in my life as well. I’ve moved to West Philadelphia, one of the most remarkable places I have ever lived. I am also writing code again to earn a living. It is a full-time position, and so far, it’s pretty great. Life is good, for now, anyway.

Working on software again has been sparking a lot of thoughts I haven’t had the time or energy to blog about, but hopefully that will change.