Found an interesting blog about Scala

http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html

Tonight's Java developers meetup fully booked at 166 attendees. And the subject is Groovy on Grails. Groovy is something I never heard of, but the blurp it's an OOP-JVM scripting language. Sounds familiar to Taak.

So I do what I always do with something I don't know, I looked it up on Wikipedia. The code sample looked a lot like Scala, cool. Then there was the first citation on this quote from the author (James Strachan) of Groovy: "I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy."

Wow, I followed the link. Not only is huge proponent of Scala but also there are many great resources he had linked on his post.

Starting on Scala

So my bro just sent me some books and a few tutorial on Scala. It's new to me, so here we go. I'm starting on "Beginning Scala" seems like the best book to start with. Then that leaves "Programming in Scala" , "Programming Scala" from The Pragmatic Programmers and "The Definitive Guide to Lift - A Scala-Based Web Framework."

Let's see how much I can learn in week (by Saturday)!

Internal Speaker for Compaq CQ56-115DX Notebook

After I stepped on my Vaio mini-laptop, I realized "whooops!" I need another laptop. A blessing in disguise, the Vaio was 3 years old, slow, clogged up with whatever useless junk. And a great chance to dump Windows.

I hopped on my bike and was at Best Buy, licketty-split. "Sir can I help you?" turned in a quick "What's the cheapest laptop here?" I fended off the upsell and got my hands on a mispriced Compaq with a real AMD processor. I didn't want to hear about how this box doesn't work well on Windows 7.

It was mismarked $50 less at $349. Cool. Paid. Done. Back on my bike towards home.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04, everything was smooth except my speakers didn't make any sound. I checked the soundcard settings, it plays sound through the headphone jack. Hmmmm.

Google saved the day. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1451767

A quick installation of some software and a reboot then my speakers started making music!

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-lucid-generic