I’ve got my first Android application written! It’s a lame little todo list, but it’s MY lame little todo list! 
And the best part is, I was able to backport it to userspace version mc3 and my lame little app is running on the Nokia n810!
Yes! It’s ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now to get maps and GPS working…
This holiday weekend, I’m spending my time just hacking Google’s Android. I’m writing a location-based todo list (yes, a unique idea, I know). The purpose of the exercise is to learn how to write Android code in Eclipse.
So far, it is a fun experience. I’m only one day into a three-day personal hackathon but I’ve got something working already. I need to add a little more database code, write the GPS stuff and then put it on the n810. I’ll let you know how much progress I make today.
One thing I’ve noticed though: Although Eclipse is a pretty cool IDE and Android seems like a good framework, I can’t help feeling like I’ve done this before. The design patterns are defintely the same ones I used 25 years ago. Sure, the IDE was Turbo C and the framework wasn’t object-oriented but it still feels the same.
And since a car analogy is always an appropriate metaphor for a technical topic, I’ll repharse the above to ask “Why does it feel like I’m driving an ‘85 Camaro with spinning LED rims?”
Anyway, back to the hack…
I’ve been playing with symfony for a project I’m working on called Intelligence Exchange. So far, it’s been pretty cool, even if the learning curve is a bit steep.
As a sub-project, I want to write a cool-looking dashboard to monitor database activity. After looking around a while, I stumbled upon OpenFlashCharts. It looks good, it’s free and, best of all, it’s Free. I’m really looking forward to digging through its code RSN since I’ve been wanting to learn Flash. There’s even a symfony plugin for OpenFlashCharts! What more could one ask for?
Better frakkin’ documentation, that’s what! On the plugin download page, the example they give doesn’t work (on a properly configured system anyway).
If you look at the example given, the code snippet at the bottom of the page for the view template is this:
<? use_helper("OpenFlashChart"); ?>
...
...
...
<?= open_flash_chart( 300, 300, 'example/chartData'); ?>
Well, on my Macbook running php5, that <?= thingie does nothing. Why? Because “short open tags” (SOT), as they are known, are A Bad Thing and no one should be using them in this day and age. Hell, the general consensus back in the year 2000 was not to use them! Why they’re still being allowed eight years later is another bitch I’ve got with the designers of PHP!
The above isn’t quite true. Even with the short open tags, the code was *still being executed*. My system is configured NOT to use the SOT. To me, <sarcasm>and I may be a bit naive here </sarcasm>, if something is configured not to work, I expect it not to work! but I was able to sprinkle echo commands throughout the Helper code and see the results! IOW, the code was still being executed! WTF?!
To make the above example work, change the above line to read like this:
<?php echo open_flash_chart( 300, 300, 'example/chartData'); ?>
now the example pie chart shows up!
Well, I got the touchscreen working, thanks to the android_touchscreen_neov2.diff patch.
This tutorial is pretty good for getting Android running on the 810. If you go with the “Doing it the hard way (from source)” method, you’ll find there are a three problems with it:
One thing I noticed is I have Wifi capabilities in Android when there aren’t supposed to be any Wifi drivers since the existing ones are proprietary. A colleague of mine noticed the same thing, but he got Wifi only after properly configuring OS2008 before booting into Android.
So, I’m beginning to wonder: is Android an OS and an application stack, or “just” an application stack? I’ve got to do some more research on this but probably not this week; I’ve got paying clients that need attending to.
So, until then, as the captivating Nadia G. used to say…
Alla prossima!
Well, I finally got to play with Google’s Android this weekend. I “installed” a version of it on a Nokia n810. I say “installed” because the procedure was simply (?!) flashing a new kernel and running a script from the micro-SD card. I’ve got to look into the code some more, build a custom kernel, boot into init, and all that Good Stuff. Then I have to read up on the SDK and start hacking away.
The Nokia n810 is a nice little machine. My only complaint is the default font size in the browser is too small. Imagine taking all of the content you see in your browser window on your desktop and then shrinking it down to a screen that fits easily in your palm. Yeah, it’s a little hard to read.
The whole process took me back to Ye Olde Days of Linux (ca. 1995) when compiling kernels was de riguer, and you had to search all over the place for patches, and the instructions weren’t always quite right.
It looks like I may be playing with this alot more in the near future! Keep your fingers crossed!
I have been fighting all week trying to get Samba 3.0 and LDAP 3.0 working on a openSUSE 10.2 server. I got it working once; I was rebuilding it again for the practice.
I kept getting these errors whenever I ran smbldap-populate, depending on whether or not I started with a clean LDAP database (clean LDAP database == ‘rm /var/lib/ldap/*’):
“failed to add entry: naming attribute ’sambaDomainName’ is not present in entry at /usr/local/sbin/smbldap-populate line 495,
or
“failed to modify entry: structural object class modification from ’sambaDomain’ to ‘inetOrgPerson’ not allowed at /usr/local/sbin/smbldap-populate line 488,
I RTFMed, I Googled, I searched through the O’Reilly Zoo, I even fired up the Perl debugger and stepped through smbldap-populate! I found nothing that helped.
The problem was this: in my /etc/samba/smb.conf file, the workgroup was defined thusly:
workgroup = fubar
but in /etc/smbldap-tools/smbldap.conf, the pertinent line is:
sambaUnixIdPooldn="sambaDomainName=fubar,${suffix}"
See the problem? Of course you don’t! I didn’t see it all week until I was looking at the smb.conf file under vimdiff! There’s a space after the word fubar in the workgroup line!
It turns out the two entries have to be EXACT. To LDAP/smbldap-tools, ‘fubar ‘ (with a space) and ‘fubar’ (without a space) are two different strings!
I don’t know about you, but I figured Perl could handle a space at the end of a line. 
Let me know if this helps you out.
One of my clients can’t connect to his UW IMAP server using Windows Mobile Outlook because of the kiss of death when using MBOX formats.
Solution? Use Maildir format. Duh!
Since UW IMAP doesn’t support Maildir format, it just makes sense to switch over to Dovecot.
But I had a problem finding the right combination for Dovecot and Maildir, especially when it comes to Outlook’s “Inbox’ folder. Well, here’s the magic incantation for getting Dovecot with maildirs to work with Outlook:
DEFAULT=~/Maildir/
As you can see, I like putting the folders in the user’s directory. Place them where you like.
mail_location=maildir:~/Maildir:INBOX=~/Maildir/:INDEX=~/Maildir/tmp/index
The slashes or lack thereof are important!
Add-Art has got to be my favorite Firefox extension in a LONG time (my previous favorite was Book Burro)! This cool extension, in conjunction with AdblockPlus, replaces the ads on web pages with curated art images!
It is SO nice to see (currently) Japanese art painting show up when I browse the web instead of annyoing ads or white rectangles.
I understand they’ll change the artwork every two weeks (which some people are bitching about (unfortunately I can’t find the curmudgeons at the moment (and since I’m a prorammer, I can nest as many parantheses as I want! (HA!)))) which is fine by me!
If you’re using Firefox, you really want to get this extension. If you’re not using FF, why not?
…as of 20080523 1822 EST.
Maybe I’m just an old fart, but if a service wants me to think of them as indispensable, they’ve got to be around all the time. If you’re not going to be there when I want or need you, then you’re not very reliable, eh?
Maybe the youngun’s over at twitter need some old farts to show them how it’s done. Remember, just because you’re young doesn’t mean you know everything.
Reuven Lerner has a good post over on OStatic about how Open Source’s strength is in integrating with other systems, even legacy and proprietary system.
Of course, integrating Open Source with other Open Source apps is easiest, IMO, even if the documentation isn’t the best. In my experience, the documentation for Open Source is usually better for proprietary apps (go ahead, prove me wrong! That what the comments section is for) even if the documentation is “just” the source code.
My favorite Open Source tool for integration is, of course, Perl, the Glue of The Internet.
What’s yours?
Linux New Jersey powered by
WordPress Wordpress Template Design was Done In Style.
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).