Nokia N900

After almost 3 years of Nokia E90 usage I  ordered a Nokia N900. Imho it’s the only phone/MID worthy of replacing my E90.  Ok; it’s bulky, heavy (the E90 is a brick too)  and the OS is probably a bit rough around the edges, but it runs Linux (maemo), has a 800×480 px screen, 1 gb of RAM (of which 768 mb is swap) and a whopping 32 gb storage.  I will miss Route66 though, not sure if Nokia Maps is capable of keeping me on track…

Can’t wait to get root on my phone

Virtual Pre

Update: Palm released the SDK, you can download a Linux, Mac Or Windows-SDK at : http://developer.palm.com/

The windows-version of the Palm Pre SDK leaked out last month; though still in beta it’s supposed to work, but unfortunately the installer itself is Windows only. Wine-to-the-rescue! I installed the SDK using Wine and checked the installed files. I found the emulator as a VirtualBox image in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Palm/SDK/share/emulator/images/sdk47, in windows it looks like it’s booted from a bat-file using several jar’s, but that doesn’t work on linux.  So I added the virtual disk to the “Virtual Media Manager”, created a new virtual machine with 256 mb ram, added grub.iso as CD-rom and tried to boot the VM.  Booting worked, kind-of; the bootmanager complained about “undefined video mode : 360″, if you don’t select a display-mode the VM will eventually halt with an error

PmCertificateMg[1092]: segfault at 0 ip 0804fd18 sp bf869228 error 4 in
PmCertificateMgrService[8048000+b000]

If you do select a video-mode the emulator will boot, however; the Virtual Pre doesn’t understand the resolution and controlling it with the mouse is very difficult. It seemed the Virtual Palm needed the right resolution to work OK, but this resolution/video-mode is not available from the bootmanager.
Then I found this post, you need VBoxManage to add some configuration to VirtualBox, so open up a terminal and enter:

VBoxManage setextradata "NAME OF VM" "CustomVideoMode1" "320x480x32"

Change NAME OF VM to the name you’ve given to the VirtualBox instance (and keep the quotes!), boot the VM again and your Virtual Palm Pre should work like it’s supposed to.

After playing around with the VM I’m quite impressed with the Pre. I was considering a Nokia N97 because the Palm is still not available here in Holland (and it will probably take some months before they release it here), but having seen the Pre-software in action I decided to keep using my 3-year-old Nokia E90 until the Palm is available here. As soon as I get the chance to look at the SDK in detail I’ll post my findings here, there’s supposed to be an Eclipse Plugin somewhere in the SDK, can’t wait to try that and write my first “hello world” TwitterClient (a tutorial on writing your first app for the Pre can be found here, has nice wordpress-skin too!)

More detailed description on how to get the VirtualBox image working can be found here

Some more screenshots:

Palm Pre booting in VirtualBox

Splashscreen after boot on Virtual Palm Pre

Applications overview on Virtual Palm Pre

Dialer on Virtual Palm Pre

Syntacticsugar.nl from the Pre Webbrowser

Installing Moonlight was quite easy, just go to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/, click on the image under “2. Download the plugin” and Firefox will ask if it may install the Moonlight Add-on. But; Moonlight by itself is quite useless without the copyrighted audio & video codecs from Microsoft. Novell (moonlight’s daddy) can’t distribute those codecs in Moonlight itself and you need to install them after Moonlight has been installed. This is supposed to be easy, go to the Moonlight-website, rightclick on the notice at the top saying “Congratulations!! You’re running the current release of Moonlight” and select “install microsoft codecs”. You’ll need to accept that you’re willing to sell your soul to Microsoft .. eh.. the EULA and the codecs will be downloaded and installed.
However, after the download I got the message “Permission Denied“. Obviously some directory was off limits for me, but I didn’t know which directory. So I tried to install Moonlight and the codecs as root,  gksudo firefox, which went fine. Next I started looking for files, where did Moonlight leave the codecs? In /usr/lib? /usr/share/firefox? I found it in the home-directory of root; /root/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight/silverlight-media-pack-linux-x86-5-1.so.  Next stop; copy the .so-file to my own home-directory, but wtf? No directory /home/[me]/.mozilla/plugins? So.. i created the directory, and while I was at it, also created /home/[me]/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight, chmodded it to allow writing by me and tried to install the codecs;  Success!!! And they actually work; the codecs:)

So.. all you need to do to get Moonlight with Microsoft Codecs Pack installed, step by step

1. Go to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/ and click on the image under “2. Download the plugin” (see here for moonlight installation instructions )
2. You’ll be asked to restart firefox, don’t.. Bookmark this page and open up a terminal.
3. In the terminal; type:
   mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins [enter]
   and
   mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight [enter]
   and
   chmod +w ~/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight
4. Restart firefox
5. Go to the Moonlight website again, and if Moonlight was installed successfully you’ll see “Congratulations!! You’re running the current release of Moonlight” somewhere at the top of the page. Right click on that (the normal context menu of firefox will show up, click somewhere on the page to hide it)
6. Click “Install Microsoft Codecs”
7. A popup will appear with a lengthy EULA, accept it (if applicable) and the download of codecs will start
8. When finished installation will start as well and you should be done.
9. Check the moonlight site again to make sure it’s running OK; if you right click the notification you shouldn’t see the item “Install Microsoft Codecs” anymore

Please upgrade (by www.robotjohnny.com)

From: http://www.robotjohnny.com/

My personal favorites:

//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 16
//

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
//Now, God only knows

# To understand recursion, see the bottom of this file
At the bottom of the file:
# To understand recursion, see the top of this file

IE6 showing Facebook (in WINE)

rant-alert :  IHMO You would only use IE6 if  ;

• You’re using an illegal version of windows and you’re not able to Windows Update, why would that be supported by anyone? If you’re too lame to buy a legal copy, switch to a OS that’s free (and stable, and secure, and  looks better.. and.. and.. well)
• You’re at work and the ICT-dept.  is lame and not doing their job (security blackholes)
• You’re a complete n00b and don’t know what windows-update is (you shouldn’t use a computer at all)

I’ll try to post some snippets and more info on my WebPublishingSystem inbetween workrave-breaks!

Hi there.. visitor! Welcome to this blog. If you’re into Javascript, PHP, XML, XSL, Ruby on Rails and web-development in general, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll try to post progress of my daily development-routine as freelance webdeveloper. It might not be rocket-science, or maybe it is, I don’t care. Just learn from it, as I did from other geeks posting their dev-stories onto their blogs:)

So.. off we go, who am I ?
I’m Ivo, 32, living in the Netherlands. I’ve been a self-employed webdeveloper for almost 5 years now. Before being self-employed I’ve worked as a developer at several internet/software companies for 8 years.
My expertise is mainly in webdevelopment, ASP (classic), PHP, XSL, Javascript and (since several months) Ruby on Rails.

WPS
I started development on a PHP web-publishing-system, called WPS, about 2 years ago. I’ve created and worked with a lot of content management systems, but none of them fit my needs, worked the way I’d liked!
I wanted a system that would allow users to manage content from within the site itself. No backend! Also, the system should use the xml-DOM everywhere, allowing templating with the (imho) best templating-method out there: XSL-T. It had to be build completely object-orientated, and had to make use of Plugin-objects and Command-objects. Development of those plugins had to be easy, with a lot of helpers, but also the freedom of PHP and external sources. It should be able to handle authenticated AJAX-calls on each object, and above all: visitors of website running this system should NOT notice the website is running on it.

The first release was a bit messy, still figuring out what to do with the client-side javascript, and not quite happy with the initial object-relations. It’s still out there, on sourceforge, getting no love and attention at all.. ahhhh.

BUT; i’m now at Version 2.5! And 2.5 is running a lot of sites now! I’ve created a javascript library which is used extensively throughout the systems admin-clients. I’ve added caching, usermanagement/authorization and Rails-integration. I’ve created about 40 different plugins, one of them being used as a “publishing” system itself. [objectWeb on mollenhagen.com]

I’ll be posting a lot more on WPS on this blog, in fact; this blog is running on WPS

That’s it for now.. i’m out!