or maybe something uplifting…

As I’ve been getting started with Android I decided to take some notes. What follows is something I wrote down as I was working on getting a first sample to build and download from Eclipse using ADT. I followed the instructions from Google and tried the troubleshooting directions. My platform is OpenSuse 10.3 Linux. This note might be helpful if you’re trying to develop for Android.
Read the rest of “When Android doesn’t Launch your application”…

I took a little break today from the C++ and Lua stuff I’ve been doing to have a look at Google’s new phone platform. I followed the installation instructions and had some demos up and running pretty quickly. I also grabbed the source and poked around to see whose shoulders they stand on. I saw QEMU source, SDL source and they distribute the source for the Linux kernel that they’re running.

The installation instructions worked fine for me on my Linux box, running OpenSuse 10.3 and Eclipse 3.2 that I installed via Yast. I ran in to one hiccup, when I first installed the ADT Eclipse Plug-in the extra options for it didn’t show up in the Preferences Dialog where they should. I had to check a couple times to make sure that I had installed it correctly but it showed up where it should in Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration.

I started looking at the other options for building projects then realized that I didn’t have an Ant view in my Eclipse. So I went looking for where that comes from and I decided I needed to install the JDT Plug-in via Yast. Most Eclipse users probably already have the Java Development Tools (JDT), I think it’s part of most installations, but I haven’t been using Eclipse on this machine yet. After that I had the Ant view and the Android plug-in showed all the options it should. I set the SDK location and was able to create Android projects just like the directions describe.

It’s easy to get excited looking at this SDK. I tried out a couple of samples in the emulator. The connection to Google Maps is pretty impressive. I also see configuration options for XMPP. I’ll have to see if I can talk to a Jabber server on my machine and do something interesting. Maybe I could try a little Java game, I’ve done some SDL. It’s hard to choose what direction to go in but I feel like it’d be a shame not to build something of my own with all this great code to start from.

There are a couple things I’ve done to tweak World of Warcraft on my Linux box. I run OpenSuse 10.3 now but most of this will be the same for other distros, especially if you use KDE. These are just specific to what worked for me but I guess that some other Linux WoW players might benefit from the same settings.

First off I lost the ability to do a quick self-cast. Self-cast is done by just holding alt while clicking the icon for a spell. So, as a mage, every half-hour I want to self-cast Arcane Intellect. That’s no big deal since it’s not in combat. Remove Lesser Curse is a bigger problem. The second fastest way to use that is with a shortcut key or click followed by F1 (which also targets your own character). I thought the problem was because of some multi-language keyboard customization I had done but as it turns out it was a setting in KDE for moving windows by holding the Alt-key. To turn this off just follow the steps here - I included pictures, click each to get a bigger image.
Read the rest of “WoW: Self-Cast in KDE and Faster Performance in Wine”…

A few awesome KDE keyboard shortcuts, some I forgot, some I never knew and just said “wow, what a great idea”.
Read the rest of “KDE Keyboard Shortcuts”…

Just in case anyone’s wondering about the outcome from the parts I ordered the other day, I just installed my Ruby Orb fan on my Asus M2NPV-VM. It was a little scary, for one thing that heatsink & fan is really huge. I mean really. It’s a 120mm fan, stock CPU fans are about 65mm if I remember right. The Ruby Orb is so big I don’t think I could take the RAM out of the computer without removing the CPU heatsink. I will say it’s very quiet for the amount of air that it moves. Still my computer overall seems about as loud as it was with just the one case fan. Of course now it’s got two case fans running and with the old case fans I had the noise would’ve been unbearable. I’ve also got five hard drives in there now (just installed the 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive).
Read the rest of “Installing the ThermalTake Ruby Orb on my Asus M2NPV-VM”…

It seems like the shorter the code is the longer it takes to write. I’m trying to rename a group of similarly-name directories using Bash and for no good reason I decided I’d like to do it all on one line. There are a bunch of ways to do it, not all fit on a line and some are more efficient than others. There’s apparently a package out there called mmv that I haven’t looked for which does stuff like this. There’s also sed. With sed I got something close:
Read the rest of “Moving Multiple Files in Bash”…

I started out talking about SMART and drive temperatures the other day but got all geeked out about hardware and forgot where I was going. I meant to also talk about how I tried to just spin down my older Western Digital ATA hard drives to give them a chance to cool off.

I looked at the hdparm, I saw some comments on forums saying it could be used to set a time delay to spin-down a hard drive. Read the rest of “Spinning Down Hard Drives in OpenSuse 10.3″…