or maybe something uplifting…

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.

Background

I’m trying to move forward with the plan I outlined the other day. In short I want to use LDAP to simplify my home network of five computers and six users. I haven’t got as far as setting up a login yet but I have got the LDAP server running on one of the computers (named copper) that’s running OpenSuse 10.2.

Today I just want to talk about the steps I’ve taken to experiment at getting something going. I’m learning this as I go and these are just notes to help remember how I got to where I am. If they help you too then that’s great.
Read the rest of “A Little LDAP Progress”…

The conference went really well considering there was no electricity until 3pm. It wasn’t their fault - the power was out in that whole part of the city apparently. Candace went ahead without the PowerPoint Slides she worked so hard to make and gave a great talk on Collaboration Nation. She gave an intro to a bunch of the different ways people collaborate and work together online. It can be a tough topic to approach when you’re already using blogs, wikis and every Web 2.0 social site effortlessly. You have to go back to the spot you came in from and try to draw your audience in. I think Candace did a great job of it in the half hour she had.

It sounds like U Windsor’s got the Open Source bug. The new software they’re deploying campus-wide is an open source Learning Management System called Sakai. The executive director of the Sakai foundation, Dr. Chuck, gave the keynote. It sounds like they follow a model a lot like Apache Foundation, in that there’s a non-profit foundation which guides the project and a bunch of developers volunteering their time to get the actual work done.
Read the rest of “Technology Day 2007 Notes”…

I can think of three things I really want from my email: it should be easy to use, fast, and private. SquirrelMail gets me pretty close to those goals. It just got better today with the release of version 1.4.10. Somewhere between the last version I last installed and this one they’ve added support for multiple identities - that is to say that you can have more than one return address.

If you want to set it up on a site you host at 1and1, there’s an FAQ at 1and1 on how to do exactly that. Unfortunately they haven’t updated it since they changed their outgoing (SMTP) mailservers to require authentication. I got the hint because it’s mentioned for other email clients. Since SquirrelMail is really just an IMAP email client written in PHP, the same rules apply.

What worked for me was this change in SquirrelMail’s config/config.php:
$smtp_auth_mech = 'login';
The default was none.

So overall all you need to change in the default config file to make SquirrelMail work with mail at 1and1 are the $domain, $smtpServerAddress (smtp.1and1.com) and $imapServerAddress (imap.1and1.com).

The other interesting thing is that since SquirrelMail is just an email client, you don’t have to run it on your 1and1 web server to get your 1and1 mail. If you have a home server or one hosted somewhere else, you could use the same configuration file and SquirrelMail will go get your mail just like any other client would. Depending on how you use your mail you might find this a little more convenient and possibly faster than using your web server.

I listened to a talk John Ostrem gave at the 2006 Emerging Telephony Conference. I got the podcast from ITConversations. His talk is about LiPS, the Linux Phone Standards Forum. The talk went well enough and I learned a little bit but I was left wanting to know more. I guess that’s a good side-effect for a standards group. LiPS seems to be interested in the middle layers of software on a mobile phone. They’re not in the kernel stuff, that’s something that OSDL is working on. They’re not at the top layer, that’s up to application developers and left for various handset and service providers to differentiate themselves. LiPS sounds like it’s there to work with the in-between parts. The window management and some of the UI mechanics - not UI details like layout or design but maybe widgets or something under there.
Read the rest of “Looking at Linux and Phone Standards”…

A while ago I started thinking about running World of Warcraft on Linux, and someone even left me a note about a petition for a Linux-native client a month or two ago too. I’d love to see a native client for WoW in Linux, but that’s not here today. So I turned to Wine for the first time in years.

I tried Wine way back when I first installed Debian Linux in 1998. Things were different then. I’d wanted to try out Linux before then but I was help up by lack of support for exotic things like IDE hard drives. Yes, it was a different time. I was tied to a lot more closed-source Windows apps, like the brilliant IRC client mIRC. So my experience with Wine was trying to get mIRC running without really understanding Winsock, sockets, or any of that stuff. The program would start but never connected. Let’s just say I was left wanting.

While I’ve been off doing my own thing, the Wine team has been hard at work and they’ve done some amazing things. Amazing things like working without an installed copy of MS Windows on your machine, supporting some DirectX stuff and generally taking a lot of the pain out of running Windows applications on Linux. My new desktop is a single-boot machine so far. I might try out MS Windows Vista some day, but I’m not in any hurry.

So the other day I started thinking about how fast my AMD 64 X2 4200+ computer is compared to my year-old Compaq R3000z laptop that I’ve been running WoW on. I read about some very positive experiences with WoW on Wine under other Linux distros. Read the rest of “World of Warcraft on OpenSuse Linux 10.1″…

I criticize them for locking it up, so I have to give props to Google when they talk about letting users take their own data. I realize it’s only a speech and nothing specific about their own plans, but the fact that the people at the top are talking about giving data back is great. Vendor lock-in sucks. I realize more and more just how much different things could be every time I pick up a new Open Source project. From Linux to Firefox to Asterisk, every one has opened my eyes to what can be done when people are free to choose. And talk like this makes me believe there’s room left before this whole Internet boat sails on over that crapwave.

So thanks for the sentiment Mr. Schmidt, I look forward to seeing how you follow through on it.