Diego has posted a monster blog entry about blogging. If you want to learn about blogging and/or start a blog, go read it.
Jonathan Knudsen at Sun has a write up about mobile blogging. It is a good roundup of mobile blogging in general, and also accessing/updating blogs from the J2ME environment.
Hani at TheServerSide has written up some Ant anti-patterns. My favorite so far:
8. Ask users to prove their loyalty and dedication to your cause by demanding they add jar files to ANT_HOME/lib. For extra points, do not tell them what these jar files are. It can be a test of the true faithful to see if they can figure it out from an ant stacktrace and find out what jar to download from where.
Sam Gentile takes us through building your first app on Longhorn.
Update: At least we will still feel at home with Longhorn BSODs. Actually, Virtual PC seems to be the one to blame.
Dealmac has two excellent deals on older B&W G3 Macs: a G3/300 (128/6/CD/Zip) for $299.95 and a G3/350 (192/6/DVD) for $349.99 from MegaMacs. Both of these come with 17″ Studio Displays. I consider both of these excellent deals and would jump on one of them if I were liquid for it. I’m trying to scrounge together enough to get my hands on something to properly run Panther on.
XPostFacto for Panther should make it work on my 8500 soon, but it’s going to be dog slow if it will work at all. I’m hoping that something really cheap crops up on my local craigslist.
If anyone else out there is looking for user Macs, Baucom Computers is another great source. Right now they’ve got some attractively priced G3 and G4 desktops.
I just saw the Cadillac of strollers: the Chariot Cavalier 1. It is a lot like your typical joggersport stroller, but it’s just a little bit more beefy and a and just looks so cool in person. It has the required handbrake and all the goodies. It’s really sturdy but only about 21 pounds.
My kids are so going to roll around in something like this.
These Whidbey screenshots definitely evoke a Pavlovian response. Previous versions of Visual Studio .NET have been some of the most pleasing to work in. Hopefully Whidbey will feel even better.
Of course the more powerful client-side apps will be the ones taking advantage of the Longhorn SDK. [Via Scott Hanselman, who has been covering the PDC extremely well, as have all the other bloggers at the PDC]
There is a new Skype beta out. More news can be found at Betanews.
I was reading a BBC News article on multimedia mobile phones via BBC’s WAP site this evening. Jo Twist gave an excellent overview of Series 60 phones and also hinted at the enhanced capabilities of Series 90.
I’ve got a 3650 in my pocket, but I have seen the light, and it is tinted Series 90.
I’ve been going through the examples included in the Wireless Toolkit on the s90 emulator. I’m starting to jive with the emulated interface. Of course I should expect it, but it’s nice to take a stock MIDlet and have it conform to the sexy Aqua-like s90 interface.
In order to run your MIDlets on the s90 emulator from within the WTK2.0, just copy the Series_90_MIDP_Concept_SDK_Beta_0_1 directory in to the wtklib/devices directory of your WTK2.0 install. When you restart the application, you should be able to select the Series 90 emulator.
At first glance, I thought of this device as a high end taco. After tinkering with the Emulator, I think that it is going to be a whole lot more. Hopefully the 7700 will be the first in a fleet of Series 90 devices. That would rock.
Russell Beattie’s weblog and Mobitopia were down this morning. The guys on #mobitopia were trying to get in touch with him to let him know, but we should not have been worried:
<RussellB> My *Mom* called me at 7:00 a.m. this morning to tell me
I was curious how much it would take to get a Hello World style app running on a Series 90 (the platform that the Nokia 7700 is based on) emulator. The answer is just the following three downloads:
I took the code from Getting Started with MIDlet Development, built it, packaged it, and ran the emulator with emulator -classpath HelloSuite.jar HelloMIDlet. Once everything was downloaded and installed, the Hello World process took just a minute or two. It was well below the 5 minute threshold that Russ has deemed neccesary for wireless development.
You’ll note that on the emulator, the thumb buttons and keypad are reversed from those on the 7700. The emulator/SDK release is versioned 0.1, so beware. I’m sure that some things will change before the official release of the 7700.
I have a feeling that we are going to see a ton of apps written for Series 90 and the 7700 in particular. My guess is that we will see lots of J2ME apps, but the killer apps will be built using C++. In skimming the docs, it looks like I have at least limited access to the camera, wireless messaging, mobile media, and bluetooth. This is much different than the super sandbox that is MIDP 1.0.
I was having issues with SETI@home last night and this morning. I have it set up to start in screensaved mode. It kept trying to start up and quickly shut down, leaving a row of little green icons in my tray. I tried starting it up in standalone mode and got an error numbered 100. Here’s the fix from the site:
If you are unable to connect due to “100″ errors (or perhaps “41″) you may need to exit SETI@home, remove the files “result.sah” and “user_info.sah” from your system, and then restart SETI@home. This is probably fallout from the user database crash a few days ago. Sorry for the inconvenience.
That should do it, it worked for me.
Newsforge has details about the keynotes scheduled for Linux World Conference & Expo scheduled for January 20-23 2004 at the Javits Center in New York.
It looks like IDG is embracing BOF sessions this year, which is A Good Thing ™. I will definitely head up to LinuxWorld for at least one of the Expo days, and depending on how the sessions work out I might spend a day or partial day in some of those.
If anyone is planning to head up/out/over to LinuxWorld NY, let me know and maybe we can meet up.
I posted my first entry on Mobitopia this morning: Nokia’s Mobile Media 7700. I think it’s a good start, and if it’s the tip of the iceberg as El Reg suggests, I’m so there.
Here is a quick roundup of the Longhorn news that I’ve seen whizz past my aggregator this evening:
System.MessageBus.That’s all I have for now, but I have a feeling that this is just the beginning.
I didn’t realize it until this evening, but when Radio rendered my code, it was munching some characters. I have updated my CamelCase Parser post. What was incorrectly (S*?) is now (\S*?) and should behave properly. My apologies to anyone who was led astray by the incorrect version. The source has been correct the whole time, so if you were working from that, you’re good to go.
khtml2png is an excellent little program for Linux that allows you to create a thumbnail image from a specified website. The program itself is pretty lightweight, but requires X, Qt, and kdelibs. It needs both the libraries and the headers, which required me to install qt3-dev, kdebase-dev, and their various dependencies under SuSE 9.
It’s quite easy to use once you do the ./configure && make && make install dance. Here is the command that produced the thumbnail on the right:
./khtml2png --width 800 --height 1000 --scaled-width 160 --scaled-height 200 http://postneo.com postneoss_tn.png
You could easily call out to khtml2png from inside your scripting environment, but it is probably not very well suited for a server environment. In addition to requiring the desktop libraries, it needs to connect to an X server. The workaround discussed in the README is to use Xvnc. I think you’re best off running khtml2png on a desktop machine and then moving the thumbs to a server via your transport protocol of choice.
There is a similar program out there called html2jpg which uses Opera, Perl, and ImageMagick to do its work.
This is a fantastic hack with a GPL licence. Rock on, Simon.
If you are at the PDC, check out the Mono BOF:
The first in a series of undercover Mono BOFs at the PDC will take place tonight at 7pm on the Academy meeting, in room 411. Come join us to plot the evolution.
Leo Laporte is putting together a Linux box for a next-gen TMBG Dial-A-Song. Read all about it: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4.
Apple is running a pretty good deal for ADC members. Until November 21, you can pick up Panther and an ADC Select membership for $500. You will also get Xcode (of course), early access to software, a developer hardware discount, six ADC TV coupons, two code-level technical support incidents, access to Apple’s compatability lab, plus all of the other goodies available to ADC Select members.
As Erik pointed out, you’re pretty much getting Panther for free with a Select membership.