Matt Croydon::Postneo

Busy making things: @mc, notes, tinycast, github, links, photos.

  • How Much for that 7700 in the Window?

    Posted in

    I had not seen a price mentioned on the 7700 before, but in a piece by Reuters, I saw this:

    Nokia unveiled the 7700 model last week, a space-age looking device with a large touch-screen display that gives users the possibility to watch TV. The $572 device is due to hit the shops in the second quarter of next year.

    The piece is actually worth reading, as it deals with the neccesity of having a right to view television license in some countries.  $572 is actually less than I was expecting to see the 7700 debut at.  I’ve been looking into Series 90/7700 development and might be picking one of these up as soon as they are available.  It could be so much more painful.

    Has anyone seen confirmation of this general price range?

  • Leona Naess and Badly Drawn Boy

    Posted in

    I’m heading down to the 9:30 Club this evening to see Leona Naess and Badly Drawn Boy.  It should be a chill acoustic filled evening.  I won’t be taking my 3650 with me, so no moblogging for you.  Of course I’ll write it up tomorrow.

  • Russ Found a Pad!

    Posted in

    Congrats, Russ.  I’ll make note of your experiences with beds on the Bay Bridge:

    General Rule of Life: No matter *what* the IKEA guy says, you cannot drive over the Bay Bridge with a Queen sized bed strapped to your roof. You *will* end up pulling over to the side of the highway and repacking your entire car to fit the bed in, trust me.

  • Series 90 C++ Emulator and Development Environment

    Posted in

    I downloaded the demo of CodeWarrior for Symbian and the Nokia s90 C++ SDK this afternoon and I can say without a doubt that the C++ emulator is ten times better than the j2me emulator.  You can definitely get a feel for the environment with the C++ emulator.  I built and ran the C++ Hello World program (which is a helluva lot more complex than the j2me hello world) and was blown away when the above screen popped up.

    The environment is beautiful.  I took the time to poke around a little bit, and everything seems to make sense so far.  The only thing I am worried about is text input.  It looks like your two options (at least on the 7700) will be tapping away at a virtual keyboard or using a pop-up text regognition box.  Below are examples of these two types on input.

    I continue to be impressed with the environment, though I do find the C++ toolchain a bit cumbersome.  The Metrowerks IDE is pretty much required for writing C++ for the 7700.  The C++ SDK is also a lot beefier, but you get an awesome emulator with it!  The build process is run on special build files either at the command line or from within CodeWarrior.  I can’t complain, I just wish that it was easier.  From grokking the various examples that are included with the SDK, the C++ route is definately the harder way to go, but it so much more powerful.

    The basic Hello World app requires the following files:

    • HelloWorldBasic.cpp (DLL entry point)
    • HelloWorldBasicApplication.cpp (Application that creates a new blank document and defines the app’s UID)
    • HelloWorldBasicApplication.h (header)
    • HelloWorldBasicDocument.cpp (A document object representing the data model, constructs the App UI)
    • HelloWorldBasicDocument.h (header)
    • HelloWorldBasicAppUi.cpp (App UI object that handles the commands generated from menu options)
    • HelloWorldBasicUi.h (header)
    • HelloWorldBasicAppView.cpp (Application View object that displays data to the screen)
    • HelloWorldBasicAppView.h (header file)
    • HelloWorldBasicView.rss (Resource file.  It describes the app’s menus and string resources.)

    The build/make/run process isn’t too hard after that:

    bldmake bldfiles
    abld build winscw udeb
    epoc

    I’ll be diving deeper in to the development environment and emulator in the coming days.

  • Apache Axis C++ 1.0 Alpha

    Posted in

    WebServices.Org notes that Apache Axis C++ 1.0 Alpha has been released.  Here’s a quick tidbit about the Axis C++ team:

    The team consists of four active developers and other contributors sponsored by Sri Lankan software companies. Development is done at the LSF (Lanka Software Foundation) which, launched the Axis C++ effort.

    More information can be found in the docs.  It requires XercesC and Apache under Linux.  Glancing at the docs, it looks like it will have the ability to generate wrappers from a WSDL file using WSDL2WS.  It also looks like it builds under MSVC++ under Windows, rather than your typical Cygwin port.

    Who will be the first to throw out some benchmarks?

  • Testing C++ Applications on Series 90

    Posted in

    Nokia released a new pdf today titled Developer Platform 2.0 for Series 90: Testing C++ Applications v1.0. It outlines the steps required to properly test a native C++ app. They suggest that this testing be done on physical hardware rather than an emulated environment.

  • Wallop: Microsoft Enters the Fray

    Posted in

    Via Ken MacLeod, Wallop is a place “where you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends.”

    It’s by invite only right now.  If anyone has the hookup, I’d love to hear from you (<%radio.macros.mailTo ()%>).  The idea is scary but exciting at the same time. 

  • NovSUSEian: Novell Acquires SuSE

    Posted in

    Via EntLinux, Novell is picking up SuSE:

    PROVO, Utah — Nov. 04, 2003 — Novell today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire SUSE LINUX, one of the world’s leading enterprise Linux companies, expanding Novell’s ability to provide enterprise-class services and support on the Linux platform. With the open source expertise of SUSE LINUX and Novell’s world-class networking and identity solutions and support, training and consulting services, Novell will be able to deliver Linux and all its components – from the server to the desktop – and give organizations a secure, reliable and mature Linux foundation. Novell will pay $210 million in cash to complete the acquisition. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and the winding up of shareholder agreements. Novell expects the transaction to close by the end of its first fiscal quarter (January 2004).

    I must not have been paying attention, because I didn’t see that one coming.  I really hope that Novell manages to do well with Ximian and SuSE, kicking butt in the enterprise without forgetting the little guy that runs SuSE in his basement…

    More coverage:

  • From VPNs to Leona Naess

    Posted in

    So many links, so little time:

    • Wi-Fi Networking News points to HotSpotVPN.com for $8.88 per month, it’s worth every penny.
    • Ken Pugh on pair programming.
    • Sean and Scott show the code to slurp all of the PDC materials.  A Python port of that would rock! 🙂
    • Fedora screenshots.
    • Edd’s P800 keeps him sane in the boring cold.  He pointed to Leona Naess, who has a new new cd (which is different than the old new cd).  It turns out that she is playing two nights in the DC Metro Area.  I’m going to do my best to see her.
    • I have installed OggPlay on my 3650 but don’t have any Ogg Vorbis files kicking around to test it.  The app runs, which is a plus.
    • Monologue aggregates mono weblogs.  It also has RSS.  Note to self: subscribe.
    • Ewan writes up the nice Nice Series 60 seminars.

  • Fog Creek Redesign

    Posted in

    Joel announced the redesign on Fog Creek Software’s web page by Dave Shea.

    I like it.

  • November Netcraft Survey

    Posted in

    According to Netcraft, it looks like a lot of people jumped ship from IIS to Apache.  Apache gained 2.8% of the market, while MS/IIS lost 2.44%.  Here’s why:

    Apache has a significant percentage gain this month as register.com, a leading domain registrar with a domain parking system serving responses for over one million domains eliminated its Windows front end, and reverted to Linux and Apache which it ran previously. Barely weeks ago its largest rival, Network Solutions made a similar switch from Microsoft-IIS back to SunOne, nee Netscape-Enterprise, for its own domain parking system.

  • Addicted to Pensacola: Wings of Gold

    Posted in

    Hi, My name is Matt, and I’m addicted to Pensacola: Wings of Gold.  It comes on at 6am on TNT in the DC Metro area.  I’m usually up anyway, and it is one of those things that I can watch without devoting 100% of my attention to it (most of the time).

    P:WoG was around for 3 seasons.  Season 1 is more action oriented and centered around the Sea Dragons.  Seasons 2 and 3 seem to be a lot more soap-ish.  Either way, I can’t seem to stop watching it.

    I wonder if season 1’s rantings started to slip, as only the main character played by James Brolin continued on the second (he was an executive producer).  I’m sure that there are all kinds of continuity issues lurking about, but I choose not to think about it.  It makes great background for multitasking at 6am.

    Linkage:

    Now back to your regularly scheduled geekblog.

  • Snonews: Text-based RSS Aggregation

    Posted in

    Snonews is a GPL’d text-based aggregator that uses libxml2 and ncurses.  It can handle RSS 1.0 as well as 0.9x and 2.0.  Of course there’s also the Ruby-based Raggle for those you you seeking a 3-paned experience.

    Sometimes low-tech just rocks.

  • Freevo 1.4rc2

    Posted in

    Freevo 1.4rc2 is out. A few features, more translations, bugfixes, and more are in this release.

  • OpenBSD 3.4 Released

    Posted in

    OpenBSD 3.4 has been officially released.  Of course I’ve been rocking out to the release song for a few weeks.  I should probably upgrade my Sparc Classic…

  • MOTOCODER October Update

    Posted in

    The October 31 MOTOCODER Newsletter is out.  It hit my mailbox sometime between 5am and 8am.  Here are a few interesting things from the newsletter:

    Moto looses points in my book though:

    <meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 5.0″>
    <meta name=”ProgId” content=”FrontPage.Editor.Document”>
    <title>New Page 1</title>
    <title>Newsletter</title>

    It announces itself as “New Page 1” at least in IE.  Oops.

  • Blogging and Mobile Blogging

    Posted in

    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.

  • Humorous Ant Antipatterns

    Posted in

    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.

  • Developing For Longhorn

    Posted in

    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.

  • Great G3 Desktop Deals

    Posted in

    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.