Oh where was I....

Spent the morning fighting RS232 connections to the BeagleBoard. No success yet, but getting there. Updating the EEE PC 901's Ubuntu 8.10 Array.org kernel. Generally nerding about a bit. Which is nice.

A metaphor for free software?

I feel that this tale may serve as a useful metaphor for free software too.

And if you listen to Mark Watson makes the world substantially better... sing along... "Exemplum exemplum, an example from your own life, except in this case it's from a theme park employee, so it's probably a themeparkempluuuum". And if you don't, give it a go.

Ah Drugs Specials....

This just replaced the "Just Say No" song as the worst drugs special ever.

I want that one... big flash drives...

I want that one.... 64TB of flash, 64GB of cache... Mmmmm...

A Pondering....

For the people who think Linux should be referred to as GNU/Linux to properly credit the GNU software used in Linux distributions;

If the attribution of credit is so important, shouldn't the GPL have had an attribution clause?

And a supplementary ponder.... Why GNU/Linux and not Linux/GNU? Answer for that found at the gnu site... fair enough... now back to the primary ponder.

What I look for in a phone...

Oooh I said, a new release of OpenMoko OM2008.8 ....

I wonder..... Looks down page .... Ah Known Issues....

"GSM not working properly after x hours"

Ok... well that can be work....

"Can not make phone call after GSM on/off/on"

Right, well at least we got the source and....

"No Pin-Dialog is showing up and so GSM is not usable at all"

Oh for goodness sake... at least there's the Wifi...

"WiFi can only connect once"

..... Still maybe there's another distro for the OpenMoko eh?

Yes, I've been quiet.... There's a good reason...

You can see what I'm doing during the day by following Heise Online UK's Open Channel. Look out for some useful, interesting and possibly fun stuff about open source and the community around it coming up on there. And if you think I should be writing about something, drop me a mail on djwm [at] heise-online.co.uk.

It Strikes Me....

It strikes me that a phone that uses Linux inside but has locked down DRM is a far greater offence than say a phone with a proprietary OS and locked down DRM. I'm reading here about the motorola Linux based phones... But then I am also finding it very hard to track down info on how to develop for those phones. 95% of what I seem to be finding is how to unlock these phones... Which again strikes me with the thought that "hey, wasn't it also some sort of heinous offence to sell a locked phone too?"... Oh my head hurts with all these strikes....

Some people....

Some people(1) will do anything to justify getting their picture(2) out there...

(1) Ok, me...
(2) Or image that resembles the side of their head.

Well, That Worked

And it reminds me how really really neat the iPhone app store is.

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Trying Out Lifecast

Interesting idea, it seems to be a little multichannel diary which you can wire to multiple blogs (or not) which strikes me as simple and .... Well let's see if it posts this first shall we.

Geolocate this post

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10 points for redefining "Hello World" in Java

Some code we never go back to. Like Java's Hello World... it has a main method which takes arguments and it always looks a little daunting. At Cavdar.net someone had a bright idea and uses a static initialiser block to print "Hello World", and then promptly exits to stop the JVM looking for the main method and giving an error. I, for one, welcome our new "Hello World" overlords...

Context sensitive trackpad on the iPhone?

I was thinking, wouldn't it be neat if you could have an app on the iPhone which talks to your Mac and acts like an intelligent trackpad for the Mac?

You could experiment with context sensitive trackpads which change according to the application running on the Mac.

A pope can dream.

Trying out blogging by mail.

I've been thinking about it, and the lack of a iPhone app to post to
Blogger has lead me to giving mail based blogging a go.

Well, at least that's the theory.

Ah Momus brilliance....

And there in my feeds this morning, Momus lists the tracks he's doing in a Berlin set. And to top it off, a wonderful bit of Momus on a webcam, performing "The Cheques in the Post"....



Brilliant stuff...

How overegged were the iPhone queue stories?

Some Guy With A Website demonstrates.

Thrift, the other interconnection protocol....

How did I manage to miss Thrift. Released a year ago by Facebook, it's very similar to Google's Protocol Buffers, so this comparison by Stuart Sierra puts meat on those bones.

There's only one way to resolve this... PROTOCOL FIIIIIIIGHT.

Actually, Thrift looks nice with more languages supported too and now Thrift is in incubation as an Apache project.

Foxtrot does....

Foxtrot does Penny Arcade, PvP, xkcd and Joy Of Tech in one.

So close yet....

So our local constabulary are sending out local crime maps by email to people who are interested. This is good.

They are sending out .Doc files embedded as a link in a .rtf file. You can't open this on a Mac or on Linux and I suspect you'd need Office on Windows for it to work. This is not good.

But, it's a start.

Google undoes a dumb....

Google Mail had what someone must have thought was a neat behavior. Exchange mail with people and pow, they are added to your contacts. Of course, in real life, that doesn't work. You get a contact list full of crapola addresses, which devalues your contact list which is dumb. So the good news is that is in a future release, Google is getting rid of the dumb. Now, there's "Suggested Contacts" and the ability to pick and choose who becomes your contacts.

And there's another thing to think about.... Is this the start of more controllable contact management for Google's services, making it social networking without the ninjas and spammers? One can hope.