Blrg

So this is hardly news at this point, but I figured I'd comment on it now that things have progressed a little and I've exported my projects.

For those of you who don't know AppInventor: It is a web application created by Google to facilitate the creation of Android apps. The premise was that you wouldn't need to know how to code: It was a drag-and-drop creation environment, and sadly it didn't get terribly far.

It's not that it was terrible, mind you, it's just that.. well, there weren't many employees behind the creation of this tool and it wasn't open source, so development and bug fixing was slow, and there were two glaring flaws: Apps that were created were large (one of mine, which was essentially a predefined phone book, was 1.3MB), and these apps could not be uploaded to the Market: they weren't actual apps yet (they do not "compile" to bytecode) and required a helper to run.

I'm sure this can be fixed and AI can become a great tool, but I believe the main issue is one that has been a thorn in Google side for a while now: They're spread too thin and are trying to do too many things at once. Google may have the money for it, but they don't have the manpower. Thankfully, they seemed to have realized this and have not only open-sourced the code instead (or will) and have funded a new MIT Centre for Mobile Learning; This, to me, is a great idea as it gives Google a certain amount of control while not requiring them to directly manage it.

(Oh, and it being open source means others can contribute, but I don't see too much of that happening soon. Call me sceptic but those who can develop will probably not notice the tool at all and be directly trying to create their own apps. Then again, beginners could still be stuck in that middle zone, and perhaps advanced developers will still see it as a useful RAD tool ... if and once you can create actual source with it, I'd imagine!)

tl;dr: Remove "Indicator applets" from your panel.

I've been using Ubuntu on my netbook for a while. With things getting crazy with recent versions of Ubuntu and GNOME, however, I find myself not wanting to stay with Canonical's Unity and rather keep a classic desktop-like interface to my netbook.

The easiest way to do this, I figured, was to simply use another version of Ubuntu. KUbuntu was already out; I'd tried a live CD of it on another system and it didn't seem ready to me, nor did I like the direction they were going. It's not that it's bad, it's just not my style. Okay, so that leaves a few other editions to try out, like XUbuntu and LUbuntu.

Since I was already familiar with XFCE (XUbuntu), I decided to try out LXDE (LUbuntu) first to see if I'd like it. It's pretty nice, but at some point I noticed something was off - I don't know if it was always like this and I hadn't noticed, or it happened after an update - and that is that my menubars were gone!

Continue reading "LUbuntu and the case of the disappearing menubars"

I recently ran into an obscure issue with PHP's preg functions:
Exception: preg_match(): Compilation failed: unknown option bit(s) set at offset 0
This error message would show up whenever a PCRE function was used with the u (unicode/UTF-8) flag set. This is apparently triggered by using a new version of PHP (>5.3?) and an old version of libpcre (<8.1?).

Continue reading "Gentoo, PCRE, and PHP"

Yeah, so I have an HTC Dream from Rogers because my boss wants me to be able to get e-mails and calls when things go wrong - expensive for an on-call phone, eh? - and I was having difficulty updating it. See, Rogers has been for the past month demanding that users update their phone due to a bug concerning dialling 911 (apparently, if you have GPS enabled and try to call 911, the call fails or somesuch; but I never have GPS enabled anyway, since Google tracks you if you have it on and I have no use for it - besides, the cell location works better), and they disable your data plan until you update. After trying to update it on two Windows systems and trying to manually put the firmware on it as well as calling Rogers tech support, I finally found these instructions:

Windows 7 Instructions for Rogers HTC

It's actually pretty simple, but here's the real problem I was encountering:

I had mistakenly assumed that since it was a new device, the SD card was formatted FAT32, as they need to be for the update. However, it was not (Good job, Rogers). After getting everything off the card and formatting it to FAT32 then replacing the firmware onto the card, I was able to update the phone without a hitch.

I'm still disappointed that it took Rogers so long to update the HTC Dream... ...and didn't even provide a real update. Geez, guys, get with the program already.

Okay, so it turns out you CAN use themes with 3.6 — the theme just has to be correctly updated for it. Simply version bumping does not work for this version, it seems.

Phew!

Oh, and since 3.5, the auto-complete behaviour changed, so for those of you who liked browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped, you may want to read about changing automcomplete behaviour in Firefox 3.5/3.6.

That is all for now.