On The Fence Development

Migrating my Broadband – Android to the Rescue in the meantime.

Ok, so it’s no secret that I’m not impressed with the Broadband service from TalkTalk; the connection speed is pretty good but it is unstable – dropping sometimes dozens of times a day. This is just too frustrating for words and the TalkTalk Technical Support is frankly a joke! Anyway, one day I was trying to download the Ubuntu Lucid Server ISO and was having numerous connection drop outs when a Sky salesman knocked on my door. Now normally I would not entertain these intrusions into my evenings but today was different. To cut a long story short, I signed up for the TV, Phone and Broadband services.

Knowing that I would lose the broadband when the phone switched over I was prepared for a couple of days downtime but how was I going to cope? Well as it happened I have a HTC Hero phone and it was very recently upgraded to the official Android 2.1 release – and when I plug it in to my laptop I get a number of options including Charge Only, Mount as Disk Drive or Internet Sharing!
Read the rest of this entry »

Writing a plugin for Statusnet : Part 1

My work is getting into microblogging – both internally and to the outside world. We had previously considered using Twitter and even tried using Yammer for purely internal posting but there were concerns about privacy – the data is stored ‘out there’ on somebody else’s server and we were at the mercy of any future changes in service terms and conditions.

In the end we opted for the StatusNet engine which also powers the Identi.ca microblogging service. Its Open Source, can be installed locally and has a Twitter-like API which meant that we could integrate it with our internal systems like our CruiseControl.NET build server.

But that’s not the end of it – StatusNet is extendible as well. With a little knowledge of PHP and knowing which ‘hooks’ to use (or how to find them) it is possible to intercept most (if not all) of the important events in the world of statusnet, like posting a notice, and injecting your own logic.

Well it has come to pass that the company decided not only to implement an internal microblogging platform but to create a presence ‘out there’ as well. But the question is “how to do it in the most effective way?”, I mean there are loads of social networks out there and we don’t want to have to repost manually on multiple sites. Well the good thing is we don’t need to!

Using a service called PingFm it is possible to post to a vast number of services including microbloggers like Twitter and Identica as well as LinkedIn and even blogs like WordPress, all from a single application.

Now the crunch, getting users to post when they are up to is one thing, asking them to do it through two services (StatusNet and PingFm) is another thing altogether. But hope is at hand, StatusNet has a plugin architecture which allows new functionality to be added quite easily. Read the rest of this entry »

Oops – Hit my bandwidth limit :-\

Well I’ve been seeing some increased traffic to the site lately and while I kept an eye on the number of users but not on the effect it was having on my bandwidth!

Suffice to say that this morning I was greeted with a ‘You Have Exceeded Your Band Width’ limit email! Oops!
Well as I host the site on a reseller account it was simple to increase the bandwidth limit so normal service has been resumed.

Installing Eclipse and the Android SDK on Ubuntu 10.04

As previously posted I have recently bought myself a nice new Android phone – a HTC Hero to be precise. One of the main reasons for buying it was so that I could look into developing applications for this new platform, thus expanding my skill set.

I had been playing around with installing the Eclipse IDE (arguably the best Java IDE around) and the Android SDK on my previous Ubuntu installation and basically made a hash of it a few times. Having refined my process I’ve decided to write it down so that I don’t forget Read the rest of this entry »

Now, how do I upgrade to Ubuntu Server 10.04 using the Command Line?

Like most Ubuntu ‘geeks’ I have a box running the Server edition, just to play around on – mine is in the garage and performs some of the mundane tasks I’ve blogged about in the past, e.g. updating my OpenDNS and DynDNS settings when my external IP address changes and pinging the kids computers so I know when time the ‘really’ shut down last night.

However, I’m a worlds away from a sysadmin who works in the command shell all the time – I like my GUIs and tend to tread around the command line like its a bad tempered dog. So without the good old Update Manager and not wanting to blow the whole installation away and start again, how do I upgrade my system to the recently released 10.04 Lucid Lynx? Read the rest of this entry »

Moving to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

With the release of Ubuntu 10.04 on 29th April I was keen to blow away my existing installation (Ubuntu 9.10) and perform a fresh installation. Not because there was anything wrong with that release but as I am still finding my feet with Linux in general there were numerous redundant packages and general cruft laying around.

With my /home folder fully backed up onto an external HDD (and to my Amazon S3 account) I duly downloaded the .iso, burnt it to a cd and set about the installation. Read the rest of this entry »

Posting From Android

Just a quick post from my Android phone to test out the free WordPress application from the Android Market.
Ok, it may be a bit geeky but sometimes I just don’t have time to fire up my laptop. Well this app is feature rich and a snap to configure, it can even handle multiple boots.
So I have 5 mins while I’m waiting for my girlfriends daughter to come out of Guides and can now feel like it’s not dead time.
If you want to blog on the move then its well worth a look.

[Edit: From PC]

Ok now that I have uploaded the post I can see’ that there are a few minor issues. First of all it was not clear that when I ticked’Publish’ and then pressed ‘Save’ that this would only save the post locally, i.e. it would not actually be published. To achieve this I needed to long press the post in [what I now see is called] ‘Local Drafts’ and then select the ‘Upload to Blog’ option. Ok a simple thing but the absence of any Help made it an easy mistake to make.

Secondly the post came through as ‘Uncategorised’ which is not ideal and I do not recall seeing an option to set the Category – but will check shortly.

Besides that, I’m more than happy with the application. Now I can utilise the otherwise dead time, if I can come up with something to write about that is.

Running CoPilot 8 SatNav for Android

When I bought my Android phone (a HTC Hero) I wanted to be able to use it as a SatNav as well – to save me having to carry two devices around with me. The Hero has built-in GPS and as it runs Googles Android operating system it has the Google Maps application installed as standard. So that’s it then – well no, not really. Read the rest of this entry »

I, Android

So I was in the market for a new mobile phone and being the geek that I am, it had to be a Smart Phone of some description – but which one?

The iPhone is the obvious choice for many but while it cannot be denied that it is a fantastic piece of kit but I really don’t like the fact that I’d be tied to iTunes, and therefore Windows/Mac! Add to that the fact that I’m probably goiung to want to write applications for the devise and that I don’t know Objective C the learning curve to develop even simple applications is going to be quite steep. Then there is the licence restrictions on the use the the SDK and conditions for deployment of applications to the App Store – from what I can make out you have to use a Mac, which I don’t have. All in all, the iPhone is not an option for me.

I turned my attention to the Android phones in general and the HTC Hero in particular. I liked the look of the phone itself and had heard a lot of good things about the device (along with a handful of problems it has to be said!). Android is an Open Source operating system which is based on the Linux kernel and this appeals to me as a Linux [Ubuntu] user. The SDK is essentially Java based with a little python thrown in (both of which I know), it can be used on Mac, Windows and Linux so I can develop and install applications directly to the phone.

The final factor in my decision to buy the HTC Hero was, trivially enough, that nobody else at work had or wanted one. There are a few Apple fan boys in the office along with a Blackberry or two – but no Androids, so I felt it was time to change that Read the rest of this entry »

Syncing my iPod with Ubuntu

In a previous post I listed some of the things that I still do in Windows that I needed to be able to do in Ubuntu before I could truly consider it to be my Operating System of choice – one of these was to be able to sync my music and podcasts onto my iPod Nano. Now as every iPod owner knows, these things are simple brilliant – but Apple do not provide a version of iTunes for Linux so what are we to do?

Well as ever the Open Source community has a number of answers and there are some fine iTunes alternatives out there. We all use our iPods differently and mine it mainly used for listening to Podcasts during my daily commute (about 40 minutes each way). I do have some music on the device but this is normally pretty static – when I get bored of what is on there I normally blitz the lot and start again.

iTunes is a good application for managing Podcasts because it will not only download new episodes as they become available and automatically sync them to the iPod when I plug it on, it will detect which ones I have listened to and remove them – freeing up space for new content. To consider another application to be a genuine replacement it needs to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »