Android Development : Moving from Emulator to Device

So I wanted to roll my sleeves up and get going with Android and have come up with a suitable ‘pet project’ to work towards. Now that I’ve got my development environment sorted out, and with my pet project in mind, I decided to do something with the accelerometer. In the Android Development book that I bought there is a sample application to display the current G being experienced by the device as well as the maximum G experienced.

Now the keying in of the code was a useful exercise in itself but there was an obvious flaw in my selection of project – can you guess what it is? That’s right my laptop doesn’t have an accelerometer so even if the code builds (and it does) and runs in the emulator (and it did) the G readings are not going to change no matter how much I shake the laptop around! Doh!

Moving from Amazon S3 to Dropbox for my server backups

For the past few years I’ve been using Amazon S3 for my remote file storage needs, initially it was used for a site I created blog-type in DotNetNuke for my girlfriends daughter to use on her Gap Year trip around the world. The hosting I had at the time was quite expensive in terms of disk space so the low cost of the Amazon service made it an easy choice. Time passes ….. and I start to use Amazon for storing backups of my websites (this one included), initially manually but more recently I’ve been using plugins to do it for me and just send me an email when they are done. Even with this increase in storage I still only run up a $0.10 bill with Amazon every month – very cost effective I think you’ll agree.

Running Screwturn Wiki under Mono

So at work we had a need for a Wiki of some description and after evaluating a number of different systems we decided to go with ScrewTurn. This is written in C# and was initially installed on a Windows Server under IIS – and all was well. At the same time I was evaluating the Statusnet microblogging platform – which we then also decided to implement for internal communication (Yammer and Twitter were deemed as not being suitable).

Now, here lies a problem; Screwturn is written in C# and supported to run on Windows but statusnet is written in PHP and I had no end of problems getting all of the requirements (mainly php_curl) running under IIS. On the flip-side, installing statusnet on a Linux platform like Ubuntu is a breeze once the LAMP stack is installed – but what about Screwturn? Obviously I knew about Mono but didn’t have any really experience with it – would it support enough of the .NET Framework to run the Wiki? If so then we could implement both Screwturn and Statusnet on an Ubuntu server (actually a VM) our DMZ – replacing the ageing tin box Windows server.

So Skype on Android, What’s it like?

So today I found out that Skype have released an app for Android 2.1+ devices and just had to give it a whirl. I have friends in France and Thailand that I’d like to keep in touch with and Skype is a very cost effective way of doing so. Ok I could use the full application on my laptop/netbook (yep – the Linux versions run just fine) but hard to believe as it may be, I don’t have them turned on all the time. Having Skype in my pocket would be fantastic, but would it work?

Writing a plugin for Statusnet : Part 2

In a previous post previous post I configured my development environment so that I could start work on my Statusnet plugin. Well, a little later that anticipated, I’ve managed to get enough time together to get a working plugin – although it’s not perfect by any means.