Ubuntu Forums: The font of all knowledge?

Many developers will know about the Stackoverflow ‘trilogy’ of sites which take a fresh approach to user forums. In addition to the Developer, SysAdmin and PowerUser sites the Stackoverflow team are also hosting more specialist sites such as Game Development, photography and even home improvement. In amongst these is a site dedicated to my operating system of choice, Ubuntu. It’s still in it’s infancy but if Stackoverflow is anything to go by it will flourish into a place where users know that there is quality content.

Skobbler SatNav for Android: First Impressions

One of the reasons I bought a smartphone was to use it as a SatNav – thus removing the need to carry around two devices. I’d heard that Android phone came with turn-by-turn navigation – for free! However, I didn’t really do my homework and bought a HTC Hero. Not that there was anything wrong with the phone itself, but it was running Android 1.5 which didn’t have the functionality I wanted. With a trip to France looming I bought CoPilot 8.0 for Android with the Europe maps and apart from a few, minor niggles I’ve been quite happy with it. However, just because I have one SatNav application doesn’t mean I can’t have another – I’m a gadget junkie after all.

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!

Writing a plugin for Statusnet : Part 1

While migrating this blog to a statically generated site I found that many of the links in this post were broken or the domains have been resold. I decided to leave the content as is though.

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.

Installing Eclipse and the Android SDK on Ubuntu 10.04/10.10

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 ;-)