John Flinchbaugh's Weblog

Events for the Photo Site

john — 2010-02-26T06:04:54Z

Way back in the day, when I used to shoot at clubs and raves, I'd always want a way to share the images with the people I'd meet, but exchanging email could be a bit cumbersome or just be a deterrent.

While I'm not out clubbing these days, I'm still often out at various events, so I still need a quick and easy way to point people to the images, so I just added the Event Code box to the photo site.

While I'm out shooting, I can create an event code (from imagination or using my phone), and then write that short code on my business card to hand out. Then it's really easy for someone to hit my site, punch in the code, and get right to the photos on Flickr or in the Gallery.

It's just one of those little things I've wanted for a while, and now I've finally added it.

Nokia Messaging on E71

john — 2010-02-23T18:52:32Z

I was confused months and months ago when I tried to load Nokia Messaging, and it looked just like the old S60 email client. It turned out it wasn't installing back then.

Just yesterday, I installed Nokia Messaging again from the Ovi Store, and it definitely took this time.

I connected it up to my mobile email account (which is sort of hard to tell the settings once it's done), and it seems to be working. It started on reboot, it shows the '@' indicator and new email on the home screen. It seems to be using a hosted middleware layer (which seems unnecessary, but we'll see), and I had to login to the email website to tune a few things. Most notably, I had to wipe the outgoing server settings to get email to send, since my mail server isn't configured to allow just anyone to send.

I still can't see anywhere in the configurations that I'm logging into mail with an account name different from what I publish -- it just feels like too much is hidden. It sends and receives a little slower (the middleware), but I'm hoping that the vast improvements in the UI make up for that.

I've found no show-stopper problems yet, so I've turned off my normal email notifications on the home screen to give messaging room to show its status, and reassigned the email key to the new Nokia Messaging. The old email client is still configured, but it's not set to retrieve email anymore.

Update (23 February 2010): Nokia Messaging seems to talk plain old HTTP to its middleware, so I can now let it use the locked down wireless at work to send and receive email, instead of always being on 3G. That should help with battery life.

D-Link DIR-615 vs Asus EeePC 1000HE

john — 2009-08-06T19:12:40Z

Claire's excellent little EeePC 1000HE was not being so excellent in one area -- the wireless network. Everything had gone so nicely with the installation and daily running the machine, but the network kept dropping out, and it always seemed to have a weak signal (~50%) in our favorite parts of the house.

The Problem

I didn't use the machine much, but it seemed to mostly behave for me -- I had trouble reproducing the problems, so I was continually moving the DIR-615 router around in the office trying to get it closer to where she wanted to use it. It only needed to go through 4 or 5 surfaces (walls and floors). The DIR-615 was performing fabulously for every other device in the house (ThinkPad, E71, MacBook Pro).

I really started to suspect the netbook was maybe broken (but at this point, it's been months of it working on and off) when I installed the same model access point (D-Link DIR-615) at K-Prep, and Claire still dropped connection just trying to get packets across an open room!

Google turned up some discussion of the wireless being weak, and people cracking these things open to install external antennae, but fortunately no talk of it being a Linux vs Windows driver issue. I also stumbled upon talk of some radio bands no working so well.

The Resolution

Finally, I started digging around more in the router configurations to try to work this out. I figured maybe I needed to eliminate the fringe technologies and settings (like those problematic radio bands, etc). I didn't find those particular bands (5GHz?), but I did find the 802.11 B/G/N settings, and locked it down to the more tried and true B/G networks, eliminating the fringe N spec.

I did this on both the home and work routers, all the normal devices kept working, and now even the EeePC is working reliably -- it almost never drops connection!

I don't actually know how to get the Linux to tell me that much about its wireless network, so I don't know if it was ever really using the N network, or if the N network was just causing interference for its G connection. Interestingly, the connection power still sits around 50-70% in the popular spots in the house as it always has, but the connection is more robust at those levels than it had previously been. Either way, Claire is once again happy with her little netbook, and I'm sort of wanting one again for myself.

Birdstep SmartConnect for E71

john — 2009-07-18T05:02:47Z

I've been testing out SmartConnect (which seems to be free for E-series devices) from Birdstep to automatically switch my network connections as I move around.

I started out by defining a connection group for each of my applications, since some applications use the network differently, and some of my locations offer different limitations.

I started out with an "email" group. This group prefers 2 open wifi points I frequent and then falls back to the EDGE network when needed. I specifically exclude my workplace wireless in this group, because it doesn't pass IMAP traffic, so it would be useless to try to do mail there. With that configuration, and the messaging client configured to use that group as its accesspoint, I stay connected on EDGE all day, and then it switches to wifi sometime shortly after I get home -- that works as advertised and it's pretty cool. I think it's saving me battery, because I had previously had to keep my mail client always configured to use EDGE. Interacting with the mail server is also blazingly fast when you're not on EDGE.

The operation gets a little less optimal when I try to use one of my other groups I defined: "Web" or "Mobbler". Since the applications using these groups only need web access, I can include my work AP in those configurations, but upon selecting one of these, it never lights up the wireless, and instead uses the active EDGE connection that the "email" profile already had going. That's an unfortunate limitation mentioned in the SmartConnect FAQ. It sounds like it's on the radar to be fixed in a future version.

Until the multiple group problem is resolved, I think I'll need to stick to defining one group for email, and then I'll just continue to manually select the access points for myself when each application prompts. I look forward to updates to this slick little utility.

Nokia E71

john — 2009-03-27T07:29:11Z

Since my birthday on Saturday, I'm now the proud owner of a Nokia E71 smart phone. I had been poking around and reading specs of lots of devices, and this was definitely the forerunner. Along with a bit of research, I had started to prepare Claire for the sticker shock of leaving the subsidized carrier phone world to start buying unlocked, retail phones, and that it would probably happen this year. She apparently believed me, because she went out and bought it.

It's a serious geek phone with a qwerty keyboard and enough configurations to keep me playing and reading the manual for days. Fortunately, I like exploring devices, their manuals, and all the online tips.

I'm pleased to see it runs Java applications as seamlessly as S60 applications, and as I had hoped, I can assign my own applications to shortcuts and soft keys on the home screen.

My stupid phone tricks:

Mobbler allows me to feed (scrobble) my music and podcast listening live as the built-in audio player plays on my device just like iTunes and Rhythmbox does on the computers.
The default text messaging interface doesn't identify your recent recipients like my Sony Ericsson phone did, so it seemed like too much clicking around to pick a recipient and send a message. Nokia's Conversation application organizes text messages as conversations, so you can easily see your frequent recipients and send them quick messages in an IM-like interface.
I have the fftogo website bound to the long-press of my messaging key, and the Google Reader mobile site is bound to the left soft key for quick access. The JavaScript on the full (or iPhone) version of the FriendFeed site doesn't *quite* work right, so I had to stick with fftogo.
The phone will do SyncML, but Google doesn't do it yet for the calendar, so I use the CalSyncS60 application (bound to the long press of the calendar button) to sync between my Google Calendar and the phone calendar. It seems to only pick up my personal calendar, though, and not the other shared calendars to which I subscribe.
I have JoikuSpot Light installed to turn my phone into a little wireless hotspot to share its 3G connection, but that only allows browsing and not ssh, etc, so I quickly setup good old bluetooth DUN tethering. JoikuSpot will be fun to just show off, though, because it's very quick and simple.
Flash works on this handset, so I was able to watch the Strong Bad Email on the go.
GPS navigation is quite amusing. It works pretty well -- walking or driving. The voice prompts in the turn-by-turn directions are conspicuously devoid of any street names -- it's all "turn left", and "enter highway", but not which street or highway. I guess this keeps them from having to figure out how to pronounce these things. It gets the job done.
I'm pleased to see that the PDF reader remembers my current page number, so it'll serve nicely as an ebook reader.
I may be able to script this thing with Python!
I found that the 2D barcode reading capability is built into the phone -- it reads datamatrix and QR-code on its own.

The shortcomings of this device:

2.5mm headphone jack instead of 3.5mm (always an adapter)
No USB charging
Firmware updates require a Windows machine
Firmware updates for North American models lag behind European releases

As you've probably already seen, my FriendFeed is being filled up with Nokia and S60 bookmarks and comments, so that'll probably trickle over into the blog soon enough. I look forward to seeing what these devices and they're Symbian OS can do.

Ubuntu 8.10 on EeePC 1000HE

john — 2009-03-26T12:23:23Z

I picked up a Asus EeePC 1000HE for Claire, and she needs Linux installed on it. Ubuntu 8.10 looked great on the ThinkPad, so that's what I'm installing on this new netbook.

First problem: get an Ubuntu installer on an 4G SD card. It turns out that unetbootin does an excellent job of this. I installed it on my Debian unstable server right from the repository. unetbootin provides a choice of distributions to download and install (including Ubuntu), or you can build a bootable USB device from an existing ISO.

After a few failed attempts, I realized that I needed to repartition the SD card with fdisk, giving the card one big partition, and marking that partition bootable. That main partition needed to also be given a vfat filesystem (mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdX1), not ext2.

With the SD card in order, I could have unetbootin install the full Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD image to the main partition (/dev/sdX1).

F2 on the EeePC gets into the setup screen, and there, I disabled all the quick boot stuff and booting off the hard drive. Then, I rebooted and hit Esc to choose a boot device. Upon choosing the Single Flash Reader, I got to see the SYSLINUX boot screen, and then the nice graphical Ubuntu boot screen. After a few more moments, it played it's normal chimes and I was looking at the live, wide-screen desktop with battery, bluetooth, wired network indicators going. I clicked the network applet, and on the Gnome toolbar, and I see that even wireless seems to be working!

The Install icon is sitting right there on the desktop, so I give it a run, tell it to use the whole 160G drive, and it's off. I let that finish, and rebooted, and I'm in business.

At this point, the volume keys aren't working for some reason, but the brightness and suspend keys are working. First time out, the battery was only lasting 4-5 hours, but I suspect that probably had something to do with the processor scaling defaulting to on-demand instead of conservative or power-save. I'll have to look into that a bit.

As I search around for solutions to the last few things, I see lots of details on fixing problems I'm not experiencing -- it seems that Ubuntu has taken care of most the hard stuff already, and they've rendered many of the other fix-it articles outdated.

It looks like its going to be a great little machine.

Update (16 March 2009): I'm still not seeing the 9-hour battery life yet -- instead the fan runs and runs, and I see 4-5 hours. Additionally, it seems that the ASUS ACPI kernel module is reporting a few events incorrectly, so evolution keeps trying to pop up when I plug in the AC power. This lead should help me get all the little buttons working, like volume the volume keys.

Update (26 March 2009): The LCD display, USB hub, keyboard, and mouse arrived for the notebook over the past week. Ubuntu mostly saw the display correctly when I plugged it in. I ended up having to restart the X server, and it seems that I have to restart the X server any time I want to switch now, but it took care of the configuration itself. The external display isn't running at its full resolution yet, though. I have to look into it a bit closer, but it's working well enough for now.

I assembled the USB gadgetry, left it on the desk. When Claire found it later, she just plugged it in, and it just worked. Linux has come a long way.

A Night With Java ME

john — 2009-02-26T01:30:29Z

I decided I needed a change of pace last week, so I sat down with Eclipse, the Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ) plugin, and MPowerPlayer on the Mac, and cranked out a little toy game using the Game APIs. My only reference was the Beginning J2ME: From Novice to Professional ebook and previous experience.

Starting up the mobile project was never easier -- the stack finally works nicely, even on a Mac. Within about 7 hours of coding and interruptions, I had a working platform-style game with a little backhoe that can be driven back and across the screen, and you dig for little jewels. It's dead simple and the kids find it amusing. It looked good in the MPowerPlayer emulator, and it worked even better on my SonyEricsson W810i.

The next day, I spent 2 more hours or so adding some trees to plow over. It still needs a few finishing touches and features, but you can grab Ben's Backhoe and amuse your kid in the grocery store or something with a simple little game. I hope to be able to put together a few more little mini games like this -- Paige is already making requests.

Emerging Technology Conference at MapQuest

john — 2008-03-28T14:02:56Z

I'm organizing An Evening of Emerging Technologies at MapQuest in Lancaster, PA on 23 April 2008.

It's a free open space conference, so join us to hear about technology in our region and to share your own experiences. Click the link and register today.

If I Implemented a new Jaiku

john — 2008-01-09T06:02:20Z

Jaiku's getting boring, since they don't actually update anything, and now, they seem to just be letting it fall apart. Maybe I'll need to move soon.

A true Unix philosopher would find just the right tools for each part of the job and pipe them together. Is that Twitter for microblogging, and Tumblr for full aggregation of all my content? Do I care about the community that has gathered around Jaiku? Leo Laporte concludes that you just have to go where your friends are, but I think I may just be able to point my RSS reader at my friends.

The key features of Jaiku to me are:

RSS aggregation
Microblogging
Comments allowing threads to grow

What else is important?

I think that otherwise, I'd enhance my system with:

Configurable RSS periods
Unlimited post length
Uniform content formatting across posts and comments
Versatile mobile, email, and XMPP interfaces

Those are the features that are important to me, but unfortunately, I don't actually get around to coding anymore, so I'll just have to wait for someone else to do it.

Spread Thin

john — 2007-08-23T12:31:22Z

Looking at my weblog, I feel that I've spread the content that I produce pretty thinly. Jaiku sucks up most my little thoughts, Flickr sucks up my occassional notable photo, del.icio.us has my links -- I don't have much left to actually post to this weblog. Fortunately Jaiku aggregates it all together, otherwise, you'd never be able to find it all.

I'll have to try to remember to dig through my past Jaiku posts for ideas to expand into real articles.