I have been meaning to write about a new project I have been working on in my spare time for a while now. It’s a project where I wanted to maximize the fun I had doing it, learn something new and to do something that I can use. Sadly I have been putting it off since enumerating all the reasons feels like quite a daunting task. So instead of writing everything in one big blog post I’ll just do shorter posts. One for each argument. First one is pretty simple.
Everyone hates spam, and like everyone else I get tons of it. So I’ve of course written about it two times before. Earlier this week we migrated over to a better email solution, so that we could get SPF working properly. SPF should help google figure out what is spam and what is not. In the process I went through all my old spam (all 4200 hundred of them) and found the following patterns to be effective in cleaning my spam folder:
Matches: (Pfizer || replica || diploma || pharmacy || meds || pills || male enhancement || BuyCializ || http://www.nobelbarmoebelonline.com || http://www.nobelfahnenmitmast.com || http://www.nobelbarmoebel.com || Bestellseite || http://www.nobeltannenonline.com || http://www.nobelgewerbetools.com || health || Reinigungswirkung || britney spears || http://www.edelebarmoebel.com || http://www.edelefahnenmitmast.com || http://www.alumastmitfahnen.com || 성명 || ì£¼ì‹ || Проверки || Damen und Herren || и || видео || lv-bestbag || lv-bagshop || 밤세ìƒ)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it
BIG FAT WARNING: This list is of course highly personal, and you should check how many in your inbox it matches, before installing it.
With this list in place I get about 10-15 spam a day and I can actually go through my spam box to look for false-positives. Sadly something that still happens way to often 🙁
Being small and agile has many advances, but sometimes people confuse it with being fragile. Although one could argue that betting on a single-vendors proprietary solution would be a more fragile business proposition. Anyway, to make people feel safer buying web systems developed in Django and Python based on Open Source, we have had a finger in the creation of the Django Alliance. The web site complements Django People with a focus on companies rather than on single individuals.
First a short background. HTC Hero released with android 1.5. Google releases android 1.6 with TTS (text-to-speech) support. Andnav2 working fine since it uses external tts library. Author of Andnav2 (Nicolas) releases version compatible with android 1.6, but leaves all users of 1.5 devices out in the cold. The update was uploaded to marked with NO warning. After many talks back and forth Nicolas finally agrees to release a version that at least starts up on 1.5, but still crashes when using turn navigation. HTC announces that they are working on a new firmware based on 2.0, but release has not yet been determined.
So with that history out of the way, I now announce a version of AndNav2 that works on HTC Hero by simply removing all the calls to TTS. You can download the version here. Please note that you need to uninstall your previous version of andnav2 first as this version is simply signed with the android beta key.
I could have removed all the ads as well, but that was not the point of this reverse engineering. I simply want to be able to use a program, which in my view, is the killer app for the android phone. Don’t get me started on Google Maps with navigation. It’s US only, not based on OSM, and works only on android >= 1.6.
Enjoy 🙂
Google released a new system programming language. I wonder if the names of Robert Pike and Ken Thomsen will make it more appealing to C people 🙂
It’s clearly meant to go head to head with C++. The two most interesting design decisions to me is their take on OO (feels like templates done right and no crappy inteheritance in the ordinary sense) and concurrency which looks a lot like Erlang because it’s CSP. Both of these things make it feel very functional.
So many languages to tinker with and so little time 😉 Oh yeah and it doesn’t run on Windows yet 🙂
Last friday, Lau discovered an interesting edge case of python. Something that at first appeared to be a bug, but later revealed a deeper truth about the scoping of Python. I guess coming from a C++ background spoils one in some regards. Scoping in C++ is simple and uniform, I have never in many years of programming C++ got bitten by the scope of the language, something that I also can’t say about C#.
The problem boils down to how Python treats local variable and global variables. The following example, stolen and modified from here, shows the edge case in its most simple form:
a, b = (1, 2)
print(a, b)
def test():
print(a)
print(b) # (A)
#b=1 # (B)
test()
(A) works as long as (B) is commented out. The strange thing is that changing (B) into += produces the same result. Actually it is the case that += a global variable will never work, unless you have declared it in the local scope first. This comes back to the way Python threats variables in the local scope. The following link has more examples to illustrate how scoping works and also how this is different in Python 3k. As explained on Stackoverflow, using the dis functionality sheds some light on strange cases like these. All this said, the scoping has one good thing going for it. The following is quite useful and perfectly legal in Python:
i = 0def ex1():
if i < 0:
b = 10
else:
b = 20
print bex1()
I had a little trouble getting the android emulator running on my laptop. I wanted to start debugging why andnav2 is no longer working. Hopefully Nicolas can get it fixed, but it appears that he’s quite busy 🙁
The first problem I ran into was that the buttons in the tools/android application where not responding properly. Starting tools/android with the env variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 fixed that problem. Next problem was that the ssl mirror for getting the different SDK versions was not working. A quick google revealed that adding a sdkman.force.http=true to ~/.android/androidtool.cfg fixed that. Do not try to just remove the http. You’ll get the SDKs, but it will not work.
Last problem was getting java jdk working. I settled on openjdk as it seems to be the way forward. Be sure to use java-alternatives to set your java version. Sun-java6 seems to be 9.04 so I should probably remove that at some point. Just don’t want to ruin my webbank 😉
After getting everything up and running I tried the debugging tool and it appears to be really neat. It has tons of debug information, even down to when the GC is running, and was able to give me a proper backtrace of the problem. Another really cool thing is that it’s extremely easy to test ones application one 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 by simply running 3 different emulators. Or different screen sizes for that matter. One can also see some of the goodies coming in android 2.0. The browser seems to have gotten a nice overhaul. Can’t wait for HTC to release an updated ROM based on 2.0.
I upgraded early to Ubuntu 9.10 release and have been overall very satisfied with the changes. 3d effects are back, thanks to fixed intel drivers, kernel has been upgraded and suspend + boot is faster, and Emacs has been upgraded to 23 🙂 I just had one problem when upgrading, namely that QT applications would use a non-hinted font which made Skype and Virtualbox would look like crap. It took a bit of googling to find out what the problem was. Using qtconfig-qt4 did not work for some unknown reason. I followed the guide on the link, and got fonts working again by simply copy/paste in his .fonts.conf file into my home directory.
One of the more interesting aspects of the HTC Hero for me was the android market. As paid applications are not yet available in Denmark, this list only includes free (as in beer) apps:
I’ve been strugling getting album art working properly with the music player included on the HTC Hero. Covers was only working for some albums. After a bit of googling and a few different tries, since there was a lot of misinformation on google about this problem, I finally figured out how it works. The player reads covers from a tag on the files. This is apparently the only way it supports covers. The player after reading a new cover, then thumnails them and stores the thumb in the albumart directory on the flash. The first application that I tried to add the album art to the files was Easytag, sadly it has a pretty nasty bugs that leads all the covers all fucked up. That combined with the caching of the player, left me strugling trying to correct the covers after I found a tagger that actually worked. So please don’t try that at home 🙂 My second try was Kyamo, which I can’t recommend sadly. There are simply too many things that sucks in it. Things that combined makes fixing up ~10gb music a complete pain in the ass. I finally settled with Mp3tag, it’s for Windows, but at least it works quite well and its free (as in beer). Another annoying thing about the player is that, while it supports Ogg Vorbis, it doesn’t understand covers embedded in ogg. So no cover for those albums. Ah yeah, I should probably also mention that the thumbs generated are in 320×320, so in my experience around 500×500 pixels works best.
Hopefully this should help others, who have been struggling with figuring out how the hell the music player on the HTC Hero handles covers.