The Madness Subsides

I apologize for the silence of in the last few days.  Things really picked up at work, to the point of insanity.  Fortunately yesterday I managed to get the component I was working on out the door.  Still a good amount of overtime was required by the entire team to get our part done.  Hopefully the client will be pleased with my initial contribution.  I’m sure they’ll be satisfied with my latest work as I’m adding the final touches to that component.  Another reason for my silence, is that I’m transitioning to using my cellphone as my main computing platform.  It can feel cramped at times, but the portability is amazing.  I’m sure it will be even better if I get a nicer device like the N900.

Ok, well all I have time for today is a quick update.  I still have a good amount of work ahead of me, and very little time to do it in.

By the way, the new beta release of Kubuntu is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.  Definitely worth the upgrade.

Meet My Next Phone

I’ve been a huge fan of the Maemo system, since I got my hands on a N810.  Now I can hardly wait to get my hands on an Internet tablet with phone capabilities: N900.  The price is a bit prohibitive, and I have no clue when I’ll be able to get one up here in Canada.  But the specs look amazing: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/

I can not say how excited I am by this phone.  It matches up with what I’ve wanted from both a phone and a tablet.  While I really enjoy using my 5800XM, the OS it uses: Symbian S60v5 and its hardware makes the device lag a bit.  The N900 on the other hand, is built on an awesome platform (Maemo), has great hardware and processing power to do what I need it to do.  It will really be mobile computing device that you can use heavily, while carrying it in your pocket.  I wish Nokia luck with selling N900s like hotcakes. 🙂

A Tiny Update

It is Friday.  Feeling tired from the irregular sleep cycles of this past week.  I didn’t move forward as fast I wanted to this week.  I’ve felt distracted, tired and could not focus.  Still the minutae of this week didn’t tie me down.  Thanks to a friend my Polish writing improved in leaps and bounds this week.  No regrets this week, and many things moved forward.  And thanks to the same friend, I can see a positive glimmer of hope in my future.  I plan on focusing on making my schedule sane again, and living a fairly active but normal life.  No updates on the writing past a few notes, and ideas.  No code updates either, aside from a steady tinkering with the justCheckers website.   Enjoying using the new Firefox 3.5.  It feels so much sleeker than before.  Oh and thanks to the fine folks at Fido for having simple and sane contracts.  Guess whose service is gonna get recommended to friends?

Kicking Tires

This week, I’ve started working on my delayed projects again.  I feel exhausted from the week.  But I also can not wait to play around with my projects.

Learning Qt

I’ve always admired the KDE and Qt developers.  They make some of the most innovative and interesting technology in the consumer-desktop-mobile land.  I’ve decided to pick up learning Qt and C++.  So far I’ve read the beginning of C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (1st ed).  I need to play around with C++, which I plan on doing it while using Qt Creator.  One of my first major Qt experiments might be getting the TEA text editor working on my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.  I know that Nokia just released the tech preview  of Qt 4 for S60 devices.  But I’ll give it a shot.  Hopefully the GUI will port over nicely.

Completing justCheckers

Yes, the project that I left for dead still lives.  I want to work on it, as portfolio material.  I first plan on building a website in PHP (or maybe JSP?) that renders beautiful CSS and XHTML.  And then I need to give the project much love.  But I owe it to myself to finish this application.  I won’t build any crazy game servers.  But I want to make something totally configurable and fun.  And in the process I want to create something that proves that I am a strong Java developer.

Writing A Collection of Shards

I am going back to writing.  Unfortunately I need to start almost from scratch, since many of my written sections simply will not work.  The ideas are there.  I just need to get them down on paper.

Driving License

This one is the ultimate in the tire kicking sense.  I plan on getting my driver’s license really soon.  Aside from parking, I feel comfortable driving.  Once I figure out all this parking stuff, then I’ll be ready.  I’m exciting since this will give me a lot more mobility and flexiblity.  I’ll be able to solve a lot of problems and have even more time to do things in the day.  And I’ll be able to sleep and live in normal time periods.

Enter the Grumbles

Marika likes to ramble.  And I like to grumble.  Not because I’m a negative or enjoy complaining.  But I find a guilty pleasure of grumbling my annoyances.  In fact I know I shouldn’t.  But I feel like it nonetheless.  Also I really am at a loss of what to write about… but grumbling… that comes naturally.

The day started off in an annoying manner.  I could not wake up early, so I’ll have to stay at work longer today.  This I blame myself for my not sleeping last day.  I find it a more convenient schedule to come in early, and leave early.  Alas that did not occur today.  The weather decided that wet, cold and windy would be the fashion for today.  Wet and cold being my least favourite combination of the four possible weather combinations (hot, cold, wet and dry).  So this morning I trudged out to work.

Once I got into the office, I remembered that I forgot to bring food.  So part of my earnings have helped the two fast food places survive the difficult economic situation.  While I ate, I realized that the provincial government in their valiant efforts to prop up the economy.   At least the economy of our dear friends in traffic enforcement… and ironically the manufacturers of Bluetooth devices.  I read that the government proclaimed that the use of cellphones and any other electronic gadgets while driving is now verbotten!  My first reactions was great, no more idiots talking on their cellphones when driving.  But Bluetooth devices are allowed… so… said drivers will still be distracted.  And the juggling of Tim Horton’s coffee and doughnuts while driving still is permitted.  And there a geniune times when driving and using a cellphone is either harmless or beneficial.  Like in a traffic jam… Or to report traffic conditions, or deal with really urgent calls.  Anyways… our dear nanny/government agents have just invented yet another arbitrary  reason for intruding upon and controlling people’s lives.  Joy.

I dove into technology hoping that at least that would frustrate me less.  Well no… I had to fiddle with Nokia’s PC Suite to upload music back onto my cellphone.  In the efforts of efficiency, I thought I could upload all my music in two goes.  And in the second the application I assumed would gracefully skip the tracks that were the same.   Well no.  I was wrong.  It did ask whether to overwrite or not… but rather than continue… it just stopped.  So I ended up getting it to overwrite all my tracks.  It took an hour to do, and drained my poor cell’s battery.  So no listening to music on my commute back.  And I discovered that while Nokia seemingly wrote their phone management programs in Qt… the applications don’t have a Linux equivalent.  Bother.

Finally, everyday I get to work with my company’s technology… which can be fun.  I can’t talk about it too much.  Lets just say I never saw how dragging and dropping parts of a program was faster, easier or less error prone than just typing out reams of code.  I really don’t.  And I have to use this tool, regardless of much I grumble or sigh. :s

Well that is about it for today.  I’m sure I’ll find more to grumble about more after work… but I’m hoping that I’m wrong.

Phoneing This One In

My recent loss of my Nokia N810 Internet Tablet has meant I need to resort to more exotic devices for offline blogging. At the moment I’m traveling on the bus (or standing at a bus stop), chilling to music and blogging/writing on my Nokia 5800 cellphone. So tapping on a touchscreen feels more etheral than tactile than on a slide-out keyboard. But if you don’t have what you like, you like what you have.

Also on a N810 I could use a blogging application and publish directly to my website. On the 5800, I need to take the extra step  of uploading to a computer, copy and paste and then post the entry. If I need to suffer for my art to get a daily post, I’m willing to suffer cold fingers and confusing workflows.

And I just got news that the N810 is back!  Note to self, when the phone rings and you are getting on the bus… Figure out your priorities. Hint show ticket first. Also learn to use the headset, it looks less awkward.  And noone wants to hear your Pink Floyd tracks. 🙂

Forced Update

Ugh…  I feel so tired this early in the morning.  Normally I enjoy mornings.  My best thinking happens in the morning.  Today I feel comatose.  So Marika, if you think that you are the only one whose brain goes on vacation for the weekend… guess again.  This new entry probably comes off as forced.  But I’m willing to suffer for my art. 🙂

Friday’s Latin Mass was pretty fun.  Pretty confusing, and I got lost after the first few moments.  I’m a bit disappointed in what was supposed to be the introduction to the mass.  It came off as “Most of you never experienced a Latin Mass.  And since the Pope is talking about it…  Well then here, enjoy!  And lets discuss afterwards!”.  Clearly a very informative introduction.  I hoping this leaving people in the dark, was mostly a sign of incompetence and not maliace.  I’m not complaining about the people helping to organize the mass.  Many of my friends and acquaintances took part in getting this mass off the ground.  But I’m not sure what kind of meaningful discussion can one have after sitting blankly, trying to follow along.  And the people who are familiar with Latin masses already have an opinion, so why even bother mentioning a discussion in that case?  Still I found it worthwhile to attend that mass, and I enjoyed meeting up and talking with friends afterwards.

The rest of the weekend went by in a “meh” sort of way.  Mostly work at home.

No real work on my writing.  Other than the realization, that I could recycle ideas from a previous attempt at a novel.  This will change the plot of the novel a bit, but not the general theme.  And the older work, which was supposed to consist of short stories in a larger overarching story will work well for this novel.  In fact you can say this novel will be the distilled ideas that I’ve toyed with for over 5 years.  I’m hoping the final product will turn out as amazing.

Also my Internet Tablet officially died this weekend.  So sad.  Glad it is still under warranty.  I miss that gadget already, it proved quite useful and usable.  I managed to extract all the information I needed from the device.  I’ll call Nokia for support sometime today.

Also disassembled two laptops yesterday.  And assembled my old one back again.  Interesting how the design of different machines is similar but with enough difference that components aren’t easily replaceable from one machine to the other.

On Hacking with Maemo

Time is the ultimae in precious and scarce commodities. With work and travelling up North to kayak, I spend most of my spare time away from a workstation. Hence the convenience of owning a N810. I can code and write anywhere!

Ok so I haven’t tried putting gcc or other c development tools on this tablet. While with Jalimo I can run Java code… I’m not sure on the feasibility of running Tomcat. And there is no way Eclipse will fit. Actually Tomcat would need an SDK, so running a full Java web development platform is most likely a no go. Instead I could set up a hosted test server.

Still I can edit the code itself. Originally I installed Vim. Then I tried PyGTKEdior and it works for me. Additionally I installed subversion. So now I can work on justCheckers while on the go.

Oops, I broke something

I broke my Internet Tablet today. Not physically.

Rather I used Dolphin from KDE 4 for some file transfers yesterday. Me and my obsession running beta versions. And to add insult to injury, yanked out the cable without unmounting (safely removing) the device. Silly me.

Well now the internal memory is read-only. Dmesg reports filesystem panic, and fsck.vfat errors out. So it looks like I’ll need to backup and reformat that partition. But hey at least I learned to gain root access on the N810 (install rootsh and run sudo gainroot in the x-terminal.

A big thanks to johnx, and others on #maemo on irc.freenode.com for all the help.

Football (Soccer) Madness – A Quickie Update

Ok, I’m just gonna post a quick update as part of my resolution, to post daily. I reckon that my life is not as half boring as I make it out to be…

I surprised my system admin at work that my N810, is in fact a Linux device. It is true that there isn’t too many Linux of such a small form factor. Updating to the newest version was a great idea.

Also we played a round of soccer (European football). I played a fantastic game. Maybe a bit aggressive, but thats just my intense focus when I game. I would love to do this on a weekly basis.

These past few days, I’ve a bit panicky. So many new adjustments and things happening to me. I am still adjusting. Please bare with me.