Bluetooth Essentials For Programmers Review
If you have been following my TEOTWAWKI Net project you will know I'm interested in dynamically formed short range wireless networks and so of course bluetooth seems natural to explore. To help me get started I purchased "Bluetooth Essentials For Programmers by Albert S. Haung & Larry Rudolph ISBN 978-0-521-70375-8"
I thought I might review this book a bit and mention what it covers vs what it leaves up to the reader to figure out.
This book is great to get you started writing code that actually does something very quickly and has great examples in Python, Java, C and objective C. For that reason alone I think it is worth it to buy if you want to get started quickly writing bluetooth applications. Here's a short list of whats covered.
While it is still a great help for someone wanting to get started with Bluetooth I think they could have gone a bit further than they did its really a basic bluetooth tutorial in book form and it does that well but I think a more expanded edition of the book should be made covering the following topics.
If I have time I plan to cover some of these topics that aren't covered in bluetooth essentials once I have finsihed R&D on the bluetooth support in the future versions of TEOTWAWKI Net.
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As noted on the wiki and on facebook. Thanks to the generous contributions of Fred Grose I got my First rooted HTC Dream phone on Saturday and the second one today. Being someone who is very behind the times as far as mobile technology goes this 2 year old smart phone really impressed me. It's also highly addictive even without any cell service.
So far I haven't written one line of code for the platform yet but putting it through its paces has been very fun. There's so much this thing can do out of the box that I'm sure Apple is in big trouble. particularly since this platform is open source friendly. (That is the main reason I chose this as my first smart phone platform to develop for)
This phone also has me thinking about ARM based machines and how I would really love to have a good ARM netbook with similar capabilities (but with a regular Linux distro and lots more ram and flash space and a bigger screen of course) Hopefully we will see some come onto the market soon. until then I have one heck of a powerful and flexible machine that fits in my pocket! something I have wanted for many years is now a reality.
I still want to own an open pandora one day but this is close enough for what I want to do for now.
I'm done rambling now more info when I finish the python re-write and get serious with the droid. My project will need to use the NDK for various reasons and I should be learning all about android internals soon. I will post more on my blog about android internals that I find interesting as I run across them.
I also wanted to thank the author of the Super E ROM I had no end of trouble with cyanogen 6.0 but Super E seems be nice and solid. It leaves me at android 2.1 but I'm sure the 2.2 roms for the dream will get better by the time I will care about having a 2.2 machine.
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I finally forced myself to sit down today and I re-implemented about 90% of the mapper daemon today. If I keep things up at this rate we might actually see a real sugar activity version of TEOTWAWKI Net soon.
I still have the following milestones to complete
Once I have a working sugar activity I will release a standalone Linux version and see what can be done to make it work under windows and hopefully smart phones.
I need at least one USB bluetooth dongle and two rooted HTC dream phones (also known as the G1 phone) to get started on the android version.
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I just made some amazing hot wings in the crock pot yesterday.
This is what I did:
I needed two batches of sauce to cover my wings.
Cover the wings with the sauce and stir to make sure all the wings are covered and set the crock pot on high for 2 and a half hours. (do not take the lid off to check until at least the 2 and a half hours are up!)
Check and make sure the wings are done by taking out a wing and testing it.
Once the wings are fully cooked separate the wings and the sauce. transfer the the sauce to a sauce pan and boil it down as much as you can and then thicken it back up like you would making gravy. (I used flour, but you might also try corn starch, it came out good with flour)
I came up with this because I could not find any good recipes for hotwings that only used a crockpot.
I wasn't expecting it to turn out so good so that's why I'm posting it to here. The end result is a lot like buffalo wings except its
tender and has a really nice flavor. It is greasy but then so are buffalo wings.
I found the sauce to be so good that I ended up just soaking it into bread rather than wasting it.
If you try it let me know what you think.
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Whenever I get involved with something I like to study it's history for me that means finding the earliest copies of the software and sources.
I decided today to find a copy of the original B-News software and spent a few hours pulling my hair out since ftp.uu.net seems to be no more.
Finally I managed to find copies of A news B news and C news plus the nntp reference implementation. In the interests of posterity I am hosting a copy of the software I found here
I hope I save someone from pulling their hair out.
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Thunderbird 3.x preferences rant
I really like Thunderbird so don't get me wrong here. However I just have to rant a bit about the user interface for configuring this particular mail client.
To their credit they do have most everything you would want in the GUI. Except one thing I really needed, a way to set the font size for the list of emails and other things that are part of the user interface not just the message body text.
I know some people will say "but look a simple google search tell you how to do that! Why are you complaning?" I'm complaining because things like this should not require editing a config file! I like that its customizable by a CSS file thats a wonderful thing. But you can't tell me that this couldn't have been editable in the preferences GUI. I have nothing against config files I like being able to do cool things with config files but this is 2010 not 1992! Evrything doesn't need to be in a GUI but I would expect that basic look and feel modifications, like the font size of the list of emails would be configurable from the GUI. Is that too much to ask for in the 21st century?
Maybe I'm getting spoiled these days but I'm sure people considering an open source mail client are put off by things like this. I know they are because I actually got asked by the person whom I was increasing the font size for "Is it difficult to config that option because it's open source?"
Anyway I still love Thunderbird I just hope that they will fix things like this in newer releases.
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I really tried to be upbeat about Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems. I thought for sure that they would do all they could to encourage wide use of Solaris and would invest heavily on Solaris and the SPARC platform.
Whether or not they invest in Solaris and Sun's hardware platforms remains to be seen but one thing is now every clear. They have no intentions whatsoever of treating their customers and potential customers with respect.
Instead they decide that they should handle support and licensing just like they do with their other products. This includes charging well over $300 a year for access to critical security patches.
I have been a long time fan of Solaris over the years and still think it has a lot of merits technically. But those merits mean nothing to me if I'm forced to pay for security patches. There are a lot of small shops out there running Solaris that don't want or even need the hassle of a full support contract just to get patch access.
I might feel a bit better about this if you could simply pay for only basic sunsolve access to documentation and patches only and do self-support. for a reasonable price (say $50 to $100 a year) but charging over $300 a year for something we used to to be able to do ourselves for free is just insane.
I also consider blocking access to security patches to be irresponsible. The net is more hostile than ever today and there will now be even more unpatched Solaris boxes out there just waiting to be rooted, and all because Oracle wants to squeeze as much as possible out of Sun's remaining user base.
So as much as it pains me to do so I will be moving off of Solaris on my web server and switching either to CentOS or one of the BSD flavors. I will still run Solaris on my desktop system on my private network but I think my love affair with Sun has just been killed by Oracle. Thank you Oracle for taking a great company like Sun with tons of talent and some of the best most innovative technology out there and killing it by forcing it to conform to Oracle's culture.
It's been a great ride but I feel that Sun will share the same fate as DEC unless Oracle changes It's ways and soon. RIP Sun Microsystems 1982-2010 you will be missed.
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