During the just finished semester, my group and I was part of course called Publishing Papers in a Peer-Reviewing System (PPRPS). As part of this course we were to write a scientific article, mine was related to the speed on Android devices compared to the emulator (Are Emulators Trustworthy - In terms of speed) and compares some different scenarios of computational and memory usage. The article only focuses on Android 1.5, so it is already quite outdated, but at the time of writing I only had a device available with Android 1.5. I thought it may be useful to someone anyway and can be found here.
Twisted on Windows 64bit
Apr 24
I have just spend several hours getting twisted working with python 64 on my Windows 7 64 bit install so I could make a dummy test server. Basically it turned out that the 64 bit version of python posed the hindering, and i ended up installing the standard 32 bit version and using easy_install to install twisted which is now functioning.
My first thought was simply installing python and using twisted own windows install file, however this did not work at all (I have not tested this method with the 32 bit version of python, but I am guessing it would work as supposed).
Next I tried to use easy_install, but I could not install easy_install from setuptools, and got a warning about python 2.6 not being installed. But when I removed the 64 bit version and installed the 32 bit version it installed without any problems. So my advice is: Use the standard 32 bit version!
Hopefully this will be helpful to others in similar situations.
Android 1.6-r1 emulator demo
Sep 16
I have just downloaded the 1.6-r1 emulator, and made a small video demoing some of the new stuff.
The project aims to enable the user to control his media, like most other remote controllers for android:
- Browse content on the computer
- Add content to playlist
- Playback control
Beside this, the system makes it possible for you guests to add media to the playlist, but not control the playback, thereby making everybody at you party able to have a say in the music theme.
Technical
The client communicates via a TCP connection, the protocol is quite simple and will be released as well along with the code for the server and the client, my hope is that other people will like it so much that they want to make new clients and servers for other platforms, (currently only vlc under Linux is supported for the server and only android for the client).
Zyb.com is a great service, and I have been using it for a long time (nothing worse than loosing all your contacts or having to copy them to the SIM card when moving between phones) but unfortunately the doesn’t have an Android client, and I have been unable to make any other clients work.
There for I have been working on a zyb importer, which can import JSON files with your contacts, which zyb makes available from zyb.com/feeds, the project can be seen at code.google.com/p/zyb-import, I will try to make the application available via android market as soon possible, until then you can download the source and build it yourself.
See screenshots here.
Update: the app is released to android Market, search for “zyb”.
Update 2: the app only works with android 1.5 and 1.6, I was planning a new version supporting 2.0+, however, zyb has in the meantime announced that they will close down on the 31st of July, I will not make an updated version, I thus urge anybody with android 2.0 or greater to use the method described here: http://www.consumingexperience.com/2009/05/zyb-export-copy-mobile-phone-contacts.html for importing their contacts, before it’s too late! Thanks.
QR code for android market, scan with barcode scanner or like
Palm Pre Emulator
Jul 15
Exciting things are happening these days. I will try to capture and upload a video of the emulator later to day.
Update I have uploaded a video to youtube of the emulator (embeded below).
Palm SDK booting
Timezone in PHP 4
Jul 1
Need to set timezones in PHP 4? Use putenv() as described here, for example putenv(“TZ=Europe/Copenhagen”);
I just used a few minutes getting the above mentioned printer working with ubuntu, normally most printers I have used works out of the box with ubuntu, but not this one. My solution seems to be quite simple, however it may be that it is not the correct way to do it, but it worked for me 
- Install brother-cups-wrapper-extra
- In “Printer configuration” (System -> Administration -> Printing) click “New”, select “Brother DCP-135C”, click “Forward”, wait for search to finish, click “Provide PPD file”, select the file /usr/share/ppd/Brother/brdcp135c.ppd, click “Forward” and click “Apply”
You should now be able to print with your DCP-135C printer – however this is just the printing part, for the scanner to work, you probably want to look at http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html
Chromium daily builds
Jun 6
As you may have heard Chromium is released for Linux in Alpha version, with daily builds available from here. Normally you would properly use the ubuntu repository if you wanted to live on the edge, getting the daily builds.
But if you, like me, are in the middle of a reading periode before your next exam, and needs an excuse for not reading, you might find youself writing a sh-script downloading the newest version (if it is not the one you got already)
#/bin/sh echo "Chromium daily build downloader"; echo "-------------------------------\n"; STARTDIR=`pwd` INSTALLDIR="$HOME/Desktop" CONFDIR="$HOME/.chrome" # Check if confdir exists if [ ! -d $CONFDIR ] then mkdir $CONFDIR echo "Configuration directory is created..." fi cd $CONFDIR if [ ! -e CURRENT ] then # If no current version is available (e.g. first download) OLDVERS=0 else OLDVERS=`cat CURRENT` fi if [ "$1" != "" ] # Get specific version then CVERS=$1 echo "$1" > NEW # Get newest version else wget -q http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/LATEST -O NEW CVERS=`cat NEW` fi if [ "$CVERS" = "$OLDVERS" ] then echo "Already got the newest version: $OLDVERS"; rm NEW else echo "Downloading version: $CVERS, $((CVERS-OLDVERS)) revision(s) difference"; wget -q http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/$CVERS/chrome-linux.zip if [ $? != 0 ] then echo "ERROR: Build number $CVERS could not be found" else echo "Unziping..."; unzip -q chrome-linux.zip -d $INSTALLDIR rm chrome-linux.zip mv NEW CURRENT fi fi cd $STARTDIR echo "\nDONE";
Hey look at that, now another five minutes went by without me doing any reading.