Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Two good links

Just for fun, but you really ought to read SinFest. My favourite webcomic keeps getting better and better. New comic every day since the start.

Also, Broken Picture Telephone is a very fun take on the old whispering game of miscommunication. Describe a picture, draw the description, repeat until satsified. See results. (The site has some problems, so you can't even connect to donate some times. Best to try it when the US is sleeping. :)

Making the smartphone smart, only €19.99

My HTC Touch HD (a.k.a. Blackstone to you guys across the pond) is my first "Smartphone", and was reputedly an iPhone killer.

It hasn't lived up to that. Not that I've owned an iPhone.. yet.. but it feels a bit clanky to use. And no games has worked well yet. Bah!

But, since it's got 0.5 GHz, ~300 mb ram and 8 gb flash, it ought to be good at something. And I just found out that with WMWifiRouter it becomes an excellent 3g modem + wireless router (that can also play youtube videos in 800x480 :).

This is an excellent piece of software. It installs smoothly, asks for some options, then gives me 6 buttons to start mapping between wifi, 3g, bluetooth and usb whichever way makes sense.

It also monitors the battery's temp in case it overheats... Oookay. I suppose it's a good thing that it does, but it's like having a warning light + engine shutdown in your car in case the rear wheel nut is coming loose.

Can't blame the program for that, though.

I ended up with this because Vista fails to reco'nize my HTC as a PAN supporting bluetooth device. Pfft! My old GSM-only Nokia worked amazingly well (connect to network - bluetooth pan - presto), although it was hideously slow. Well, since it worked for the Nokia, I'll blame HTC this time around.

Anyway, I'm glad that I can now access the net from my laptop _anywhere_. Very nice when on some trains that don't yet offer WiFi. (Most budget trains don't, and the only ones running to my parent's part of the country don't either... although they do have power outlets.)

Thursday, March 12, 2009

My BuildBotIcon app now hosted on BitBucket

I've uploaded my BuildBotIcon app to BitBucket.org!

It's a small java app that polls a buildmaster and changes the color of an icon in the java tray depending on the status. It also alerts when statuses change so you notice it a bit more.

I wrote it 1,5 years ago and published the jar-file on BuildBot's mail-list, but I decided to put it up as a proper project tonight, just for fun.

Bitbucket and Github are both greats hosting sites for open source projects. Very easy to use, very fast (compared to SourceForge) and they use DVCS:es both. I like Mercurial more, so I opted for Bitbucket.

On a related note, my work with patches for BuildBot on Github is apparently going fairly well, as I was just promoted to contributor with commit rights to the current 'official' BuildBot repository. (Dustin Mitchell's master branch).

On a related related note, Github's network feature is cool, if you like graphs. See mine here.

Oh, I also hang out a bit at StackOverflow.com.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Slow Django-dev in FireFox

This has been bugging me for a few years, and solutions have only recently crept up on Google, so to further spread the word, here is the solution

Disable IPv6 in FireFox (via about:config -> network.dns.disableipv6) or use http://127.0.0.1/ to access via IPv4 directly.

Then it's just as fast as IE on localhost. Whee!

More details here.