Ubuntu 11.10

I have long used a dual-interface Linux machine at the edge of my network to provide firewall, file server and other interesting services to the network. My old machine was getting pretty noisy and I was sure something was going to die and leave me in a bad situation. I bought a cheap new HP tower machine to replace the old machine and was tripped up on multiple things:

• I didn’t think about the fact that my old network card would no longer fit in the machine due to bus changes. I was further surprised to find out that it was impossible to find a PCIExpress networking card without going online and waiting for delivery.
• The latest Ubuntu installer guessed that the HP machine was using UEFI for bootloading and failed to boot Ubuntu. With lots of great help from the Ubuntu forums I was able to diagnose the issue and get grub-pc installed and the machine working.

This machine is up and running pretty well now after the false starts. I wish I could say the same for my Dell laptop. Every time a new version of Ubuntu comes out, I tell myself I’m not going to update for at least a month and that I should really wait a bit longer for the issues to shake out. Every time, I lose the battle to wait and end up regretting it after the fact. While Ubuntu 11.10 has some pretty nice new features, I ran up against new regressions that I had to work through.

• Screen backlight issue
• Wireless connection issue

Thanks to Canonical engineer Kamal Mostafa, I have a patched kernel to fix the backlight issue. Unfortunately, I’m still struggling with the wireless issue that kills my wireless router from time to time.

Cyanogen Mod 7.1

I was excited to see Cyanogen Mod 7.1 come out with support for my Samsung Captivate. I’m a fan of Android, but not a big fan of the crap-tacular software loaded on AT&T devices by default. The idea of installing a new ROM that was cleaner and faster was enticing. While the transition has been relatively smooth, I’m seeing some strange behavior with my external 32G SD card. I’m also having a hard time figuring out if the battery life is as good as it had been on the stock firmware. I need to do more digging to figure that out.

In the end, I don’t expect my habit of installing new software will likely change very soon. I usually try to avoid upgrading too early for mission critical hardware such as my work laptop. Admittedly half of the fun of installing new software is that you can usually dig yourself out of a hole if something goes wrong.

In the meantime, the Eclipse Foundation has managed to deliver the Eclipse Indigo release on schedule yet again. It is always strange to see the Eclipse MTJ project based on my original EclipseME work ship “yet another release” with no involvement from me. While I’m glad to see the project outlive my involvement, I have to admit it is kind of strange.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), JavaME is on a downward slide at this point. I had hoped to take a look at the Eclipse Usage Data for the MTJ project and get an idea of its usage as well. However, I’m still looking around for up to date usage data. If I find something useful or interesting, I will try to post something here.

The Project

In order to learn a new platform, I always like to have a project to build.  Looking around, I didn’t find any iPhone DAAP clients for servers like the Firefly Media Server.  I’ve been trying to build a DAAP client as my learning experience.  I have a good chunk of the navigation working at this point.

DAAP Player

The iPhone Core Data support is amazingly powerful, providing a good chunk of the underlying data source support for table views like those in the client.

DAAP Albums

There is still much to be done, but the iPhone SDK has provided a large amount of functionality for a very small price.  As always, I continue to be impressed with the power packed into modern handsets.

Circus VIC-20

Looking back at this article publication, there are a couple of things that make it particularly interesting to me 20+ years later.

• My original program was written on the Commodore VIC-20 (5K of user memory!) and was rewritten for all of the other computers for the publication.  This happened behind the scenes and I was unaware until publication.  Not surprising, they also rewrote all of my descriptive text.
• This game was a clone of a game that was available in arcades and pizza places around that same time.  Had I done this in present day, this game would very likely not have been published due to copyright or other legal issues.

20+ years later, I’m still a computer programmer (software engineer?).  While I program less than I used to, it is cool that my hobby so many years ago has been able to be both a hobby and a source of income for so many years.