tOMPSON's blog

Twitter shared items of Google Reader

tompson — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:04:47 +0000

As I stated already multiple times I am a big fan of Google Reader. Since I am using Twitter more and more I searched for a way to inform my followers about new items on my Google Reader shared feed. I found this solution Bob Lee uses. It is basically a Greasemonkey JavaScript that allows you to post directly from Google Reader to Twitter.

I decided to do it another way. Since I am already using twitterfeed for updating Twitter from my blog I added another entry that points to the RSS feed of my shared items.

Problem with network of vmware appliance

tompson — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:31:35 +0000

Today I updated my vmware test environment by downloading a new Ubuntu 8.10 server appliance. After extracting the zip file and staring the server inside my vmware player version 2.5.1 there was no eth0 device available. I tried to start it manually with ifup but that did not work.

A quick google research brought up Eric Martin’s excellent post about how he fixed that problem. It seems that my vmware player instance created a new MAC address for the network adapter. I deleted the old entry for eth0 from the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file and changed eth1 to eth0 in the second entry. After a reboot everything worked fine again.

Mylyn and trac 0.11

tompson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:54:02 +0000

I am using trac now since about half a year for one of my current Java projects. One thing I missed from the start was the Mylyn integration in Eclipse - with bugzilla I was used to handle most of my issue tracking inside Eclipse. If you get used to this kind of “task oriented” working it is hard to do anything without.

Today I found a nice post about how to enable Mylyn to work with trac version 0.11. Basically you have to add the XMLRPC plugin to your trac installation and to configure the XMLRPC connection mode in the Mylyn trac connector.

My blog is very masculine

tompson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:47:34 +0000

Meeting the BlackBerry Professionals

tompson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:44:14 +0000

On Friday I had the opportunity to meet and talk to some RIM employees at the BlackBerry Technical Seminar for IT Professionals in Vienna. I attended mostly to Track C which focused on application development for BlackBerry devices. Tariq Tahir and Michael Weitzel did a great job and learned a lot about the fundamentals behind the BlackBerry platform. A lot of ideas for new applications and improving existing solution came to my mind.

In one of the breaks I also had the opportunity to test the BlackBerry Storm. First it was a bit unfamiliar to me that the devices makes a difference between just touching the display and “pressing” it. For clicking I had to “press” and this made the whole display go down a bit and to give some kind of vibrating feedback. This is very different to the surface of the iPhone because the whole display part of the BlackBerry Storm “moves” like a big button. I tried to type some text with the virtual full QWERTY keyboard but soon I realized that it will never be possible to type as fast on the Storm as with a real keyboard. The RIM employees said that I should hold the device in portrait mode and to use the SureType keyboard because it has bigger buttons and the text-finding-intelligence has been improved a lot - but I am no SureType-guy.

Since I read the latest reviews of the BlackBerry 8900 Curve (aka Javelin) I am sure that with the Bold I got the right device for the next couple of months.

More instant messaging for BlackBerry

tompson — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:24:59 +0000

This is a up to date screenshot of the “Instant Messaging” folder on my BlackBerry Bold. From left to right:

BlackBerry Messenger - classic, no BlackBerry is complete without this one. My most uses IM at the moment. Safes a lot of SMS costs.
twibble - one big plus of using twitter is that it allows me to publish from my BlackBerry to the web - therefor I am using twibble, I tried twitterberry but had some problems with it
facebook - the BlackBerry facebook app allows me to make status updates and upload fotos directly from the Bold
iSkoot - on my search for a free BlackBerry Skype client today I found iSkoot, great Skype client, I am using it mostly for chat, though voice over IP works too
ICQ - allows me to stay in touch with my old ICQ friends. Provided by RIM directly under mobile.blackberry.com
MSN Messenger - another native BlackBerry app provided by RIM

With all those instant messengers added the BlackBerry Bold really is a communication monster - I am very satisfied with this device.

Which browser user type are you?

tompson — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:41:32 +0000

Activity

tompson — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:59:30 +0000

Due to a lot of things going on in my life you may have noticed that I am updating my blog not as frequently as I did the last years. I never quite understood why people wanted to be able to update their blog from their mobile phone - now I want to do the same. At least I want to update my “online-me” when I am away from my PC.

I am doing this by using twibble as a mobile twitter client on my BlackBerry Bold or by uploading pictures taken with the BlackBerry directly my facebook profile or flickr account.

Instead of posting comments about posts I read in my Google Reader I just mark them as shared so you can see my filtered interests on my shared feed page or on friendfeed. The same goes for youtube videos - I mark them as favorites and they are listed on my facebook profile and friendfeed page.

The latest thing I tried is to consolidate all my online actions into a “soup” by using the service soup.io (created in Austria!) - so check out my soup under http://soup.dertompson.com/ - maybe the day comes when it replaces dertompson.com

Ubuntu server and vnc

tompson — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:17:21 +0000

Yesterday I installed a vnc server on my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. I did this because I want to run some GUI applications like a BitTorrent client on it. The last time I installed a vnc server on a machine without a window manager was back when I was using Redhat. So I did a little search and found out that the best way is to install gnome-core and tightvncserver by issuing

apt-get install gnome-core tightvncserver

After the first start of tightvncserver I was able to connect to port 5901. Tightvnc only starts a simple window manager and an xterm. To get tightvnc start a gnome session I had to edit the file xstartup in the .vnc folder of my home directory. I removed the line

x-window-manager &

at the end of the file and added

gnome-session &

After stopping the vnc server with the following command line

tightvncserver -kill :1

and starting it again I was entering my gnome session when connecting with my vnc viewer (UltraVNC).

Vodafone BlackBerry Storm video leaks

tompson — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:26:16 +0000

Looks like the Storm is the step of RIM trying to hit the consumer market.