fidzu : BeOS

1-2-3 testing. It's great fun to see how advanced the first versjon of the Wordpress editor for the iPhone and iPod Touch is.

Working with it is straight forward and it couldn't have bern much easier. My only complaint is writing longer articles sith the onscreen keyboard, AS writing with a thumb is nor fast or easy!

Adding pictures to an article is also in seconds, and tou can even take pictures that you add directly to the blog entry.

This blog entry was written on my iPod Touch and I can't wait to upgrade my iPhone to v2.0.

a2a_linkname="Moblogging from my iPod Touch"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=434";

22 Jul 2008 8:05pm GMT

The gap between Opera and Firefox seems to become bigger and bigger. I have been on and off on Opera, but lately I have been more or less just on. Opera 9.5 gives simply gives the best browsing experience, and now it gives us even more.

In a blog entry the desktop team is explaining why they still are using to different installers for the installation under Windows, as well as giving access to the latest build.

The release is with the latest desktop plus:

• Video (Ogg Theora) - used by Wikipedia and others. There are HTML5 examples based on working drafts of the HTML 5 specification being developed at W3C, and Erik Dahlström's video in SVG article. I have been looking in to HTML 5 a bit this spring, and I am not sure that Ogg Theora will be part of it, and I am more or less sure that Opera will loose a battle against Apple and Nokia! Having said that, it's about time that we get standards for audio and video on the net, that is for me more important then what file formats are chosen. And needless to say, these formats should be open.
• 3D canvas - is according to Opera the most experimental feature in this build. At least Opera and Mozilla have been thinking about how to provide 3D rendering in a way they can implement cross-platform even on proprietary systems. 3D canvas, like its 2D cousin, gives developers a javascript-based approach.
• File I/O - yepp, the browser is about to become the operating system. File I/O was originally announced by Opera back in May, and proposed to W3C for development as a standard, and gives you a way to interact with the filesystem from within your application. In this build, Opera has only enabled this feature for widgets, which can now ask the user to enable them to use an area in the filesystem - either to work with their existing content (manage photos that other applications also work on, for example) or a new clean sandbox for storage.
• eBook widget: Opera is brilliant at supporting standards, and with this widget you can read books published in the Epub format. This is one of the demo widgets released for this new build of the browser, and will not work in regular Opera builds as it needs the File I/O functionality.

And this time Opera is not only coming with a special build for Windows, the build is also available for us Linux and Mac users. Now we can all have a peek at what HTML 5 will bring us. I can hardly wait!

a2a_linkname="First release of next generation of the Opera desktop browser"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=424";

22 Jul 2008 5:59am GMT

The usual batch of builds: R5, BONE and Zeta. BONE builds have fyysik's Haiku patch applied (second version). I had some spare CPU time sitting around, so I've also posted Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 and yes, updated builds of Sunbird 0.9. BeBits has 'em all. Enjoy!

22 Jul 2008 5:32am GMT

I just saw perhaps the wildest sport in the world: The Red Bull Cliff Diving competition on Wolfgangsee in Austria. This as the last year, the big champion was Olando Duque, his jump was worthy of a six-time world champion.

With a perfect triple backflip coupled with a double twist, Orlando Duque (343,7 points) won the contest that was carried out by the 14 best cliff divers in the world. Sergey Zotin (328,8 points), cliff diving world champion of 2003, won second place, and another Russian took the third place, Sergej Zotin (306,3 points). Daniel Ballarin gave a sensational premier: as the American became the first-ever to perform a quintuple flip in a competition.

Jumping from a height of 27 meters, remaining 2.5 seconds in the air and landing at 90 km/h on the surface of the water, the dives were no easy feat. Three thousand spectators, most on ships, surf boards, paddleboats, and a collection of airbeds and dinghies, cheered in awe of the divers' breathtaking performances. I would have given a lot to have been there, it must have been breathtaking to see them jump!

Here's a spectacular picture posted on the German Wildcard Photodesign.

a2a_linkname="Wildest sport in the world?"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=421";

21 Jul 2008 7:12pm GMT

Earlier today I got my YouTube Subscription email and the Make Magazine section contained a link to the Citizen Engineer video "Volume 01 - Phones: SIM card & payphone hacking":

I don't have a home phone and I don't plan on getting VOIP, but I think it would be sweet to install a bluetooth board so I could use it with my iPhone. Maybe, someday, I'll complete some of the projects currently on my plate and give this one a stab.

20 Jul 2008 8:48pm GMT

Seems either my HD is failing or maybe my (passively cooled) northbridge is overheating due to warm weather here. Either way, I'd just started building 2.0.0.16 when they system decided to reboot, then not boot at all. Posting this from the Xubuntu box in the garage. Hopefully this will be quickly rectified.

Update: so much for the "quickly" part. Somehow it seems all of my BFS partitions are hosed, as is the grub/boot partition on my HD. Very odd. I booted the machine from the Zeta 1.21 live CD and could read (and backup) all data from my NTFS and EXT2 partions. The BFS partitions are all there according to DriveSetup but the file system is unrecognized. Diskprobe shows the files appear to be there also but I have no idea how to save them. May be starting over on a few things...

Update 2: only the boot sector was trashed. Zeta 1.21 livecd doesn't have a BFS driver, as pointed out in the comments. My ignorance strikes again! Machine is happier now.

18 Jul 2008 4:43am GMT

The beginning of the TechDirt article "Disney Sues Party Store For Costumes Looking Like Disney Characters" is an amusing jab at Disney's incongruent view of copyright protections and derivative art (not that I necessarily agree with how it meshes with the second half of the article) by way of explaining the origins of Mickey Mouse.

17 Jul 2008 9:53am GMT

Hello, people. What do you think about switching CAPTCHA technology on here even for registered users?

(There is new trend here in LJ in last 2-3 days, lot of spam-bots created and activated. They try to post on topic, more or less, using theme recognition, but actually are bots with advertasion in single posting or info page)

16 Jul 2008 9:42pm GMT

I have promised myself to try to live in an environmental friendly way. This year I have managed to cut my paper use to a minimum, I have almost not bought a newspaper, magazine or printed out a PDF! The same goes for books, I have bought 6 eBooks so far this year and with O'Reilly going digital without DRM I guess several books are to be read on my Cybook in the time to come! It is not the best selection, but at least it is a start. And if Bookeen soon could update the Cybook with ePub support, computer books would be a pleasant reading on these devices.

Why ePub? Cause Mobipocket doesn't currently support some of the elements that are pretty critical to many of technical books, for example tables and monospaced fonts. Right now if you see a proper table in a Kindle book or Cybook, it's actually just an image of the table (which means it's neither searchable nor resizable, two key features in an ebook).

a2a_linkname="It's getting easier to be Frank …"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=419";

15 Jul 2008 7:47pm GMT

And the hatch is:

First of all we are initially rolling this out in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and Spain. We're looking at other locales but have to deal with licensing and a host of other issues. We assure you that we're working on it.

Why, why, why? Norway is forgotten again

a2a_linkname="Almost perfect: Last.fm for iPhone and iPod Touch"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=417";

15 Jul 2008 6:43pm GMT

Before I continue: I use Windows Vista, Ubuntu 8.04 and MacOS X 10.5, but I am quite tired of the constant bashing of how bad Windows Vista is. I totally disagree, for several reasons, one of them is this:

A few months ago, Steve Ballmer publicly noted that Windows Vista was "a work in progress." …

The reality? All modern operating systems used as mainstream business and consumer platforms are "works in progress" and require frequent updates to fix bugs and resolve security issues (and occasionally to add features).

Don't believe me? Then here's food for your thoughts.

a2a_linkname="Brilliant blog post: Windows Update versus Ubuntu Update"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=415";

15 Jul 2008 6:28pm GMT

Sorry for the delay, fyysik. I had to test a bit; Thunderbird caused KDL Crash with r26384. I had to make sure the build wasn't bad but works fine under r26375.
Firefox for Haiku
Thunderbird for Haiku

These are (manually) reordered packages, ready to unzip and run. If anyone wants Sunbird, please reply and I'll build that also.

Edit: forgot to mention, these also have a version of tqh's revised NSPR. I don't know if it's the latest. tqh doesn't love me any more and hasn't sent his latest. ;-)

13 Jul 2008 4:55pm GMT

If someone needs Firefox which doesn't close other Mozilla apps and won't to be closed itself by others, there is such build for download - until Tigerdogs publishes full set of of Mozilla apps.

Works also on R5-BONE. As it was built on my own development code, it fixes problem with mouse sticking (lost mouse-up events), features filtering in File Picker, proper file-type recognition and also adds Postscript printing.

Also here is download for SeaMonkey users (Haiku, R5-BONE) with same critical fix and mentioned features.

I think those fixed version will be safer for use also in R5 and Zeta - as that bug with ports may lead to unpredictable things in BeOS-based OS-es too.

Look at older messages for solved problem explanation, e.g.
http://community.livejournal.com/bezilla/281777.html
http://community.livejournal.com/bezilla/282356.html

12 Jul 2008 7:52pm GMT

I couldn't wait and upgraded the iPod Touch as soon as the upgrade was made available. The iPhone, bought in U.S., is still running the old ROM, as I guess I have to wait for a hack to be made available.

My first impression was that this software upgrade should have been free for those of us that already had bought Mail, Todo and Google Maps. But ok, 10 dollars are not much these days … . There were not many noticeable changes for me, as wireless was already working and I was already using the Installer. I guess I'm first to go wow Monday morning, connecting to the WPA Enterprise network we have at work. I change that I did notice at once, was the far better Norwegian translations!

One of the first things that I will do at work next week, is to write user manuals (in both Norwegian and English) for the inbuilt VPN client and the enhanced WPA support. I am looking forward to finally be able to use the iPod (and later the iPhone) at work, Mail has a close to perfect IMAP implementation. Far superior to any embedded device that I have tried, and that is quite a few!

But for now I will write some lines about my first impressions of the App Store and the applications you can find there today. But before I start, I should say that I have not tried any of the commercial applications available in the App Store, that I will first do when I have upgraded my iPhone with the latest ROM.

The first thing that I noticed was that the App Store was far better to navigate then Installer, and the integration with iTunes and iTunes Music Store is perfect. It just reminds me why most people still are willing to pay for software, most open source software have a not to user friendly interface!

Having said that, don't rush in to upgrading to iPhone 2.0 if you are using many of the applications that were available on the Installer, as only a few of them are available on the App Store. All the applications that were available through the Installer, must be rewritten to work on 2.0, but I guess in time most of them will find it's way in to iTMS.

I have started playing with some of these early applications, NetNewsWire, Express, Exposure, eReader, Evernote, iPint, NYTimes and Remote. iPint is "spamware" (I know, one of my terms) and will find it's way out of my iPod fast …

I guess most Mac users will love having their favorite RSS reader available on their iPhone, and I can only hope that Vienna gets ported to the iPhone as well.

There is a few applications that I miss not having available on the iPod: RagingThunder, iChabber, Fring and not to forget MobileScrobbler. As many of you perhaps know, I am a great fan of Last.fm.

a2a_linkname="Updated my iPod Touch to the latest iPhone 2.0 software"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=414";

12 Jul 2008 7:41pm GMT

I just love Last.fm and how it keeps track of the music that I listen to.

A few days ago I reached 10.000 songs scrobbled, and on my profile you can see what kind of music that I am mainly listening to. It turns out that I am quite an allrounder, listening to both, Pop, Rock, Jazz and Electronica.

It took me more or less 3,5 years to reach 10.000 songs, and that is mainly cause I don't have a Last.fm client installed on my computer at work. So I guess that the next 10.000 songs will be reached in much shorter time frame, as I as so many others, am running around with both an iPod Touch and iPhone.

Last.fm has to some point changed my listening habits. Making it in to social network, it's easy to check and listen closly to what my friends are listening to and to similar music that others with the same taste are listening to. And one thing is sure, I buy more music now then before. I even went to a concert after having listened to them on Last.fm!

a2a_linkname="10.000 songs scrobbled"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=413";

12 Jul 2008 5:52pm GMT

Today it is all about microblogging (read: Twitter), a thing that I have never understood the point of. I have always hated the limitations of SMS, and then comes Twitter with a limitation of a 140 signs. Now, why on Earth would I use that?

It was great to read, just hours after iPhone v2.0 was out the door, that the first information about Wordpress for iPhone had also just been published:

Seeing this video, and you just know that moblogging gone from painful to something that is quite trivial! It is to the point were you can say that is how the future of blogging is gonna be. I think that blog posts in the future will be posted more or less as things are happening. Lets face it, it is perfect for photos taken during travels.

A mobile TypePad version is already published, and I guess that it has more or less the same functionality.

I know, iPhone's virtual keyboard is definitely taking some getting used to. But typing on it is getting somewhat quickly, and thanks to the auto-correction feature of the keyboard, I am not constantly hitting the backspace key.

I can hardly wait till getting my hands on iPhone v2.0, and the release of Wordpress for iPhone!

a2a_linkname="Moblogging v2.0"; a2a_linkurl="http://www.frankps.net/?p=412";

12 Jul 2008 4:29pm GMT