So, what’s new in 0.3? Well, just about everything. I’ve renamed the bundle (at least its metadata), since webOS is not just limited to the Pre and I’ve modified the shortcuts of existing features to fit TextMate’s styling guidelines a bit better. I’ve also created some snippets which can be used for faster code-writing now and in addition to that, I’ve implemented a very own language for the bundle, which can’t be found in the document type picker named as “Mojo”. “Yeah baby!”, as Austin would say now. Actually, yet it’s just a copy & paste of the JavaScript-language implementation in TextMate, but I’m planning to extend it to fit the Mojo-framework even better.

The TextMate bundle is now also available on GitHub, for everyone who can’t wait for me packaging the releases and releasing them here. If you have any ideas for improvement, feel free to contact me by mail or just leave some lines here on my blog.

Enjoy!

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Palm Pre Development Bundle 0.2

Yes, after not even four hours I’ve already finished building the 0.2-release of my Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate. In case you’re wondering what weird stuff I’m talking about, please read my previous post first.

However, this second release includes a lot more features than it had before, plus I’ve made use of the CocoaDialog now. Let me describe the new features from the top to the bottom of the screenshot on the left site.

First of all, there’s “Generate New Project”. This lets you execute a palm-generate with all important attributes and opens the created project afterwards using the “mate” terminal-command, which needs to be available for this to work. All you have to do then is simply to save the TextMate project right into your generated project-directory.

Next, we still have “Generate New Scene”. I’ve enhanced the feature now, so that you’ll get a cocoa dialog asking for the scene’s name. Beware: The generation usually works as it should, the only problem is the TextMate project-drawer, which doesn’t seem to refresh by itself. A workaround: Cmd+H to hide TextMate and then click on its Dock-icon to make it appear again. Then all newly generated files should be visible in its drawer.

The next three features work just as before, no enhancements at all. On the fourth, the “Launch Project in Debugging-Mode” feature, I’ve implemented a palm-launch with debugging options, that can be run on an existing, packaged and installed project.

Next, there are ways to close and remove installed Projects. “Close running project” of course only works, when the App is actually running and “Remove installed Project” removes the App from the device. As device for all those commands the first device found by the Palm toolset will be taken – so if you would like to use the Emulator, better disconnect your real device and vice versa.

I’ve also built-in two features that let you simulate test calls and SMS on your Emulator, if you changed from password authentication to SSH public key authentication. You can do this either manually or try to use the feature at the menu’s bottom named “Auto-install SSH-Pubkey on Emulator”. Depending on your SSH-key-setup it works out or… not.

The other seven features allow you to simulate GPS drives on the Emulator – again only if you’ve set-up SSH-Pubkey authentication.

I hope you enjoy this release of the Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate!

Download: Palm-Pre-Bundle-0.2

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available! Get it here. Or use GitHub.

The scene generation works like this: You implement your this.controller.pushScene(“Main”);-statement, select the scene’s name (Main, without the quotes!) and select the scene-generation command from the bundle’s menu. The command will immediately generate you a new scene named just the way you chose to name it.

The other three commands can be ran by pressing the keys Fn+Ctrl+F5/F6/F7. Attention: The bundle only works with TextMate Projects! Generate your Palm Pre project like you always do, by using the following command:

palm-generate -p “{ title:’ProjectName’, id:com.my.ProjectName, version:’1.0.0′ }” ProjectName

Then, create a new TextMate Project and drag&drop the folder palm-generate created for you (“ProjectName”) into the Project’s drawer. Save the project within your Project-directory (“ProjectName”) and then run the commands.

This is the very first version of this bundle and I’ll keep constantly improving it with other features that help me and hopefully others on the development of Palm Pre Web-Apps.

Enjoy!

Download: PalmPre-Bundle-0.1

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available now! Get it here.

On August 23rd, I wrote an E-Mail to the SourceForge-Support:

Dear Sir or Madam,

some years (now already ago, I registred on SourceForge.net (Username: devilx) and uploaded some OpenSource-Projects of mine. After a while, my Account has been blocked without any (for me visible) reason. Now, I’m interessted in using this Account again, unfortunately I can’t re-enable it by recovering the password (or else).

I would like to ask, if you could help me re-enable the Account.

Thanks in advance,

bye.

On August 27th, the SourceForge-Support (finally) answered:

Hello Marius,

This account was removed for a policy violation. It may not be
recovered. If you choose to open a new account, please be sure to
closely review our Site Legal documentation (
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki ).

Best regards,

Daniel Hinojosa
SourceForge.net Support
sfnet_ops@corp.sourceforge.com

On the very same date, ten minutes later, I wrote back:

Hi Daniel,

thank you for your reply. I don’t know, why I should have violate your policy, since I didn’t do anything wrong on that account. It had been removed shortly after I created a project named “BFC”, what stood for Brainf*ck Compiler. I’m sorry, but it is not my fault for the Programming-Languag being called like that. If you rejected the project because of this fact, it would have been fair. But deleteing my whole account is pretty sad.

I was having some projects running under that account, which seem to be still available. Are there any possibilities for me to get my account named “devilx” (and all the project memberships I had) back?

Thanks in advance,

Marius.

On August 29th the Support wrote back:

Hi,

The account was closed at the time as there was a policy violation. We
won’t be restoring that account.

you may open a new account and if you desire, attempt to take over the
projects. If they are abandoned, this should be very easy to do.

Please be sure to be fully familiar with your Terms of Use:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki/Terms%20of%20Use

Best regards,

Daniel Hinojosa
SourceForge.net Support
sfnet_ops@corp.sourceforge.com

Half an hour later, I finished the communication:

Great! Say “Hello” to OpenSource and its support – that is, why people buy commercial, closed source products.

Thank you for no help.

Have a nice day.

And yeah, I know, it’s a free service and they have the right to do whatever they would want, blah blah blah. Still, it’s the fact that the support apparently had no idea what the actual problem with my account was nor why it really had been blocked. I’m not going to sign up for a new account, since nowadays there are (luckily) way more possibilities to get your own project hosted in whatever way.

Yet again a poor statement the OpenSource related projects/SourceForge makes.

Cheers!

The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new paradigms for launching applications, accessing documents, and organizing open windows in GNOME. Later, it will introduce a new applets eco-system and offer new solutions for other desktop features, such as notifications and contacts management. The GNOME Shell is intended to replace functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies.

So, the GNOME Shell is actually a more lickable and not-so-crappy version of what we can remember from old Windows 98/2k times, usually called something like Talisman Desktop or similar. Those applications were replacements for the actual explorer.exe binary, which hooked into the system logon and tried to build a better looking and feeling, theme-able interface for the end-user. Though, these applications never really found a market niche, last but not least because of the mostly exorbitant pricing policy. A few time later these add-ons were pushed away by Windows XP’s own theming abilities.

However, as it seems the GNOME community now starting writing a similar add-on for the GNOME desktop, using features provided by modern soft- and especially hardware. The whole Shell is hardware accelerated and seems to be working pretty fluent – not only because it’s exceptionally not written in Python or any other sick scripting language. Instead, it makes use of native C code, combined with Clutter and hooks for JavaScript plug-ins.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not that bad and finally seems to really be an add-on that integrates into the desktop, instead of being just another application which I need to bound somehow into my GNOME desktop. My colleague just quickly compiled and ran it and at least on his nVidia accelerated hardware it worked out pretty smooth and at least while testing it didn’t crash once.

It could become a pretty cool and promising project, if the people running it will find somebody concerned about UI-Design/-Usability and maybe some graphical artists, too and maybe make it look more “stable”. At the moment, the whole ‘shell’ still looks pretty half-cooked, but of course, they’re just at their beginning. So let’s wait and see – or better even contribute and change!

I actually had pretty much work to do at the office and besides in private I also had to do stuff like learning for a certificate I’ve been doing for quite a long time, working on some private projects and of course not forgetting my princess. Also, due to the long working-days over the week I didn’t feel like sitting down in the evening and trying to hack something into my Blog, just to have written. At the weekend I’ve been away most of the time, as you could read on my Twitter profile and see within my gallery, heh.

Right now it’s around quarter past two in the morning and I’ve mostly finished everything I wanted to do for “today” – “today” as in saturday. The past hour I’ve been spending on writing e-mails to the developers of Apps like TextMate, Pixelmator, Wallet and Viscosity, to ask about their licensing models. I’m actually planning to use the licenses I bought for my desktop also on another machine, but before I wanted to be sure that I’m allowed to. By now I’ve already received the answers from the TextMate-, the Pixelmator- and the Wallet-guys, which were all the same: It’s no problem. It’s pretty cool that these Apps use a model where the license is bound to a person and not to a machine or a machine+person.

Aside from the IT stuff, my car said Hello again. Last week I had to do a day home-office, since I had to bring in my CRX to the car-shop. After I got it back, it had its oil and its brake fluid changed, new summer-tires put on and some news regarding my rear suspension: It’s fscked. Now I’m wondering whether to get replacement parts for the lowered suspension I’ve built in… or…. just get a K&W adjustable suspension. The second choice would cost me €799 + working hours. However, I’ll think some more about that.

Another thing I thought about was getting an Apple TV, since Apple finally managed it to provide movies in the german iTunes Store. The only two reasons that keep me from doing that are first of all the price (a.k.a “Apple ‘cool’ Tax”), which is way over the device’s value (especially when regarding the american-$-price for comparison), and as second the hope that Apple might introduce new hardware for the Apple TV soon. I mean, they haven’t had a hardware upgrade for a long time now. Eh.

I guess that’s all for now.

The first two things weren’t that hard to realize. Sysprep actually runs every command contained in the Cmdlines.txt in \%sysprep%\i386\$oem$\ directory. Enabling RDP is possible using a simple reg-commandline which changes the value of the fDenyTSConnection key. Also opening the firewall’s port is trivial by using the netsh command. There seems to be some way by using a winnt.sif-file containing some parameters that should modify the firewall setup, unfortunately I didn’t manage to get that working in an reasonable amount of time. So I’ve just used the mentioned command to open the port in the firewall, for all profiles. The profile-argument is important, for me it did not work out without setting it to ALL.

Anyhow, the third ToDo was (and still is) tricky. The problem when using the net localgroup command to add the group to the local Remotedesktopusers-group is the following: While the mini-setup is running, the computer hasn’t got its future hostname and because of that it’s not yet joined to the domain. When trying to execute the net command for adding the domain-group to the local group it will of course fail. I searched for many different ways to do that, but each method I’ve found didn’t really work out for me:

autoexec.bat: Hacking the command to the autoexec.bat, so that it gets executed on the next reboot would be a way, unfortunately this file is ignore by every not-DOS-based Windows, like Windows XP is, for example.

win.ini: I’m not sure exactly why this didn’t work out, because the documentation says, that the Run-parameters configured in that INI will be run on Windows’ startup. In my case, the net command hasn’t seemed to be run. I think that the win.ini commands get executed before the connection to the domain has been established, so that the actual net command would have been run, but unsuccessful.

Run/RunOnce/RunService/RunServiceOnce-Keys: Would work out pretty good, if some user would log in. In my case, no user will log in until RDP is available to the specific domain-group.

And so on. I got pretty desperate, until I got an idea: A scheduled task! Windows supports adding scheduled tasks even from the commandline by using the schtasks command. I tried out the /sc onboot parameter, but unfortunately it seems to be working just like the win.ini, what cause the group not to be added. Then, I wrote myself a batch-script, which executes the net command for adding the domain-group, checks the command’s error code and if successful removes the scheduled task. The task itself I created using /sc minute /mo 1. By that, the task will be run every minute after the task-scheduler gets started on Windows’ boot and try to add the group. The whole schtasks /create thing works and even my script runs when I doubleclick it, but somehow the scheduler can’t run the script I passed to him while the mini-setup was running. I tried to same /create command within Windows XP and it worked out – my batch file got executed after one minute, added the group, saw that there was no error adding the group and removed the schtasks job.

Now I’m trying to understand, why the job does not work when I create it within the mini-setup. It’s really annoying, because Windows really does not provide any information below the basic output. There is no way (or at least none I would know of) to see what the schtasks daemon actually does when trying to run the script and fails. There is no strace. Nothing. Argh.

It really rankles me that the last piece doesn’t work the way it actually should, because the other implementations run pretty smooth and lasting. *beckon to Thomas*

Hmpf…

Full interior concept drawing

After some more drawing I finally got a detailed plan on how the construction could look like:

Detailed drawing of how the construction could look like

Then I bought the materials I needed and went to a friend’s of mine garage. Together with him, we started implementing the stuff I doodled on that paper. First, we had problems with the welding points, because the used to just break up like nothing. After replacing the gas with a new bottle it worked out pretty good. We bended the small steel-pipes for the speakers and created the “arms” that hold the amplifier. Actually I wanted to bend these two pipes, too, but it would have looked pretty ugly, so we decided to just leave them straight. For mounting the speakers and the amplifier, we took screws and welded them onto the pipes, with theirs screw thread to the upside.

After everything was welded together, we started grinding all the ugly welding points away and sprayed the black-metallic paint onto the construction. Then, we waited. And waited. And waited. God, I hate this sleazy paint. And still waited. After nearly two hours the paint wasn’t at least running away anymore, so I carefully took the construction and mounted it into my CRX. Then, piece for piece I started putting together the hifi components and did the wiring through the car, to the front where my capacitor is. I know, a capacitor should not be more than thirty centimeters away from the amplifier to be efficient, but actually the only reasing why I have that capacitor in the front of my car is for not having to wire every little cable (central-locking, amp, etc.) directly to the battery.

However, after wiring the whole thing up I tested out the sound and quality, and I have to say that I imagined worse. The problem is, that these speakers are hanging “in the air” and have no resonators, so I didn’t expect to much from the output, but it’s actually better than I thought. Now I’m wondering whether to just build two resonators or make an open baffle construction out of it, for example by using two thick plexiglas disks.

Anyway, I will think about it some more. So far, so good.

See all pictures on my Picasa WebAlbum.

However, I’ve also been thinking of some new stuff I could implement into REX and had a nice idea regarding the output-volume. A microphone could be connected to the mainboard and placed somehwere in the center. This microphone records the sound and compares the signal-line with the one of the audio that is just being played. Depending on the grade of differences it could then automatically increase the output-volume to reach a acceptable signal-strength again. I got this idea when I became pretty annoyed of the fact that everytime when I open my window while driving I can’t hear the music anymore, especially when driving fast. By this feature REX would automatically adapt the sound to the actual soundscape. I don’t know how hard it is to implement this feature, since I’ve never done anything like sound-analytics in programming before, but I’ll find out soon.

Btw: And still I’m searching for some Map/Navigation software for Linux. It is pissing me off that nothing useful exists. I’ve found a project on BerliOS called Navit, but it doesn’t seem to be pretty far right now.

However, I’ve also been thinking of some new stuff I could implement into REX and had a nice idea regarding the output-volume. A microphone could be connected to the mainboard and placed somehwere in the center. This microphone records the sound and compares the signal-line with the one of the audio that is just being played. Depending on the grade of differences it could then automatically increase the output-volume to reach a acceptable signal-strength again. I got this idea when I became pretty annoyed of the fact that everytime when I open my window while driving I can’t hear the music anymore, especially when driving fast. By this feature REX would automatically adapt the sound to the actual soundscape. I don’t know how hard it is to implement this feature, since I’ve never done anything like sound-analytics in programming before, but I’ll find out soon.

Btw: And still I’m searching for some Map/Navigation software for Linux. It is pissing me off that nothing useful exists. I’ve found a project on BerliOS called Navit, but it doesn’t seem to be pretty far right now.

Besides of all the hacking I’ve also contacted the actual developer(s) and wrote about the changes I’ve done to gTwitter. Regarding this, Nil Gradisnik already mailed me back and asked for my GMail-Account to be added to the project. Unfortunatelly I had to reject, since I’ve got a lot to do with other projects. I sent them the package containing the changes and hope now that they will introduce them into the upstream. If you’d like to try out my hacked version, just feel free to download it. Enjoy!

REX Car Entertainment System

To get the whole thing running you first of all need to get VirtualBox (not the OSE!) 1.5.6 and of course the REX.tar.gz. After creating a new Guest OS (Linux, Kernel 2.6) and adding the REX.vdi as Virtual Hard Drive you can already start it up. The first thing you’ll see will be the Splashy Bootsplash (which of course I’ve designed to fit into my car, heh). After some seconds you should see a regular Linux login-prompt. You can log into the system using root:install. After that you can start the REX user-interface by typing /etc/init.d/rex-ui start go. To make the interface start right after the boot just edit the init.d-script to remove the “go”-check. I didn’t make it start right after booting since I’ve experienced problems when doing that. Besides, the mouse does not work. Well, like I said, it’s a preview. Somewhy the Xserver doesn’t recognize the mouse so that you’ll need to navigate using the keyboard – but it shouldn’t be too hard.
However, altogether it’s like I said just a preview to make a first impression of how I’m imagining REX to be. I’ll package the software itself (REX User-Interface + Bootsplash Theme) as Debian Packages and provide them here for download so that everyone can build up a custom system.
Anyway, enjoy!

Download REX.tar.gz (Hendrik’s Mirror)

This means that I still won’t be able to provide a first preview of REX, what I’m really sorry for. Somehow it seems like everything just has to go wrong at the moment…

//btw: Sorry in advance for the crappy Project site, but I will need to work it completely over.

//edit: And by the way, I designed now my own Revenir icon, instead of using Apple’s TImeMachine icon.

Btw: I’m still searching for a place where I could upload at least one GB. If anybody knows a good place, please feel free to mail me.