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.

However, after I bought Money, I exported my whole transaction info from my ING-DiBa account as CSV (since they do not provide me anything else) and tried to import it into Money – and it failed. I was using the latest version (3.4.4 v1938) and had quite a few problems with the CSV import. First of all, the columns haven’t been recognized automatically. Also, I didn’t really knew how to import the transaction-value, since I only had one column containing a positive (income) or a negative (outgoing) number, where Money expected “Withdrawal” and “Deposit”. Also, Money seemed to have problems with the punctuation of the numbers, what cause 1000€ to become 100€. And in general, the software didn’t work well with the CSV my bank provided me. I had to manually cut out the first few lines (which were just some additional information but not party of the transactions) and stuff line that. I was wondering, why this is so, since Squirrel automatically recognized the CSV and imported it just perfectly into my virtual account.

I wrote an e-mail to Jumsoft and explained the problems I have with my freshly purchased Money and of course asked for help. After some more mailing, I got a patched version of Money one day later. I tried it out and: Bam! It worked! The CSV imports work just as they should now, even if there’s still no automatic column recognition. Still, I’m very happy that Jumsoft helped my out that fast and in such an uncomplicated way – I’m not used to this from Apple-related companies anymore.

After I had all my data imported into Money and got everything categorized, synced the info up to my iPhone, what also worked out as smooth as I’d expect it.

The one thing I did not check yet are the possibilities to sync Money over two different Macs. I’m sure it’s possible by using the Dropbox-way, although I would not like to upload such sensitive information to my Dropbox. Maybe it’s possible to sync via W-LAN, dunno.

It seems to be possible to sync different Macs via MobileMe! Hurray! I’ll test it out and give some feedback as soon as possible.

I’ve been working on a web-site that used the jQuery framework to render content on the client side and get information from its back-end, via XmlHttpRequests. The whole built-up worked just fine of every modern, popular browser available in the market – like the Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari (on the Mac platform). Now, I had to test the site and make it workable on the iPhone-plattform as well. The site itself uses OAuth as authentication method and provides the information within a HTTP-header named “Authorization”. The theory is pretty plain: The back-end receives a request, checks for this header and responses accordingly.

However, iPhone’s Safari didn’t behave like the other browsers did. For whatever reason, the XHR was sent to the back-end, including every header that was set on the JavaScript side – except the “Authorization”-header. First, I though that Safari maybe could not handle the parameters of this header, but when I just renamed the setRequestHeader-argument to “Auth”, it worked. It simply just worked.

This happening made me search for other users experiencing this problem, unfortunately there doesn’t really seem to be many users testing JavaScript-sites on their iPhone – to be more precise, I did not find one result on Google that describes the problem I’m experiencing. I though, “Oh well, why not call Apple’s Technical Support?” – bad mistake. I got connected to a very annoyed and stroppy telephone-support which tried to convince me, that the iPhone’s Safari yet does not support Java. When I repeated myself by saying “It’s about JavaScript“, he didn’t really make the impression to understand the difference. I told him what the actual scenario was and all I got as answer was “Fill out the Feedback form on Apple’s site”. This made me a bit angry, because I more and more got the feeling of him trying to simply get rid of me. I asked for someone who is more technically involved into the whole iPhone stuff and he answered with “You’re already calling the most-advanced technical support – there’s no way to go further!”. At this point total disappointment overcame me and the only thing I thought of saying before I would hang-up the phone was “FAIL!” – luckily I was behaving more polite than the support-guy himself. Eh.

The end of the story is, that I (once again) wrote a report via Apple’s Feedback form (which from my impression is saving the submitted content to /dev/null) and implemented a workaround for myself by renaming the “Authorization”-header to “Auth”. Yet again a scenario in which I’m feeling like talking to a wall of bricks and have no possibility to get any information regarding my problem or maybe even correct this sort of bug. I think, this is the other side of closed-source software.

I need to create a minimalist base-system for a project and have been given the strategical requirement of using Ubuntu Server for my installation. It’s not actually the distribution me or any other team-member would have preferred, but I thought “it can’t be that worse, it’s based on Debian and it’s hard to break something that good“. But of course, today I’ve been disabused about that.

The first thing is, that it’s very hard to strip down the default Ubuntu Server installation, to make it as minimal as possible. You have to fuck around with many dependencies that seemed to be there only because some maintainers thought how cool it would be to compile every bleeding-edge feature into that application, regardless if it’s really useful on a Server-Distribution (as they call it) or not. But let me clarify a bit what I mean with “fuck around with dependencies”…

On a standard, “minimal” installation with no extras selected in tasksel, this is what has to be removed additionally after the setup:


aptitude --purge-unused purge apparmor apparmor-utils bash-completion bind9-host dnsutils ubuntu-standard ubuntu-minimal bzip2 command-not-found command-not-found-data console-setup console-terminus dmidecode laptop-detect tasksel tasksel-data dosfstools eject ethtool fdutils file friendly-recovery ftp fuse-utils ntfs-3g gnupg python-gnupginterface ubuntu-keyring update-manager-core hdparm info inputattach installation-report iputils-arping iputils-tracepath libbind9-30 libbz2-1.0 lsb-release python python-apt python-central python-gdbm python-support python2.5 ufw libcurl3-gnutls libexpat1 librpc-xml-perl libxml-parser-perl libfribidi0 libfuse2 libgc1c2 w3m libgc1c2 libgcrypt11 libgnutls13 libldap-2.4-2 libopencdk10 libgpg-error0 libgpmg1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tree-perl libwww-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libidn11 libisc32 libdns32 libisccfg30 libisccc30 libiw29 wireless-tools libldap-2.4-2 liblwres30 liblzo2-2 libmagic1 libntfs-3g23 libopencdk10 libparted1.7-1 parted libreadline5 wpasupplicant librpc-xml-perl libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules libsqlite3-0 libsysfs2 pcmciautils libtasn1-3 libterm-readkey-perl liburi-perl libusb-0.1-4 lshw usbutils libwww-perl libx11-6 xauth libxmuu1 libxext6 libx11-data libxau6 libxcb-xlib0 libxcb1 libxdmcp6 libxext6 libxml-parser-perl libxmuu1 lsof memtest86+ mii-diag mime-support mlocate mtr-tiny nano netcat netcat-traditional ntpdate pcmciautils perl perl-modules popularity-contest ppp pppconfig pppoeconf python python-apt python-gnupginterface python-minimal
python-support python2.5-minimal readline-common reiserfsprogs rsync startup-tasks sudo system-services tasksel tasksel-data time ubuntu-keyring ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard upstart upstart-compat-sysv upstart-logd usbutils util-linux-locales vim-common vim-tiny wget wireless-tools wpasupplicant x11-common xkb-data at ed iptables linux-server pciutils


After that, the system is still something around four-hundred Megabytes large and contains over one-hundred-thirty packages. You removed “gnupg”, because it has an extreme amount of additional features/dependencies which seem just useless for 99% of the cases on a server-system (e.g. ldap), but of course this will also automatically remove the ubuntu-keyring – what is kinda not fun. However, after searching for an stripped down package of gnupg, you will notice that there is none but gpgv. Unfortunately this tool can’t be used in combination with apt-key, what makes the whole GPG/Keyring stuff unusable. The only compromise you have, is to stick with gpgv and manually update the keyring, since gpgv can only verify but not update the GPG stuff.

Now, after executing the purge-command, you will be prompted to type in “I am aware that this is a very bad idea“. Not because you are removing an essential package which causes your system not to reboot anymore (upstart), just because you remove python-minimal. When I saw, that neither the upstart- nor sysvinit-packages had the “Essential: yes”-flag set, I was really shocked. That should be Linux for Human Beings? A Linux which lets you delete /sbin/runlevel and /sbin/init without even complaining about it? Holy crap.

So, after manually installing sysvinit, we need some editor (no, not nano, that’s not an editor!) to modify our sources list. Since Emacs is quite big and bloated, vi (no, not vim, n v i) is probably a good choice. After installing it and opening APT’s sources list, we will see many entries we do not want (multiverse, universe, whateververse), since they are barely supported and provide no security-updates. After removing everything but “main”, we execute aptitude update and continue installing the software we actually need.

Next, we would like to have the versioning-tool rcs, for handling the configuration files we will need to change. Also, we might want an mc (midnight commander) for performing filesystem operations and navigation. Unfortunately now, we just found the next problem: We can’t install them. There is no installation candidate for these package-names. Why? Simply because they are not in “main”. I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell anyone who could, but these packages are contained in “universe”.

However… let’s move on. So, we fight ourselves through the configuration and stuff and in the end there are only some peanuts left to be set-up. An example could be, the locale and keymap settings. So, let’s begin with the keymap. We would like to have the keymap #150 (German, Latin1, Qwertz). We check the installed packages and see that console-tools are installed on our system. We browse the net and find out, that (for changing the keymap), we only need to execute dpkg-reconfigure console-data. Before we can do that, we need to install it. And I think you know what comes next…. right. It’s not possible. This is another (elementary) package, which is not contained in “main”, but instead it can be found in “universe”. For no reason, in my opinion. But okay, since we really need it, we manually download it from the “universe”-repository and install it. Now, we try executing the dpkg-reconfigure command: The command runs, finishes, and doesn’t display any errors or warnings. “Great!“, we think. Unfortunately, after rebooting the machine, our thought became more like an “Wtf?!“, since the keymap didn’t change at all. After some more trying, searching and debugging, we find out, that there’s some script which calls some install-keymap command, which of course we can’t find on our system. Unfortunately, the calling script doesn’t show any error, if the command can’t be executed/found, what let’s us think, that everything went just fine. After searching on packages.ubuntu.com for the binary, we find out that it’s contained in a package named console-common. Which, again, is only available in universal. So, up to now, we got already five packages which we will have to maintain manually, since they’re not in “main” for no frikkin’ reason. That’s Linux for Human Beings.

After finally installing the last required package and successfully changing the keymap, we can now focus on the locale. On a regular Debian, the only command needed for selecting which locales to be built and which to be used is dpkg-reconfigure locales. Let’s take a look at what has to be done on the Ubuntu Server:

First, we need to manually insert the locales we would like to be built into the file /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local. One on each line. After that, we execute the command mentioned for the Debian system, which only builds us the locales. After that, we edit the /etc/default/locale and insert the LANG we would like to be used. And then we might execute update-locale and reboot the system. This is how locales are being handled on the Linux for Human Beings. Again, for comparison, on a Debian the only command you need to know is dpkg-reconfigure locales. And reboot. But that’s all.

Personally, the installation today taught me, that Ubuntu might be a nice (and very bloated) operating system for Desktop computing, but in the Server area it still lacks the knowledge of seeing the point and really simplifying the administration of a machine, instead of complicating everything by using obscure dependencies, odd tools and a package management which keeps out rock-solid and widely spread software of its “stable” package-branch.

At the moment, it would call it “EPIC FAIL“, to cite my buddy M. Pain.

My future Livingroom

Last evening I was playing round with Google’s great 3D-modelling software called Google SketchUp and tried to do something, what’s actually not SketchUp’s purpose: I was trying to design a room. I was searching for quite a long time some home designing software that includes real furniture and the only one I’ve found till now was “The Sims 2″, though it’s pretty pricy since there’s also a need to buy the Ikea-Addon.

However, as I was saying, I tried out Google’s SektchUp and I have to say that I’m positively surprised by its features and the possibilities it provides – especially because it’s freeware! I did some scratches for practise and half an hour later I began to create my interior design. I spent around thee and a half hours for designing, but in the end I am very pleased with the result, especially regarding the fact of me being a SketchUp-rookie.

The Media Center

So, how does my future livingroom I’ve designed look like? Let’s start with the basic information: The room has approximatively 8.3 x 6.3 meters of floor space and a regular height. On the mocha-carpeted floor I have two smaller carpets (unknown brand, designed by hela19). On the lighter carpet a Sofa by Mark Goetz, a Noguchi glas table and the Nelson Coconut Chair is placed. In front of the Sofa, the Chicago Media Center by Blu Dot holds a Samsung Flatscreen-TV, an Apple TV and a DVD-collection. Since the DVD’s would be available on the Apple TV itself, the DVD boxes in the Media Center’s cubicles would be more prestige than use. On the glas table, a MacBook Air would be available as carryable media device.

Wall unit, Media Center, Storage Benches and Turntables.

On the left side of the room, a Smart Furniture Wall Unit would keep all books, magazines and other things in it. On the right side of the Media Center area a nice plant lightens up the room’s ambient and another seating accomodation with integrated shelves called “Cognita Storage Bench” by Herman Miller provides additional storage space.

Right after the benches, three (modificated) Linc L18 tables by Bernhardt Design provide the space for my DJ equipment. Into these tables, a part of my Vinyl collection could be placed.

The room’s entrance would be at the corner in which the SketchUp figure stands. Besides the entrance, a nice, black George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa would provide another additional seating accomodation, in a stylish way. Right next to the Sofa, another nice plant and a Herman Miller Airia Home

The "Office" Corner

Office fill out the other corner of the room. I replaced the original chair coming with that Home Office set by a Herman Miller Eames Softpad Executive chair. On the (modified – I stretched it to be longer and deeper) desk, an Apple iMac with wireless keyboard and Mighty Mouse is available for work, placed in a way to not get derranged or even distracted by the images showed by the TV, though it’s still possible to turn around and take a quick look at the show, even if someone sits on the sofa.

So, however, this would be my idea of how a perfect livingroom for myself could look like. The main problem would be to find an appartment which provides a 52.29 square-meters (living-)room, heh.

Some more pictures are available on my Picasa WebAlbum. Enjoy!