2008 Blog Entries

Since the G1, running on Google Android, is so new, I'll discuss some of the other points about the phone for anyone interested. I previously discussed the features that sold me on the G1. Everyone is very excited about the Android operating system, however, there have been serious misgivings about the HTC G1 hardware that is running this first generation Android.

People seem to be confused about the "chin" on the phone where the bottom part tilts slightly.

The marketplace is coming out with really awesome apps. A lot of the popular apps for the iPhone are also available for G1. These apps take advantage of the internet connection, Google maps, GPS and tilting detection, making some really innovative stuff. They are all rather new since the G1 only just came out - but if they are great already, they will be awesome in a year!

I am hoping that the open source nature of Android, in addition to the market place starting out free will foster more free and open source applications.

Last week people discovered a means to access Android as a super user, effectively allowing them to "jailbreak" the phone. Saturday morning, RC30 was pushed out that closed this ability to access the phone as root.

Some people seem to think that this update was to solely prevent jailbreaking the phone, and are pretty upset that Google appears to be acting evil by closing down people's attempts to use their phone with open source software in any means they wish.

I am going to go off topic to discuss the G1 phone that runs Google Android. I figure web enabled phones are of particular interest to the web development crowd :)

I have had both the G1 and iPhone for one week each. At the end of a week with the iPhone, I returned it with much disappointment. With one week of the G1, I am just ecstatic.

Although I am an expert in executing HTML and CSS, I am not an expert in the details of the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0/1.1 standards. As such, I have had some strange misunderstandings of how it all works. When compared, XHTML strict is an elegant thing of beauty and order, while HTML transitional is an unholy land of disorder and corruption.

And why not think this way? Whenever I have taken a peak under the hood of a poor looking site, it was in HTML 4 with disordered markup. Whenever I look at a good looking site, it is in XHTML with orderly markup.

Back in the day (only 18 months ago in fact), whenever I started a new Drupal project I would read through the entire modules list and download each module I thought could be useful for the website I was developing. Once the contributed modules grew to such an extent that it would take me half a day to read through the entire list, my method to become acquainted with the current state of modules became prohibitive. Today, it would likely take several days to read through the entire list of available modules, and it would overload anyone's brain to process the sheer quantity of information and inspired ideas of relationships between modules.

I finally decided that what I've been developing in the dbscripts module is stable and decent enough to deserve an official 1.0 release. I've written up the problem I was trying to solve with these scripts in another blog post.

So what are some improvements I've done since I first released it? Besides refactoring and cleaning up the code, I have added:

So here's my environment: I'm running Fedora on my laptop, with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postgres and Ruby on Rails for my web development work. I then use VirtualBox to install a Windows XP virtual machine for browser compatibility testing.

Problem: How do I get my XP virtual machine (the guest) to see my Fedora's localhost (the host)?

Here's a quick bash script for automatically adding and deleting files in subversion. Don't you hate having to list each one individually? Or getting all those messages that say, "the file has already been added" when you just do svn add my/directory/*. Even more of a pain if you selectively delete a bunch of files.

I use this small little script. It's a huge time saver.

For the Brown University Featured Events website, I needed to develop a means to use their events for other purposes around the Brown.edu websites. I ultimately created a basic way of exporting iCal, RSS and HTML of a selected span of events.