It has been a good 4 year run here on wordpress.com, but the time has come – we’re moving to http://tarnaeluin.houseofbeor.net.
I’ll be comments are closed here. All the posts are migrated over to the new site and I’m starting to remove old articles from here and leaving a url to the new site.
beren
So far so good over at tarnaeluin.houseofbeor.net, but so far performance seems ok. I’ll have to look into the comments features and how to enable openid and wordpress accounts not on my server to work for comments and stuff.
If I get that working I’m going to close comments here and open things up over there.
I’ve created a shadow blog over at my hosting provider to test out the concept of moving my blog over to my own domain. Here’s the url:
http://tarnaeluin.houseofbeor.net/
What do ya think? Its a wee bit rough so far. The export and import process does not really work too well. All my images moved over but they did not get re-attached properly so when you click on an image it is actually linking back to the wordpress blog. I’ve got a couple of other issues as well – the Aksimet spam crap is not working – even though the stats stuff does seem to be working ok.
What I do like is now I have control of themes and styles so I can make my blog a lot fancier. What are my concerns?
I’ll keep working on the new site as I get a chance.
Continuing my work with Android – I seem to have hit a snag. When I start emulators the process hangs and the emulator never loads properly. I can see adb.exe and the emulator-arm.exe running in the process list, but nothing ever appears on screen. Attempting to kill it from the task list does not work either. The only solution is to reboot my laptop. Not sure what the problem is. Continue reading
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Ok the wordpress generated report is goofy – working on some decent stats. This year was a tough one for me – I had a lot of responsibilities at work that took away from blogging and my karate practice with my son also takes time away from general messing around…although to me that’s a good reason not to blog! Continue reading
I’ve used the same theme (Tarski) on my blog for about 4 years so I thought maybe it was time for a change. I’m using the freebie service from wordpress still primarily because it works and it would be a pain to move my blog site over to my hosting provider. The new theme looks pretty ok for me – what do you think? My primary complaint is the fixed width of the article column. It seems that most of the “free” themes are fixed widths with silly proportions – probably to get you to upgrade for the $30/year to tweak the CSS to reasonable proportions.
I’ll continue to mess around with the themes and play with options – the current theme as I write this ( 12/31/2011) is based on Pilcrow. I’ll put screen shots of each below in case you had something better to do while I was messing around 
The second shot is using Twenty Eleven – I think I prefer this one mostly because the article width is more than Pilcrow.
I think I pretty happy with the Twenty Eleven – it is clean and simple and a bit wider than the others (still cannot adjust this in the options). The header graphic is a bit large, but its ok. Ted Nasmith is the artist – quite a famous guy with LOTR fans. He’s done a bunch of pics that I really like. The other favorite of mine is a painting of Gondolin – the hidden city of Turgon. He has a number of pics of Beren and Luthien. I’ll have to make a bunch to round robin in the banner area.
My wife gave me an iTunes card for Chirstmas so I went today to use it…little did I know what was going to happen. I poked around to find something to buy and picked out Journey’s Greatest Hits Vol 1 & 2 – I lost my Escape CD years ago. I had an existing credit in the store of about 13 bucks – not enough for the album. I banged in my code for the gift card – it appeared…but my $13 disappeared!
Calm Down – its Apple
Ok – no biggie I’ll just call customer service. Uhh…I guess I will not call customer service…there is no number. WTF? They 
have my money and I have to send an email and wait at least 48 hours for a response. Ok…its Apple – they love customers – I’ll wait since I still have $25 I can get my music still.
Corruption….d’oh
I downloaded the album and thought all was well. I ran about doing some stuff with the music playing – I wasn’t paying attention too much. Came back and sat down for the last song to hear it cut out after about 10-15 seconds. I checked all the songs and 5 of the 30 songs were messed up and wouldn’t play.
Still maintaining a sense of calm, I figure – ok just download them again. Uh – you can’t! WTF? I google around on “corrupted iTunes songs” or “iTunes song stops after a few seconds”. There’s one article copied and pasted onto a bizillion sites that says to delete the stuff in your downloads/TMP folder. Uh…don’t got one of those. All those posts don’t seem to pertain to Windows 7.
Breathing deep…ugh…my dealer called in the middle of all this to tell me they got the wrong seal for the rear differential on my car so it wil be another day without my car….ok that does it!
How to Fix Things?
The next best advice I could find on the internet, the Apple site, or the forums was to contact Apple customer service (yes another 48 hour deal with email). Screw that! Here’s what you do:
I performed this on Win7 64 Home Premium with iTunes 10.5.2 – no clue if this will work on other versions or OS’s. I do not have the iCloud crap working either.
Yo Apple – how about a big page or FAQ on this? Now where’s my $13???
I’ve been using and coding with bluetooth for quite some time using Java, C++, and J2ME. Java’s support for bluetooth is fairly decent although for the JDK you need to use an SDK from a 3rd party – I’ve used bluecove.org for this. In the past I’ve used bluetooth for connecting serial devices to exchange data payloads in an XML or ASCII text bump. Today I’m going to see if I can get my droid tablet to pair with my laptop and send something – maybe a picture.
Eclipse ADK
I’m going to be using the Eclipse ADK plugin for development (see my other post for info. on that). A smart place to start is the great set of sample 
applications that come with the ADK. In Eclipse go to new project, other, and android. Under there you should see a Android Sample folder with a lot of templates to get going quickly. I picked off the “widget preview” project as a good place to get started. In this example you can get a good view of UI and event handling and also lots of samples for controllers and other OS level stuff. I see there are also samples for some bluetooth stuff…cool…maybe this will be easy
The next step is to make sure that you have the latest and greatest installed. Using the ADK Manager from either inside Eclipse or from the start menu I’ve added all the latest updates to my current SDKs and also added the new 4.0.3 SDK for tablets. You should be able to right-click the project and click Run As and pick off Android Application. Continue reading
I’ve messed around with Linux distros for years wondering when I would finally get something that was truly a consumer oriented and simple OS to install and use. I think it finally happened! I was messing with some translation files for work – GNU gettext crap. If you’ve ever done that you’ll know that its not exactly super fun stimulating stuff so why not break up the boredome and install an OS on a spare machine. So I did – Fedora 16 and it is really a nice experience – and easily as good as Windows 7 and OS-X. Continue reading
I got four days off for Turkey, PS3 games, goofing off with the family, and of course a chance to fiddle around with another framework. I saw a post on Wicket on InfoQ a few weeks back and it looked kinds of interesting as a possible replacement for some things I was doing with Spring on my labs site. My main problem with Spring is the resources required to do anything….and my lack of resources given my cheapo low budget hosting deal. Why write a blog page? Well inevitably these frameworks are written by super gurus who always seem to leave the little guy (part time hack-arounders like me) behind with the docs. A quick look at Wicket will leave a lot of people scratching their heads and asking – whaaa? How’d they do that?
What’s Required for Wicket?
Well any modern framework will require a bunch of stuff – you’ll need Eclipse (I’m using 3.7), Java 1.6.xxx, Maven, Subclipse, and the M2E plugin installed from the Eclipse site (not sonatype). Before doing anything I recommend getting the latest updates for all that stuff. Make sure you can run “mvn” from a command line while you are at it. It definitely helps to understand what Maven is and generally how it works. That’s pretty much it.
A First Test
The Quickstart on the Wicket site is a good first test, run thru this and see if all is well. Once you get the project downloaded with mvn and then added into Eclipse you should be able to start the internal server from the java class src/test
/java/com.houseofbeor.Start.java file. Don’t forget to first stop anything running on 8080 or you’ll get a port conflict.
That seemed to work ok for me, but of course my next question would be how do I deploy that to a real server. More on that later since there is no mention on the Wicket site for how to do that. In the meantime there are a bunch of examples to play around with. You can see them on the Wicket site, but that’s not too much fun.
If you grab the source bundle then you can run them all locally. Extract the zip somewhere on your PC, then copy src\wicket-examples to a folder on your machine where you can mess with it using maven. Go to the root (wicket-examples) and execute a mvn build and then a mvn install. After that do a mvn eclipse:eclipse and you can add the entire thing to Eclipse as a project like with the Quickstart. You’ll notice after running the install that a .war file is dropped out for you. If you have a local app server you can deploy this to your apps directory and see everything local. Browsing thru the war packaging at least gives me some assurance that at the end of the day what you are deploying is a true war 
file…it also is a scary confirmation that maven is a useful tool that I know very little about since it has transformed the baffling development setup into a nicely organized war that deployed with no issues on my tomcat 7 server.
What’s even more impressive is that with the server up and running and clicking thru a bunch of the examples, tomcat is hovering, with a default config, in the 100 MB range – try that with a reasonable Spring or Seam configuration.
Deploying the App
The easiest way I found to deploy your app is to go back to the command line and do a maven install. This generates a complete war file that you can then drop into your app server. Works great.
Digging into the Examples and Rolling my Own
Starting at the top with the HelloWorld you can add these to your quickstart base. Here’s how I’ve done this:
To make it easy to browse the example code create a new Eclipse project from the code base you created above….ruh ro…no workie…I get build failures citing build path issues. Um – well there must be some problem with pom.xml, but I can see the build path is right – not sure what is wrong. Well – I can still browse around the code. I’ll fix this later….hmmm I smell something…pumpkin pie, turkey, sweet potatoes…time to go. I’ll post a Pt 2 with more interesting stuff on creating custom apps.
A bit on my system:
More to come…in Part 2.
