Palm Pre homebrew apps

So I ended up adding in some homebrew apps. Some of them are pretty good. Some, not so much. And yes, they have the light-saber app. And no, its not worth it.

Palm Pre calendar

For the last weekend, I couldn’t see my calendar on my pre, even though it was alerting me to my events. Finally figured out that the problem was I had too many calendars. My work Google calendar lists 20 calendars in total, and home has about 8… so the display was just over-whelmed. On the pre I just told it not to display most of the calendars in the ‘all calendar view’ and everything works fine now. Of course, then I removed calendars from my other accounts that I don’t care about anymore either.

Rcov versions…

Rcov is a great tool to verify what code is touched by test cases. Its only C0 testing, in that it checks that the code is hit for a test but not testing for all possible permitations.

The original project is all but abandonded and several forks on github.com have come out. The latest one that I like the most is the relevance on which is based on Spicycode’s fork.

The Dell Mini9

So the Mini9 came today, and I moved it into place on my wifes desk. Its a pretty nice machine. This model has the faster processor, 2 Gigs of ram, 32Gig hard drive and blue-tooth support. At some point well get her a blue-tooth mouse and keyboard, but for now we’re using the one she used to have. Also, we hooked up her old monitor as the external monitor.

As sad as it is to say, its pretty much as powerful as her old system, with a few differences. Its a touch slower, but runs much of the same programs she’s use to just fine (Firefox, open-office, pidgin). The keyboard is fantastic, though a little small for my hands. Its the perfect size for Jacob, who much to his disapointment, as to settle for Kirsten’s old computer.

I’ve include a second picture so you can see how tiny it is compared to a 17inch monitor. The box it arrived in was smaller then a book sent by Amazon these days. Honestly, I want to get one for me now.

Sun may live…

It looks like Big Blue may purchase the Sun. This would only be good for Sun and specifically, benefit Java developers big time, as IBM is really one reason why Java is as successful as it is today.

But at my core, I wonder what would happen to the recently purchased MySQL folks compared to DB2 and the PostgreSQL support team. I have no clue on how IBM’s very strong database group would view those segments.

Amazon pretends to be apple: DMCA

Amazon has taken a page from the Apple playbook and issued a DMCA take down request against a python file that reveals the ‘pid’ of the kindle. Basically, each kindle has a unique serial id. When you buy a DRM book, Amazon encrypts it against that id. So those books will only be viewable on your kindle. The python script in question reveals that ‘pid’ which can be used to make purchases in other stores. There is actually a second script that has to run to make a minor change to the resulting ebook file so that its viewable on the kindle. Amazon can’t do anything about that second script since it acts on content that isn’t on the kindle, nor is that content from Amazon. So instead, they go after the original script that exposes the ‘pid’. Keep in mind this is not circumventing the encryption… its using the same encryption… so it ‘doest not seem’ to be a DMCA thing… the end result is a book that only can be read on the kindle. No where else. Amazon is unhappy because the DRM is being used to get books other retailers to work on the kindle. (Interesting enough, because the benefactor is a retailer, Amazon could have legal win against retailers that push it, though Amazon will lose their image in the end.)

I’ve not tried this myself. I like my kindle and I like the Amazon store front for the kindle.  But I kinda figured this day would come;  Amazon is really pushing their store usage more then they are the Kindle as a product.  I’m sure the end result is no DRM books, but I just wonder how long it will take Amazon to get there. I’m pretty happy that I can use the Kindle for the free Gutenberg books as well…

The September 2008 gold spike…

Not sure how many people read my tumblr log… its basically a dumping ground of random stuff. But last Sept 17, 2008 I noticed a huge spike in the price of gold that came out of nowhere, and posted it. It seemed like someone was manipulating the market.  Well, thanks to one of the 2 people who actually watch C-SPAN, we now know that around that time money market accounts in the US were being depleted. The gold-spike we had was akin to water at the beach retreating before the tidal wave comes in. I still feel that to achieve such a spike in the gold market required automatic trades initiated from computers, but I have no proof.

Netflix and Tivo

Just a note that most movie geeks already know by now. You can get Netflix on your Tivo. It just appeared on my Tivo box today. We were planning on going back to Netflix once they did this.

Buy Gold

Governments around the world pumping ‘cash’ into the market.  Current stock crash creates a hyper-deflationary period. Stocks and commodities are dropping. Even oil is falling.Once that cash filters into the system, inflation worldwide will shoot up.

In a roller coaster, this is the first drop, we’re about to hit a loop in 2009Q1.

This is bad…

Assembla for Mercurial/Project hosting

Just found Assembla, which provides team/project hosting. Handles Subversion, Mercurial, Git, trac, tickets, blogs, job posting, etc. You can even make your projects protected from the public. Free accounts give you just about everything, and 500M of disk space. $12.50/Month gives you 5Gigs of space, SSL, email/phone support…  Looks really good.