Archive for the ‘android’ Category
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BdRuAmIpN 4 days of craziness
I have been none stop since Thursday and I figure, what with it now being technically Tuesday I should give myself an opportunity to brain dump. So in the last 4 days..
I earned a BrainPOP badge, yay thanks for that
I’m Impressed by Egil, Joes and Michael’s ability to sit in complete science with the odd groan for prolonged periods of time.
It sucked that Aaron Iba the original developer of Etherpad couldn’t make it talk to us, he was ill, I hope he gets better and gets a chance to have a chat with us soon!
I’m not a proper programmer, you might think I am because I can fix problems by programming. But programmers are awesome. Scala has changed and Etherpad can’t compile on the latest version so I went into #scala on freenode, explained my problem and some guy fixed it and committed to Github.
One of the work vehicles got broken into. We will not be claiming on the car insurance and probably wont report it to the police. Tools were left in the van. It’s just one of those things that comes with the territory of living in Bradford.
Firebug is awesome.
I now have a load of kudos on Reddit, how the hell did that happen whilst I was away from my computer?
As a general rule of thumb, caretakers should avoid touching ICT in schools, in hindsight I’m sure they create more problems than they solve.
Primary Blogger has had some updates (I can only assume by Adam) and it looks much nicer.
We had a bunch of hackers from Olin university join us for the hackathon and while I appreciate their efforts I was slightly disappointed with their output.
Everyone from the Etherpad foundation shares the same views about how the foundation and software should be maintained and supported.
The Amazon Kindle doesn’t really fit into my busy life schedule. Most tech rarely does. I didn’t get time for books before the kindle so who was I kidding thinking I would when I bought it? It is a great device though, I wish I had more time to play with it.
Here is a picture of Etherpad running on it.
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Could an Android update be the reason you replace your next TV?
Ever owned an android phone that has been late to receive an Android update crippling some functionality? It is pretty frustrating. Your TV may have same issue. In the future when a new great game is released and the only way you will be able to play it is by getting an entire new TV. Google apologize because an update for your TV is not available due to Android hardware restrictions. Sony point at Google. Sony win because you buy another TV.
Sony’s new TV potential poses this exact problem, it runs Google Android and it is speculated that it has the same processor as the Motorola Droid. I’m a big fan of Smart TV as a whole, I just hope that Google / Sony were smart enough to allow modular upgrades of the Android device.
It would be awesome if the big TV players could develop an open standard so other operating systems, not just Android could leverage the warm glowing screen in our living rooms. It will also be interesting to see if any camera functionality is build in for video conferencing and for Kinect like control.
Sony you are in charge here, make it open and the community will do the rest. Note: Please no comments about Android being O/S. I know it is, but that doesn’t mean there is choice if the TV platform is closed.
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A week in the life..
I haven’t been very vocal lately, because I have been busy…
Satpin
I have been working on Ian Addisons new project now called Satpin (something to do with phonics according to Miss Pitkethly). My Javascript skills have improved massively doing this project which I have enjoyed thoroughly. Javascript is awesome. I need a decent tutor though, I am cobbling my way through stuff using “John” logic which isn’t good enough. Once the project is complete/stable I will be releasing it open source (it will require a LAMP stack). I am spending masses of attention to detail on this project, more than I have ever done. I’m focusing 99% of my efforts on UI. I decided to make it writeable by anyone which will upset some people but oh well..
Wind power
I have been finishing the electrics on my wind turbine, which is now up and running (hopefully okay). It’s been a while since I did any component level work and Sparky helped me which was good.
Apache load balancing
We spent a few hours working on how to improve load balancing on our main apache cluster. We are considering casandra if we grow any quicker than our current projections.
Shib constipation
Mid week I struggled and I’m still struggling massively with a Shib SP deployment. I’m running the same config as another deployment but I am getting errors. Think this is a job for team john and tom to get sorted properly. We are doing it so we can work with the Swedish equivalent of JISC for their Etherpad deployment.
Classdroid
We got classdroid working properly, well, sort of. Turns out Android isn’t as cool as I first thought. Well, android is.. Turns out motorola/lg etc. are idiots and install custom software including custom camera intents that breaks a lot of the phones functionality. Thankfully google will fix this with any v2+ updates. The LG Optimus is due V2.1 this month so I am willing to wait a few weeks instead of trying to squash a documented/fixed bug.
PHP
I helped Challenge CLC with a touch of PHP this week, super easy stuff. It is always good to collaborate with people, especially when I am so comfortable helping out in PHP.
Etherpad
I did a few more edu installs of Etherpad, nothing exciting here. Wrote a new way to integrate with the scribblar API. Stefan has the code if anyone wants it. Important thing to note, why the Hell are so many Americans and now Africans getting me in to do Etherpad deployments yet there are so few EU deployments going on? Is their something about Europeans and our lack of encouraging collaboration in the work/edu place?
Finally. Happy Pirates day! Now gimme your loot.
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Classdroid on the iPhone
I keep getting asked if Classdroid is coming to the iPhone…It is complex so I wanted to write a specific blog post.
Firstly, I don’t like the iPhone. I don’t like how its marketed, how it’s sold, how it’s app store works, how the community support is supposed to work, how the licensing model works and what impact it has on the tech industry as a whole. “We need substance, not glitter” is probably the best way to put it.
Now you know how much I dislike the iPhone it will be of no surprise that I love Android, but this isn’t about love/like/dislike. It’s about economics. I would need to charge $5 per device or so and sell 400 copies of Classdroid on the Appstore and still wouldn’t break even.
Classdroid must remain free and open source to encourage others to use it, if you don’t know about crowd sourcing and how that develops applications then here is a quick example of why open source is good…
Before Classdroid got to market someone had made language support for traditional/simplified Chinese. That would of taken me hours to do, but it’s now done just by some guy I don’t even know. Classdroid includes parts of the WordPress open source App so we were able to make it, test it and publish it quickly without writing too much code.
Stop ranting and tell us when it’s coming to the iphone!
It’s coming to the iphone as soon as:
a) Apple allow iphone apps to be developed on something other than Apple devices.
b) Apple reduce/drop the ridiculous 100$ annual SDK fee.OR
c) Someone who does done apple/ios development reads our source code and makes an apple version then publishes it under their name (that is fine with me). The code must remain open source, that is the only prerequisite.
So that’s it, Basically I would need about $1100 just to start coding.. It’s not worth it for a handset that is losing market share month after month.
If you really still want Classdroid for your iPhone then ask about, see if someone you know, knows an iPhone developer who will be happy to help out. If so then get in touch or point them at the source code.
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Classdroid public beta
Here is the Classdroid apk for public beta. We only have support for primaryblogger and xparena(not a live service) available right now. We are waiting on Moodle V2 to bring moodle support in.
1. Get the Classdroid.apk
2. Read this guide for how to install an .apk
3. Make sure you have a Primaryblogger account & Blog
4. Have fun Note: We still have a lot of GUI tweeking to do but most of the functionality now exists. We will be releasing the source code once beta testing is complete.
Thanks to this guy for the great custom artwork/logo/icon!
