Posts
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spam
The idea that legislation is useless against spam has reappeared on my radar. It’s a ridiculous notion. Many spammers are operating in the open and they need to be caught and fined and shut down. Nay-sayers on spam legislation argue that there are too many spammers, that they’ll just move off-shore and make it harder to catch them. Harder? If you’re not trying to catch them in the first place, there is no harder.
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grr
I just spent like an hour debugging this stupid problem with a resource file for symbian. Turns out when you get this error:
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tales from a symbian programmer
Now that I’ve got my semacode app marginally working. I say working, because it does actually work. You can click on a symbol (I mean, photo a barcode), and it will take out the URL and then you can launch the URL in the browser. It’s slow and ugly but it works.
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Direct connect on Mac OS X
Direct connect is yet another p2p file sharing program. But unlike Kazaa, it’s available on OS X, partly because it’s an open protocol so there’s a number of application developers out there writing clients and servers. It’s vastly superior to Gnutella in my opinion, both in terms of the number of results you get and the speed of downloads and uploads.
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There’s a couple of different clients available for OS X. The first one was the NeoModus client for OS X which quite frankly, is a nice bit of work. Too bad it hasn’t been updated for like 2 years or so. It’s a very, very clean, sweet interface but the functionality is just sorely lacking these days. And, it’s not a very popular client with the server operators, who like to see you using a more modern client with tags, and many will kick you off without them.
The newer option is the DCGui-qt client. There’s a “native QT version” available which runs out of the box without any need for extra libraries or X11. As a Mac user you will most likely be highly offended by the user interface. It takes a bit of getting used to. It’s, to put the brightest face on it, clumsy. But, behind that not-so-shining exterior is a heart of gold. This puppy is seriously powerful.
The power is hidden away in the search window. Type in your search term into the “Search” tab and then click on the “Hubs” tab and change it to “Public Hubs”. Now go to the hubs window and make sure to update it to a fresh list. You’ll see more than 10,000 public hubs listed, many with thousands of users each. DCGui lets you search all of them in one click. It’s such a big search that it can take almost an hour to complete, but the results start showing up right away in the “Results” pane. Note that there is a trade-off for this power, currently, you can only perform one search at a time.
Using this feature it’s possible to find very obscure videos and get enough duplicate results to make a “multi-download”. This is where you are downloading from many people at once, getting a much higher speed. I can typically saturate my DSL connection and pull down files at a rate of about 150 KB/s.
The learning curve is steep. I actually gave up once on dcgui before coming back to it (and then I discovered the “public hubs” search feature). It’s under active development so we can expect more good things in the future with version 0.3. -
some amusing french
Read the french carefully ;-)
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weblog archive
I just added more of a proper weblog archive that actually lists out all the entries in a list format, providing link-throughs to each entry on a separate page. Now you can see all of the entries at a glance. It’s not as good as a by-the-year / by-the-month view would be, but it’s a lot better than what I had before which was just every single entry, full text, all on one page.
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symbian learning curve
I feel like I may be slowly getting on top of the symbian programming API. One thing you have to do is enable the full error codes for leaves and exceptions. There’s a SIS file you can download to turn it on (sorry I don’t have the link on hand). Then you can look up the errors from untrapped leaves and the system panic codes . Oddly, the term “panic” is used for user level application crashes. These would usually I think be more accurately called exception codes.
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Japanese made comprehensible
Here’s some brilliant stuff from Bob Myers on Kuro5hin (who thought anything useful would ever show up there???). It’s a primer for Japanese for Geeks . It presents the japanese language in BNF form and wow, it makes so much sense. You know, I took a year and a half of japanese and never understood the grammar half so well as I’m starting to now. Here’s the second part and let’s hope that he soon delivers part III… and maybe even more?
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Virtual PC icons
If like me you are forced to use Virtual PC, well maybe you still remember the good old days of Connectix. Back in those days VPC was like a badge of honour for Mac users, that a Mac company could be so clever to make it work. And you could install Linux on VPC and stick it to the man. Well, now you have to pay M$ cash to get the software but you don’t have to put up with having their beige boxes and logo sitting in your dock any more. Introducing Tux’n’tosh , the perfect icon set for VPC. Personally, I chose this icon and now my screen is free of beige boxes once again.
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programming for symbian (tips)
Programming for symbian isn’t very sexy. J2ME? That’s sexy. But Symbian C++ is NOT sexy. First, at least in theory, you have to use Windows, and windows is NOT sexy. Two, it’s C++, and frankly, although C++ may have had some sex-appeal in the mid-90s, it’s all gone now. Three, it’s poorly documented. What documentation exists is terse and seems to have been generated from header files. It rarely explains how to use the API. So for any kind of help understanding how to do it, you have to go to the examples, which are fairly limited. Next you can try NewLC: they have articles and forums . Next you might want to try searching the Forum Nokia discussion area . And finally, be sure not to miss the newsgroups. No, they’re not archived anywhere on the web, which is a real pain. But you can access them through your favorite newsreader at publicnews.symbiandevnet.com . Only the NewLC postings are archived in google, which is a major hassle. There’s also a small number of web pages and even some source code floating around on the web with some useful symbian C++ info. So there is some information out there, but you really need to dig to find it.
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