Life span of an iPhone app

"The average life span of an iPhone app is five mins". (Vid from Stanford Univerisity CS class) People do not actually live in your app or want to....

Coding for the real world

It's always better to write stuff that solves a problem for YOU! - I want to do this... - I want to play this... - There is nothing out there that does blah-de-blah and I want it!! - There is an app or tool that does exist that does something like what I want but it's not good enough. It's missing some features Rule Number one: Know your user(s) Know what they want Know why they want it It's sooooo easy to get into writing code for a project only to see it flounder.

iPhone app:- pTerm

http://www.instantcocoa.com/products/pTerm/

just bought ;-)

macbook pro in da house

Damn,

Let's face it, they do look cute. So what's it like to use from a "Linux on a PC" perspective?

The good:-

1. Everything works.
2. Not crashed yet and I have trashed it
3. The dock is just like that of the many window managers available on Linux distros
4. Audio play is very nice. Bit trivial but listening to music with iTunes or spotify is cool.
5. Workspaces. Again, just like that on Linux distros.
6. UNIX. It's why the internet works and will be around for a loooooong time. Macs run on a BSD variant.

The Odd:-

1. The ruddy keyboard. Had to ask some one at work where the # key was, (alt+3 == #).
2. Shortcuts. Hate using the mouse unless I really have to. WTF do all those keys do? Building up a list with with the sticky notes application.

Teh outrageous:-

1. They ain't cheap. Yeah, I know that each MBP is hand-crafted by a Tibetan monk, but duuuuuuuuude - how much???

Miles Davis Via Spotify

I don't mind the ads, just gimme Miles Davis. Thanks Neil P for the invite! ^_^

Fedora 12 + hibernation == works

pm-hibernate
works at last on this laptop ^_&. At a guess it must be something to do with improvements to the nouveau driver used by/for the Nvidia graphics device.

Disable Trackpad on Dell E6400

Man,

This Trackpad sucks! Well with *nix anyways ;-) Google "dell e6400 trackpad" and you'll soon come across a number of people that have reported bugs for the driver and or hardware [0]. I even asked chaps on a mailing list a similar question some time ago [1].

Why? If you as much as fart on the trackpad or look at it whilst typing you'll find that your mouse will go all over the place and you'll fight to get it back to where you think that it is supposed to be. Your /var/log/messages file will be littered with

psmouse.c: DualPoint TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6 or some such crap.

dmesg | grep ^psmouse | wc -l
89

and that ain't good. Seeing this error so many times is tedious and fighting with your mouse gets very boring, particularly if you spend most of your time in a terminal, writing code or administering servers like me ;-)

On the train home I ran
man -k X

which listed xinput. The man page don't really tell you much as to how to actually use it. Sometimes I wonder why I bother or why people write such cryptic man pages :-/ Anyways, after an hour of mucking about
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 1

taaaadaaaaaaa! The trackpad has been killed - hurrah! No more stinking, nasty trackpad!! Next step is to get this automated so that I don't have to run this command when this laptop boots. I've seen from the bug reports and attempts at solutions from the Ubuntu buglist(s) that there's some stuff going on in hal/fdi. Dunno too much about this and I'll prolly add this to the todo list.

ls /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/
10osvendor 20thirdparty

Added:-

Comment to self:- The trackpad on a Macbook Pro is not bad and does what it is supposed to do - move when you want it moved and __not__ when you touch it by accident....
[0] http://www.mail-archive.com/xorg@lists.freedesktop.org/msg08701.html
[1] http://old.nabble.com/permanently-setting-%60-gpointing-device-settings%60-td26216677.html

Trackpads suck

I have Dell E6400 laptop. Good battery life, keyboard ain't bad. Decent screen. Only thing that I cannot stand is the *ing trackpad. If it gets even a whiff of my thumb it sends the mouse -crazy- and it goes all over the place.

I use fedora12 on this laptop and have not found a /simple/ method to kill this trackpad. BIOS has an option to disable the t/p completely when a USB mouse is inserted but who wants that? This is a "laptop" and I should be able to use the "eraser head" nipple in between the keys....

... groan, rant and grilllaaaaa!

test blog entry

This is a lame, boring test blog entry. Lamers beware!