dinkatron

Links for 2012-01-06 [del.icio.us]

2012-01-07T00:00:00-08:00

RestAssured (REST Assured 1.3.1 API)
Java DSL for testing JSON based services.

Links for 2012-01-04 [del.icio.us]

2012-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

Scala School
Quick scala tutorial used in twitter.

Links for 2011-12-27 [del.icio.us]

2011-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

InfoQ: Have the Pragmatists Won? Water-Scrum-Fall Is the Norm
Oh dear.

Links for 2011-12-16 [del.icio.us]

2011-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

Akka 2.0 Pre-Release Milestone 1 - typesafe's blog
Akka 2 - new stuff - looks awesome

Links for 2011-12-09 [del.icio.us]

2011-12-10T00:00:00-08:00

Scalada - all about Scala
Scala blog, example of using trait as function to enable DSL.

Links for 2011-12-07 [del.icio.us]

2011-12-08T00:00:00-08:00

Instagram Engineering • What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies
3 engineers

Links for 2011-11-30 [del.icio.us]

2011-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

Yammer moving back from Scala to Java
Cites perf problems (closures, collections, for expressions), complexity of language, build complexity, lack of skilled engineers, lack of established patterns, steep learning curve, binary compatibility breaks.

Google+ Hangouts gets desktop sharing and recording

2011-09-21T01:50:00.000+01:00

Wow - Ironically we wanted these features from Group Video Skype - but they aren't available.

Well now they are.... and they are free.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96-97-98-99-100.html

HTC Desire Rooted

2011-07-21T16:59:00.000+01:00

I had heard mixed reports of HTC Desire rooting (cynaogen), but I took the plunge (thanks Dean) with Oxegen - an Open source minimal android (gingerbread) 2.3.4. It works very well, minimal, fast and bug-free. 2.3.4 seems pretty nice on battery usage as well which is nice.

Also you get more memory to play with cos the HTC sense stuff (pretty but bloaty) isn't there.

Steps to install.

Root: http://theunlockr.com/2010/09/20/how-to-root-the-htc-desire-unrevoked-method/.

Top-tip when they say turn on USB debugging and connect your phone via USB, ensure you have disk sharing enabled.

Copy the above oxegen zip to your SD Card
Put your phone into recovery mode, wipe and then load the above zip.
Switch on, configure and start installing your favourite apps - note you'll need to install Maps and YouTube. Since Google won't allow these to be distro'd.

Wow - Babylon slapdown

2011-06-16T07:28:00.001+01:00

Woah: Lulz Security Just Took On the CIA - Gizmodo

Things are certainly hotting up.

Apple TV + XBMC - nice hardware meet nice software

2011-05-16T12:56:00.005+01:00

So first-off thanks to Ross for switching me onto this.

The AppleTV is a neat piece of hardware, small with a HDMI out for connecting to your TV. It streams movies directly in HD to your TV. One problem in Ireland is there aren't that many movies and there's no TV shows. However, the main problems are the lack of connectivity options and the poor support for media formats - both are deliberate and typical of apple walled-garden.

So on its own, the new shiny AppleTV could basically rent a limited selection of movies, which granted is a slick process. In order to connect to any other media, you need a server running iTunes - no support for UPnP/DLNA, SAMBA, Apple Networking. You can't even stick a USB hard-drive in the back.

Even if you do have a server running iTunes continuously, the support for non-apple media is poor. So essentially, for me the out-of-the-box AppleTV would be limited to on-demand movie rental.

Enter XBMC. First you need to Jailbreak your appleTV a simple process using Seas0nPass. This will install. Then install XBMC on it - which involves ssh and running a couple of commands.

Your appleTV will now connect to basically anything and will stream most media formats - allowing the excellent AppleTV hardware to be used to its full potential.

Nightlies

While more formats ran fine. I ran into some difficulties with large MKV files so I've opted to install one of the nightlies - which fixed the problem. While slighltly more complicated, it can be perfomed on top of the basic install above, which means you can choose to do this at your convenience.

The download link is here.
Reasonable instructions are here

One thing to note - as pointed out in the download link above, if you do this, you must turn off apple auto-updating checks, since these seem to interfere with this build of xbmc. This is pretty trivial, simply editing the /etc/hosts file. See this link for details.

Mobile phones kill bees

2011-05-12T08:46:00.000+01:00

First it was fungus, now phone calls, Facebook will be implicated next. From Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide

⇗northeast scala symposium

2011-03-18T16:20:00.000Z

⇗northeast scala symposium

Some good videos here from the cutting edge of Scala. Particularly like the Akka presentation. Next generation distribution via Actors. Scala actors on steroids. This looks very good - project has gone 1.0.

Will definitely give this a whirl.

via:Mike

Permanent TSB leaves mortgage business

2011-02-11T13:33:00.000Z

Irish times reports the crazy fixed rates hikes bringing their fixed rates between 7 - 9%. - personal loan territory. this effectively ends their fixed rate business.

But they are also pricing themselves out of the variable rate - for new mortgages. They are more expensive and the mortgage products have effectively been removed from their website. Used to be front and center - now there's only a item on "Mortgage Repayment Difficulties".

So now they effectively don't offer new mortgages at all and essentially exist to gouge more money out of their residual variable rate mortgage holders. Is this really their business plan?

Ebooks outselling paperbacks

2011-01-28T15:40:00.000Z

We new about hardback, but now they are outselling paperbacks.

Kindle is everywhere on every device, which is why it's so popular.

Still not sure how many Kindle devices were sold, but as Gizmodo below states, it's Amazons best selling product - ever. Guess the Xmas impulse buy went very well.

I've had mine now for a couple of months and it is excellent.

The good:

* battery life is excellent - 3 weeks/month on a charge

* instant book download

* cheap enough to be impulse buy.

* light / super portable

The bad

* Sharing / Re-giving / Selling -the old DRM issue.

* UK store - there lots in terms of numbers, but finding new stuff is still slightly challenging.

* Wifi buying on the kindle device is usable but not great, prefer iPad or PC/Web Browser

* Wifi browsing - avoid.

* No page numbers - really this is quite bizarre. The index of books is in page numbers, but the device lists lines indexes for a page.. How hard would it be to compute the page numbers? It's annoying. Percentages don't cut it.

Rise of the eBooks: Kindle Books Now Outsell Paperbacks

CouchDB scaling

2010-11-10T10:58:00.001Z

The CouchDB is appealing for those who want to expose their datamodel to the world via web-services (REST). RWW ponders whether when coupled with Javascript-y clients, could this model of development cut out the server-side presentation layer? We expose a lot of data via Web Services, but strangely we are rarely exposing raw data models. There is often a layer of indirection, translation, validation and BP processing associated with these services, rather than a thin-veneer. That could be just a style thing on our part.

Having read about CouchDB, I could see the appeal, certainly for internal projects, but it seemed a little bit alpha-ish for my purposes. Then we ran up against it in anger, when using Chef for ops automation. Basically it can began to fall over under heavy write load - a lot. Much tweaking, auto-compacting and other general pottering about with bleeding edge code and it is functional, but not ideal. Then I came across the blogpost from Jonathan Ellis's - CouchDB: not drinking the kool-aid.

Akira remake with Zax Efron

2010-11-08T13:37:00.001Z

Of High-school musical fame. Eek.
Film | guardian.co.uk

Kinects future

2010-11-05T10:35:00.001Z

Watching this video on kinect - Gizmodo by MS Engineers, the description of the multi-echo cancellation sound array struck a chord with me. This is the same-ish technology which is used in the lifesize video-conferencing system we have at work (which is awesome). It is clever enough to pick up even whispers around the room and it does this by identifying the location of each speaker and doing some clever maths to isolate each of the voices. Couple that with its motorized optical processing that does full stereoscopic depth-of-field analysis and tracking and you have some pretty interesting tech ripe for exploitation.

Games will drive a lot of innovation, but I would be surprised if this stays just in the Game arena. For example, ehat would kinect for video-conferencing give you. Well it might give you the ability to do Snow Crash avatar-based conferencing (the novel that inspired Second Life - don't be put off by that though the book is worth a read).

Updated the Acer Liquid to Froyo

2010-10-29T12:00:00.001+01:00

LCR (Liquid Community Rom) - is a community-based ROM for the Android Acer Liquid. When I first bought this phone for Xmas, it was running Android 1.6. Acer have been reasonably good at releasing new versions (not necessarily for the Liquid but it's phone successors (Liquid E, Liquid Steam)). The LCR team have been brilliant about taking them and porting them to the Acer Liquid and then tweaking them to extreme to fix bugs, optimise speed and battery-life.

I downloaded the LCF-F (Froyo) 1.0 release and it really is impressive for a 1.0. It's really fast and stable. Froyo is just nicer all-round and I now get flash support which just appears to work - I'm agog (go mixcloud!). This community-support idea for phones is not for everyone obviously (but 11,000 people have downloaded the ROM in 2 weeks, so it's not exactly unpopular). For me, it makes me look at phones the way I look at PC's - tinkerable, modifiable and improvable. I was happy with the phone I got this time last year, there were some wrinkles and bugs certainly. Over the last year it's done the opposite of most consumer products, it has actually got better! Not just a little better, a lot better.

LCR Community Rom - News » LCR-F 1.0 ! It's here !!!

Kindle 3

2010-10-28T11:17:00.002+01:00

Have had my shiny new Kindle 3 for a couple of weeks now. It really is terrific. My main reason for buying it was traveling and books - both the bulk and the inevitable situation where you end up reading airport-trash.

An obvious question from people is why not an iPad. A couple of reasons:

iPads are big and bulky - what? compared to a book they are. The kindle 3 is nice and light - like a novella.
The e-ink display is fanatastic. I get eyestrain from LCD's.
Lasts for a month on a Charge.
Cheap @ £100 - this is in impulse buy territory.

Essentially there are different devices for different needs.

I can highly recommend it. You do need a little time to switch over from the learned response of reading a book (page-turning etc), but once you do it seems normal.

Actual 401 mail

2010-10-14T12:15:00.003+01:00

Have received lots of spam 401 scams from the alleged President of Nigeria, but never one by actual mail.

From PhoneUploads

Meteor Unlimited Data

2010-07-29T15:05:00.003+01:00

I'm on Meteor's Bill Pay Lite - €10 / month - one month rolling contract.
I also have an add-on for €5 / month - 250Mb data. Which I've been very happy with, but I'm about to start going over (and you never want to do that with a mobile), plus limit-watching takes all the fun out of watching YouTube on a bus.

So I want to switch to their unlimited data add-on (for meteor unlimited means 10Gb / month) - for €15 / month. Would prefer if there was a €10 / month - 1Gb option to ease myself in, but there isn't.

Anyway tried the online site, no dice - error some code or other. So I rang customer support. They said ok, waited. Then they came back and said "sorry, checked with our managers, you can't get that on your tariff".

Oh really, not according to your web-site.

They went off and checked and said yes I should be able to get it, then they tried to get a technician to force it through. It didn't work. So now they'll have to get back to me next week (I'd been on the call now for about 20 minutes at this stage). So they have credited my account with €5 for my trouble - nice save, customer service! Hopefully, it'll all work out soon.

Meteor new EU Roaming Rates

2010-07-01T18:06:00.004+01:00

From EU Announcement in Irish Times

Making call - 39c ex VAT / Meteor quote it 47c (incl VAT) - matches
Receiving call - 15c ex VAT / Meteor quote it 18c (incl VAT) - matches
Sending Text - 11c ex VAT / Meteor quote it 13C (incl VAT) - matches
Receiving text free
Data - Maximum wholesale rate per MB (megabyte) - €0.80 / Meteor quote it €10.24 (inc VAT)- WTF!!!

I know that a wholesale rate isn't the same things as a consumer rate, but greater than 12x discrepancy?

The EU should be applauded for doing this, but after setting max consumer rates for texts and voice, they should also set a maximum consumer rate on data roaming rates.

Also - according to their site they are still operating an opt-in on roaming broadband cap (€60). No opt-in should be necessary, the cap should be applied by default - see New EU Rules

See : Meteor - Roaming with Meteor

Android 2.1 on Acer Liquid

2010-05-26T12:05:00.002+01:00

Acer Liquid E is due out about now, which is basically the Acer Liquid with Android 2.1 (instead of the 1.6 Donut).

The clever pixies o the net have leaked the new ROM early.

You can easily install by simply installing the above bin using the Acer Flashing Tool. That's it, there is no step 2. Changes re Donut are incremental - everything is just nicer.

nicer keyborard
nicer transitions
nicer browsing
mutliple google accounts

Full instruction on how to do this including a YouTube video (and how to ROOT your phone - if your so inclined) at unlockr

Aer Lingus Flight Information - expected delays are coming up as on time

2010-05-11T23:59:00.001+01:00

Aer Lingus - Flight Arrivals/Departures.

If you don't have a volcano-based airline delay story, your simply not cool. Aer Lingus aren't helping though. Their site consistently says outgoing (non-cancelled) flights are on time. Particularly for outgoing US flights. But US Flights are experiencing long delays - due to re-routing round the ash-cloud and extra maintenance. So you can see this with a flight that is coming from US say with a 2 hour delay. It's next outgoing Irish flght will say ontime, despite the fact that it will arrive 2 hours later meaning zero turnaround time. This happened to me on Monday. I checked their site today at various points and it happened again, and checking the current outgoing US flight EI124 - it's again 2 hours late, but the site says that tomorrows Irish departure EI125 is ontime - so expect it to happen tomorrow again.

So the bottom line is their flight information is only useful for cancelled flights.

This blog has moved

2010-04-28T09:35:00.001+01:00

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Google Maps Navigation for UK and Ireland

2010-04-23T20:43:00.002+01:00

So now turn-by-turn navigation is now supported on Android outside the US for UK and Ireland - and yes it works in the Republic. So I was interested to try it out. For some reason I couldn't get it on the Marketplace - could be an Acer Liquid build thing. So I found package on Android Freeware and manually installed it.

I wanted to try it out immediately, but I cycle to work, rather than drive, so I came up with a plan. I'd connect a set of headphones to the phone and I could at least check out the voice navigation while I cycled, you know "turn left in 200 meters" that sort of thing.

Now there was just one problem: I like to listen to music when I cycle. I know, not terribly sensible, but a lot of fun. Could I do both? Thanks to Android's multi-tasking I was able listen to some sounds with the occational navigation voice-over giving me directions. Sick!

That's right 1 meeelyon servers - mwahahahahaha

2010-04-15T09:50:00.001+01:00

Google's Insane Number of Servers Visualized - Servers - Gizmodo

Why you should avoid Mozy

2010-03-23T22:52:00.003Z

I've been using Mozy for months. I've really liked - nice and easy to use. That is, until my laptop's drive died - blitzing the OS. No problem, it's all backed up on Mozy... well no. So laptop fixed, time for a backup. Here's where the rub is.

While Mozy has a nice (if pretty slow) client for doiing backups. Restores are a completely different animal. With restores where your computer has crashed, you have only 2 options:

Web Restore - This is where they generate some files containing your data. The files are split into around 500Mb chunks. For 40Gb of data I had stored, that's 80 files. Which you have to download manually. That's right manually - and they aren't faster to download than they were to upload. So for some reason you have a client to upload your files, but you have to download manually. This is completely shit and for this reason alone it's worth chucking Mozy.
DVD Restore - for about $80 I can get a set of DVD's containing my data. Well if I lived in the US I could. Not available internationally.

OK 80 files to download in 7 days. But it takes about 60 minutes to download one file - that's right. 60 minutes. So if I sit continually downloading, not sleeping I can just about get this finished in 3.5 days. That's without sleep and I better get it done in 7 days - cos that's when the files expire and I have to do the whole process again.

OK - so I have no choice - I need my data, but just in case I was tempted to stay with Mozy (and look forward to future days of downloading should my laptop ever decide to die again), you should be aware, that after spending days to get your own data back, it's not like you can just restore the data and your back where you were before the crash. No, no, no - you have go through the whole backup procedure again. That's right, weeks of uploading - just to get back to where you were - because Mozy in their wisdom, forces you to remove your old computer in order to do a restore. It is completely insane.

Use something else.

Android Update

2010-03-16T17:45:00.002Z

Received and OTA update notification for Acer Liquid.
This is a download link which downloads a Win Acer install tool.

The instructions forget to mention one important point. You need to switch on USB debugging on your Android phone before connecting the USB cable - otherwise it will not work.

Slick new Irish comparison site

2010-02-26T09:54:00.005Z

One of the problems of being a small country is that the domestic market is small and consequently native commercial internet properties are actually a bit thin on the ground. Imagine life if Amazon or Play didn't serve the Irish market from the UK. This situation is especially true in comparison shopping. While over in the UK we have moneysupermaket.com, gocompare.com, comparethemarket and confused.com to name just a few - comparing financial products and pretty much anything else is quick and easy.

What's the situation in Ireland? Well 123.ie used to offer comparisons but now seems to be pretty much a broker for Travellers Insurance under the hood. Which is a shame - I've used 123.ie a couple of times. UChoose.ie initially launched with a site that was like a bad-parody of early ninety's web pages complete with typos on the homepage. Then the Irish times bought a small stake and at least it got a facelift, but is still sucked and now unfortunately it's being wound up. Compareireland.ie just looks like an fugly directory service leaving all the legwork up to you.

I stumbled onto bonkers.ie. The site has de rigeur "beta" sticker on it and a twitter feed. So far it offers comparisons for financial products and energy. Insurance (household, etc) in the next month or so. The site is pretty impressive - I tried comparing a couple of savings products (a couple years ago it would have been mortgages - but that's the recession for you). It's slick.

2.1 for Acer Liquid

2010-02-25T11:05:00.001Z

The Acer Liquid e has been announced which is basically the Acer Liquid with an updated OS from Android 1.6 (Donut) to 2.1 (Eclair) and should be out this month. Attempting to call this a new phone by giving it an "e" moniker just leaves everyone confused. The blogs/techfeed react by saying this is the same phone, just with an updated OS. What could have been a positive "Acer updates the Liquid to 2.1 goodness making a great phone even better" gets at best a "huh? Liquid e, eh?". Meanwhile the early adopters that have helped to make the Liquid such a grassroots success are left scratching their heads - does this mean their existing Liquids are getting an update to 2.1 or not? Presumably unless Acer really wants to generate some bad reaction an update will be coming.

HTC by contrast have been very good about letting people knowing where they stand. Pre-announcing ROM updates. They've generated a lot of goodwill from users and remember HTC fluffed the original release of the HTC Hero, the ROM was slow leading to initial reviews claiming the handset was "laggy". They quickly released an updated ROM that fixed the problem and will even support 2.1 on the Hero.

So Acer why so silent, how about some clarity.

Meanwhile if you really can't wait for the Android 2.1 love there's always.....

acer-liquid-community-rom-bugtracker - Project Hosting on Google Code