May 302009
 

I’m randomly looking around to see what I can do with my current spare time, as I’m not making good progress with PPCam project and this makes me feel bad. This becomes a good excuse to get something new :).

There are really enough stuffs that I’m interested at, and I’m currently “evaluating” following areas:

  1. embedded system – pure hardware oriented, such as robot, ARM, etc
  2. Mobile – Windows CE, Symbian, embedded Linux (haven’t determined which Linux to go now :D), iPhone
  3. Mac OSX – focus on pure native OSX application done by Objective-C along with Cocoa
  4. Windows – focus on multimedia area with DirectShow, etc
  5. Ada – this is just for language, other than PPCam I haven’t figure out what to do
  6. Python – trying to see how to do Web development with it, then desktop
  7. Lisp – sorry I still want to do something with it
  8. Some weird stuffs like encryption, P2P, AI, etc, they can only be done with something above

I may put some sort of priority to these items and then pick one or two, I will post my thinking later with comments.

May 292009
 

Yesterday (actually, May 27) I encountered a pretty long “glitch” on http://libre.adacore.com, and was wondering either there were too many downloads that brought down the site, or AdaCore gurus were working on the site for the coming release.

I’m genius ๐Ÿ˜€ – it turned out GNAT GPL 2009 is ready today, I’ve been waiting for this version for quite some time, most because of the new feature that can generate Ada specification based on C/C++ header files.

I’m going to see if I can get Ada specification files for DirectShow stuffs, I believe this kind of feature works fine on *nix, but for Windows … I don’t have much confidence as Windows is at the bottom of the supporting list in open source world.

Let’s see.

May 272009
 

My WorkshopWorking from home today, and found that I should post this photo here so that people know how I work at home :D.

Actually I have only two machines on the desk – on the left is the company-issued laptop that I still need to check some bookmarks (sorry, I’m still surfing libre there which supposedly not to be), other two monitors are for my desktop machine, the one in the middle is a 17″ LCD, dedicated for the virtual machine (a Windows XP) for all those risky stuffs, such as surfing BBS site (virus, etc), and installing some test software. The one on the right is a 19″ LCD which is actually the working environment, running putty, Thunderbird, Firefox and Yahoo Messenger.

I think I can shutdown the laptop at home, from tomorrow, as almost everything is there on the desktop now. I also found not using laptop at home will make my life healthy, as I won’t hold it the minute before I go to sleep, and I won’t capture it once I get up.

Though, I think I will turn my blackberry to be the laptop, bring it to my bed and grab it once I wake up ๐Ÿ™ its screen is way too small and is killing my eyes, I should find something bigger, maybe … E90 or Nokia’s next flagship phone ๐Ÿ˜€

May 252009
 

I’m moving my main working environment at home from company’s laptop to personal desktop, I wish this can help me away from work for enough time while staying at home, as life is not just working for the company.

It’s done already – everything got set up almost exactly the same as the laptop, except some IM accounts (I have too many IM accounts, I know, but 90% of them are for email only :D). Also, I’ve removed some personal development environments from the laptop, include Blackberry’s BDE, and Microsoft’s Visual C++ Express, I’ll remove GNAT GPS and Windows SDK from it after I finish code clean up over my laptop, sure I will not need Tortoise SVN to check in code after that, then company-issued laptop will just for company.

May 252009
 

Just found that we are having more mobile platforms than years ago – we used to have Symbian, Windows CE series, Palm, Blackberry, and some Linux (not that significant in terme of market share), however, we got iPhone and Android (Linux) in the past two or three years, and now moblin could become another serious Linux player, though it focus on netbook, but who knows, as Android is trying to get netbook market share, it is reasonable, to me, for moblin hitting handset.

Various Linux are NOT the same in mobilel platform as they were on server platform, as you don’t have to deal with user interface on servers. I haven’t done more comparison with Android and moblin, but first guess is that they are using different UI libraries, I just wish I’m wrong.

And seems J2ME/MIDP is still the only way to do cross platform development, I’m just not sure how much “native features” it can handle, such as GPS, game, etc. If I want to do native development, I have to use C++ for Symbian, VB/VC for Windows CE, Java for Blackberry, Objective-C for iPhone, and pretty sure C/C++ for Android/moblin. Thanks god at this moment Palm is no longer a serious player, though it may change in the coming year or two.

So, I will leave mobile development untouched for a while – I did some Windows CE (Wnidows Mobile) development a while back, and tried playing with Java on Blackberry, I will try Symbian or iPhone based on what I’m going to get next (most likely would be Synbian). I will try anything if I can get a simulator around, as well as the company does not limit my applications (stupid Blackberry, I cannot do anything I want without a application key, so I gave up).

May 252009
 

I cannot believe it is late May now, it’s soooooooo cold here and we turned on heater last night again.

So, there is no plan for memorial day, staying at home, doing some random stuffs, and prepare for the coming work days.

May 242009
 

Compare with 20 spam comments per day weeks back, now I get, roughly, 3 per day, it’s a great improvement though I don’t know what happened.

 Posted by at 00:37  Tagged with:
May 232009
 

Finished HelloWorld with Objective-C on Mac using Xcode, everything seems fine, though I know hello world is always simple and easy.

It seems to me Objective-C is something similar to smalltalk, but I’m not quite sure as I’m not familiar with smalltalk either. Anyway the syntax is sort of weird to me, as it does not like a procedure/function oriented language, but more like a functional one.

I will keep play with Xcode for sometime during this long weekend, and back to my PPCam (Ada on Windows using GNAT) next week – again, it is not just as simple as hello world, get to spend more time to get things done.

May 232009
 

Blackberry’s screen seems too small to me and it’s killing my eyes – I’m trying not to read from there too often.

I should try 4″ screen for my next phone, and thinking of the requirement of full QWERTY keyboard, maybe I will switch back to Nokia, or try some Windows Mobile devices from HP.

You know, I’m not a fan of Google or Apple, so their phone is not yet in my consideration, unless someday something significant happens.

May 222009
 

The wireless connection was really bad in garage, so I moved the Ubuntu box back and put it under my table now.

Strength of wireless signal improved a lot (from ~15 to ~60), so I no longer have high packet lost rate and latency.

I’m still thinking of retiring this P4 machine, but virtual machine does not provide me enough stability, I will try VMWare, Virtual PC, and VirtualBox again to see if anyone can give me better x64 virtulization support.

 Posted by at 22:48