Jun 132012
 

Got a Nokia Lumia 800, and slowly migrating to Windows Phone platform now.
I would like to say the hardware design is great, but the software is some sort of sluggish, though it may be because of I’m still trying to catch up.
BTW, I checked 900 in a Microsoft store – doesn’t seem to be a great design.

Apr 062012
 

Everytime I looked at an iPad I feel like I want one, but once my hands are on it, I feel … well, no feeling.

Cannot recall if I evern mentioned this before – it’s heavy and bulky. I still prefer the size of Kindle Fire, though I’ve moved to Kindle as it’s far lighter. Right now what I bring for all the day are only two gadgets – my phone (the 4.3″ HTC Android one, cannot recall exact model, could be G10), and the Kindle.

The Android phone gives me all kind of mobile applications (why people need a Pad for that? Isn’t it too big?) and Kindle give me the best reading experience, especially good to my poor eyes. The only down side is that I always need strong lights whenever I’m reading, but for 99.9% of my time it is not a problem.

Mar 172012
 

You have to admit that you are not a superman, so you could not solve every problem you met, even if they are in same/similar area.

I was playing with MuseScore which is an open source alternative to Overture, however it kept crashing while open some specific ove files. After searching around and reading some posts, you must have guessed what I did – checkout source codes and start building.

It’s fun, I guess that saying was correct – programmers used to want to face problems that hard to solve. Well, this does not mean I can solve the problem :D. After (accidently) upgraded Xcode to 4.3, I have to install a nightly build version of CMake to get rid of the “-buildstyle” problem, then spent quite some time on trying to build mscore from scratch, but so far no luck.

This morning I asked myself, WHY? Let’s forget about what was being debated in my mind, but now I decided to give it up, at last before I can finish my term extraction project which can help me make living, for real.

In the mean while, I will postpone all mobile development for several weeks. Actually I made pretty good progress with Windows Phone 7 development, and it won’t take me too long to finish a WP version for my AWS client, but I want to push it to late April.

Focus please, you cannot solve every single problem you meet.

Mar 042012
 

Several things that I need to do but failed (failed means didn’t finish or even not started yet), I tried my best during the weekend but the progress is not that pretty :(.

I didn’t touch solr in the past week for the term vertor problem in distributed search, I’m going to try it out in the coming week but I have no confidence at all.

I do try to set up Windows Phone development environment but obvious I need more resource (read: memory) on either the Windows laptop or Windows VM on MBP, I even upgraded my Windows laptop (an HP) to Windows 7. However, it seems memory is still the problem. My next step is raising the memory for VM on MBP to 4G (later 6G, maybe) to see if it works better, but that will make WP7 development really a occasional hobby as I cannot leave it up and running for all the time. Pity MBP supports 8G memory only, I think under 16G I will have enough headroom for everything.

Playing with Android is still a fun, or maybe funny? hehe. I started working on that but Eclipse’ or Android’s UI designer really sucks, I still need sometime to get used with it. I wish I can get this part done faster as this could be the only platform that I can try without cost.

Since the mail team was kind of slow releasing whatever we want, so I started digging into alternatives to see if I can speed up a little bit – I constantly update and build Android clients and also tried to build up some backend features with open source projects, this involved Postfix, atmail/roundcube, solr, and so on. This part didn’t go well either, mostly because I stuck in the front end features, and turned me back to backend stuffs again, but that means I’m not that helpful to the current project since front end features are much more important, at least at this stage.

Terminology extraction is much better than other projects, at least I finished a demo for JS extraction, it works wel for 95% cases, pity for those 5% leftovers, I cannot do anything about it since they have have either HTML mess up, or JS conflicts (well, maybe I can do something for later one, but not now since this is not a serious project so far).

What else? hmmm … seems almost all batteries @ home are having problems, from cell phone to lawn mower, from blower to iRobot. I did a lot research in the past couple of days on Lead Acid, Ni-Cd, Li-Ion, 12V, 18V, 24V, purchase, recycling, and so on, but good thing is that I’ve put all necessary orders and now just want for those batteries arriving.

Nothing else I think … the office will have network tuned in the coming week, probably I will have to run my own Wifi after that :-$

Feb 272012
 

I was working on a simple feature to grab some innerText of HTML tags in a web page, and need to get that done in front end, i.e. JavaScript. The basic feature took me no more than 5 minutes to finish, but after I turned from Chrome to Firefox, I knew I’m in big trouble.

Browser compatibility, which seems still a nightmare in now a world even Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Safari are all announcing following some sorts of rules, and obviously learning those rules seems to be tough.

So I turned to jQuery (and actually tried YUI as well) and it seems pretty cool, everything works smoothly even on my mobile phone. Although the feature is not that fancy so it may haven’t hit the brick yet, but definitely this is a good sign to me.

A friend of mine told me that their dev team is moving from native Apps to HTML5 for quick prototype and to avoid troublesome incompatibility problem, is that what I should do?

Jan 242012
 

Just found that I had no time to use those fancy mobile apps, either popular SNS Apps like twitter, facebook, or those “utilities” like yelp or tango. The app I used the most is Google Navigation which serves as my GPS device, and GMail/Mail Apps as I’m still a mail guy. Some other Apps consumed a little time, such as Price Check from Amazon, GPS Tracker, and Youni SMS.

The problem is that I don’t have much so-called fragmented time – I wake up in the morning, drive to office, sit in front of my laptop for almost the whole day, then drive home, then sit in front of my laptop for another couple of hours, then go to bed. I cannot twittering or update my facebook status while I was driving, and in the other time I don’t want to use mobile phone cos even the Pad is far more easier to use.

I’m not sure how many people are in my situation – does it mean all mobile Apps are for those who take public transportation, or those who work/study for not a full day?

Jan 222012
 

It’s Lunar New Year in China so not much to do recently, so I could have spent some time on digging into development stuffs to see what to play in the coming months.

I upgraded my Windows VM from XP to 7 so that I can install full set of Visual Studio Express tools thus I can develop Windows Phone 7 applications, at the same time, I moved back to Eclipse from NetBeans for Android. Also, I did some research (little to none, though), found MonoDevelop seems like a pretty promising tool though plugins for mobile platforms are not free.

I don’t have enough time to do serious development … Client side software development is still a headache to me. I have to recall how I made the music player last time – it took me more than a year to did everything but at least I had a runnable version within a month, which is not that bad.

My current plan is build up a Amazon AWS console for all three major platforms (did I mention this before?), wish I can get things done in a month or two.

I just spend too much time on the way to the office, need to think about a solution. ๐Ÿ™

Dec 272011
 

Let’s see what we have now from the Christmas – a Bambook, a Kindle, a Kindle Fire, a Samsung phone (running Windows Phone), pretty much all popular mobile devices are in my house now (yes, iPhone and iPad came from last year).

I can say all mobile OS’s are good enough, though iOS is having better operational features, Aneroid is rich of free Apps, and Windows Phone is just … cute? Sorry I don’t know what can exactly describe it, but its look and feel is nice.

I think I need to spend some time follow Windows Phone while playing with iOS and Android, will be busy.

(This post was sent from Kindle Fire with WordPress App for Android.)

Jul 182009
 

This is an old model, but I’ve been expecting for it for quite some time.

Now I have one in my hand, it is pretty much what I want for all these years ๐Ÿ˜› – QWERTY keyboard, wireless and cellular connection, display is big enough, and, phone is big enough :D. Pity it does not support 3G on AT&T, but I guess EDGE will be good enough since I was on it with my blackberry.

I haven’t found enough software for it, but at least I have putty now so anything else could be delayed (yes, I’m still looking). Now I want a good connection manager (say, switch between wifi and cellular network automatically), some games (boring games to kill time), and I need a good Jabber client (or a multiple protocol client). Sure I wish all these can be free, but I will pay some if they are good.

It’s weird to me that Microsoft has their messenger client on Symbian, while Yahoo and Google don’t have one. If I understand correctly, Symbian is one of the major competitor of Windows Mobile, so what’s the logic behind all these?