The Professional Service Delivery Experts

reprinted from my opensource.org blog...

One of the most interesting things to happen in the past couple of years, is Microsoft's embrace of Open Source. This means different things to various people I've spoken with at Microsoft. Some seem genuinely sincere. Some seem less so. What hasn't changed is Microsoft's behavior to the Open Source community at large.

In August of 2006 off my "merger consideration" from the JBoss acquisition, I bought a Sony KDS-R60XBR1. It was over $3000 when all was said and done. I expected it to last a few years. It had the best picture in the store of all of the big TVs. I wanted to watch boxing in HD!

For the past few weeks I've been using Google Chrome for my primary browser. On Windows XP (I run in KVM for client testing primarily) it is pretty darn solid. There are a few sites that don't support it. On Ubuntu 9.04, it is a bit rougher cut. On each it uses far less memory than Firefox and generally renders nicer.

Good

• Smaller
• Flash crashes just flash and not the whole browser (you have to copy or link via ln -s to /opt/google/chrome/plugins/libflashplayer.so and run with --enable-plugins on Ubuntu)
• Multiple processes means that if I don't want to watch a page or slow AJAX app load I can go to another tab reliably

Bad

If you came from buni.org and got redirected to this site and want to know why, I'm working to move buni.org over to a reliable host. ThePlanet has been HORRIBLE. The Meldware repository and downloads will be back up over the next few months and we'll have a new site for buni.org and bunisoft.com overall. Bunisoft's main purpose is going to change a bit, but we'll have more on that shortly. For the moment, I've redirected Buni domains to OSIntegrators which will be providing hosting for Buni's activities.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Check out the Android Console we did for OpenRemote. They had an existing iPhone app. The Android console is designed to be compatible.

Key highlights:

I needed to do some semi-dangerous testing on Windows XP, but I really didn't feel like buying another copy at "we want you to upgrade to Vista" prices (especially since I own several compulsory copies). I need to keep my netbook clean and eventually I'd even like to swap it to Linux (once I figure out what to do about the gyro disk driver thing). So I installed a VM using virt-install under KVM on my laptop. It installed lightning fast and runs faster than on my netbook even.

However, initially I had a mouse offset that was intensely annoying. The trick was changing the /etc/libvirt/qemu/winxphomevm.xml file near the bottom to read like this:

    <input type='tablet' bus='usb'/>
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>

It is easy to forgot to write anything if you're busy. Obviously I need to tell folks what we're doing.

I have joined the cult of twits. However, I'll be in Puerto Rico next week, so don't expect much.

Appcelerator is a web development framework for rich Internet apps. I needed to debug some things. Unfortunately it uses Rake which is really unpleasant to debug the dependencies in. I did it so that you don't have to (you're welcome). Okay.. Pre-requisite: git and ssh and the normal basic stuff is set up.

I bring you "eclipse-osil" package of Eclipse 3.4.341 for Ubuntu. I'm using Intrepid but there is very little reason to think it won't work just as well on other versions (as long as it is the 64-bit Intel/AMD and not the Itanium stuff).

Key features

• Memory is pegged at 512m to 1024m in eclipse.ini
• depends on sun JDK 6 SOLELY (not GCJ or the 100 repackaged jars)
• installs in /opt/eclipse-3.4.341 with a soft link /opt/eclipse
• installs a shortcut under Applications/Other with the planet logo

I'd love feedback.

On Packaging stuff in Ubuntu