Advanced Task Killer

As some apps don’t stop running when you are using the back or home button they keep on running in the background. The Advanced Taks Killer (I use the free version) enables you to kill (as in stop) those processes.
Advanced Task Killer on Android market

Evernote

This app is priceless for taking notes and syncing it with multiple devices (PCs, Macs, Laptop, iPad, iPhone, Android Phone, etc.). The link to the market: Evernote on Android market

Seesmic

My favorite Twitter app for Android devices. I have tried several other ones, but like this the most. Tweetdeck is on my list of Twitter-apps to try out in the near future. If you are using Twitter at all, make sure you give it a try.
Seesmic on the Android market

Opera Mini

This is my browser of choice for my mobile phone and serves me really well so far. I gotta admit that I did not experience big issues with the built-in browser but I kinda got stuck with Opera as my go-to app, wenn it comes to browsing the web.
Opera Mobile Download site

Pkt Auctions

This is a really really good ebay application for Android devices. I have already used it several times when buying/selling stuff on ebay. If you are an ebayer, you should definately check it out. I’ve found it way better than using the ebay mobile site.
Pkt Auctions on Android Market

Endomondo

Endomondo enables you to track your running / cycling / walking / skating / whatevermoving using your phone’s GPS module. Works really well and gives you a detailed overview on where you were and even displays the song you were listening to at a particular spot if you are using your phone as a music player while doing sports. The web interface (you can upload all your workouts) is pretty nice to and the built-in Google Maps (both for web and mobile) display your route. I used it to figure out how far it was from my place to work (6+ miles). Check Endomondo’s download page if the app is available for your phone, too (if you do not have an Android device).
Endomondo on Android Market

What are your favorite apps?

Let me know what your favorite apps are – I am continuously looking for new ones!

So a project using the Django framework that has to be completed in 48 hours. I was and still am new to Django, still wanted to take part to get deeper into the development of we applications using this framework. Django is a web framework written in python and is comparable to Ruby on Rails.

The application idea

Coming up with an idea of what to do for the Dash weekend was the smallest problem for me, as I have a collection of a few ideas flying around in my head. My goal was to create a shopping list application. The difference to just a shopping list was that users would be able to create 'their’ supermarket first, they would enter the order of categories as they are lined up in the supermarket of choice. Then when entering the items a user wants to buy the shopping list will be displayed in the correct order. So the items on the shopping list are in the same order as you can find the items in the supermarket. I thought this idea was good and sounded easy enough to complete in 48 hours (actually 48 hours minus some sleep).

The tools I have used

I have used Django before, but not for a project I started from scratch. This blog for example is developed using Django (see Django Mingus for more information), but I am just a user of the blog engine and have not done any development on it.
Django was not the only tool I was using for the first time. I needed to find a text editor to use for development. The ones I chose from included VIM (MacVim) and TextMate. I opted for TextMate as it is a pretty popular editor on Mac OS X and I have not used it. It was fun to use (I used a 30 days test version of it) and it worked pretty well. I liked the fact that I had the project overview and the file to edit in one program. I think TextMate is more than an editor, one could say it is an IDE of some sort.
Another tool I was using – inside of Django – was South for intelligent schema and data migrations. It was easy to install (using pip) and use – I’ll definately use it more often now that I came to use it for the first time.
For the frontend I did not want to write a lot of CSS and so went for Yet Another Multicolumn Layout for the layouting.

The good things

There were quite a few things that worked pretty well from the start. For instance I had no problem implementing the models and writing tests for them, that was pretty easy, see models.py on GitHub.
Another great Django feature is the Admin interface which enabled me to see how the models turned out pretty quickly.

What went wrong?

The first couple of hours of my Dash worked pretty well until I tried implementing the urls.py, views.py and the corresponding templates. There is such a thing called the RequestContext that you use to wrap to request and hand over to the template for access to several variables that the RequestContext provides. Now that I know it – it makes sense and all that, but it took me a while to figure out. It is especially important if you want the use authentication in your template.
Some more problems occured when I was trying to test the templates. As said in the tools section I used a CSS framework for the layouting of the templates. Now when I tried calling the templates from the browser using “python manage.py runserver” the static media files (images, CSS) were not displayed. What was the cause for that problem? Django does in its default settings not serve static files. In production one uses a web server to serve the static files – in development (by default) they are just not being served. To solve this, all you need to do is at:

 if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        (r'^media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {
            'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT,
            'show_indexes': True
    }),
)</path>

to your urls.py. After that the media files are served by Django.

Then for the Dash I had the problem of not being too good in web design and design in general. This is pretty bad when you work on a site from top-to-bottom and do all of the work alone. So, what did I do? I tried to come up with a design:

I definately need to work on this one! ;-) Or the design in general.

What should I have done differently

1. For one I should not have underestimated how much it takes to finish an app from scratch in 48 hours. If you check out the other participants you can see what is possible in the time frame – just not for me. So lots of respect for everyone who finished their project.
2. As I am a beginner in Django, Frontend-Design and 'from-scratch-development’ I should have tried harder to find a partner or two to work with – some more experienced ones, enabling me to even learn more from their code / skills.
3. Be better prepaired, as in know more about Django!

Do I regret taking part and do I think the 48 hours were a waste of time?

No, and you should take part next time, too. You learn a lot, trust me!

Further readings

• Django Dash Lessons Learned”
• Lessons Learned From The Dash: Easy Django Deployment

Please let me know how you handle your Django project in the coments or via Email or via twitter.

The use case

The usage

The command line

VBoxManage createvm

VBoxManage clonehd <uuid of the disk to clone> <destination name> --format VDI
</destination></uuid>

--type

VBoxManage list hdds

VBoxManage modifyhd <uuidname of the disk> --type immutable</uuidname>

The conclusion

The find out more section

What's the background?

• Symbian - a now open source platform for mobile devices
• Apple iOS4 - the operating system that powers the iPhone
• Maemo - which is now being transferred to Meego (a cooperation between Nokia and Intel)
• Android - developed by the Open Handset Alliance

What is the operating system for?

What's special about Android?

Who develops Android?

Where to find out more?

• Android.com - The main source everything Android
• Android developers guide - If you are interested in developing software for Android
• Android videos on YouTube
• (German) info site for Android

If you liked this post or have some feedback / comments please feel free to post them below, send me an email or contact me on twitter.

1. How it works using Tomcat

   So on the server side we use the

   ServletInputStream
   

   of a

   HttpServletRequest
   

   of a standard servlet. On that InputStream we receive data using

   request.getParameter("param1");
   

   and keep calling the

   is.read(target, transferred , size - transferred);
   

   method to read the appended data from InputStream. Once that data was read into a

   byte[]
   

   we write this array to an

   OutputStream
   

   .

2. What happens using Weblogic

   Everything is done using the standard

   javax.servlet.*
   

   classes, no Tomcat specific classes so we thought this should work on Weblogic, too. But we were wrong. After I spent a (long) while debugging the problem I found that on Weblogic, once you have accessed some methods (not quite sure which ones)

   request
   

   object you can no longer read from the

   InputStream
   

   . It seems to me that Weblogic marks the request as totally processed after reading a request, parameter for example:

   request.getParameter("param1");
   

   (this one is for sure causing the not readability of the

   InputStream
   

   ). So once we read the parameter that we needed for further processing we weren't able to read the data appended to the POST request using

   is.read(target, transferred , size - transferred);
   

   anymore.

3. How we got it to work using Weblogic

   To solve this problem we now don't put the

   "param1"
   

   value as a parameter, we now put it in the request header. Accessing the header value

   request.getHeader("param1");
   

   leaves the

   InputStream
   

   the way we expected it so we are able to read the appended data.

4. Question

   Maybe someone can answer the question, why are Weblogic and Tomcat handling this differently?

But hey, we got it working. Not even Weblogic was able to stop us. If anything in this post is not clear and you would like to help clarify this but need more information please feel free to contact me or post a comment here.

Update:

The description for the

ServletRequest.getParameter(String)

...If the parameter data was sent in the request body, such as occurs with an
HTTP POST request, then reading the body directly via getInputStream()
or getReader() can interfere with the execution of this method...

So there are a couple of tools I used to access the web from Lua that I wanna go through first.

1. LuaRocks
LuaRocks is defined as a tool that allows you to install Lua modules as self-contained packages called "rocks", which also contain version dependency information (see: LuaRocks.org). After installation it's as easy as

luarocks install [name of luarock]

. There are more functions that will be listed after just typing

luarocks

on the command line.
2. LuaSocket
According to the website LuaSocket.luaforge.net "LuaSocket is a Lua extension library that is composed by two parts: a C core that provides support for the TCP and UDP transport layers, and a set of Lua modules that add support for functionality commonly needed by applications that deal with the Internet." Sound perfect for the use case of accessing the web from a Lua script.
3. Twitter API
Twitter is a famous tool to exchange 140 characters long messages. I offers a nice API that will be useful for testing the web access. In particular the paragrph about using A command line is all you need to use the Twitter API is of interest.

Use LuaRocks to install LuaSocket

LuaRocks makes this step really easy. All you need to do is type

luarocks install luasocket

-- Use the luarocks module to load from the 'rocks' module

require("luarocks.require")

-- Load the specific rock: 'socket'

require("socket")

Use LuaSocket to access the Twitter API

Now that LuaSocket is installed properly we can use it to access the web. For that we first have to load the required modules:

-- use luarocks to load the modules

require("luarocks.require")

-- load the http module

local io = require("io")

local http = require("socket.http")

local ltn12 = require("ltn12")

http

As for every access to a web page you need an URL, we need to construct one. The URL is a simple string that will be handed over to the http module. We just have to get the user login information in order to access the timeline of the user's friends:

print("Enter username: ")

username = io.read()

print("Enter password: ")

password = io.read()

authentication = username .. ":" .. password

myurl = "http://" .. authentication ..  "@api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml"

All there is left to do now is to hand over the URL to the http module to perform the request:

http.request{ 

    url = myurl, 

    sink = ltn12.sink.file(io.stdout)

}

This should give you the output of your timeline in form of a XML file. There are more formats available, such as JSON or RSS. I commited the lua file to my Git repository. I hope this will help others to get started using Lua on the web and / or using the Twitter API. There are a lot of chances in both of them. My plan is to use this tiny lua script and extend it to use it as a "full" twitter client ;-) ... Well a command line twitter client using Lua. Next step is to send a statud update from lua to twitter as so far this is only a request to retreive data. I also need to get into more depth using the LuaSocket module. Stay tuned if you are interested and please do leave a comment and / or feedback. Thanks!

I use Firefox frequently and switch the search engine in the search box every once in a while. Recently I've been looking for the jquery homepage (www.jquery.com). So, this is what I did (for both search engines):

1. Open search engine
2. Enter keyword "jquery" without quotes

The expected result for me was http://www.jquery.com/ to be the first result on both pages - right? In my opinion this would be the most fitting result. Not for Bing I guess. It is on page 1, but it is only number 10 of the search results for me. Google displays the project homepage as result number 1 + Google has a link to the docs of jquery on number 2 of the search results.

Why is that so? What makes Bing think that the official homepage of a project is of less relevance than for example a wikipedia entry about it? Whose answer is 'correct'? In my opinion Google is more correct than Bing in this case and given it is a fairly simple example I wonder what actually causes the different results?

Would be nice to have some discussion on this topic in the comments - maybe you wanna add some of your search engine result differences.

1. Take him/her to a different city you both haven't been to. Short trips don't have to be expensive and can be a lot of fun.
2. Take him/her out to dinner - not the usual subjects, try something like a dinner in a dark room (no light at all - you can't see anything, you can just feel and taste). There are a few restaurants offerings that - you should check in your area!
3. Go to a cooking class together. This can be real fun. Making food yourself (I've heart Americans usually go out to eat) can be interesting, too. For example a Sushi making class - in case he/she likes Sushi.
4. Invite him/her to a language class. Let's say like a 2hr class in a foreing language he/she is interested in. For geeks that would be a "Hello World" in Spanish, Japanese, Swedish, Finish, Russian ... whatever language you want to try.
5. Cocktail mixing class. Learn how to make your own drinks. Don't try them and drive home if they are alcoholic, but knowing how a bar keeper's work is like, can be fun.
6. Take him/her to the casino. Of course both have to be of the legal gambling age in your country, but it's a lot of fun.
7. An iPod Shuffle with 'your' songs on it. Every couple has songs that 'belong' to their relationship. Put those on the Shuffle and give it to him/her.
8. One of my favorite sites - animoto.com - offers a Valentine's Day special. Animoto combines your pictures and videos with music into a nice video. You could make a video of 'your last year' or something like that really easily. Try it out!

So lately I've come to the joy of joining a development team who uses Lua extensively, mainly as an embedded scripting language for C++. For me as a Java dev this sounded really interesting and so I started an expedition into the world of Lua and wanted to give a short introduction and a couple of links I found useful. Please note I am still just playing with Lua, haven't written that much code in it yet, but so far I can say: It's definately worth a try.

What's the first thing you do, when you take a look at a new language? Well at least I do: "Hello World" ;-) To actually see Lua in action you don't even have to download anything. lua.org offers an online demo for the language. So what does it take for a hello world?

print("hello world")

Yep, that's it. Easy, huh? ;-) Now what else can you do? Expand our example a bit, but before doing that I decided to get Lua installed on my Kubuntu VM. Fun story, it is already installed, so Ubuntu ships Lua with it. To start the Lua shell you just have to type

lua

original = "Check it out - this is one long text."<br />
changed = string.gsub(a, "long", "even longer")<br />
print(original)<br />
print(changed)

So this is an easy method to replace / exchange the contents of strings. Now what was new for me, there is no such thing as

String original

You can put all of the code into a Lua file (ending with .lua) and then call this file using the Lua interpreter:

lua stringswitch.lua

text = "Hello"<br />
name = io.read()<br />
print(text .. " " .. name)<br />

The two dots (

..

print

text

name

Hello Stefan

Those were my first steps in the process of getting to know Lua, so far I like it, it's fun to use and has nice and very important intuitive methods to offer.

Some links:
Lua.org - Official homepage
Programming in Lua - complete book online
The Lua online demo interpreter
My github repository for my lua learning path

Please feel free to comment, contact me with questions via email, twitter or in a different way. Would love to get some feedback and opinions on Lua.

I gues everyone knows about twitter: A social network to post messages of 140 characters or less. It's definately popular and there are no real rules as far as I know, so these are the rules I am following in order to keep twitter fun for everyone:

1: Tweeple are people, too!

2: Think before you tweet!

3: Read before you retweet!

If the used expressions are not familiar for you, check out Twitter dictionary and look them up if you will. I think they are pretty common already!