The Geek under my Skin

As I am switching my calendar and contact from a Microsoft Exchange server to my Google Account, I needed to make the configuration change on my T-Mobile Dash as well. Google offers an ActiveSync server to sync Windows Mobile devices with your Google Calendar (m.google.com). You can find more details about that here.

The issue I faced though was that the ActiveSync Menu “Configure Server” was letting me change the server, the account password, but the username and domain where not editable. After a few minutes, I finally figured out the trick to make the switch to a different ActiveSync server: you must delete the ActiveSync configuration first.

From the ActiveSync screen:

1. Menu
2. Options
3. Put the selection on “Microsoft Exchange”
4. Menu
5. 1 Delete
6. Yes to the alert

and your previous Exchange server is now gone. Hit “Done”, then “Menu” and finally “Add Server Source”, fill in the server and user information and you will be sync’ed up with your new server in no time.

The Nokia N800 Internet tablet with OS2008 supports Adobe Flash 9 for playing video and running small Flash apps. But when I tried using websites which record video using Flash, I was surprised to see that no webcam was found. The N800 clearly has a webcam, which is supported by the provide VoiP client.

After some Googling, I found the answers to my questions: Adobe Flash 9 on Linux only interface with the now deprecated Video4linux API version 1. The Linux kernels for the past couple of years have stopped compiling the Video4linux 1 support some time back, in favor to the new version of the API, Video4Linux 2.

While searching on this topic, I found this small utility which basically recreates a v4l1 virtual device based on the v4l2 physical device: Flashcam. A .deb for the Nokia N800 is available ready to install from here: http://www.zdez.org/flashcam-0.10.deb.

Installation was as simple as can be from the tablet, and in no time, I was able to record videos on Flash websites. The only remaining problem is with audio, which I did not figure yet how to address. This will be an Internet search project for another day.

Google has been running developer events in several cities in Europe in these past couple of months, starting with London, and following with Paris, Munich, Milan. Today was the Prague, Czech Republic event. I was unable to attend previous sessions, and as I am in the Berlin area, Prague is only a 3.5 hour drive away so it was an easy decision to go attend this day of technical sessions on Google technologies.

The day was organized in a fashion very similar to the Google IO event in San Francisco, but in a much smaller scale.

The event was very well organized. The registration process was painless with no waiting. I do not speak or understand Czech but I still had a great choice of sessions in English language, which was great. I have to mention though that although they insisted on us returning feedback forms, they did not provide them in English, so I couldn’t fill mine out. We were provided with a cool grey T-shirt showing the icons of Gears, AppEngine, Android and Maps. The Clarion Hotel conference level had open Wifi service allowing the attendees to stay connected.

We were greeted with a breakfast before the keynote started.

The content of the keynote was pretty much similar to what we had on the first day keynote at IO. Nelson Mattos, VP for the EMEA region, presented in English, but before he started, a lady from local Marketing management kicked off the event in Czech. Following her, a local Engineering Manager also said a few things in Czech before introducing Nelson. I do not understand Czech, therefore I have no idea of what was said in the first 10 minutes of the keynote.

Nelson’s presentation covered the 3 current main focus for Google:

1. Making the browser more powerful (Chrome, Gears)
2. Making the cloud more accessible (Data and AJAX APIs, App Engine)
3. Keeping the connectivity pervasive (Android)

Several other Googlers handled technical parts of the presentation, starting with Mads Sig Ager, a software engineer from the Chrome development team, who covered the Chrome browser presentation and demo, focusing on its features and stability (one process per tab, the built in task manager).

Nelson covered briefly Gears new features, including the geoLocation, openFiles(), and onProgress() handler, before switching to the cloud connectivity, where he made a few statements regarding the Data API for read/write access and the AJAX API for read only services. Vladimir, a local Czech Google engineer performed a few demos, all commented only in Czech. I noticed he showed some stuff using the Search API, demoed some mashups including a race sync’ed on Youtube and Map. His closing demo was labeled YouTube HD, where he had a 2×2 matrix of YouTube players, showing 4 sync’ed videos.

Nelson continued with a quick App Engine update, reminding that this was still pre-release, but that the free quota was allowing apps with up to 5M page views per month. He mentioned that serving https was now possible on App Engine. His then moved to the last focus area with a quick status on Android, and the fact that the source code was now available.

The closing topics of the keynotes were GWT, presented by Andrew Bowers, and Open Social by Nelson. Both these topics were spanning pretty much all 3 focus areas.

The rest of the day was segmented in five 1-hour sessions. There was a good diversity of topics, most in English but about 1/4 in Czech. There were as well workshops on App Engine and Maps API.

I attended an App Engine presentation by Kevin Gibbs, the tech lead of the App Engine team. Kevin shared a bullet item road map of what they are planning to add to the platform between now and end of Q1′09. One of the item was the support for another language (only Python is supported now), which prompted several questions to find out more about what this meant, what language would be added. The answers were not satisfactory though, as Kevin pretended they still do not know which language will come next…

My next session was on Maps and Earth API, which covers a lot of content. Jean-Laurent Wotton was entertaining, making the presentation fun to listen to. But this was a 101 type session, and I wish some topics would have been covered a bit further.

Next, I attended a GWT technical session, covering Javascript Native Interface, Overlay Types and DOM manipulation. As the session ended early, I jumped to the room where NetLog was introducing their OpenSocial platform. It was noted that Netlog does not allow external links on the applications. Such a hard statement will probably keep many developers away from their platform unless they relax this a bit.

My next stop was at Jean-Laurent Wotton YouTube API presentation. Here again, the talk was fun, illustrated with many demos. A lot of functionalities were covered, but experimentations are required to follow up with what was presented. YouTube is a terrific video hosting and streaming platform, but it seems like the capability to host private, not searchable videos is no longer possible. This as well will need to be researched further.

The last session attended was about how to make App Engine applications scalable, with examples like a counter and a blog engine. This was one of the most technical sessions I attended today, but the presenter was going really fast on some aspects. Some slides with 5-10 lines of codes were only shown for 5 seconds or less.

In the middle of these presentations, we had lunch and snacks available, and the day ended with a dinner and a party where a guitar singer was performing live pop songs. We played a few foosball games, had some drinks and food and talked to other attendees before calling it a day.

This event offered a great opportunity to learn about some of the large portfolio of Google technologies. This was a good complement following my attendance at IO 5 months ago, as I could focus on attending sessions in different technical areas. The size of a local event makes the logistic much easier: all the sessions are within a few 10s steps of each others, the amount of participants is manageable, avoiding long lines to register, move around, getting food, etc.

I am looking forward attending another Google Developer Day.

I use several text editors, because I like to check what is available out there. But for quick source code editing tasks, I enjoy using Notepad2, an open source free piece of software from flos-freeware.ch. This comes as a drop in Exe without any installation or configuration utilities. Windows Vista does not like this much, and have been bugging me with the security popup saying “The publisher could not be verified…” for sometimes now. There is a checkbox on this popup to not be bothered again with this warning, but with Notepad2 copied the Program Files directory, the checkbox had simply no effect.

Some Googling on how to address this did not help much, so after some messing around, I successfully cleared the problem doing the following:

1. Copied the notepad2.exe from the Program Files directory to my Desktop
2. Ran notepad2.exe by clicking on the icon on my Desktop
3. On the warning popup, unchecked the box such as I do not get warned next time
4. Closed Notepad2
5. Verified that clicking on the icon on the Desktop again opened without the warning
6. Copied back the notepad2.exe from the Desktop to the Program File location.

The key was that notepad2.exe had to be outside of the Program Files directory to allow the “do not warn me again” option to works.

Of course, after you do this, you will have to recreate your links to the Exe.

The past 2 days attending Google IO in San Francisco have been extremelly exciting. There were many great speakers and many opportunities to meet with Googlers and other attendees.

Generally speaking, the event had been well organized, but it looks like Google has been a bit overwhelmed with huge success. On Wednesday morning, it took about 45 minutes between the arriving at the Moscone center and being able to get on the conference floor. The following pictures give an idea of what this was about while waiting to get our conference passes:

As you would expect, we were greeted with a good breakfast, and had a little bit of time left to network while waiting for the keynote to start. Another hint that the event was not prepared to get that many people is that the open access Wifi network was getting saturated. Connecting to Gmail from my Nokia N800 was a real struggle. There were access points all over the place mounted on small temporary poles. The T-Mo cellular data network was working ok though.

The Wednesday opening keynote was hosted by Vic Gundotra, a Vice President of Engineering at Google.

Several people were standing in the back. The keynote started 15 minutes late, and not everybody had had the time to register, and were allowed in the keynote without their conference badge… The developer community response to the event has been very strong, and there was a big crowd.

The keynote was well organized, and covered the main areas of focus for the conference:

• Gear, with a demo by MySpace of their new mail search
• Android, with live demo of the phone including the street view app using the phone compass to orient the view
• App Engine, where the addition of mem cache and image manipulation libraries were announced, and the fee schedule was finally made public (still free for less than 5Mpv/month)
• AJAX and GData API, with demos of YouTube, News, Transtate, etc.
• GWT, where the version 1.5 was announced, with Java 1.5 support
• Open Social, with a short summary of what is coming in version 0.8 of the API, mainly RESTful API and Template language. Some audience number were made public: In May 08, Open Social is exposed to 275M users, is backed by 20k developers, and has currently 50M application installed

The day went by very fast, attending as many great sessions as possible, including talks on AJAX, GWT, Android, Open Social, Social Graph API. Several sessions were packed, with people sitting on the floor or standing in the back. It was good to see the speakers well prepared and with great public speaking skills.

We stepped out of the conference after the last session to meet to have some dinner in a few friends and Googlers and discuss about some on going projects. When we returned the the Moscone center around 8pm, the after hours party was well on going. There was lot of food and drinks available everywhere, arcade games, Wii on projectors, air hockey tables, pool tables, and live music.

On the second day, the keynote was hosted by Marissa Mayer. The talk was interesting and entertaining, but was mostly about topics we have heard before in other Google talks, or read about on blogs and such.

The second day went by even faster than the previous one. There were more 201 sessions than on the first day, and the quality of the content and the speakers was still outstanding. Session attended included talks on Design Patterns in Javascript, OpenID and OAuth, Open Social, and GWT. At 4:15pm, the event was over. We stayed around for an improvised meeting with some people, while the Moscone staff was taking down Google IO 2008.

I put together a tutorial on how to write an iGoogle Gadget using
MyVox. MyVox is a free service which gives voice to your applications
or gadgets.

If you go through the whole tutorial, by the end you will have your
own working Gadget. It’s also a great experience for those of you who
are relatively new to MyVox, and trying to figure out the best way to
get started. You can see the tutorial here, and the gadget itself is at this location.
 

I have another set of gadgets, a voice blog management and client
gadget, using this API here:

1. http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=api.myvox.com/demo/igoogle/voi…
2. http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=api.myvox.com/demo/igoogle/lis…

For more information on MyVox, check out this site: http://www.myvox.com/

Google opened their Orkut.com social network site to 3rd party applications in limited markets a couple of weeks ago, starting with about 20 test applications. The test markets are still limited to Estonia (1% of the Orkut user base) and India (10% of the Orkut user base).

LjmSite first Orkut application has been included in the Orkut directory for users in India and Estonia about a week ago. We are application number 31.

This application development started back in late October 2007 when Google organized the first Open Social Hackathon in Mountain View that I attended with a limited group of web app developers. We have been working on improving the application functionalities, and porting it to the multiple revisions of Open Social through the past few months. It is a great pleasure to see the application now live with many users trying it out.

The Friends’ Time application allows you to specify the location of some of your friends and displays the time it is at your selected friend locations on your profile. Friends are grouped by time zones. If a friend install the application and set his/her time, this will set the time shown on your profile as well. This application will be of a great help when you want to give a call to a friend who is oversea, or who is travelling, as you have a one stop location to know what time it is where they are. If you are trying to organize an online gaming party, or a video conference call with friends around the world, the application will be a great help with its built-in meeting planner.

The core of the application is based on our popular World Clocks iGoogle gadget. The production Orkut application is using Open Social version 0.7 to get the list of friends and handle the storage of the settings, and the message bundles for localization of the time and date.

We still have several features planned to enhance the application that we will develop in the coming weeks. If you are not in India or Estonia but you would like to check out the application, you can either set your Orkut account to pretend you are in one of these countries, or just patiently wait for Google to deploy Open Social in other markets in the next few weeks.

It sounds like there is another Google Accounts outage ongoing. This is obviously not affecting all Google users, but the Google groups are starting to relay the panic of many locked out users. Once you start using Google services, you depend heavily Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Groups, etc. for your communications and information access. Any downtimes of more than a few minutes becomes a significant pain and distraction.

Two hours ago, I noticed I could not log in my Gmail account anymore. Error was saying that this was a temporary error and to retry in a few minutes. This did not sound too bad.

But after an hour, and noticing that all the Google services using the Google Account became inaccessible, I started digging for information. I filed a problem report with the Google “contact us” link from here.

I found a fresh thread in the Gmail Help Google Group about the exact problem

http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-issues-logging-in/topics

I decided to add my comment to let people know how to report the issue, but… rats… with my Google Account being down, I could not add myself to the group to be allowed to post a message… As I have a 2nd account for testing, and it was not affected by the outage, so I was able to post in this thread anyway.

Update - 3pm CST the account is back. The outage lasted a little bit over 2 hours.

The wait is finally over. A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Bugzilla on maemo.org for a bug I stared some time back. The bug number 1195 was about the missing PAN Bluetooth profile on the N800, which bug had been closed as will not fix some time back. https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195

Internet connectivity on the N800 is possible either through Wifi, or through Bluetooth DUN. The DUN profile is supported by Nokia cellphones, but Windows Mobile phones no longer have this Bluetooth profile. Microsoft made the switch from DUN to PAN starting in Windows Mobile 5. My HTC T-Mobile Dash running Windows Mobile 6 had been unable to talk to the Nokia N800 so far, which was limiting greatly the use of the N800 in locations where no public Wifi network was available.

But the good news from this Bugzilla email was that a garage.maemo.org project finally made an installable package available to enable PAN on the N800: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/maemo-pan

Tonight, I followed the short instruction from the project forum, installed the .deb on the N800, turned Bluetooth on, and enable Internet Sharing on my HTC phone through Bluetooth PAN. I had the surprise to see the N800 reboot twice on the first 2 attempts to establish the connection, but the 3rd try was the good one, and I have been able to browse several websites successfully while being connected to the T-Mobile Edge network.

The N800 will surely travel more often in my pocket now.

Just a quick note about a annoyance I recently experienced with Internet Explorer 7 and the prompt() Javascript function.

Even though doing Javascript prompt() is a poor practice for creating web UI, this is on the other hand a quick and easy way to handle user input without having to implement a form, input, submit on your HTML/CSS UI. For in-house quick and dirty tools, this is something I have happily used in the past.

Well, a few days ago, an Internet Explorer 7 user told me that he was getting a security warning from the browser when using the web app instead of getting the window to enter the data. Sure enough, the web app was still working great on Firefox 2. Starting with Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft disabled the Javascript prompt() function for ’security reason’. You can go back to your Internet settings to revert this security measure, but we should not expect our users to do this. Javascript alert() is still working fine though.

I think we should be thankful to Microsoft, as they are clearly helping us avoiding the quick and dirty solutions. Well,… probably not.