Monthly Archives: December 2010

Trackball Answer

Posted by on December 24, 2010 Comments Off

One of the best things about Android is how easy you can modify it. Need proof? Use Cyanogenmod. Need more proof? I modified the Phone app to allow answering your phone vía the trackball.

So far, the community’s been great. I’ve received French, Italian and German translations for the app, with Spanish and English covered by me.

I’d love it if it became part of CyanogenMod, so I started a review request. There’s different settings, tap to answer, hold half a second to answer and hold a full second to answer, though a user’s been reporting that there’s an issue with the phone mod and they all respond the same.

I’ve been trying to repo sync to Gingerbread, as I want to get this working for Gingerbread ASAP.

UPDATE: It’s already part of CyanogenMod’s Gingerbread tree. Enjoy! :D

Try the RabbitVCS beta, live a happier life

Posted by on December 10, 2010 2 comments

Lets face it, typing svn or git commands into a terminal is no longer cool. What’s cool is having a user interface where you can just right click a folder, and commit it onto your favorite* Version Control System with no fuss. (I know, I know, I should get off your lawn).

RabbitVCS does such a thing. I’d call it a Nautilus extension, but there’s more than that, since they’ve added gedit and thunar support as well as command line.

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Why COBOL?

Posted by on December 10, 2010 1 comment

COBOL, not Kobol.

UPDATE: This post was meant to be a hilarious rebuttal to “Why develop in C#“, not to hurt the original author’s feelings.
Tom, if you shut down your blog because of this, I’m very sorry. I was just trying to prove anyone can make any language sound awesome.

I’m surprised absolutely no one has asked me the following question in these past few years:
“Why develop in COBOL”

A year ago I would have said, “COBOL? ROFLMAO!” but now I’d answer differently….

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Tiled for Fedora

Posted by on December 8, 2010 3 comments

If you ever woke up at midnight in cold sweat thinking “Oh man, I had another nightmare today trying to compile packages on Linux, I wish someone packaged Tiled for Fedora” then you can finally rest.

I created an unofficial Fedora RPM for both Fedora 13 and Fedora 14.
You can find the packages here [http://repo.k3rnel.net], as well as the SPEC file used to build it (If you’re a SUSE/Mandriva packager, for instance).

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Android 2.3: The Gingerbread Song

Posted by on December 6, 2010 Comments Off

Android 2.3 made me want to break into a song

On December 6th, 2010,  Google gave to us… A brand new SDK! And I felt so Jolly, I broke into a song. I hope that you enjoy! :D

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Random Hacks of Kindness: Chestnuts for all

Posted by on December 4, 2010 3 comments

Random Hacks of Kindness is a project which aims to use technology to make the world a better place and since I need the karma, I figured I would lend a hand.

Chestnut is a tiled map editor, written by a friend of mine, @Tom_Cashman. The problem? It’s written in C# and uses .Net 4.0 and the Windows Presentation Foundation and was closed sourced and that’s just cruel. I firmly believe that the world would be a much better place if it was cross-platform compatible, open-sourced and backwards compatible with Tiled.

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Save the world, but don’t hurt yourself trying

Posted by on December 3, 2010 1 comment

Not really

Nowadays, it’s extremely common to see chains on Twitter and Facebook. They’re quite similar to the 90′s version of chains that asked you to resend this email to all your contacts or Microsoft would kill Hotmail (Wouldn’t that have been nice?), but where the 90s chains have left off (threats of impending doom) these new chains encourage you to do so (You don’t want to see the Tazmanian Devil extinct, do you?).

Today’s spam chains make the reader believe that “Every time you ReTweet this, ${company} will donate 0.01 cents towards ${noblecause}.”. At the end of the day, the company gets millions of RTs, donates a 20 usd and calls it a day, and millions of users think they did something noble. And they’re wrong.

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