mandazi

So while working on ShoutReel, I had to upgrade to a newer version of RubyGems in order to use the i18n version of the geokit gem.  When I upgraded, it said I was missing all the gems for the app.  Consulting with my friend who told me that when upgrading RubyGems, you also have to re-install all the gems for the app.

This is just a newb note for myself as well as anyone on the Internet having this issue.

So I signed up to get an invite to use the Google App Inventor for Android and was excited to see an email welcoming me to it. I started reading the beginner’s guide and setting up my environment. Since Java is the language used to write Android apps, I installed Eclipse. Google has an add-on for Eclipse called the Android Development Tools or ADT plugin. I attempted to install this, but got this error:

An error occurred while installing the items   session context was:(profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null –> [R]org.eclipse.cvs 1.0.400.v201002111343, action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).   The artifact file for osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.cvs,1.0.400.v201002111343 was not found.

After googling, I found out that installing Eclipse via the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t fully install all the necessary files for Eclipse.  Installing it with the Synaptic Package Manager installs everything needed.  So I un-installed Eclipse via the Ubuntu Software Center and installed “eclipse” along with the rest of the required packages using the Synaptic Package Manager.  By the way, when you select “eclipse” package it asks you if you want to install the other required packages.  Make sure you do, or else it will not work.

I’ll be posting more about developing for the Android in the coming weeks.  Can’t wait to build my first app!

According to this post the Intel i7 core CPU will be cheaper in the coming weeks.  Maybe it’s time to build a new gaming desktop PC.  Mine is less than 2 years old. It’s a Core 2 Duo.  Runs Starcraft 2 just fine, so I doubt I’ll build a new one for a while.  Maybe next year, when the i7 Cores are cheaper.

So I couldn’t get ColoZilla working on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit.  After checking out the Ubuntu forums and doing some Google search it seems that it doesn’t work for 64-bit versions of Ubuntu.  The solution is to use gcolor2.  You can get it via the Ubuntu Software Center or via the command line with:

sudo aptitude install gcolor2

It’s a separate application that functions the same as ColorZilla, so you will have to switch from window to window to get the color picker.  Not really ideal but its a solution for me.

If anyone knows of any working color pickers for Firefox, please share.  Thanks.

I recently got the HP dm4-1060us laptop since my old laptop (which was my wife’s old laptop) died after close to 6 years of use. I used it only for web dev work so I didn’t really need a fast machine. As soon as I got my laptop I installed Ubuntu 10.04 and got it running smoothly out of the box surprisingly. Only minor issue is the mouse trackpad being buggy, but I use a USB mouse most of the time anyway. I kept Windows 7 to try it out and after using it for about 2 weeks now I’m impressed. It’s not as bad as I expected it to be.  I’ve never used Vista and when I used it for a few moments on someone else, I dreaded it.  It was slow even on a brand new PC that was just booted up.  Windows XP SP 2 was the standard OS that I have been using on all my machines since it was released.  My gaming desktop PC is still currently using.

So what impresses me about Windows 7?  The speed for one.  It is fast.  I loaded IE, FF and Chrome all at the same time and opened multiple tabs of various sites and tried to recreate a common crash scenario I usually almost always experience while working on XP.  It didn’t crash.  It started to lag but nothing crashed.  This wasn’t a good test, since I didn’t have Dreamweaver or Photoshop open but it was still better than I expected.

Microsoft definitely took some UI layout styles from Apple’s Mac OS X.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they even looked at Ubuntu.  Browsing the computer is very user friendly and simple.

All in all, it’s not that bad at all.