Robi's blog

Installing Ubuntu 8.10 on a Acer Aspire One from Windows XP

robis — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:31:09 +0000

I recently got a Acer Aspire One (AAO) for Christmas and have been very impressed with it. It is very light, has a good battery life, and actually fits in the pocket of several of my jackets. The AAO also has a decent screen size and keyboard although I find the track pad highly annoying in prolonged use and suggest a wireless mouse if you plan to work with it often. When I bought the AAO, after discounts, I got it for almost 250 dollars although it now seems a like the average price on Amazon is 359.00 you should be able to find it cheaper at places like Walmart or even Best Buy.

I have now started to even use my AAO for work when I travel since a large amount of my work is, email, Power Point, and work with Word and so lots of times the AAO is sufficient for my needs and on two business meetings I traveled with the AAO inside my < a href=”http://www.scottevest.com/”>Scottevest jacket pocket. For someone with a bad back who hates lugging around a desktop replacement like Laptop (although I still love my Lenovo T61p and I still own like 4 Thinkpads) the AAO can be a god send as long as you are using it in for simple things.

At the same time one thing that annoys me about the AAO is how poorly windows XP responds. The AAO has a decent processor, 1.6 Mhz Atom, and decent amount of memory, 1 gig, but for some reason when you open a browser or open more than one tab it seems to lock everything till that one process is finished. Its very annoying so I decided I wanted to install Ubuntu on the netbook (I am also thinking of getting another one to put OSX on it). So I did some googling to figure out what it would take to install Ubuntu on the AAO and at first I was a little concerned and most blog posts seem to imply that you would need another Ubuntu machine to create a bootable USB thumb drive. After some research though I found a great site called Pendrive which has a wealth of information on creating bootable USB Drive images of various flavors of Linux. In fact to get Ubuntu on the machine all I did was follow this link, USB Ubuntu 8.10 install from Windows (non Persistent), which walks you through how to make a bootable version of Ubuntu 10.8 on your thumbdrive. Since I was new to Ubuntu I also found this tutorial, Installing a Dual-Boot with Windows and Ubuntu, very useful.

Finally there are a few things you need to do to make your AAO wireless work after boot up. I found this great guide, Install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 on the Acer Aspire One , from the Ubuntu community which helped a lot. I would suggest though that unless you have a wired Internet connection handy that you down load Atheros-based driver for the wireless from the Madwifi project from http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/ before your start and put it on a USB drive so when you follow the above guide you have the driver ready.

This whole process was pretty fast and now my netbook is really fun. I am able to do more than one thing at once in it now and still watch Hulu making me one happy camper.

Unlocking Android Example Code

robis — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:17:02 +0000

Charlie Collins, has setup a Google Code project with updated source for the Unlocking Android book here. There are several really interesting projects in the source and all the code is running and working on the lattest 1.0 builds of the SDK. Whats great is the authours will be actively updating the code and you can leave comments at the Manning forum if you find issues.

Coraline

robis — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 04:37:03 +0000

A wonderful book, audio book, and now movie. I cannot wait to see it!

Kevin O’Kragly featured at Dev Net

robis — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:42:48 +0000

I was pretty excited to see the very cool work that my incredible co-worker, Kevin O’Kragly, was highlighted at Adobe’s Devnet. He and several other members of Twin Technologies have been developing some very interested solutions for Adobe Solution Accelerator Program. To read more about it and check out his pretty neat video logs click this link.

Modern Day Pirates

robis — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:14:38 +0000

Issues with updating LiveCycle Enterprise

robis — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:17:16 +0000

One of the developers over at Twin Technologies has written some good blog posts on issue with LiveCycle and trying to update it. You can check them out here. The three specific topics are:

Also of this came about during a tuning engagement for a client. Since LiveCycle is a Java application tuning it is much like any other Java application performance tuning.

Unlocking Android

robis — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:18:19 +0000

In case you are wondering why I keep posting Google Android code snippets the reason is I have been working on a book called Unlocking Android: A Developers Guide from Manning Press. I happen to have written a few chapters for this upcoming book and I think if you are interested in Android as a platform you should really check it out. I have seen several of the other books and in my biased opinion ours seems to have the greatest breadth and depth. Two of the Authors have just done a fantastic job on their sections especially considering the difficulty of trying to write against a SDK/API that’s in flux and has made some radical changes and may make some more.

Anyways here is some background on the book from Manning and if you want to get access to the book now I suggest you check out Manning’s Early Access Program (MEAP) which lets you get the content now.

“Android is an open source mobile phone platform based on the Linux operating system and developed by the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of over 30 hardware, software and telecom companies that focus on open standards for mobile devices. Led by search giant, Google, Android is designed to deliver a better and more open and cost effective mobile experience.

Unlocking Android: A Developer’s Guide provides concise, hands-on instruction for the Android operating system and development tools. This book teaches important architectural concepts in a straightforward writing style and builds on this with practical and useful examples throughout. Based on his mobile development experience and his deep knowledge of the arcane Android technical documentation, the author conveys the know-how you need to develop practical applications that build upon or replace any of Androids features, however small.

Android has been available in pre-release form for only a few months now, with actual hardware still months away from commercial availability, and already thousands of software developers have embraced it as a potential market mover to rival the incumbent cell phone platforms.

Unlocking Android: A Developer’s Guide prepares the reader to embrace the platform in easy-to-understand language and builds on this foundation with re-usable Java code examples. It is ideal for corporate and hobbyists alike who have an interest, or a mandate, to deliver software functionality for cell phones.“

Comming soon

robis — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:13:19 +0000

As you may or may not know my I unwittingly let me old blog domain expire and a cyber squatter has taken it over. In part this was because I have been too focused on my new job to pay attention to my old blog as well as the domain register I was using for some reason had not applied my updated contact information to a couple of domains (but it did to the 20 others so go figure). Anyways this give me a excuse to break from Ray Camden’s Blog CFC which, while very useful, was just becoming a pain for me to manage and Wordpress just is so much better. Anyways I hope bring back all my old blog posts soon as well as start pushing up some good content.

Hello world!

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:04:22 +0000

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