Eamonn Faherty » misc http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk technology enthusiast and public speaker Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:14:19 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Android with the HTC Desire at the end of the honeymoon period http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2011/02/09/android-with-the-htc-desire-at-the-end-of-the-honeymoon-period/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2011/02/09/android-with-the-htc-desire-at-the-end-of-the-honeymoon-period/#comments Wed, 09 Feb 2011 23:49:09 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=348 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I have had my HTC Desire on Orange for a while now and I think it is fair to say the honeymoon period is over!

First of all, Orange have been a nightmare.  The service is terrible (compared to O2).  I seem to either have HSPDA access (great!) or Edge or more often than not nothing!!! Pretty bad for the people with the largest ’3G network’!

Moving on to the handset, the update to Froyo (Android 2.2) took quite a while to come out.  I was impatient and so installed many of the custom firmwares.  I tried:

  • DJDroid – Reliable and fast. This was the first one I tried.  I regretted changing from it but the releases seemed a little behind the others.
  • Expresso – Crashed and rebooted often.  This was a pain to use.
  • Leedroid – Crashed and rebooted often.  This was also pain to use.
  • Oxygen – Reliable-ish but didn’t look very nice.
  • CyanogenMod – Reliable and fast.  I had no issues with crashes or resets.  This is what I use now.

I tried out developing on Android.  I made a simple app that checked for open ports on machines.  This was to check if services were running on a server. I also looked through an augmented reality library demo in quite a lot of depth. Android uses a combination of Java and XML for development.  The layout is generally written in XML and then the ‘code-behind’ (sorry to steal a flex word to describe this, but I think most of my blog readers are from the Flash world) is written in JAVA.  Developing for Android felt better than developing in Flex 3.  The separation in Android code behind seemed to cleaner than in Flex, but comparing this to native JAVA it felt a little smelly.  The conventions say to use private inline methods and classes which just feels a little smelly to be honest. I have decided to leave Android development for now and am learning Objective C (I know it is a little late) very slowly.  The packaging up and deployment onto my handset was far easier than the pairing system for iOS apps!  You just prepare an apk file, which is the app installer, and then copy it to your handset. Nice and easy! Debugging was good too.  The emulator worked well, although the handset templates could be made easier to use.

My main gripe has been with the handset itself and the market place.  There are not enough apps in the market place!!  My wife has an iPhone and she is always playing a new game, Guess Who or Where’s Wally?  I cannot imaging games like this on Android for at least another year. I have read rumours of Google hiring developers, I hope these are true!  Having apps to install would only exacerbate my second issue.  The storage memory on the handset is tiny! After installing the main os I only have about 60MB to play with.  Installing the Adobe AIR runtime takes up about 20MB of this so I have little space left for apps.  I know I can move apps to the SD card but this is not possible on all apps and I believe the cache for these apps is still stored on the main handset (I may be wrong about that). I have got to the point where I really miss my iPhone!

Despite all the bad, there is still some good.  Google integration is great, as expected.  Maps and Navigator apps work really well! The YouTube player is very slick and syncing between my Google Apps accounts (both personal and work) is very easy.  As a work phone the handset is great but as a gaming device is fails!

I hope the next generation of Android handsets are better and I hope the market place content gets better! C’mon Google!

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2011/02/09/android-with-the-htc-desire-at-the-end-of-the-honeymoon-period/feed/ 0 I am back… http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2011/01/25/i-am-back/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2011/01/25/i-am-back/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:24:03 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=321 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Well sort of.

This is a quick post to say I am back! I will post what I have been up to recently in the next couple of days.

I just want to check this is coming through on my new hosting.

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2011/01/25/i-am-back/feed/ 0 Changed themes again http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/22/changed-themes-again/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/22/changed-themes-again/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:32:51 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=291 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Sorry all, I have had to switch back to my old theme. The comments plugin is broken in other themes :(

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/22/changed-themes-again/feed/ 0 Promotion at Work http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/18/promotion-at-work/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/18/promotion-at-work/#comments Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:16:03 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=297 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> It has been a crazy few months. It all started when I left Gamesys.

At Gamesys I was a flash developer. We produced gambling games. We used the flex sdk to compile, we used HudsonCI for continuous builds. We even (many moons ago) used to develop using TDD. It was, for a long while, a serious programming outfit.

For many reasons, I decided a change would be good and so I took the plunge and accepted a position at Fuse, who I had been really been impressed by. Fuse is a digital agency with strong video and 3d skills. Skills I have been lacking.

Fuse were working on a project for The Football Pools, it was Spot the Ball. It was a free to play gambling game to be used as an acquisition tool and then a pay to play version was to be delivered after initial go live. The project was a success and was delivered on time and we have now been asked to work on some more projects for The Football Pools. I was really interested, working in a digital agency working on a gambling game after just leaving a gambling company. The difference was unbelievable.

Since joining Fuse, have worked on programming with Papervision3D, Away3D, JiglibFlash, Unity3d, Cocos2d and more. I have written a tool that uses OpenOffice 3 to convert PowerPoint documents into swfs and html. I have written a php ldap address book which we have opensourced. I have worked on internal network support, replacing a 2 x quad core mac with an NSLU2 (more on that later). It has been crazy but great!

Fuse have been happy with my performance and have made me a technical director. I am very honoured and I am very excited about what we are going to achieve so watch this space!!! To celebrate this promotion I decided to give my blog a little facelift. (I installed a new theme, lol). Despite the change being minimal here it is! I hope you like it and I hope nothing has broken ;)

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/18/promotion-at-work/feed/ 0 My new phone! HTC Desire http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/17/my-new-phone-htc-desire/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/17/my-new-phone-htc-desire/#comments Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:20:52 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=288 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I replaced (upgraded?) my iPhone for a HTC Desire.

I started off by getting annoyed at people for not having html versions of their flash sites, then I got annoyed at Apple for not allowing flash on their iPhones and then I decided to go with the internet and embrace flash. So I bought a HTC Desire.

I got my Desire about 2 months ago. It was free on a £30 / month price plan from Orange (who turned out to have a worse network than 3!).

The handset it amazing. The battery is average, the screen display is very nice and it feels really sturdy in your hand. It uses micro usb for charging so getting a charger for it is pretty easy!

I use Google Apps for my personal email/calendar/docs. When I turned on the handset I entered my details and it sync’d over the air. I had my calendar, my email and all my contact available on the go. AWESOME!

The market place app is pretty good. It doesnt have the same feeling of quality as the App Store, but that is a very minor let down. The apps themselves are a little lacking. It reminds me of when I first got my iPhone. There were very few good apps. I think that will all change when Froyo is out in full bloom and when the Air App Store opens up.

I have used three different software keyboards (including ShapeWriter, which i gave up on because I couldn’t figure out how to write in caps). I am yet to try Swype.

Web browsing is soooo much better than the iPhone. The pages feel like they render quicker (I have not checked this out thoroughly so do not flame me!). When you zoom in and out of a page the text automatically reflows to fit the screen, which makes reading it much easier.

The built in music player is a little shabby to be honest. I am yet to find something as polished as iTunes. It is nice just copying MP3s over to the microSD chip though and not having to sync. Any tips on a media player would be great! :D

I have started devloping for the handset. It is easier than the iPhone as I know Java already but I will go into more detail on that soon in another post!

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/17/my-new-phone-htc-desire/feed/ 6 The prodigal blogger returns http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/17/the-prodigal-blogger-returns/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/17/the-prodigal-blogger-returns/#comments Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:02:44 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=286 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I have not blogged for ages! Sorry!

Things have been pretty crazy the last couple of months. I will post more on that very soon!

I am now back and will be blogging until you are sick of it! Ha ha ha!

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/07/17/the-prodigal-blogger-returns/feed/ 0 [Google Services] What a gem! http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/01/27/google-services-what-a-gem/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/01/27/google-services-what-a-gem/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:11:37 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=248 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I have been using Google Apps for over a year and I love the service.

[Email]
In the past year I have had about 20mins of downtime which is less than a third of the downtime I had when I paid for hosting. The service includes great spam filtering, good message labeling, secure imap and pop3 and webmail. The service is fast and very reliable. It is much better than squirrelmail.

[Sites]
I used Google Sites to host a website for our wedding. It was inbetween using a template service like RV Site Builder and a wiki. It was easy to assemble and looked pretty good. It has built in Google Analytics tracking support so that you do not need to edit any templates.

more to come…
More info and sign up

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/01/27/google-services-what-a-gem/feed/ 0 The International Gaming Expo – Earls Court http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/01/27/the-international-gaming-expo-earls-court/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/01/27/the-international-gaming-expo-earls-court/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:06:20 +0000 eamonn http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/?p=271 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I am heading off to IGE today. IGE is:

The most influential group of gaming industry speakers ever assembled at a b2b exhibition will feature at the IGE Gaming Leaders Programme of presentations, seminars and round table discussions. The three day programme, consisting of 50 sessions with more content being added up until the shows open, will deliver a unique insight and crucial first-mover advantage across a range of important commercial, technological, legislative and social responsibility areas

I am going to be checking out all of the offline slot games and some of the online ones too. I have heard that there is a lot of innovation in bingo this year and after the improvement in offline slots last year I cannot wait to see what is there this year. I will take some pictures about blog them this week along with some reviews.

On a side note: if you want to meet with me to discuss some opportunities then drop me an email using the contact form. I will be checking my email whilst there.

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2010/01/27/the-international-gaming-expo-earls-court/feed/ 0 Busy, busy, bee http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2008/11/02/busy-busy-bee/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2008/11/02/busy-busy-bee/#comments Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:44:00 +0000 eamonn Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I have been a very busy bee the last few weeks. Heather and I have set a date for the wedding !! (22nd August 09) !! We have received permission from the priest and we have a venue !! I am sure there will be more posting on the wedding in the next few weeks !!

I have had to rebuild flour.doughball.co.uk. It was in a bit of a state after I tried to get a media center installed on it. There isn’t very good suppor for VIA gfx chipsets in Linux! :( I am glad the job is done and the machine now seems a little better than before.

I have been using a script hellanzb for a while now and I still love it!!! I am using another script with it called PADS. it checks myepisodes.com for releases of shows and cross references it with newzbin and then sets up the download.

this works great but after downloading the show myepisodes doesnt know you have now downloaded it. i wrote the following to handle it:
#!/usr/bin/php

$acqs = "/var/local/pads/mark_as_acquired";if (file_exists($acqs)) { $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://myepisodes.com/login.php'); curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'username=doughie&password=silkchild&action=Login&u=myshows.php'); curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, '/tmp/cookie.txt'); curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $store = curl_exec ($ch);

$aquireds = file($acqs);

foreach ($aquireds as $aquire) { list($show, $season, $episode) = explode("-", $aquire, 3); $url = "http://myepisodes.com/myshows.php?action=Update&showid=$show&season=$season&episode=$episode&seen=0"; print "url is $url"; curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); $content = curl_exec ($ch); } curl_close ($ch);}

?>
if you are interested in how it works email me and i will give you a hand.

Last, but no means least checkstyleas3 !! I have resumed development on this. i have written the score class which will encapsulate the results of the tests and will control how they are displayed etc. I have finished writing the tests for all of the existing code. I have come across a couple of interesting articles on the net about “clean code” and am reading the gang of four design patterns book. I should hopefully have another milestone release this time next week!!!

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2008/11/02/busy-busy-bee/feed/ 0 Bonny Scotland http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2008/08/23/bonny-scotland/ http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2008/08/23/bonny-scotland/#comments Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:32:00 +0000 eamonn Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I had to go up to a funeral this week. It was my better half’s granny. It was a sad day but the funeral went without problems, which was nice.

We had a nice time shopping and sight seeing there too.

We went to Provand’s Lordship which is the oldest house in Glasgow. It is filled with furniture from the period and has some interesting biography information on people from Glasgow.

We also went to People’s Palace. This place was better but we didn’t really get to look around. It has a history of the city including WWII.

We also squeezed in a quick trip to the Science Centre. It used to be free but now you have to pay to get in. It is quite expensive for what it is. I am not sure I would recommend it.

I also got some kick ass headphones (thanks to my misses!). link They are awesome headphones, much better than my last two pairs!!

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]]> http://blog.eamonnfaherty.co.uk/2008/08/23/bonny-scotland/feed/ 0