Lee Packham

This week I got some quality time with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad SDK – ok so iOS… but the iPhone and the iPad are so far apart until November at the earliest it’s not worth thinking of them as the same… yet.

• I watched the Steve Jobs presentation of the new iPods – it’s available over on the Apple Site. I have to say that, Steve didn’t seem that excited on stage this time. I mean, yes the iPod Shuffle… meh. The iPod Nano… really!? In fact my wife loves watching videos on her Nano on the tube and specifically doesn’t want a touch… The Touch… well, that was an interesting update. It’s bought it back in sync with the iPhone 4.
• The iPad 4.2 update was announced – for November. It was supposed to happen in 4.1. Turns out too many people went on vacation over the summer and the project slipped!
• Now, my own stuff. Pushed an update for my Tube Notify app to Apple for approval. The last version had a slight bug in it where people who were installing it on new devices, wouldn’t of registered for push notifications. I also added support for Mutlitasking so it doesn’t behave stupidly and refreshes items on coming intro the foreground.
• Started implementing CoreData and StoreKit into the Tube Notify app – why!? Well, you’ll have to wait and see.
• On a side note, managed to do Reverse Tethering with my Android phone using bluetooth. That is, I used PAN from the phone to use my laptops wifi connection then used tethering on the phone. Why? Who knows – was fun to do though!

That’s it for this week – not many items… but again – it is summer!

This week saw a lot of work involving Node.js. For those that don’t know, Node Knockout is also taking part this week. Unfortunately I’m too busy to take part – noooooooo. Anyway, on with the show:

• Deployed Green Man Gaming‘s new backend systems! This was a complete rewrite from Tornado/Python to Node.js. This was a lot of work – but well worth it. Everyone noted just how much faster the new architecture was. For me, it’s not about the speed, but the fact that it is now fully asynchronous, all the way down the stack.
• Having a love/hate relationship with TweetDeck on Android. Even on the latest Beta, it is using way too much battery to be on the phone. Sorry Max!
• Did some field testing of my Android application to discover I get Force Closes in the oddest of situations. Nothing major, looks like one gets Intent floods in certain network scenarios.
• Liking the new iTunes Connect screens for money handling. My word they are just ACE! So much easier to handle/deal with.
• Picked up a iPod Touch 3G. Why? Well, new iPod Touch will come out next week and I wanted the certain processor/RAM combination. The only device I am missing is the iPhone 4G – which I still can’t be bothered with. Seriously. I know I will have to at some point… but I’ll put it off for as long as possible in the mean time.
• Sticking to the first beta of 10.6.5 for now. Simply because I don’t want to have to deal with the VMWare USB device problem that they mark as a Known Issue.

Another slight shorter update… need to sort that out! Well, it is summer. Another “This Week” post next week then!

Not so much to report this week. It’s been rather hectic doing things I don’t actually usually do – so we’ll get to it:

• Spent a lot of time doing work with Google AdWords.
• I also managed to do a lot less coding this week. Although I did get a chance to check out the newly released Node.JS 0.2.0 that has come to pass.
• Played some games! Now that the Graphics Update is out for Snow Leopard 10.6.4, I can finally actually play some games at a decent FPS. Ok, so yes I have actually had installed for weeks – but it’s not covered by NDA now! Yay!
• Updated to the new TweetDeck for Android beta. This week they’ve done a couple of builds, still no trackball support however, which makes using it a little awkward sometimes – I happen to use the trackball.
• Finally saw my Tube Status app on a proper iPhone 4 to discover it’s looking mighty fine on the new display.

That’s it, not much happened this week really. Ho well! It is summer after all.

This week I’ve been mostly…

• Battling with a complex nested async. queue issue in some work I’m doing for Green Man Gaming
• Did my first oDesk contract! It’s just a shame that I now have to wait another 1.5 weeks to get the money for the work.
• Upgraded my home broadband and network to include new Powerline adapters to make use of the even newer 50Mb broadband. Yay for Virgin Media’s network/speeds. It really does blow ADSL out of the water in the UK – if you can get cable, you should.
• I started playing Alan Wake at last on the Xbox 360. Yes I’m bit late to that game – but then it came out around the same time as Heavy Rain and I played that one through first. It’s a very atmospheric game, I’ll give it that – I’d prefer more atmosphere and less gun action though.
• Started doing some work with the Facebook API again. It’s good, I guess.
• Did some research into the different ways people are scammed on Facebook. It’s quite scary the amount of people in my own social circle that fall for the ‘OMG THIS IMAGE MADE A GIRL KILL HERSELF’ type scams that are just there to collect your e-mail address. Scary scary scary.
• Updated to the latest nightlies of Cyanogen for the Nexus One – now with 720p video recording. Shame my lens appears to be permanently dirty! They also updated the boot animation for the ROM and it’s really nice. I did have a link to the video – but I can’t find it now – doh!

This week’s quite a short one – sorry!

This week has been another long week – but quite a productive one… or at least I would like to think so!

• Carrying on with my URL shortener and vanity ‘via’ links on Twitter, I downloaded the Adium source code and started tinkering with adding a few more custom features to it. My aim is to allow anyone to use the 1.4.x version of Adium to manage their own vanity applications. I’ll post a proper summary of URL shortening and business uses (still writing it!) very soon.
• I got to do some C++ work for a client this week. It was fun to open the bonnet on some code I wrote a few years ago to tweak/fix it.
• I popped a Three SIM card into a spare iPhone. Discovered it’s just Vodafone and O2 that can’t penetrate my apartment. The downside of Three is their customer support not being in the UK – something that is very important to me. So I’ll have to think long and hard about that one. Vodafone’s reception and service in central London has been awful of late… hence the consideration of leaving.
• Upgraded the version of Cyanogen on my mobile to 6.0.0 RC2 and then promptly hacked up the build.prop file to enable HSUPA – result… around 3-4Mbps downlink connection on my mobile phone. That’s quite nice.
• Picked up one of the new Magic Trackpads from Apple. They are fairly cool. Overall I’m not that sure about it if I am honest. I find myself reaching for my mouse still and that sort of sucks.
• Fixed up my Android development environment again. It’s quite hard to keep that all in order if I’m honest.
• Had a look at the new Android Market Licensing that Google have release for Android. It’s about time they did something about .apk file piracy… so many sites are out there offering subscriptions to effectively pirate games and utilities. Amusingly, this new library makes piracy harder on Android than it is on iPhone/iPad (where it is insanely easy) – let’s hope it attracts more developers.

And that’s it! Yay! Another weekly update post done and dusted.

Let’s get straight to it…

• .co domains came out this week. I managed to grab leepa.co and turned it into a URL shortener. I used some code I found on Github, changed it to use my down and deployed it up on Google App Engine and tada, job done…
• I then made my own Twitter Tools extension to make shortened URLs using it when things were posted…
• And I made a custom @Anywhere application that is called Lee Packham and points to this blog!
• Started work on a massive overhaul of my online presence to actually perk potential client’s interests rather than just be a.n.other blog on the internet.
• I may have bought a couple more .co domains – but more on what they are for another time!
• Life’s been busy at Green Man Gaming – the work on the component being ported to Node.js is coming along very well. Hoping to finish it in the next week.
• Had to deploy mod_security to a client’s server this week. It’s grown into quite the beast – and is actually quite useful. I was surprised.
• I got anther damned text about my mobile data usage from Vodafone. I KNOW I WENT OVER 500MB THIS MONTH – NO NEED TO REPEAT IT.
• Last week I was tempted to root my N1 – this week I did it. Running Cyanogen 6.0.0 RC1, very cool. Wish I had done it earlier.

Bit shorter this week – but I’m really keen to get back to the website update!

I’m getting good at this! Not at writing – I still suck at that – but at posting a weekly update:

• My pull requests get ignored on Github it seems. Actually that’s not true – I recently contributed a makensis formula for mxcl/homebrew. I do have my leepa/cradle which allows cradle for Node.js to actually talk using POST on views – that hasn’t been pulled. This allows one to query multiple keys out of a view at once without any API changes to library itself. It hasn’t been pulled back – but then I haven’t heard from the author at all.
• I had forked visionmedia/express – but that has since undergone a major rewrite to use express/connect. It didn’t take long to migrate code from the old version to the new one. The author has also dropped the handy wrapper for the Node.js HTTP client – I have kept it around though. It has a couple of useful fixes – the main one being that it doesn’t cause an unhandled exception in the case it can’t talk to the server though. You can check it out on Gist if you’re bored enough.
• Vodafone irritated me by sending me a text about my mobile data usage. I have already blogged about it though – so just read down the blog for details. The ‘tldr’ version – they have done a stirling job of talking through the problem with me.
• I got my new stack of business cards! Had to get two sets made up, on for the “IT consultancy” and one for “Mobile Application Developer”. Yes, I am looking for more mobile development work. So now I can use these at networking events and see what happens.
• I rooted my wife’s HTC Magic (32B) and installed the latest stable (so Eclair) Cyanogen Mod. It was very easy to do and took around 30 minutes end to end to sort it. It’s a shame that HTC haven’t released the more recent OS’s for the phone as Christy really needed multiple Google account support to be able to actually buy stuff in Google Market. Job done though! Makes rooting my N1 all the more tempting, but I’ll wait until the Froyo version is at least stable.
• I was impressed with Apple’s response to the antenna problems. That was an awkward PR problem and they dealt with it well. The free rubber bumper solution was by far the best one. Especially so because the number of affected users is a very small subset of iPhone 4 owners. Will that make me pick up one… dunno. We’ll see. I am still advising clients to develop directly for the 3G. I still see a lot of iPhone 2G phones around and to maximise one’s app distribution, the 3G is the best one to target. You have the faster network, but the same CPU/RAM limitations of the original phone.
• I upgraded my local CouchDB install to the newly released 1.0.0. It’s… fast. Really really fast. I tip my hat to all the contributors.
• This blog is now on a UK server! Got a 1GB Linode instance. They are ace, this is ace. Do check them out. It’s been a long time since I had a server in the same country as myself – it’s nice to be back.

Right – time to get back to my weekend.

Yay, I’m no longer in hospital… So let’s crack on:

• Got out of hospital on Tuesday – yay!
• While I’m a big fan of using ZSH (apparently some people are still using bash… really? really!?)  - I have now switch from zshkit to oh-my-zsh. I made my own fork of it at leepa/oh-my-zsh which includes some EDITOR env tweaks and has mercurial prompting. This makes for, at least for me, a much nicer zsh setup.
• Started the work to migrate Green Man Gaming‘s couchdb database from one structure to a simpler one. Basically, the benefit of hindsight means that it needs to move forward to a new structure so that some new features can be implemented.
• Forked the node.js visionmedia/express framework into leepa/express to add a quick fix for HTTPS support in it’s HTTP Client wrapper. Very simple two line fix, but allows me to talk to REST services that are on HTTPS.
• The new version of Tube Notify is now out on the App Store. In essence the only change is the addition of iAd – which is apparently working. Although I saw a crash on a friend’s phone. Thankfully iTunes Connect proves crash reports… oh wait, that doesn’t work. Thanks Apple.
• I ended up installing GitX and MacHg. Not because I will use them lots, but having a decent visualisation of a Git repo is actually really helpful sometimes.
• I installed hg-git and cloned some of my projects that are on Git into it. This is just because I want to learn Mercurial rather than switch to it. I last used it a long time ago – be interesting to see how it’s changed.

Cool – this weekly update stuff is going quite well for actually updating the blog

This week has been another interesting week – so here’s the update:

• Boring non-tech bit first again. Was admitted to hospital late on Tuesday night. I’m still in hospital (see post below).
• Loving my iPad and Nexus One a lot more when I don’t have a laptop. I do now – but still – they are my best friends.
• Discovered that a custom version of fstream in the Windows SDK means you can easily leak file handles. This leads to a lot of problems. If you create and fstream from an already open FILE handle, make sure you fclose after destruction – the fstream will not do it for you.
• Node.js is still taking up a bit of my time. I started fixing node-s3 to work on recent builds and then ended up starting to work on my own version instead. Really liking how packages work with it and how using git submodule just became great with it.
• My update to TubeNotify was rejected in true Apple style. Turns out they want iAd done a specific way – the way Interface Builder lets you do it isn’t actually right. Great! The example they give you to hide the advert on failure is also useless too. Happy days. Fixed now though – If I get time I’ll do a post with what I did.

And that is it – bit short – but then I’ve been in hospital most of the week so it is to be expected.

The following things happened this week and it’s easier to surmise it up in one post than to do little posts throughout the week:

• The boring personal update first! I’m suffering with quite a significant amount of pain, can still work and the staff at my local hospital (Whipps Cross) have been ace and managed to squeeze me into a surgery next week to at least start sorting it all out. That’d be ace as I really don’t want to be on pain medication much longer – it’s annoying having to remember the regime of 15 tablets I’m currently taking every day to reduce it from the tear inducing 9/10.
• I installed iOS 4 on my array of Apple ‘i’ devices and then ended up jailbreaking one of them so I could do some multi-tasking work. Any iPhone developer that tells you he doesn’t Jailbreak at least one of his devices is really either A: not very good (see my post on memory usage) or B: lying to you.
• I updated and submitted my Tube Notify app. I’m still refusing to use the new Beta API that Tfl have released as, well, it’s a Beta. Also, it appears to be written by some sort of City Banker programmer that has some weird twisted idea of how to do XML… that is, badly. So, the updates were around iOS 4 type things. Still haven’t sorted Multi-tasking background updates – hoping to do that in the next week. Especially as I still use 1/10th of the RAM of my nearest competitor… which just became important with Multi-tasking!
• I started properly working with Node.js after getting so frustrated with Tornado and Twisted in Python that I just gave up. Those that know me might be confused, especially as I’ve never really gotten along with JavaScript before. May I recommend JavaScript: The Good Parts
  by Douglas Crockford as a really good book to read if you hate JavaScript – it’ll change your mind a bit and even if you know JavaScript – it’ll make you better at it.
• I learnt that Slicehost can’t backup Slices that have 4GB of RAM. I also learnt that they have real difficulties with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and that their support for it isn’t quite as ‘Enterprise’ as they’ll lead you to believe (sorry guys @slicehost but it’s true).
• I upgraded my MacBook Pro with a 7200rpm 500GB Seagate Momentum. Apple really should fit these stock. 5400RPM on a “Pro” level laptop is just not cool.
• I started using Facebook more as a communication tool – wait that’s a bit weird.

Tada! So that’s the update! I figure that as I suck at updating the blog throughout the week – it’d be cool to try and do at least one post each Saturday with what’s going on. Will this be the one and only time I do this… we’ll see.