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Ye Olde Macbook Pro

I’ve had this old 1,1 macbook pro kicking around now for about a year. The thing has been beat up pretty bad. I clocked about a zillion lines of code on the thing, keys fell off, airport wifi thing blew up, dvd dead. I decided to at least replace the keyboard and stick linux on the thing and bring it back to some level of usable. I ordered the part from http://powerbookmedic.com and it took about a week to get here. Happy with their service, not so much with the USPS but whatever, it got here. So this morning I brewed up a pot of coffee and set out to re-animate the beast. Jump the break for the gory pictures.

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2011 03 15 jim general
hardware Comments Off Permalink

j2Cal – in the works

I have been tangled up with PHP work for the past while but have managed to get some things done with j2Cal in the meantime. The big deal, for me anyway, is the addition of time tracking to the app. Jump the break if you are interested in what’s coming.

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2010 11 26 jim android
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jCal – 0.2.0

Finally have the search functionality working. It’s a beginning anyway. At the moment you can only search appointments and I need to make the results list a bit better, but there it is anyway. Helpful I hope.

There was  a stupid bug in the month view as well that didn’t paint the header correctly if you change the first day of the week. Always showed Sun first regardless, tho the rest of the calendar painted properly. Alas. Luckily someone took a moment to fly me an email and point it out and it was an easy fix. Thanks John!

Next up I think I am going to look into the UI a bit more. Some look and feel stuff and more options to change that up. The code needs another swipe with the polish too. Still some redundant stuff lying around in there I am noticing, and still some things hard coded that should be in the layouts.

If you are using j2Cal please feel free to shoot me your thoughts either in the comments or via email.

2010 11 01 jim android
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J2Cal 0.1.9

Flew version 0.1.9 up to the market this morning. This one adds the ability to filter the data and is kind of part one of getting the search working. In fact I have search working already on my phone, just needs a bit more time in the oven but I should be able to push that out soon too.

2010 10 30 jim android
j2cal Comments Off Permalink

j2Cal 0.1.8

I skipped an announce about 0.1.7 as it was such a small thing, based on the one and only comment in the market :) It added an option to pick the alarm sound.

0.1.8 allows you to email your task list and notes to someone special. The outside world is opening up now a bit. You can grab it from the market or  here.

2010 10 28 jim j2cal Comments Off Permalink

j2Cal – 0.1.6

This release is mostly about refining the UI, look/feel and behaviours. Not really any new functionality to speak of. I decided to publish this to the market finally, so that is done.

QR is over there and here’s the changelog:

  • UI look/feel tweaks
  • toggle bottom buttons
  • swipe between screens
  • change task priority to spinner
  • cleaned up some layouts
  • show note title on note screen
2010 10 25 jim android
j2cal Comments (6) Permalink

j2Cal – 0.1.5 (initial release)

I released a new project today. j2Cal, a calendar app for android. You can check out the project page and download here. It is a re-write of an app called AnCal. I liked the look of it so I retained a lot of that but added/removed and fixed a ton of stuff. The changelog from the original AnCal code is after the break. If you decide to check it out I would love to hear what you think in the comments. Have fun!

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2010 10 22 jim j2cal Comments Off Permalink

RVM, ruby 1.9 and TextMate

RVM is a great tool for handling rubies. TextMate is a great editor. TextMate does not like ruby 1.9 however. Issues with some of the C extension on OS/X, namely plist handling. Heres the first fix:

$> git clone git://github.com/kballard/osx-plist.git
$> cd osx-plist/ext/plist
$> ruby extconf.rb && make
$> mv /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/osx/plist.bundle /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/osx/plist.bundle.save
$> cp plist.bundle /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/osx/

Rake also had issues from within TextMate so I had to add this to /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Ruby.tmbundle/Support/RakeMate/rake_mate.rb around line 50 or so

49
50
51
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53

if RUBY_VERSION < '1.9'
	tasks = [DEFAULT_TASK] + tasks.grep(/^rake\s+(\S+)/) { |t| t.split[1] }
else
	tasks = [DEFAULT_TASK] + tasks.lines.grep(/^rake\s+(\S+)/) { |t| t.split[1] }
end

This is fine but that plist.bundle does not work with 1.8.7, of course. So..

$> cd /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/osx/
$> mv plist.bundle plist.bundle.1.9.1
$> mv plist.bundle.save plist.bundle.1.8.7
$> ln -s plist.bundle.1.9.1 plist.bundle

But now when we switch with rvm we need to switch the plist bundle as well. I haven’t worked this out quite yet, just manually re-linking but to make a bash script or try and do some surgery on rvm itself? WWWD? (what would Why do?) Hmmm…

2010 08 16 jim editors
general
ruby Comments (1) Permalink

Android, yep!

Well, I went and did it. I bought an Android phone. Steve is just pissing me off too much and after 5 or so years with Apple, I am packing my stuff and moving back to Linux.

I almost bought the iPhone though. I admit it. It a damn pretty piece of work but more and more the developer program and the iphone program and the app store and iTunes being the only door (and a one way door at that). It’s all too much for me. I don’t care how pretty it all is, they are my files and I want to put them on my device and I want to take them off my device without jumping through hoops to do it.

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2010 08 07 jim android Comments Off Permalink

More bgz and apple sauce

Happily bgz (bugz) seems to be working ok for me so far. The problems with it stem mostly from my own undisciplined self. There are two question that I haven’t quite answered yet though. First, how to handle/report time with multiple people in the project, though this is not a big deal really, and second, how to handle multiple project reporting where I might work on several different projects in a day but want to report on the days work. I need to think these things through.

I was also thinking about some ways to promote this project. It would be nice to have some help on it. I figured a screen cast of a session with the thing would help so I set out to try and find a decent screen cap program for the mac. I tried Copernicus and iShowU so far. Neither of them can seem to record the window I want properly. It’s always offset somehow which is very weird and annoying. So I thought I would try Quicktime but it only does the whole screen. I just want to capture the terminal ffs. I don’t care about all that other stuff. There must be something simple out there that can do that without all the fluff. No?

Well, I bought a license to Quicktime Pro only to discover it’s for Qt7 and I have QtX on this box and Qt7 refuses to install. Unreal, so now I am out $29. Thanks Apple.

So, as usual, I gave up trying to buy something and wrote a thing in javascript that looks like a terminal and types out the text you give it. It’s actually kind of cool. You can see the thing here. I might have to make it into a real javascript utility one of these days.

Umm, anyone want a license for Qt7?

Update: I started a project/repo for the javascript textcast thing too.

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2010 03 03 jim general Comments Off Permalink