Android on the iPhone!

FINALLY!

That was my first thought when I saw this post and watched the video 🙂 I just finished installing it on my iPhone, finally it’ll be put to some use 😉

It’s just the first alpha release so things are a bit dodgy but it’s fantastic news anyway and I bet it’ll be improved quickly now. The prebuilt binaries contain Android 1.6 but others built 2.0 and 2.1 working images as well.

Bootloader

OS booting, phase 1

OS booting, phase 2

Android on the iPhone!

Web browser

Two hints if you want to try it on your own. I found this tutorial for dummies very helpful. To easily extract firmware you may want to use commands from this page.

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Java ME SDK 3.0 on Linux/OSX

Finally! It seemed like eternity but finally there’s some real news for Linux and OSX devs out there — Sun presented a prototype of Java ME SDK 3.0 running on nothing else but Mac OS X! 🙂

There’s a video available — check it out at Java ME SDK Team Blog.

Big LOL at a Linux old-timer (i.e. myself)

I’ve just had a big LOL at myself today. I bought a small Bamboo Wacom tablet, brought it home and plugged into my Linux box. First impression: it’s good. Tablet was recognized as a mouse, I could move cursor and click things but, well, GIMP didn’t like it as a damn tablet. Taught by years of hacking Linux I fired up Firefox, googled for “linux wacom tablet”, found excellent Linux Wacom Project and started debugging/configuring/messing around with system settings. The problem was that everything seemed to work as expected but damn GIMP refused to treat stupid tablet as a, well, tablet. Half hour later I read about disabling something when RedHat is booted with tablet plugged in as it differently autoconfigures tablet when it’s connected before system start and when system is running. *DING!* Maybe my old habits just don’t apply to modern Linux times when things Just Work? Automagically? I rebooted (I know, I could’ve just killed X) with tablet connected and voila! everything Just Works.

Shit!

LOL!

Happiness 🙂

That happens when you’re just so used to manually configuring things that you just don’t think that free software is up to the task of applying AutoMagic(tm) and everything Just Works 😀

UPDATE (2010.05.01): Since Ubuntu 9.4 (or possibly earlier version, can’t remember) it’s not even necessary to have it connected at boot time, just Plug’n’Draw baby, anytime 🙂

A month with no net connection

How crappy a net connection must be to call it ‘no net connection’? It must be unreliable, slow and with horrible lag. Just like mine for last 3 weeks. And when I say ‘unreliable’ I mean ‘it is there for several hours then gone for two days’. Meaning — very unreliable 🙂 Anyway, today I bought a mobile broadband modem from 3uk and things are back to normal. The signal is very weak where I live so while it does connect to HSDPA network speed is not very impressive but having a permanent connection again is like breath of fresh air 😉

Since this is the first time I’m using mobile modem I was a bit unsure how to actually use it with Linux. Various HOWTOs on the net suggested wildly different things, ranging from installing special hotplug software to upgrading Network Manager to manually configuring wvdial. Fortunately it turned out to be much easier.

3UK mobile broadband Huawei E220 modem Ubuntu Linux HOWTO