Thoughts by Techxplorer

Photo by Cat

A little while ago I posted about taking screen shots of what is displayed on your Android based mobile phone while running Ubuntu. In that post I mentioned that I had a HTC Hero phone.

The phone isn’t available from one of the carriers here in Australia yet so I had to purchase it from an online retailer. After some research I chose to purchase the phone from MobiCity. I’ve been really pleased with the phone but there was one little niggle, I couldn’t select the right locale.

Because the HTC Hero isn’t available from one of the carriers yet the phone that MobiCity supplied is one that is targeted by the manufacturer for the European market. No big deal really as the phone does everything it should except that the choices for the locale that I had were all Eastern European. Fortunately some were in English, but the locale was still wrong.

After some on and off searching of the Interwebs, and the Android Market I discovered the MoreLocal app by the C-LIS Crazy Lab. This app lists all of the available Locales and not just those that the manufacturer, or creator of the ROM you’re using, decided are most relevant.

So far testing has indicated that the Locale is now set correctly.

The photo “Two Sexy Androids” was uploaded to Flickr by Cat and used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Since starting my studies again I’ve been collecting links to interesting articles on the Interwebs using my delicious account. This morning I noticed I had 555 links. The majority of the links fall into a few defined categories:

• Mobile computing
• Google Android
• Apple iPhone
• Cloud computing

The question now is, what do I do with all of these links? There is a search function in delicious and it searches the description, tag and notes field of the links. While I try to add notes to every link this usually only the first few lines of the article and so I know it may not be an accurate depiction of what the article is about.

I’m thinking that I need to have some sort of search that could take the list of links and use the entire content of the pages as material for indexing and use that for searching. I could use something like a Google Custom Search Engine and this I think would mean I’d need to build something as an interface between the two systems.

The other downside of this of course is that my delcious account only contains links to things on the Interwebs. For items in subscription only databases, such as those available through my library, I use Zotero. Any search solution would ideally take these items into account as well.

Perhaps this is a side project for me to look into further during the summer break.

Today the 100th post when up on my photo blog which means I’ve posted 99 photos to it since it started at the beginning of the year.

I don’t keep copies of the exact files that I upload and so first I needed to download copies of the files from the blog. To do this I exported the content of the blog using the Export Tool. This gave me an XML file detailing all of the content on the blog.

Next I extracted the URLs to all of the images uploaded into the blog using the grep program and a regular expression like this.

grep -o 'src=".*\.jpg"' ./wordpress-export.xml > images.txt

I’m not very good with regular expressions so I’m sure there is a better one. It is also worth noting that using regular expressions are not recommended for manipulating XML but this did get the job done.

Next I opened the file in my text editor and removed the the extra information that was output by the above command. This gave me a file will the URLs to all 99 photos.

To download the files I used the wget program using the file of URLs as input and waiting 10 seconds between each request. The command I used looked like this:

wget -w 10 -i ./images.txt

Lastly I used the Shape Collage program to make the final image.

I’m rather pleased with the result.

Early last month I posted about an exploration I was having with using VirtualBox for web development. It’s been a little under a month and I am not going to be using VirtualBox any more.

The way I was using it was simply getting in the way of my development workflow which was holding up development of a new plugin for the kind folks at the Libraries Interact blog. Which is needless to say isn’t good.

So I’ve gone back to the way that I’ve configured the Apache webserver in the past for web development on my laptop. Much easier and simpler in the long run. Especially as I’ll be using the webserver to provide a simple website for one of my cources this semester study period.

This isn’t to say that VirtualBox isn’t any good, it’s just that it wasn’t right for the way I was using it. I’m glad I explored the technology though as I’ve learnt some new stuff.

Yesterday I came across the “Free and Open Works” posts by DoctorMo and was inspired to add the buttons to my blog and write the associated Free and Open Works page. The buttons were created by DoctorMo to help the Free and Open Works project initiated by AusImage.

I realised while writing the post that there is no part of my computing activities, and participation on the Interwebs, that isn’t supported in some way by Free and Open Works.

I hope that others are encouraged to use the buttons on their own sites and show their appreciation for the work that people have made freely and openly.