Sunday, May 26, 2013

Thought about the Pavizio X3...

For my mum, I thought of buying her another tablet and saw the low cost Pavizio X3 tablet.  It's this one.

Comparing it with the Eken W70 that we already own, most of the features are identical except for the 4 GB internal storage, which is really tiny.  What caught my eye though was that the processor was a "Boxchip A13 1.0 GHz" compared to the Eken's Cortex A9 1.5 GHz (WM8850), which got me digging deeper into it.

Turns out it's an Allwinner A13 SoC which contains an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and a Mali 400 GPU.  So for a cheaper price, you get a crappier processor and less storage.  Good to know!

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Mono Journey Update

I've been pinging ideas to one guy I know who's knowledgeable in .Net and he brings up a good point. Porting the methods function by function into C# won't do the job because .Net and Win32 API are just very different beasts.  Instead he advised me to look into the code and discard the platform invokes.  I think I may do just that.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Google Chrome and the Auto-Complete Address Bar

This is just to notify how to clear the bad website URLs that show up on auto-complete.  When you type the word and the suggestions come out, highlight it with the arrow keys and then press SHIFT+DEL.  Clear out your text and attempt to type again to verify that the entry is gone.

Grabbing the new Hipchat release on Ubuntu

Thanks to Yuri Sklar for the tip!  There is a new hipchat release and it's mighty fast.

First thing's first.  Uninstall the old stuff.  Hipchat uses a generated deb package so you just have to grep for the name and apt-get remove it.  Uninstalling Adobe AIR is as simple as doing: sudo apt-get remove adobeair.

The new Hipchat client can be installed by following the instructions here.

Essentially, it amounts to adding: deb http://downloads.hipchat.com/linux/apt stable main to the apt-get sources and then installing the apt key.

Official Site

Dabbling on Mono and SyntaxBox

My friend and I were working on a few programming projects on the side and he spoke about his sources being in .Net.  Ugh.  Okay, I guess that makes Mono my only option.  And, unfortunately, SyntaxBox, the control he's using, isn't really 100% managed code.

So, what I did was pull in the mono packages that I would use.  I didn't know what to apt-get, so I just got these:

sudo apt-get install mono-xbuild
sudo apt-get install monodevelop
sudo apt-get install mono-gmcs

These seem to get most of the stuff including the soft debugger.  Then I installed subversion to checkout the source.  I also poked at previous efforts on getting it to run on Mono.  Correcting the cases is just the start of it and I got to the exact same crash point.

Looking at the source code for this crash: System.EntryPointNotFoundException: GetDC made me realize that the code was depending on a bunch of Windows dlls for its Native functions.  There's a slew of them, but all of them can be found on NativeMethods.cs.  If I'm going to have any chance of porting this, I'd need to write the code for these.  (Wonder if Wine's implementation gives clues...)

There's a first time for everything, and I always wanted to dabble in Mono.  Should be interesting.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Using chmod

Just bumped into an issue with chmod.  I tried to put setuid permissions in a file by doing chmod g+s but instead of giving me the small 's' permission.  It was giving me a capital 'S' permission.

Turns out, capital 'S' means the underlying 'x' permission is not set.  So, doing chmod g+x fixes this so the capital 'S' turns into a small 's'.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Random Thoughts

I discovered that Cheese crashes on my HP laptop.  The good news is that guvc works just fine.  I'm happy with it so bye bye, Cheese!

I just got the AMD Catalyst 13.4 stable.  Unlike the beta releases, the fglrx deb packages have the version numbers, so that's a good thing!

Ubuntu 13.04 upgrade prompts is showing up now.  I'll keep waiting till they get their issues sorted.