I know I am still early on and I am a newbie to this type of smartphone, but the HTC Desire HD continues to exceed all the expectations I ever had for an Android smartphone.

I am convinced that the only reason Apple does so well with their iPhone line is because they have better advertising. This phone and mostly the OS can do almost anything you can think of by default without needing to root it. I do admit I was almost sucked into the Apple vortex a few times, but I ended up with the HTC Desire HD from Telus Mobility.

Right away I impressed with the ease of use and the customization level of the phone itself. It is extremely snappy and is up for any task with the perfect phone interface.

First the good, then the bad, because everything has a downside.

1) The screen is crystal clear and huge at 4.5" giving me lots of real estate for watching video or browsing photos.

2) I can tether this thing as many ways as I can think of, including pass-through from the Internet on my laptop if I so desired.

3) Can you say mobile hotspot? The phone turns itself and its data package into a highly configurable hot spot for your other wireless devices

4) Although not important to everyone, I always thought the iPhone was missing an FM Receiver, because some days I do not feel like listening to music. Well I am missing it no more.

5) Customization is king and in this case you have a bunch of desktops that can contain anything from application shortcuts to control dashboards or widgets for Twitter, Facebook, weather, time, calendar, RSS feeds and the list goes on and on.

6) The Android Marketplace is well stocked and contains any application for any situation. And if you (like me) want to develop and deploy your own there are no limits on what you can do.

7) In my case the best things in life are free. I know this is not a feature, but I did get this brand new phone for free, so that was huge plus for me.

And now the bad. It is not a show stopper, but the battery life is less than desired. Although battery technology has not evolved much in the last 10 years, the processing power and display capabilities of mobile devices have. On my first full day of usage, with moderate power conservation efforts my battery was done in by the end of business. Considering my usage will most likely drop over time this is not bad.

After charging the phone, I left it on the counter all night with the alarm set only to wake up to the battery half drained. I will step up the conservation efforts including turning off the back light when indoors and turning off all data communications when not in use. As well I may start shutting down the phone at night, something I never did with my Blackberry. As a secondary measure I am purchasing a mobile charging unit that plugs into the charging port, this should get me through those times when it is impossible to plug in the phone.

Although this is fairly big downside, the huge list of advantages outweigh the only downside I have seen so far.

As a testament to the growth of the Google Android OS, I was in store waiting for my phone to be activated. And what I would call an average smartphone user walked in excited to upgrade their hardware as they were up for contract renewal. The first phone they wanted to see was the iPhone 4, but when they were told the price they decided to keep looking. As I was leaving they were closing the deal on a Desire HD. Although I am sure they did not get the same price I did, they had to compromise because of the dollars attached to the iPhone. At the same time I am sure they soon realized it was not a compromise at all.

Sometimes I get what I like to call the Linux itch and I boot my laptop into my carefully configured installation of Debian 5.0.

I have been thinking about several projects lately one of them being the SwissTop application that I have written as a Swiss Army desktop control utility. In order to work on my itch I decided to take Mono for a test drive and try to convert parts of this application suite to use Mono to determine if go forward development is possible with built in cross platform support.

As a nerd I like to compile everything so I can truely understand an application before I use it. Today I ran into one of those issues that most bleeding edge fanatics run into, in order to have the latest version of MonoDevelop I need to upgrade my distro to the next major release, lest I end up in a dependency nightmare.

Unfortunately these are one of those barriers to entry that will probably hold Linux back and at the same time keep the Newbies from using the latest release of anything.

I recently signed up for Netflix Watch Instantly as it just recently became available in Canada. To be honest for 7.99 a month I should expect nothing less, but I was a little surprised at the same time.

There are of course some good things about this service that I picked up on right away:

- The technology is there, be it for PC or mobile devices, high or medium bandwidth the content is watchable with almost zero lag.

- The user experience is smooth and allows you to move between devices picking up where you left off. The search and recommendation feeds are easy to follow and use.

The bad:

- Selection is the main downfall to this service. I was hoping for at least "Movie Network lag", so movies that were released to DVD/Blu-Ray 6 to 8 months ago would be available on demand. Unfortunately the newer titles that do appear are less than interesting and few and far between. Television content is completely out of date and most of it is incomplete, as in only season 3 of a series appears that is currently showing season 6.

Like when iTunes started bringing video content to Canada, I suspect a few years will pass before this becomes at all useful. Unfortunately it may fall apart by than, because when my 1 month trial ends I will be cancelling. Unlike iTunes all Netflix Watch Instantly has is video and if they cannot provide up-to-date content not too many people will be willing to pay 7.99 a month for something they can find in the discount bin at Wal-mart.

Wow! It has been almost exactly one year since the last time I posted here. I guess the whole having kids thing really does rid you of all that free time you once had. Lately I have been posting over here: daddy.robinhills.com. The reason why is pretty obvious when you get there.

A quick test run of Chromium OS

The slick folks over at gdgt got the source code of the upcoming Google Operating System (currently called Chromium) and built it into a VMWare Image. Being a serious nerd I needed to check it out (most likely due to the rampant news in the past months).

I downloaded the image and installed VMWare Player, from that point I was helped by a post on the gdgt Chrome OS discussion thread since the image would not boot out of the gate. They directed me to a vmx VMWare Player script that would load the hard drive image correctly. From that point I modified the Guest OS type to "Linux / Debian 5.0" from "Other" to get network connectivity.

I was than able to log in with my Google credentials. As expected I was loaded directly into Chrome (the browser) and an attempt was made to connect to Gmail. However there was some DNS issues preventing host lookups, therefore only allowing access to websites via direct IP.

From my quick browsing I was unable to find any network settings so I stopped there. Honestly I just wanted to see if it was what I expected and it was. Does an OS entirely in the cloud impress me? Not really, but there is potential and hopefully Google carries on with this experiment to make something viable.

MariaDB is Michael "Monty" Widenius' branch of the popular MySQL database after it was purchased by Sun and taken in a different direction.

I was browsing my RSS Reader the other day and noticed that the latest beta of MariaDB was released as noted on the MySQL Performance Blog and thought as a database user and developer I would give it a try.

Since it was Sunday and I wanted a challenge I decided to install it from source. I downloaded the latest source tarball (5.1.38 Beta) to my Debian 5.0 server and uncompressed it. The build instructions were fairly standard:

1) Install the Prerequisites: apt-get build-dep mysql-server

2) In the source directory I ran: BUILD/autogen.sh

3) Than ./configure --prefix=/opt (I use /opt since I did not want it to interfere with my existing MySQL installation)

4) make

5) make install

From there I created a data directory for the MariaDB using mkdir /opt/data and the mysql_install_db tool (/opt/bin/mysql_install_db --datadir=/opt/data --user=mysql)

I stopped my running MySQL server and launched MariaDB:

/opt/libexec/mysqld --no-defaults --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --port=3306 --basedir=/opt --datadir=/opt/data --tmpdir=/tmp --language=/opt/share/mysql/english --skip-external-locking --skip-networking --key_buffer=16M --max_allowed_packet=16M --thread_stack=128K --thread_cache_size=8 --myisam-recover=BACKUP --query_cache_limit=1M --query_cache_size=16M --expire_logs_days=10 --max_binlog_size=100M --plugin_dir=/opt/lib/mysql/plugin --plugin-load=ha_innodb.so:ha_archive.so &

This defines all the appropriate paths so MariaDB does not bump into MySQL, as well as load the InnoDB and Archive plugins.

As per the warnings when I started MariaDB for the first time I upgraded the database using: /opt/bin/mysql_upgrade -u root -p

To test the install I used the MariaDB command line client and the with the default root account: /opt/bin/mysql -u root -p.

MariaDB supports the complete MySQL feature set plus some tweaks including the XtraDB, processlist and extended slow log patch set from Percona.

MariaDB has the potential to surpass MySQL since it's development and expansion is driven by community need rather than corporate desire. It touts itself as being more optimized and speedier than the MySQL default MyISAM via the Maria Storage Engine. I do hope it will lives up to it's claims as I will be following it every step of the way.

I have been running Xfce4 + Debian 5.0 on a desktop at work since March. Since replacing the hard drive in my laptop I had not installed any flavor of Linux (which I normally do). I was going to go with Ubuntu, but I thought I would add a twist this time and opted for Debian + Xfce4 instead.

I ran into my first challenge right out of the gate: Wifi. Since I did not want to move from my place in front of the media center I needed to get wireless working on my WPA secured network. To make things more challenging I only downloaded the Net Install ISO, which only contained enough system to boot into base system. After a little searching I found out about the wpasupplicant package and the non-free firmware for my Intel wireless card (firmware-iwlwifi). After grabbing these packages + prerequisites and loading them from my thumb drive I configured my card as per the Debian Wiki Wifi entry.

From there I installed the xfce4 + slim (Simple Log In Manager) packages, which gave me a base xfce4 system.

This brings me to issue #2, wireless management. I needed a decent utility to manage my wireless connections, since I do jump between connections when I travel, etc. After some searching I found wicd in the Debian backports repository, since it is not part of the Lenny release. As a side note one of my goals was to keep from running a mixed system, which can be problematic when on the road. I chose wicd since I used it before in Ubuntu and it does not conflict with my already edited /etc/network/interfaces configuration. As a footnote for a user to run wicd they need to be a member of the netdev group.

At this point I realized that my laptop was running through the battery like gang busters. This was by far the most difficult issue to solve without installing Gnome power management utilities. Since I was trying to stick with either Xfce native or GTK applications I went on the hunt. Only to find out that Debian is distributing a fairly old version of Xfce by default (4.4.2). In order to use xfce4-power-manager (which is still in the beta stage), I needed at least 4.6.0 installed.

This is where the unofficial Debian Desktop project comes in. They distribute the latest desktops in repository form for the current releases of the Debian distro.

After adding the Xfce 4.6.0 repository to my sources.list I ran a apt-get dist-upgrade. First thing I noticed is that most of my panel icons are missing. My suggestion (and that of several other people) is to install a new theme (besides the default Rodent theme) and switch to it using the Xfce4 Settings Manager. I switched to Tango, which I think is snazzier. Apparently there is some issue with icon themes during upgrade and the fact that Rodent does not exist in the newer versions of Xfce. This has been fixed in development and will fixed upgrades in future releases.

After that was out of the way I downloaded xfce4-power-manager directly from the SVN (because I felt like being on the bleeding edge). Built and installed it, only to discover a bug dealing with the version of Gtk I had installed (2.12). I posted the issue to Bugzilla and it was fixed before I got out of bed this morning.

After fiddling around and adding myself to the powerdev group I am now a smooth operator hyper-miling my laptop with Xfce 4.6.

This experience has taught me a few things, one of those being how to configure a wireless network adapter; two that the Xfce project has some great developers; and three Xfce4 is fast, allowing more of my resources to be focused on applications and less on the window manager which adds pep to my laptop + experience.

My latest project started back in December with some Boxing day sales, and finished up on the 1st with the maiden voyage.

It was interesting gathering all the parts from Greenlyph, NCIX, NewEgg and various local shops to come together in my first media center. I spent months price comparing and shopping around for the best deals, trying to decide on form factor, cases and where I would stop. There are still a few things I can think of that will have to wait.

Here is what I settled on:

• IN WIN IW-BT611T Slimline chassis
• Athlon 64 X2 5200+
• Asus M3A78-EM (Asus 780G Chipset)
• 2 x 2GB Crucial PC-6400
• 1 x SATA Seagate 500GB 16MB Cache
• LG SATA DVD-R/RW
• Logitech Wireless Keyboard/Laser Mouse Combo
• Windows 7 Ultimate RC 32-bit

Originally I was going to install Ubuntu 9.04, but thanks to ATI's horrendous proprietary drivers and two wasted days I decided to save the cost of a Vista license and install the release candidate of Windows 7 until it comes out this fall.

In the mean time this machine makes a great addition to my modded entertainment center (a story for another day).

I installed Internet Explorer 8 a few days ago and I guess I was expecting to be wowed (I have no idea why), but I was underwhelmed by the lack of innovation. The only point that I am happy with now is that everything I develop in Firefox looks just as good in Internet Explorer, without having to hack it to pieces.

Unfortunately for every web developer in the free world Internet Explorer 6 will not be dying anytime soon (in my organization anyway), so the backwards ways of IE6 will continue to prevail.

My resume and the start of my portfolio is finally online. These were the main reasons for me starting this website. I guess the main hold up was the massive amount of CSS I need to do, which is time consuming. Those pages were only tested on FF3 and IE8, so please forgive any design glitches.

Just a quick note that in all the brilliance of the Apache mod writers, the RedirectMatch directive does not support question marks (?), that's right, question marks in the redirect URL.

After almost an hour of wasted time this is the only conclusion I could come to. Apparently there is a mod_rewrite work around, but it was too shallow for me to even bother looking at. Apache URL encodes all output by default and the mod_alias authors some how overlooked dynamic URL strings.

My idea of sexy after 715 days up.

As a companion to my previous post I thought I would stay on the "essentials" theme and cover what I consider as a web developer the essential Firefox add-ons.

Firebug

Seriously, this is best thing since sliced bread when it comes to web development. It enables you browse the source as it is generated, any JavaScript or CSS that was loaded by the browser and it shows all AJAX calls along with their corresponding responses. Definitely a must have.

Web Developer

As a web developer this tool bar comes in at a close second and is handy for generating source (making it searchable), disabling JavaScript/CSS/cookies for testing purposes as well as editing or adding cookies that are accessible by that particular web page.

User Agent Switcher

I have found this useful when troubleshooting unusual behavior created by firewall privacy settings on a end users computer. Easy to install and highly customizable.

Delicious Bookmarks

This is not a web development related add-on, but it is useful for bookmarking across multiple computers and platforms. Making this the #3 add-on I install with Firefox.

I have been using computers for the past 11 years in some way or another and in that time I have rebuilt my own computers and those of many others who found out my secret trade. In the past month I reloaded my laptop twice (once for hard drive failure and the other was due to infection).

In the years since I went 100% legit (no cracked software of any kind) I have been able to find decent cost effective software to meet my needs. These are must haves for installation on any Windows desktop.

Antivirus

This one could be up for debate, but I prefer Avast! Home Edition if I must install an Antivirus and depending the performance of the machine I may not install one at all.

Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox gets installed on every machine I rebuild with the Flash and Acrobat plugins. As well I always set it as the default browser and remove the Internet Explorer link from everywhere except the one hidden in programs menu. This has probably costed me business, because they do not need to come back, but I think it is worth it.

CD/DVD Burning

Since I only burn data discs and ISOs there are a few options, but the best by far I discovered a few months ago is DeepBurner. The free edition does everything I need and on the plus side if I want the extra features licensing is only 25.00, as opposed to 95.00 for a full suite of applications I will never use (I was a die hard Nero fan before it became bloatware).

Text Editor

Since I am a web developer and have a deep dislike for WYSIWYG web page editors I write everything from the ground up using jEdit. Way back in the day I went on a search for the most flexible and smooth operating text editor that supported HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP syntax highlighting. jEdit was the winner by far with flexibility to do pretty much anything and a vast array of plugins. I have looked a few times to change it update since I spend everyday looking at this application, but have not been able to find a suitable replacement.

The #2 text editor I usually install is Notepad++, which I use as a Notepad replacement since it supports simple things like Unix style like escaping :)

Office Suite

In the last two versions of OpenOffice.org it so close to the Microsoft Suite that I could drop it on someones computer and they would not even notice the difference. If there is no Microsoft Office license onsite this one gets installed without a thought. Interest enough I bought Office 2007 - Enterprise a few months ago from work, only having to pay the shipping, but under normal circumstances I would not think twice.

Archiving/Compression

A few months ago I finally got sick of 7 years of WinRAR evaluation popups and decided to seek out a less costly solution and found 7Zip. It was a drop in replacement, except that it did not support RAR, but that is something I can live without since 7z has a better compression ratio and supports all my favorite Linux formats (BZip2, Tar, GZip).

Media Player - Video

A few months ago I discovered VLC Media player and the only thing I have been not able to play is DRM protected content. It supports almost everything and is light weight so there the memory foot print is small.

Media Player - Audio

I have not installed this recently since all my music is on my iPod, but FooBar2000 is a flexible and again light weight media player that will not cause your computer to chug when changing songs.

Graphics

GIMP is not quite PhotoShop (which I use at work), but it is close enough for my designing needs.

To be honest I only thought of GIMP when I was going to take a screenshot for this post and did not have it installed yet.

Remote Control

I have been using a VNC on my main machine for years, but four years ago I switched to UltraVNC and it has replaced my previous use of PC AnyWhere with support for file transfer and the requirement of only one open router port.

File Transfer

If a FTP client is a requirement (which it is for me) I opt for FileZilla (which runs on Linux as well) which supports SFTP and FTP protocols. In the recent releases they dropped the dependency on PuTTY so the memory foot print is fairly small.

.Net IDE

I will now mention a few development tools that have saved me some dollars over the years. The first is SharpDevelop which is now almost a drop in replacement for Visual Studio C# development.

Source Code/Versioning

I have used subversion for the past few years as well as the TortoiseSVN Windows client to make sure my screw ups can be easily rolled back.

These are my essentials and the best part about they are all viable cost effective alternatives to their commercial counterparts.

After reading a recent Linux Journal article on the light weight Window Manager XFCE I decided to take the plunge at the office on a machine that should of been left at the curb and I was pleasantly surprised.

I had an older Dell box with 512M of RAM on a 2.53 celery stick running Debian 5.0 for testing various apps before pushing them out to our production servers. Since I needed a second machine I figured I would install xfce4 to see it lives up to the hype given to it in the March edition of Linux Journal.

First off it is screaming fast and easy to get used to (after daily use of Ubuntu with Gnome). It started to chug a little when I began using jEdit, but even my new box chugs under the strain of the JRE.

It is nice to be able to work unimpeded by the overhead of a choppy operating system.

The preview event for the upcoming release of the iPhone OS 3.0 just happened today and there are a few items I have been waiting for: Copy & Paste and A2DP Bluetooth support. Even though I have a 2nd generation iPod Touch it apparently has Bluetooth built in, but is not "activated". Personally I will be dishing out the 9.95US for that reason alone.

Check out the full run through at MacRumors.

Photo Credit: MacRumors

I was simply adding a database to the binlog_do_db variable and restarting my master. I was being overly cautious so I started with a running the stop slave io_thread command on the slave to prevent any issues from propagating to the slave.

I than looked for a way to "gracefully" restart mysql so that I would not create any master binary log errors, and elected to use mysqladmin shutdown -p. On the restart using /etc/init.d/mysql start Innodb started throwing a "Incorrect information in file" error for the only 2 Innodb tables running in my database.

After trying a table repair and failing I thought another /etc/init.d/mysql restart could not hurt. And it worked, since my Innodb tables were now back online.

At this point a new problem surfaced on the slave when I start the IO thread. It could not read a binary log from the master and failed about a minute into restarting.

On the master the syslog was showing a "Failed to open log (file '')" error which seemed strange to me. After a quick Google search I found out that this usually had to do with a log showing up in mysql-bin.index that no longer existed.

When I opened the mysql-bin.index in nano I found a bunch of strange characters (@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^), so I deleted them and restarted the mysql master again.

All is now good in MySQL land (for know). Solution: restart, restart, restart. Moral: Do not mix mysqladmin and init scripts.

I would like to throw my hat in the ring with MooTools. Seriously, anything that can make cross browser Javascript easier gets my vote any day. Of course like anything else there are draw backs, including some effects deficiencies in Internet Explorer. Although how can any Web Developer take IE seriously these days?

I know I cannot do it since I spend 80% of my debug time trying to work out some CSS or Javascript glitch that Internet Explorer does not address properly. I will admit that IE8 does address some of these issues with the new commitment to standards, however in my opinion it is a little late considering that the latest version of Internet Explorer will break the majority of websites that employ IE hacks who are trying to make everything look good.

Anyway, MooTools is awesome. If you have not chosen a javascript framework yet check it out, it is worth at least a look.

This is my new home. Still a work in progress, but it is better than the "in development" page that has been in this place for the last week or so. All of my blog content plus portfolio and resume will be here soon as well.

Enjoy the popcorn ;)

It is a new day and I decided to pick a non-mainstream language and learn it from the inside out. My choice was Python and I have been picking away at Dive Into Python since last Friday and so far so good. It is an interpreted language which means there are obvious limitations including speed, but for quick and easy jobs that require multi-platform support I think it will come in handy.

After I finish the book, I am going to write a web script to enable syncing in my new PasteBox project. This will allow sharing and multiple desktops to access the same data. It will allow me to use it in a real world application so I can get more familiar with the ins and outs.

Next I will be brushing up on my java, since it seems everyone is looking for java these days ;)

Since my hard drive died this week and I needed to re-install Windows XP I figured I would leave a little space for the newest edition of Windows. After an entire day and a few restarts I managed to grab the Windows 7 beta from Microsoft.

To start with I am impressed to say the least. The installation was a breeze, it installed all of the drivers except those for the built in card reader, but that is not the end of the world. And it installed the default Microsoft drivers for my Intel graphics chip, which does not allow me to use the TV out, but again this is a beta. The install went faster then my install of XP and was simple in asking me where I wanted it to live and it went about it's business.

On the first boot it loaded in a snap. Of course, the first thing I did was reconfigure the desktop and install Firefox. All of my regular applications installed like a charm.

The only thing I noticed right off that will take some getting used to is the new task bar. I have only been using it for an afternoon, so far it is a little akward, but I expect it will grow on me.

I originally got this Toshiba Satellite with Vista Home Premium and it chugged out of the gate, after 8 months I broke down and bought an XP license, now I am pondering a Windows 7 license when it is released. Since this machine was a steal at 800.00 plus an XP license 150.00 and a new hard drive this week 90.00 and a Windows 7 license at least 185.00 I am looking at the potential of a 1225.00 laptop with 3 different Windows licenses on it. I am starting to think Microsoft planned Vista this way on purpose.

I love it so far and fear for Ubuntu's grand future since Microsoft may have a new contenter.

In our quest to optimize our MySQL powered application I decided to take MySQL Enterprise Monitor for a test drive. It is easy a snap to install and configure the Service Manager and remote Agents on 2 different servers to test. The only real hitch was the Query Proxy, which I am yet to get working.

I figured for $2999 a year their support should be extremely responsive, and I was not disappointed as I received an email in approximately 10 minutes with some troubleshooting steps. Hopefully this issue will be resolved quickly so I can get on with testing the Query Analyzer (the reason for this experiment).

Otherwise the database and server monitoring is rather sophisticated and robust. However for 3k a year US it is a little steep for our operating budget. The plan is to start from the top and work our way down to something in our price range that meets our need to optimize our database and application query usage.

From what I can see MySQL Enterprise Monitor is definitely tops in that regard.

Seriously, I got a new generation 8GB iPod Touch for my birthday over a month ago and I am more hooked on this thing then when I got it. I am not sure what it is. This is my first Apple product so I guess I am not used to the simpilicity of it all. I grew up in Microsoft world, so simplicity is not a word I heard too often.

Apple's advertising make it seem exciting to own an iPod Touch or iPhone 3G or MacBook or any Apple product, because when my Toshiba Satelitte dies (hopefully not anytime soon) I will most likely be investing in a MacBook as my next mobile office.

Don't get me wrong the iPod Touch is truly the "Funnest iPod Ever", with it's slick interface, fancy gestures and sturdy hardware design, but there is one basic function that would prevent me from replacing my Blackberry with an iPhone: copy & paste.

At the end of the day I don't own an iPhone, so really what am I complaining about.

I was already running Hardy Heron (8.04), but did not feel like working the other night so I thought I would waste that time upgrading to Intrepid Ibex. With a little help from TorrentFreak I was quickly on my way. It took about 3 hours over my wireless connection, but it was worth not having to reinstall applications and reconfigure every aspect of the OS to get it the way I like it.

My only complaint about the upgrade (and this is minor) is that it lost my saved wireless keys. Not a big deal for my home network, but a few of the other networks I visit on a regular basis use a ASCII Hex password which is a pain to re-enter.

According to BootChart I am booting at 38 seconds which is an improvement over not only Hardy Heron, but my XP install as well.

If you are looking for a cheap Windows alternative Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is a good place to start.