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WelliBUS updates and other news

This past week has been a very active week in terms of deployments.

iPhone WelliBUS reached version 2.5.1. The latest update adds a new feature that allows users to save favourite services not just stops, improves the load times significantly, brings tooltips to a few screens and addresses a couple of small issues.

But the real reason for this post is that this week we launched two Android applications.

Firstly WelliBUS for Android was launched! This first release of the application is very feature rich thanks to the work of @cur3n4 Users can search by stop numbers, station names, street names and even wharfs. There is even a Map view that allows users to find nearby stops. Once the departure stop has been identified the application allows filtering by service number or date/time and goes on to display the departure times and itinerary for the selected routes. Download this free application from the Android Market today.

The other application is the Android version Twister Referee. This is a port of the iPhone application with the same name. Its purpose is simple: enable referee-free Twister play. Rather than having one player operate the spinner the application will do it automatically, over and over again.

Cheers…

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Solved: Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and SVN (1.6.2)

Today I spent a few hours trying to figure out why Eclipse was unable to connect to my locally running Subversion server. I was annoyed especially because Xcode and Terminal were not having any issues.

Some background information.
- SVN is running as a daemon locally. It gets started by:
svnserve -d –listen-host localhost -r /Library/Subversion/Repository

- trying to checkout stuff using the command below via Terminal works fine
svn co svn://localhost/Project1/trunk WorkingDirName

- trying to browse the svn repository from within Eclipse 3.5 Galileo using either Subclipse or Subversive always ends up with:
svn: connection refused by the server

I tried many things but none of them helped. I googled but failed to find something relevant. Just before giving up I thought I would check what ports were open on my machine, maybe there was some conflict. There was no conflict but…
netstat -anp TCP | grep LISTEN
returned this:
tcp6       0      0  ::1.3690               *.*                    LISTEN
That’s when it dawned on me: the svnserve was binding an IPV6 address and Eclipse could not handle that!

Solution:
ps -ef | grep svnserve
kill -9 (where proc_id is the process id of your svnserve, the second number on the line)
svnserve -d –listen-host 127.0.0.1 -r /Library/Subversion/Repository/ (or wherever you’ve placed your Repository)

Done! Now svnserve is bound to an IPV4 and Eclipse can play nice too.

Cheers…

p.s. please let me know if this worked with other Mac OS / SVN versions too

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JSON Framework — Potential Null Dereference

If you are using json-framework as your preferred iPhone / Cocoa Touch JSON framework then you might find that the SBJSON.m is not necessarily perfect.
Don’t get me wrong, it is an awesome utility and it has saved me heaps of time but when analyzing the code (with XCode 3.2) I got lots (36 or so) of Potential null dereference warnings.

The reason for it is that when this the error is built in lines like this:

*error = err(EUNSUPPORTED, @"JSON object key must be string");

The error object is not checked for NULL.
According to Apple’s documentation one can call a method that takes a error:(NSError**)error parameter with either of these:
NULL
NSError *error = nil;

So if the argument is NULL you can’t really assign something to it.

To fix the XCode warnings (and your code) just do this test before the call to create a new error object.

if (error != NULL)
  *error = err(EUNSUPPORTED, @"JSON object key must be string");

Cheers…

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GiveOrTake is my IOU Manager

Have you borrowed something and you forgot who from?
Have you ever lent an item to someone and then you couldn’t remember who it was?
Do you forget to return books, rented movies or other things?
Do you find it hard to keep track of all your IOU ’s?

GiveOrTake will help you keep track of all these: you can use your address book and you can rely on the application to show you when an item is due. These are just a few of the features that are available in this initial release and it is up to you to request more that you’d like to see in the next version.

Features:
- integration with your Address Book to pick a contact or simply type a nickname
- use a simple but useful datepicker to select the return date
- use a predefined category (rename or even duplicate them) or create a new one
- remove the categories or the items when you no longer need them
- badges on both categories and the application itself when an item is due to be returned
- category color changes when it contains due items

Get it here

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OpenJPA – LL

Note to self: when using OpenJPA and lazy loading just remember that the info is actually fetched when calling the getter. Direct access to fields will not load the associated entity.

EOM

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iPhone: Adding Events to the Calendar

Since you've reached this blog post then you already know that there
is no API for controlling the iPhone calendar.

IMHO this is because of a blend of security reasons, mobile me and
notification issues…

There might be a workaround though but I couldn't be bothered to test
it: what if you configure the iPhone calendar to sync with a CalDAV
capable server and then your app simply posts the events to that
CalDAV server?!
In this scenario the Calendar will eventually retrieve the entries and
you'd be set. Considering that Google's Calendar web app supports
CalDAV it should be fairly straightforward.

Has anyone tried this?

Cheers…

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TelstraClear Help Page

is not very helpful.

ps. if there are any admins out there please make sure that on your http://www.telstraclear.co.nz/customer-zone/customer-services/ both the "Online Help" link and the Help Icon link to the same page…

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When the Telcos get their fingers dirty

Late last week, while browsing peacefully on my mobile phone, I noticed that Vodafone NZ had injected a header and a footer in all the pages that they were converting from HTML into WML to be displayed on my cheap phone.

So here is what I have to say about this:
1. By doing this Vodafone interferes with my browsing experience. I hate it.
2. When connecting from a Java Application things get really messed up. Those extra bytes make communication impossible. What this means is unhappy service providers and very angry customers.
3. Customers may think that they are paying for those images every time they see them. Hopefully that is not true; I imagine that they traffic to those resources is whitelisted but hey, one never knows.
4. Downloading a Java Application / Game has just become a tougher task if the Jar is not served from a secure server.

There are some clarifications that I should make:
- https traffic does not get the "extra" content injected in the translated pages
- this problem only applies to one access point: Vodafone Live!. The Internet access point is not "affected" by Vodafone's generosity. In other words make sure you are not using live.vodafone.com as your APN if you do not want the freebies. Just check that you are using www.vodafone.net.nz as your APN and your Java apps will be sweet.

I feel sorry for all the ANZ and National Bank customers that use Mobile Banking and have Vodafone phones. Chances are they are using the default APN (the so called VFNZ Gateway) which means that the requests from Mobile Banking will fail. I guess choosing HTTP for communicating with the back end servers was not the wisest idea. Kiwibank on the other hand stayed clear from that and is still up and running, thanks to the fact that HTTPS traffic cannot be changed on the fly that easily.

Cheers…

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Google Reader Comments and Duplicates

 I welcome the addition of Notes in Google Reader and the ability to share any web page via bookmarklets. Great stuff but no (real) comments available yet on share items :(
This reminds me that I would love Google Reader even more if it would filter out duplicate posts from the unread feeds.
Here is how I see it working:
1. The (duplicate) posts are available in all the subscriptions.
2. As soon as a duplicate post is read in one of the feeds it should be marked as read in all the other feeds (subscriptions).
3. If you go to another subscription and select to see even the unread posts you should be able to see that post.
Confusing? Makes sense?
In the mean time one could use:
– this Greasemonkey script to remove dupes
- this other Greasemonkey script to comment on items via Disqus

Cheers…

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Wellington Airport – Wild at Heart

A big Hi 5 for the Wellington Airport!


Free WiFi for everyone! Good music in the lounges, funny staff all around and Fuel Coffee at the gates…

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