tmro

After Mauricio (the Geekzone BDFL) asked me to review the JCMatthew DVR-320T I wasn’t sure what to expect. Now I can honestly say that I am happy to do this. I will try to be as impartial as possible and provide the readers with a no-nonsense review. My tone will be as non-technical as possible and I will strive to explain the slang as clearly as I can.

So I’ve started this reviewing journey that you can follow here. I will not be cc-ing my review to this blog but I will be taking questions via this post if there are any.

So feel free to drop me a line if you feel like it.

Cheers…

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

Sun have released not too long ago a Java ME SDK 3.0 that finally brings an official Wireless Toolkit Emulator to the Mac platform.

I have been dealing with SUN software for a while now and I was not expecting this to be a smooth ride. Those who’d dealt with the WTK on Windows/Linux platform are well aware of the limitations of these emulators. What I was not prepared for was to get so much clutter that would just not work more than a couple of times.

First impression: this wtk looks like the most polished emulator ever released by Sun.

Sadly, after using the thing for a few days I discovered that the old habits had not changed:

• there is no menu entry to run an existing jad/jar pair. You have to right click on an emulator instance and then run it…
• you cannot set-up a project starting from a jad/jar pair. There used to be an option to do this back in wtk 2.2…
• after running a couple of apps the whole thing crashes an burns
• when closing down the wtk a process is left lingering. Run this in a terminal:  ps aux | grep device-manager.app
• switching the verbose mode when launching the emulator kills the whole thing dead!
• they bundled ant 1.7.1 with the distro although ant is built in Mac OS
• Permgen errors are thrown if you try to launch the app too often. LOL

Here’s what happened when I created a new project and tried to run it:

*** Error ***

Failed to connect to device 0!

Reason:

Emulator 0 terminated while waiting for it to register!

The same thing happens with Emulator 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and … you get the picture.

Googling did return lots of forum posts, but hardly any answers…

So after wasting more than 2 hours on this issue I did the unthinkable: rebooted my mac! To my surprise the miracle happened during the reboot: I was finally able to run the project again.

Needless to say I am very disappointed but not surprised by the quality of this, early access, Java ME SDK.

Cheers…

Today I had to update WelliBUS’s search bar programmatically because I needed to use the street picked up via GPS as my street name.

Until this point implementing the search bar seemed easy:

• adopt a couple of protocols: UISearchDisplayDelegate and UISearchBarDelegate
• implement a few callback methods (from the delegates listed above)

- (BOOL)searchDisplayController:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller shouldReloadTableForSearchString:(NSString *)searchString;
- (BOOL)searchDisplayController:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller shouldReloadTableForSearchScope:(NSInteger)searchOption;
- (void)searchDisplayControllerDidBeginSearch:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller;
- (void)searchDisplayControllerDidEndSearch:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller;

• and implement my own filtering function

- (void)filterContentForSearchText:(NSString*)searchText scope:(NSString*)scope;

The problem I had on my hands was how to programmatically update the text in the UISearchBar and force the UISearchDisplayDelegate to call the appropriate callback methods.

Turns out it was simpler than expected (despite not being able to find a solution by googling). All that was needed was:

[self.searchDisplayController.searchBar becomeFirstResponder];
self.searchDisplayController.searchBar.text = returnString;

Cheers…

Today I have finally added Push Notifications to Parcel Trackr.

I decided not to waste time and I went for Urban Airship. I registered, uploaded my push certificate, downloaded the sample and integrated the two systems.

Not everything went smoothly though because when I first ran the application I got a

Failed to register with error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3000 UserInfo=0×120610 “no valid ‘aps-environment’ entitlement string found for application”

I thought my provisioning profile did not include the right entitlement… so I re-downloaded it and tried again. Turns out I was using the wrong provisioning profile.

So if you want to avoid my mistake just make sure that after you’ve configured push services in the iPhone Dev Center you download the updated provisioning profile and then you install it via XCode.

Other things worth checking include: the product name in your build configuration matches the app id and of course, the ultimate solution, clean all targets before building!

Cheers…

It’s as simple as:

1
2

theTextField.contentVerticalAlignment = UIControlContentVerticalAlignmentCenter;
theTextField.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentCenter;

Basically this will ensure that no matter how tall your text field is the actual text will be centered both vertically and horizontally.

Cheers…