David's Computer Stuff Journal

Here's the idea: there are tons of games and things out there for j2me (err, make that "Java ME"), and it's a fairly simple API, it'd be nice to have something that's a bit less than an actual phone, that can be loaded up with stuff to play.

I'm specifically thinking of my daughter when I talk about this - she loves to grab mom and dad's phones and run around with them, but it'd be better if she had something of her own, and, hey, why not make it something real where I could write some neat little games or interactive things?

There are some mobile phones that are getting very cheap, that would probably do nicely, but the really cheap ones don't have J2ME. I think the price for this should be under 50 dollars.

I suppose the best thing would be to find a cheap phone on eBay, but I think there's a market for something similar to what I'm describing.

Jeff Atwood, of "Coding Horror", snarkily writes, via twitter:

programming language popularity. they should award tiaras! http://langpop.com/

Since LangPop.com site was due for an update, in the same spirit of snarky fun, I am calling this release the Jeff "Tiara" Atwood release as a way of saying thanks for driving a lot of traffic my way.

Nothing much new this month, really. A lot of people have been asking for Scala, so perhaps that will appear in the coming months. I think it probably shows up on most of the metrics now.

Yes, I know, the Amazon results are still borked. If anyone out there knows the team at Amazon that handles that stuff, it would be really great if you asked them to fix the fact that "C" == "C++" == "C#" in their search. Thanks!

PS, let he who is without copious amounts of "merit badges" cast the first tiara...

Not of concern to most people reading this via a feed, but it's one of those things I think is nice to write up as a public service, should anyone else encounter the same error. I'm stuck doing some Rails work with Oracle, and so I needed to get ruby-oci8 working:

http://ruby-oci8.rubyforge.org/en/InstallForInstantClient.html

These instructions are pretty good. I followed them, the gem said it had been installed correctly.... and yet:

ERROR: ActiveRecord oracle_enhanced adapter could not load ruby-oci8 library. Please install ruby-oci8 library or gem.
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_specification.rb:76:in
`establish_connection':RuntimeError: Please install the oracle_enhanced adapter:
`gem install activerecord-oracle_enhanced-adapter` (LoadError)

Argh! After some straceing, I finally figured out what was missing: the libaio1 package. You need to have it or things will fail like this. It's very odd that the installation doesn't complain about it.

I've been hacking away at http://www.bikechatter.com, adding a few things like votes and tags so that you can choose which broad categories you want to follow. The first will let people vote for the most interesting tidbits that come through twitter, whereas the second will let me add more people without overloading those who are, say, not interested in reading what coaches have to say, or are only interested in professional women racers, etc... I don't think I'll bother with individuals - if you want that, just add them to twitter yourself! At most I might see about putting in an 'exclude list'... but we'll see; I'd prefer to keep things simple.

Since I love cycling so much, adding stuff to this site has always just been kind of a fun side project, something to relax with in the evenings, rather than something I thought about in monetary terms. However, the basic idea seems to be popular, and as luck would have it, I've been approached by someone looking to buy the code behind BikeChatter to drive their own custom twitter site. If someone has gone to the trouble of writing me, there must be other people interested too, so I thought I'd publicly state that I'd be willing to do similar deals with people interested in having their own custom twitter site. Interested? Write me at davidw@dedasys.com . I'd be happy to tell you what the code can and cannot do, and discuss any ideas you may have, in order to let you know if it's a good fit, or if you'd have to do a lot of work.

The code is pretty straightforward Ruby on Rails. I use Postgres as a database, but others should work fine too. As is obvious, I'm not much of a design guy, but it shouldn't be too hard to plug in your own look and feel.