Monthly Archives: August 2009

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2009/08/25

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hecl

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Open Source Infrastructure?

What’s your opinion?

I’m considering moving the Hecl project to something a bit more modern in terms of infrastructure.

My rough idea is:

  • The web site stays at http://www.hecl.org

  • github for version control

  • Google Groups for the mailing list.

  • Google Code for the bug tracker. Or is github’s up to snuff at this point?

I don’t need much – Hecl isn’t a huge project in terms of code or number of committers, but SF is starting to feel a bit… “creaky”, so I have started thinking about alternatives, even if we’re in no hurry to jump.

Attracting talent to work on the project is definitely one of my biggest concerns. I think that Groups and Github definitely make that easier than SourceForge, but on the other hand, git is fairly new, and I’m not sure how widely it’s used outside of that geeky core that jumps on anything new.

What do you think? Is it going to be more disruptive to switch infrastructure than the gains from slightly more modern systems? Is it worth switching at all? Is it worth trying to use something like Google Code that at least groups most of the bits and pieces together? If you found it worthwhile to move away from SF, what was the “breaking point” for you?

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2009/08/12

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Windows for Developers?

Unfortunately, in order to do some BlackBerry hacking, it looks like I need a copy of MS Windows, to run under some sort of virtualization software. It’s possible to get most of the bits and pieces sort of working under Linux, but I don’t want to spend too much time fiddling; I’d rather spend it hacking.

To be brief and to the point: anyone out there know if there are deals for developers, open source or otherwise, to buy a legitimate copy of Windows? It’d sure be easy to just download it, but I believe in respecting other developers’ licenses just as I want them to respect mine.

However, if I could save a few bucks and spend them on my daughter Helen, instead of Mr. Gates and company, I sure wouldn’t mind. Any ideas?

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2009/08/11

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Running the BlackBerry Emulator on Linux

I seem to have gotten it to work, more or less consistently (although I’ll keep my fingers crossed).

The first step is: do everything this guy says, and thank him profusely, as he seems to have blazed a path for everyone else to follow.

http://www.slashdev.ca/2008/03/27/blackberry-simulator-in-linux-sort-of/

Keep in mind that newer versions of the JDE (mine is 4.7) have different devices, so create, for instance, a 9500.sh instead of the 8800.sh.

These points bear repeating, as gleaned from the comments on the above post.

  1. Make sure you have the very latest Wine that you can find and is somewhat stable. I used this: deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt intrepid main
  2. Get gdiplus.dll (search for it with Google) and install it in your .wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ directory. (From Cay in the comments).
  3. Get msxml.msi (Google, again) and run it like so: wine start msxml.msi, which should install it in wine for you. (From Patrick).
  4. Edit your shell script to make wine stick with one processor: task -c 0 wine fledge.exe .... (From Andrey in the comments)

To load up your hello world application, select the file menu, “load java program”, and then in the emulator, go to the ‘downloads’ section (double clicking on the main screen should get you to the applications). Your app should be there.

So far so good, although the whole thing is a gigantic pain in the neck compared to development with platforms like Java ME or Android, where Linux versions exist.

Update

Sadly, it still randomly exhibits problems. How frustrating.