2009/02/28

Connect a Bluetooth GPS with your eeePC

I am in the process of porting my 2 years old GPS application to Linux. Basically it:
  1. Connect to your garden varieties Bluetooth GPS device
  2. The program will load your GPS coordinates every 20 seconds
  3. And display your coordinate on Google Map
Nothing too fancy on Mac. Just go to the "System Preferences", click a few button and *boooom* (chimed in by Mr. Steve Jobs) it just works.

Now, doing this thing on Linux should have involved just a few commands. The eeePC wiki has this guide that is tl:dr for me. Here are the 3 lines command to connect to your GPS.
hciconfig hci0 up
rfcomm connect 0 00:0B:0D:6D:90:A9
gpsd /dev/rfcomm0

Line #1: Bring up the bluetooth device
Line #2: Connect to the bluetooth GPS device with ID 00:0B:0D:6D:90:A9
Line #3: Bring up gpsd

How to find the ID of the bluetooth device? Use the command:

hcitool scan

Hope this page will help somebody figuring out the bluetooth GPS setup for eeePC.

Link list for today

  1. Box.net: Don’t launch a storage service if you’re going to close down within a year. I like Dropbox a lot because I always keep a cache on my local computers regardless. Webdrive only kind of services sucks.
  2. How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data: interesting way to store
  3. Upgrading MySQL with Replication: interesting
  4. Cut a pizza with laser
  5. Why lenses are the real key to stunning photos
  6. JQuery File upload plugin
  7. DJBDNS on Mac OS X HOW-TO

2009/02/26

Link list for today

  1. PDF to Word online convertor
  2. BWToolkit: cool interface builder plugin for Cocoa
  3. sslstrip: hacking ssl in local network
  4. Etherpad: interesting real time text editor like the SubEthaEdit, except it's web based.

2009/02/25

Link list for today

  1. Cappuccino and 280 Atlas look too good to be true
  2. Firefox 3.1 has huge improvements: HTML5 video support and insane Javascript engine upgrade
  3. Mailchimp integration with Wufoo: maybe all these Web 2.0 BS finally means web services can interactive with each other nicely
  4. Ivona: great text-to-speech engine
  5. Windows Live Mail actually supports POP3 for free now.

HK Q4 GDP Fell 2.5% in 2008. HK Govt expects 2009 GDP decline of 2-3%



2009/02/24

Link list for today

  1. Mighty Mouse 徹底清潔教學-分解篇
  2. XenServer is now free (from Slashdot). (Almost plan to install a XenServer Express today...)
  3. PyBrain - machine learning library for python?!
  4. Google App Engine can buy quotas now, finally. Reduced free qoutas in May: 10GB in-and-out to 1GB, 46 CPU-hrs per day to 1 CPU-hrs per day, but fixed quotas for applications with billing enabled will not be affected.

WebObjects Tutorial for the year 2009

What takes Apple so long to produce a a decent WebObjects tutorial with Eclipse?

2009/02/20

3 Hong Kong has visual voice mail in Hong Kong for iPhone

3 Hong Kong has Visual Voicemail for iPhone. Free for the first 2 months, $1 USD per month afterwards.

2009/02/19

Django CMS

Django flatpages is great when you only has a simple site with a "title" and "content" block. Anything more than that will give you trouble, such as multiple locales, extra picture uploads box, etc.

Looks like Django CMS looks pretty interesting with WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop interface. Yea yea yea you can add a TinyMCE in 5 lines of code with flatpages, but somebody else did the dirty for you here. Will try this on my next Django project.

SMS API verdict: 1328.hk

I have been looking for a nice SMS API.

Tried this Clickatel company. Their SMS always sent from the +44 country code, which should be England. Price is too expensive with setup fees. Simplewire also offers SMS API, but I don't think they offer simple GET/POST gateway, but gave you some DLL/.JAR file to integrate with. Nah, too much work.

So turns out there are 2 local Hong Kong companies that offers SMS cheaply without setup fees:
  • 1328.hk - This company's website looks seriously crap but hey, who cares if it works. I debit $200 HKD into their HSBC bank account and got the SMS API working in an hour. Rocks. Funny their company's main support hotline is a cellphone number... are they hiding something....?!
  • AccessYou - This company also offers SMS API. Didn't try. Let me know if you do. (By the way, my boss has been seeing their magazine ads on PCM and E-Zone, pestering me to give them a ring. This company 's magazine ad actually said they offers FAX API. Hey that has to be my dream come true... pass a super big TIFF/PDF with a phone number to their API, and *bang*, fax comes out from Intratubes to your fax machine. Turns out when I called them for a quote, they said they 'no longer' offer this service... good move. Your server would be end-of-story by keep receiving big API payloads... )

English book stores in Hong Kong

I have a lot of trouble finding good English technical books in Hong Kong after so many years ordering from Amazon.

There are a few good local bookstores to buy and pre-order:
  • Swindon Books offer good ordering service. I ordered TAOCP from them (okay, I'm still stuck in book 1. TAOCP are those books belong to the "A Brief History of Time" category i.e. looks good on the bookshelf). It arrived in 4 weeks and delivered straight to my office.
  • My personal favorite bookstore is the Data Bank in Causeway Bay. They are a small bookshop and seem to really care about computer books. They have quirky books like Programming Erlang, Programming Collective Intelligence as well as the whole shebang iPhone SDK books collections. Their shop is 2 buildings away from Sogo, right next to the Mioggi tower.
  • Unknown bookshop on the basement floor of Golden Computer Centre. They are a big English bookstore right underneath the stairwell, on the South Western entrance. They have a lot of Microsoft, RoR and a few Python books. Their books are more general than Data Bank, but do have quirks sometime. Bought my Rapid GUI Programming with Python and QT book there.
If you know a few more, please let me know!!! Of course you can still order online from Amazon....

2009/02/18

Hi. Welcome to Kenneth Anguish's blog.

Hi. Welcome to my blog. My nick is Kenneth Anguish, or just short for kenguish.

Generally this blog is all about web and software development stuff like Python, iPhone SDK and Django. I will figure out some other interesting topics to write here.