Develop & Test Palm Pre apps Under Safari Without the SDK Update: I’ve removed the download link, since this constitutes a redistribution of Palm’s code. You can still play with this by downloading the system restore image from Palm and either putting the code in the right place on your hard drive where all of the hard-coded paths will resolve,…

List of open source software used in the Pre I was just poking around in the filesystem of the Palm Pre, and I found a pdf file containing all of the open source software licenses used in the phone. I thought it was interesting to see all of the different packages that went into making WebOS tick.

First impressions on the Palm Pre I just got my hands on Palm’s latest entry into the smartphone market, the Pre. I’ve been talking this one up for the last few months, and I’m happy to say that I don’t think that Palm has let me down. My expectations were pretty high, but really I was bracing myself for a…

VirtualBox pause feature I just found that VirtualBox has the ability to instantly pause a running VM. Under VMWare server you had to suspend the instance if you wanted to free up your CPU. I think that Microsoft Virtual PC may have this instant pause feature as well. This is pretty cool for us laptop users that are on battery…

Database connection anti-patterns I was looking back at some older code in our codebase, and found one class that created a database connection for its own internal use. This is a Windows service, and we are creating a database connection in the OnStart event handler of the service: protected override void OnStart(string[] args) { ms_logger.Info( "OnStart(): Service started" ); LoadAppConfig();…

Accidental market segmentation I’ve been thinking more critically about how Ubernote fits into the online note-taking market recently as a result of our LaunchBox application. Before you can start thinking about how your product fits into a market, you have to think about how that market is defined, and how it is segmented. From a pure business standpoint, a market…

Moving VirtualBox Machines from Linux to Windows As I’ve noted previously here on the blog, I use VirtualBox for my Windows development machines. I’m going to be trying Windows Vista out for a bit, since it shipped on my new laptop. However I’m going to keep my same virtual machines for dev until I get things situated natively. Moving the…

The Value of Being an Angel’s Advocate Today I had a discussion with a colleague about a very ambitious business plan that he was considering. He described a brutal multi-million dollar up-front startup cost and a very short runway to launch, along with a long sales cycle for the product. When I hear this kind of swing-for-the-fences business plan, I…

Installing 4GB Kingston RAM in the Thinkpad X200 Update: I have since successfully updated the firmware to v3.11 — see note below Update2: I have since installed 8GB of ram in this machine using the v3.11 firmware — see below I ordered my Thinkpad x200 with the minium amount of RAM possible, fully intending to upgrade it to a full…

Installing KDE 4.2 on Ubuntu 8.10 The KDE team announced the general availability of KDE 4.2 on Tuesday. The folks at Kubuntu were kind enough to have been hosting apt repositories of the beta releases all along, and they have followed by offering a binary release distribution as well . To install KDE from the Kubuntu repository Open sources.list in…