In other news, I have been geeking out with both the iPhone SDK and the Android SDK, and I believe I have a little something special going here. I hope to have it ready for release, on both platforms, sometime in January. Development continues.

I will need beta testers soon. Any T-Mobile G1 users interested in helping out, you can email me at dreadpiratepj [at] gmail [dot] com

Speaking of Android, I started playing with it now that the source code to the whole thing has been released. I managed to get Android booting on a Palm TX, but it still needs a lot of work. It boots, but it doesn’t do crap once it boots.

I get all the way to the “Press the MENU key to unlock” screen, but none of the keys do anything. Neither does touching the screen. It’s an issue with the Linux kernel drivers and device configuration. It just wasn’t made to run on a Palm TX without proper tweaking of the source. I just don’t know what the proper tweaking is.

I need to look in my bag of loot for a Palm serial cable (I’m sure I have one somewhere) and hopefully I can get a serial console from which to poke around inside Android.

I do have Android running successfully on my Sprint Touch (my parents, my sister and I have a family plan on Sprint.) Credit for that goes to Dr. Martin Johnson in New Zeland. I just use his release on my phone (before you ask, no, his release doesn’t work on the Palm TX. It’s the first thing I tried.

The new WordPress administrative interface is a lot less cluttered, and more useful information is shown on the main page. The look is cleaner while remaining usable. It looks like a lot of time and effort was spent improving it.

Rather than tip my hat at the WordPress folks one more time (it’s getting old to do that every few months) I’m just going to give them Dread Pirate PJ’s Hoard of Loot lifetime award.

The image is from playrough’s photostream on Flickr.

Upgrading WordPress itself is fairly easy, but upgrading your plugins can be an annoying manual process. You have to disable the plugin on the admin dashboard, download the new version, move the old files out of the way and put the new ones in place, then re-enable the plugin on the dashboard. You typically do this one plugin at a time, to check for problems and rollback as needed. Take my word, it’s annoying doing this for more than two plugins at a time, even though it is still a fairly easy process.

In 2.5, the WordPress developers have now made plugin updates as easy as in desktop applications like Firefox. That makes the whole management of the weblog much easier and more hassle-free than it ever was.

I am probably going to wait a few weeks once 2.5 is out, to let any bugs and issues shake out. But it sounds like a really worthwhile upgrade. I’m really glad to run WordPress here. Hats off once again to the WordPress developers.

Technorati Tags:
weblog.engines, upgrades, wordpress

As is tradition in most blogging circles, I’m posting to let you know I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest version. My buddy Ken already beat me to it, as always.

I upgraded the Bad Behavior plugin while I was at it. One of my pet theories regarding why I have fewer akismet spam caught than other sites, like Ken’s, is that Bad Behavior blocks most malicious spam bot-like behavior. That leaves akismet with less spam getting through and being caught.

I like my pet theories, they help me sleep at night.

—

I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails for over 18 months now, and it continues to be a lot of fun. There are still challenges, as projects are never a total walk in the park. There is also new stuff to learn almost every week. The Rails team keeps improving the framework, and the community keeps authoring more plugins. Keeping up is a demanding part of the job, but it adds to the fun factor.

One activity I’ve been doing lately on my own time is learning different programming languages, development environments, and frameworks. The move to Rails from Java seems to have been a good choice career-wise, and I did it by trying to keep current on technology. I want to be ready for the next shift, whatever that may happen to be and whenever it comes into prominence.

—

After many attempts, I finally had published not just one IT-related article, but three, at IBM DeveloperWorks and Amazon Web Services Developer Portal. The articles were published between late October and late December 2007. They are:

Display Google Calendar events on your PHP Web site with XPath

Don’t Get Caught with Your Instance Down

Using Parameterized Launches to Customize Your AMIs

These articles are just the start of a shift from developing software as one of the faceless multitude of IT geeks, to being somewhat more known among my peers. I hope to turn these and other articles into presentations at software development conferences in 2008. Hopefully this enhanced exposure and networking will lead to great new things in 2008 and beyond.

—

Just before beginning this post, I updated WordPress to the latest stable version. I am always amazed by how easy WordPress upgrades are. Considering how easy it is to write unmaintainable crap in PHP, the WordPress team deserves a big standing ovation for doing software right in PHP.

The theme I had up for the last year was not compatible with the change to WordPress 2.3.x, so I picked out a totally different theme this once. It’s really simple and unobtrusive. If I get creative, I may tweak it or pick another theme altogether.

—

That’s it for now. I’ll try to post more often. Feel free to give me a nudge in the comments if I let posting to the weblog slide again.

Technorati Tags:
life, weblogs, software.development, wordpress