BeaverBlog

I just got an email with a signup key to join the beta of PhoneGapBuild! For those who doesn’t know what PhoneGap is; It’s a really sweet wrapper application that let you build advanced mobile applications for iOS, Android, webOS and more using html/css/js. I’m currently building a small app for Någonting Större mainly aimed at the iPhone but with the idea to someday compile it for Android aswell. With PhoneGapBuild that part just turned really easy. I zipped my contents, uploaded the zip-file, waited a few minutes and then I could download my app for Android aswell!

When my app(s) are ready I’ll be sure to post a note here (and for Android, a download link) so stay tuned!

More info about PhoneGapBuild (and a form to apply for the beta) can be found at http://build.phonegap.com/. More information about PhoneGap is available at http://www.phonegap.com/

I’m currently experiencing some problems with the syntax highlighting script after upgrading to WordPress 2.9.1. I will try to sort it out tonight but I’m afraid it might come to going back through all posts and editing them. Stay tuned!

This is mostly a small note to myself. I keep having problems with the input language changing when working with an application run via Citrix, seems like the guys (or gals for that matter) over at IT-services didn’t uninstall the default languages (I’m Swedish and sincerely miss some of the Swedish letters when writing) so I keep hitting this hotkey-combination that I can’t ever remember. Next time I’ll just look here.

To change language (when you can’t or don’t want to use the Language Bar) you press the following:

Left ALT + SHIFT

I’m a huge fan of batchfiles (.bat) in Windows. They are usually so simple to write and can help you out with automating tasks that otherwise would be a pain in your ass. As an example, here is a little file I’ve set up at work for my coworkers to be able to convert movieclips to .wmv.

@echo off
"J:\PathToOurMovieArchive\ffmpeg.exe" -i %1 -b 1024k -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -ar 44100 -ab 48000 -ac 1 -y %1-convertedHQ.wmv
pause

It’s simple enough. Don’t output anything and then execute ffmpeg,exe with the specified parameters taking the first of the dropped files as input. Works great and produces a wmv-movieclip in the same folder as the original file. The problem with this file is that it if you drop two files on this batch it will only convert the first one, which forces you to drag them one by one and then have them run simultaneously which might not be desirable on a slow computer.

To solve this problem I went to the all mighty Google and found the FOR IN command. My problem was that it I couldn’t find any samples with it working with dropped files and I couldn’t get it working by just doing FOR %i in (%*). The problem (according to the help for the FOR-command availabile in FOR /?) was that if used in a batchfile I need to designate my variable as %%i instead of %i. After changing that it all worked like charm. So this is how my batchfile ended up, it supports any number of dropped files (well I guess it has a built in limit such as 65335 or something though I’m pretty sure my coworkers won’t drop more then 10 files) and then executes each file in order and not all at once.

@echo off
for %%i in (%*) do "J:\PathToOurMovieArchive\ffmpeg.exe" -i %%i -b 1024k -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -ar 44100 -ab 48000 -ac 1 -y %%i-convertedHQ.wmv
pause

I hope that this was to some help for somebody. If you have any other good tips on scripting with batchfiles then please add a comment about it as I’m always eager to learn new things with this great technique.

It’s been three weeks since I quit my old job now. Three weeks and I finally feel that I’m getting back to coding for the fun of it. I’m currently going through my old projects seeing what needs to be completed, tidying up my svn repositories, fixing this blog (more on that below) and so on. I’m also working on a small techdemo for a small game I’ve been working on with a friend of mine using XNA that hopefully will turn out as a really fun project and a really cool game. More on that in a later post though.

I’ve been doing some work on this blog the last few days, I changed the url to get it closer to my main site, updated WordPress to 2.7 (whoa, suddenly I’ll want to write things just to see their awsome GUI), added some stubs to articles and codesnippets that I feel I want to post and I’ve finally added my feed to feedburner to get some stats on my subscribers aswell (and avoid the hassle for everyone to change their subscription url if I decide to move again). The new url to subscribe to is http://feeds.feedburner.com/crazybeavers/blog.

Oh, and I’m home sick today so if this post doesn’t make any sense to you I’ll blame it on my cold.

I’ve decided to move the blog to a new adress at http://blog.crazybeavers.se/. The old url is still valid for a month or so but I decided not to renew the domain. If you subscribe to my rss-feed (yeah right, like someone does) then you’ll have to update the url to that one as soon as possible.

Lets see now, on the 10th of June I moved into my new apartment and on the 26th of October I got my internet connection installed. Thats about four and a half month without an internet connection. About a month ago lightning struck and fried a few parts in my web server so I had to replace them, this caused the Windows 2003 installation to fail so I had to reinstall everything which took ages. Since I didn’t have an internet connection at home I decided against putting the server back in it’s original place until I could monitor it closely (and install everything properly since some parts had to be downloaded again). This led to some massive downtime for beaverblogg, crazybeavers.se, beaverpage and a few other sites of which most are restored now.

I’m currently worked up with school and some other (paid) projects but I also have lots of cool stuff coming up for CrazyBeaver Software. First of all I’ve setup my own Subversion server on which I will host most of my new projects making the source available to everyone! To start with I will be the only one who can make commits but that might change if someone shows a real interest in helping out. I’ve also setup Trac to help managing the larger projects (such as ImagerGallery.Net) by giving me a great platform for handling bug and feature requests. Hopefully I’ll have all this aswell as the new CrazyBeaver Software up and running before 1st December but since I don’t know how much I’ll need to do for school and my other projects. Keep watching this spot (maybe subscribe to my RSS feed?) for more info!

It’s been quiet around here lately. I moved to a new apartment a bit over a month ago now and won’t get an internet connection for at least another month it seems so things are going a bit slowly on the development front. I’ve managed to put together a few things though which might be of help to some.

First of all is a .Net library (and client) for working with DynDns services named DynDnsLib (and CrazyBeaversDnsUpdater for the client application) for people who want to add support for DynDns services to their applications. More information (and sourcecode via SVN) can be found at the link below.

http://beaverdnsupdater.devjavu.com/

Second up is an implementation of the Akismet (spam detecting service that WordPress and a few others use) API for .Net 2.0. It is a quite basic implementation that could be extended a bit more if someone wants to but it should be working fairly well as it is. More info (not much) and source at the link below.

http://akismetlib.devjavu.com/

None of these projects are in their final version, but both works fairly well at least. If anyone want to contribute to any of these projects then send me an email to karl.sjogren@gmail.com and tell me what you want to implement/change and I’ll consider giving you write access to the SVN repository.

When thinking about it, checking out source from an SVN repository might be a bit tricky unless you know what you are doing, maybe I should put together an article for that aswell some day if people seem to want it.

*NOTE*
If you came here looking for the ISAPI on Windows 2003 tutorial it has been moved to here due to a database crash.

The first ever stable release of Pidgin is out! For those who didn’t know, Pidgin is the new name of the great IM client Gaim. Everyone that has grown tired of all the extra stuff that comes with regular msn messenger, aol messenger or almost any other IM protocoll this is really worth trying. For more info on the new release you just have to head over to www.Pidgin.IM and have a look!

I’ve been using the Devjavu service for a while now and I think its great. You get a Subversion repository AND Trac hosted for FREE!

Wait now, its free, does that mean that there will be tons of ads and shit? Not this time. You get everything for free, you can use it for open source, commercial, academic and even personal projects! If you don’t want people to access your Trac and/or Subversion you can easily just turn it off in the admin panel! Take that SourceForge!

Anyway, Devjavu is still in beta but you can easily request to be part of the beta (really nice guys over there and it works perfectly well) and enjoy all the great things you get via Subversion and Trac. As said earlier I have to projects hosted there already and I can’t do anything but recommend this awsome service. Check it out!