rishel.org

1. Lottery ticket number generator
2. Toddler toy
3. Hammer testing device
4. Wobbly table leg shim
5. Blog post fodder

In order to silence Ben's nagging, here are my thoughts on the G1 after about 2 days.

Pros:
• Browser works well. No multitouch, but the interface is quite usable. No flash, but embedded youtube videos can be opened in the youtube app from the browser. I wrote this blog post in the browser.
• Hardware. Feels solid, but not a brick. The keyboard slides out with a satisfying thunk.
• Copy/Paste. Doesn't work everywhere, like on random text in the browser, but the browser will copy phone numbers and urls.
• Android Market. Blows away the app experience on Windows Mobile 5, and I guess very similar to the iPhone experience, but definitely feels more.. wild west. There are some really odd apps out there. More on these in another post later.
• Notification pulldown. This is the biggest UI innovation of Android. Background apps let you know they have something to show you, yet don't get in the way of what your doing.

Cons:
• Bluetooth. It has it, but I can't seem to pair with the handsfree in my car. None of the apps can interact with it either. I hope this is near the top of the android dev teams list
• Occasional Slowdown. Sometimes the system hangs momentarily when you change between a lot of apps in a short period of time. This is most likely some apps saving state and shutting down. Very minor issue.
• Battery Life. Could be better, but I've had much worse.

I'm really liking what I've seen of Android, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have one by November. Everyone seems to have a list of the announced apps they want to use but I'd like to find replacements for the following apps I'm pretty happy with in the Windows Mobile world.

1. SSH client. right now I use PocketPutty, but development seems to have staled, so I doubt there will be any quick port to Android. ConnectBot looks promising.
2. Flickr uploader w/ geotagging. Shozu is pretty awesome on Windows Mobile and Symbian, and they recently came out with an iPhone app. The Android devs have a sample app called Photostream to view Flickr photostreams, but it doesn't appear to have upload capabilities.
3. a podcatcher. I currently use Egress for Windows Mobile, which used to be my feed reader of choice as well, but I think google reader has taken over there and I just don't bother with most feeds on my phone anymore. Google reader + google gears on android will be pretty killer. but I'd still want way to grab all my podcasts.
4. Twitter client. TinyTwitter is doing a bang-up job on windows mobile and java phones. Twitterdroid looks promising and was recently open sourced.

So, since the majority of the geeks reading this already have iPhones, what useful apps are guys using that I should hope to find ports for an Android version? (that last sentence is horrible, but you get the gist.)

No one seems to have written a log rotation script for the Proliant Support Pack logs that are stored in /var/spool/compaq/cma.log, so I thought I'd throw mine up here in case someone else needs one. put this in a file called "cma" in /etc/logrotate.d/

/var/spool/compaq/cma.log {
compress
missingok
size=100M
postrotate
/sbin/service hpasm restart 2> /dev/null > /dev/null || true
endscript
}

That's it. this will be picked up by the daily cronjobs and keep things from getting messy. if you want to test your config without doing any changes, run logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf which will output the work it plans on doing. If your big log hasn't rotated in that example, run logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf which force the job to run. those 6 gigs of logs are now a tidy 39 megs.

• links for 2008-03-13:
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    Handy Latin Phrases

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    Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat.

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    (tags: latin humor list)

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