Full Posts from Current Stories Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:16:52 -0400 http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-88QQM4WindowsKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-88QQM4http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-88QQM4This comparison by Joćo Ribeiro is a great table listing all the Exchange features supported by various mobile phones.  I didn't realize you could provision all that stuff.  You can shut off a coworker's wifi as a policy setting...LOL...what a way to tick off a coworker ]]>Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:16:52 -04000http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=16EAF74049C585A68525778C006A210Chttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=16EAF74049C585A68525778C006A210Chttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-87WPG3NoneKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-87WPG3http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-87WPG3Ran into this trying to minimize the size of a VM running on my laptop (set up a 25GB drive for Win2008 and Sharepoint 2010).  Sharepoint will give you a cryptic error message in the log files and you have to look at the SQL Server Express install logs to see this (MS SQL Server refuses to install on a compressed file system, so you have to make the data directory uncompressed).  Also, install all the prerequisites manually (Win2008 SP2, then run the Sharepoint prerequisites installer).  If you're that close on disk space, you'll just get random failures and each install attempt involves sucking down 400MB off the network :-P

Then after all this, Sharepoint's configuration wizard ran the SQL DB install and ran out of memory (SQL Server cryptic error about "insufficient 'internal' memory" because I only allocated 768MB to the VM; it seems happy w/ 1.5GB).  And finally after that, the Sharepoint configuration wizard bombed out w/ a cryptic "SPUpdatedConcurrencyException: update conflict in OWS timer" error which luckily is covered in someone's blog entry which apparently happens a lot for different reasons (not just during configuration or user updates in that blog entry); and the workaround is to go clean out some xml files by hand in a hidden directory ("\ProgramData") on the windows drive.

Next I run another app that causes Sharepoint to repair itself, which fails because with a suggestion to a link that there are multiple versions of SQL Native Client installed which I fix by uninstalling (apparently, you can't have the SQL2005 and SQL2008 native clients installed), but it fails again with the same suggestion later but the log file claims the Sync Framework test failed.  So I uninstall all 4 Sync features, then do the repair again until it finally passes.

And then Sharepoint takes over port 80, so you can't run your own web sites on the machine (it kills off your Default Site without warning you).  All your previous URLs are greeted with a "404 NOT FOUND" error which you have to waste time debugging.

So I'd suggest a minimum: 40GB of disk for Sharepoint 2010 and 1.5GB of memory in a VM...though you're probably safer w/ 50GB and 2GB as mentioned in Nik Patel's blog.  With 1.5GB of memory allocated to the VM, I still saw the paging file go up to 2.9GB which I can't do much about because I only have 4GB on my laptop :-O

Sharepoint definitely feels like Microsoft's version of IBM's Large Wallowing Pig (aka Lotus Workplace)-: that was held together by bubble gum and wire and sucked craploads of memory and was a PITA to fix problems with :-P
]]>Sun, 1 Aug 2010 14:17:38 -04000http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=886E88A2033B5564852577720064943Ehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=886E88A2033B5564852577720064943Ehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-87TSZ7NoneKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-87TSZ7http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-87TSZ7Glad Google is listening:
  http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/licensing.html
This should at least prevent the easy piracy hack w/ the 24hr return policy

Now if they could only sik their lawyers after all the warez sites and shut them down :-P
]]>Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:18:38 -04000http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=FB20ADC09CCE56EB8525776F007522D4http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=FB20ADC09CCE56EB8525776F007522D4http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-85TTQWAndroidKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-85TTQWhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-85TTQWThe achilles heel of Google's Android domination is unfortunately their Android Market...specifically finding useful apps and pathetically weak anti-piracy measures.  Android Market is horribly hard to find things in because there is no web UI and the categorization tags are horridly weak; they should allow people to tag apps, or at the very least add more subcategories.  A web UI or desktop client is important to allow users to browse for apps from their desktop (Motorola's Shop4Apps store has a web UI at least).

This brings up the fragmentation of the Android app market.  While Apple has a single AppStore, Android has multiple App stores including the largest which is the Market, AndAppStore, and Motorola's Shop4Apps (there are more, but these are the ones that interest me).  Android Market is the largest but has a stupid 24hr return policy which makes piracy ridiculously rampant (users pay for it, back it up, get a refund, and then restore it to get a live pirated copy); payments have to be handled by Google Checkout.  How hard is it to add a Java wrapper that checks whether that app was ever refunded by that user???  Android Market also doesn't allow sales on some foreign markets.  Motorola's Shop4Apps is meant to address the deficiency in being able to sell to foreign markets and no longer has the stupid 24hr return policy.  AndAppStore has the best copy protection I've seen for Android apps, but you have to make users add license keys and manage keys yourself; payment is handled via Paypal.  Unfortunately, Android Market has the most users.

Once you've written an app, should you decide to offer a Lite (free) and Pro (paid) version, you have to make sure you put them in different Java packages.  The Android Market's upgrading and app finding is tied directly to your app's Java class package name (com.company.appname).  I had to change my Ant build script to rename packages in all the source code to get it to build separate versions.

So here are my suggestions to Google:
- get rid of the 24hr return policy if you have Lite/Pro versions of the app; users should be able to figure out whether the app is worth buying by trying the Lite version
- let users add cloud tags to apps and be able to vote the tags off
- add more subcategories (how hard could this be???)
- in your Java "protection" wrapper, at least check that a user hasn't refunded that app and/or tie it to their phone or phone#
- sue AndroidPlayground.net; how wacked is it that a site run by a couple of teens in Florida is flagrantly selling subscriptions to download pirated stuff on rooted phones and your lawyers aren't sharpening up their axes?
- add a web UI to browse the market..extra points if it's viewable on Android phones too
- add "top new apps for the week" to your Android Market phone app; the "top apps" stay the top apps because they're nearly always at the top of the home screen for users to click on

And a cheap plug for my first Android app
http://apps.doubletwist.com/Photo-Studio-Buddy-Lite/-3744675142063937776
]]>Wed, 26 May 2010 17:56:33 -04003http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=E0855C124461E99A8525772F00789FCFhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=E0855C124461E99A8525772F00789FCFhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-82TVBTIBM/LotusKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-82TVBThttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-82TVBTThe "man who should have used Lotus Connections" is a funny way to show how social media can be used in business:

episode 1
episode 2
episode 3
episode 4
episode 5
episode 6

It's on Websphere, but it's good to see Lotus Work Place growing up to be something more useful than the large wallowing pig it was
I wish ads like this were used to promote Lotus Notes w/ some bundled app templates 10 yrs ago :-P
]]>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:18:02 -04000http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=7991B5702352AFC6852576CF00800B27http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=7991B5702352AFC6852576CF00800B27http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7ZFQQJNoneKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7ZFQQJhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7ZFQQJWell..this was lot more painful than it needed to be, so I thought I'd document it for posterity (aka Google to find  
I had to port a web app development environment to an EmbeddedArm TS-7260 running Linux 2.4 because the current environment consisted of a bunch of cgi shell scripts that "printed" HTML code back as web pages.
]]>Wed, 6 Jan 2010 14:22:23 -04003http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=7363F393BA6629C7852576A3006A6BDFhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=7363F393BA6629C7852576A3006A6BDFhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7Z2QS9WindowsKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7Z2QS9http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7Z2QS9This was far more painful than it needed to be after following this tutorial so thought I'd mention that last step that was missing for me.  The local LAN connection and the OpenVPN TAP driver connection have to be bridged.  Your network connections should look like this after you're done:

Those two connections are bridged and you set your host system's bridge IP address in the Network Bridge's properties.  Then when starting QEMU, you give it these parameters:
 -net nic -net "tap,ifname=OpenVPN Connection"
And in your QEMU VM, you set an IP address in the same subnet as your host IP (e.g., 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.10).  You tell the QEMU VM to use the same gateway and DNS server as your host machine as well.

I needed QEMU to run an ARM emulator running Debian to compile apps for a TS-7260 board.
]]>Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:25:08 -04000http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=FF5AA116FF4A450A85257696006AD14Fhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=FF5AA116FF4A450A85257696006AD14Fhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7XPVS6.NetKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7XPVS6http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7XPVS6When you use JQuery UI's Dialog plugin to bring up a div as a dialog, it usually pulls the div out of the form to do this and then ASP.Net elements don't work.  I found this clean solution to this from Ravi's Software+Usability Blog:
In your dialog creation code, add an open event handler:
    $('#divDialog').dialog({
      bgiframe: true, autoOpen: false, height: 175,
      width: 600, minWidth: 200, modal: true,
      open: function(type,data) {
        $(this).parent().appendTo("form");
      }
    });
This will bring the ASP.Net elements back inside the form so they can post back to the ASPX page properly.
]]>Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:40:57 -04002http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=47B483BE93188F338525766B00822556http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=47B483BE93188F338525766B00822556http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7WZQWPNoneKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7WZQWPhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7WZQWPSeems like a bad oversight on MS' part.  Why would you want to read the DTD each time XmlDocument.LoadXml() is called? :-P
Someone was nice enough to write a caching XML resolver so you can save your bandwidth if you use LoadXml to parse files off a web site on nablesoft.
]]>Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:32:13 -04000http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=D94C89BDAC4727C985257655006B6501http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=D94C89BDAC4727C985257655006B6501http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7WRSSKIBM/LotusKen K. Yeehttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7WRSSKhttp://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-7WRSSKIn the early days of Notes, all the Notes clients included the "Designer" app that let power users create their own apps so most users could see how useful Notes was instead of having to wait for approval to get a corporate programmer to spend time creating something.  This way, they could prototype something they knew best about and the official developers could make it act like standard apps afterwards.  XPages is now more complete and very usable for applications that are more web-centric.  Check the Lotus site for more details. ]]>Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:08:01 -04000http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/CommentsRSS?Open&id=EA1F53D7CD812F538525764D00742893http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/PostComment?RunAgent&id=EA1F53D7CD812F538525764D00742893