Wow I haven’t updated in a while.  I’d be lying if I had a lot of new things to talk about but I suppose there are some things of note.

I have some vacation property in BC that we visit regularly but still the commute is still quite far and so we don’t visit enough to feel secure about the place.  That and the fact that it’s vacation property so often when stuck working on a project that’s frustrating it would be nice to see what life is like where I’d rather be.  I figured, I have internet at my cottage, I have an old laptop that is collecting dust at home, I have a few old webcams, why not make a poor mans security system or web cam host at my cottage?

The problem is, a lot of the free web cam software is either terrible or not really free at all but subscription based.  Being a cheap mofo I’ll always go for free software, especially if it means I can tinker with it a bit too.

I discovered yawcam a LONG time ago and really like it.  The things typically that clobber these type of projects is that they either don’t work with the cameras themselves well, are too limited on the type of output (file, streaming, etc) they produce or they’re so poorly designed that they’re a nightmare to use.  Yawcam doesn’t have any of these problems (well that’s not entirely true but I’ll get to that later).  Yawcam does have some nice features too in that if you want you can have the software detect movement from the camera too so setting up a ‘cheap’ security system as well.  I installed Yawcam and configured my main camera that I bought cheap off ebay for $8 from Hong Kong and instantly it worked.  The nice thing was this cheap webcam I bought also had LED lights too which meant  could use it indoors for 24hour motion detection and security.  This is where I started running into troubles though.

1) I did have two cameras, I wanted to have one camera pointing outside so I could see what the weather was like, who was in the neighborhood, etc.  The problem is that the camera I wanted to point outside has terrible light compensation. Basically the entire image was SO blown out (due to the outdoor light) that it was impossible to see anything.  This meant that I had to use the camera that had LED lights on it to point outside and so no night time type monitoring.

2) yawcam does not ‘play well’ with multiple cameras.  The software supports being launched multiple times (for multiple cameras) but under the covers the configuration files would overwrite themselves so you have to have multiple copies of the same app in multiple folders otherwise all the configurations you did for one camera would overwrite the other camera’s configs.  Also the output stuff (I picked streaming) will actually cause one of the other streams to crash, even though the application looks like it’s running a user could not stream to one or the other stream, that entire camera was basically disabled.

What I did end up running was yawcam with webcamxp 5.  Webcamxp5 is okay, it pales in comparison to yawcam in terms of features but it works well enough in tandem to yawcam that I am happy with it.  If I ever find some free time I may look at debugging some of the odd behavior with yawcam in regards to multiple cameras (and their configurations) but for now what I need is working.

I took some time off this summer to catch up on spending time with family, reading, watching TV.  I hadn’t updated my blog in a while so I figured it was time.

I discovered HBO’s Game of Thrones, merely by chance to be honest, I think one of my regular news sites had a posting about being able to watch the first 15 minutes of their new show for free and since I really loved Rome (and was pissed off that it was cancelled too early) I thought I would check it out.  The 15 minute preview was really well done and so I invested some time in watching the entire season.  Near the end of the season I bought the books and starting reading them and was seriously hooked.  I hadn’t read any fantasy novels since high-school/college with the Dragonlance series so it was nice to get back into 1) reading  2) reading in a genre that I had forgotten about.  During summer I read all the books including GRRM’s new book.  The new book I got digitally and was actually surprised how well reading on a tablet/ereader would be.  I expected (like a lot of people do initially) that reading on the screen would not be the same but in many ways it was better as the reader I used managed bookmarks, it was easier to take the tablet around than a bulky 1000 page book and it was easy to review and find parts within the story that I needed to re-read.  I can see eReaders being the future, something I never expected until I enjoyed reading a great book on one.

I also managed to pick up Coalitions End by Karen Traviss, which is the 4th Gears of War book based off the video game.  I enjoyed all her other books so it was easy to get into this one.  It ties in really well to where the 3rd and last? game starts of, to be released on XBOX360 tomorrow.  I’m a huge Gears fan so I’m really looking forward to going through the game story with friends and playing online.  Normally I wouldn’t really considering reading a video-game tie-in book but the characters and world created by Epic are so engrossing and Traviss has a great style of writing that it was easy to get reeled in.  I recommend her books if you are interested in reading something a little different.

Wow I have been lazy and haven’t updated my blog for a while.  I finally got my Viewsonic gTablet and it’s a pretty decent device.  I found it really difficult to put on a screen protector (to be honest I’ve never had good luck putting on any screen protectors on any of my devices).  With the screen on the gTablet being so big it was really difficult to get the screen protector on straight and without little bits of lint and misc under the film.

Recently some rom developers managed to get Honeycomb onto the device which is what I’m running right now.  It works pretty well really, my biggest complaint is that flash doesn’t work yet.  The libraries for Honeycomb are cobbled together so that’s likely why but a large portion of the OS and device work well (hardware acceleration, wifi, browsing, google apps like gmail and the market).  It’s a shame that Viewsonic basically abandoned the device but thankfully so much of it is unlocked that it’s very easy to put new ROMS on it (and it has such an active community) that it makes up for the lack of support.  The fact that it’s less than 1/2 the price of the next true Honeycomb tablet makes it easier to ignore the quirks of the device as well.

I finished Crackdown 2 on XBox, it was a pretty big disappointment mostly because I loved the first game so much.  I found climbing in the game to be a lot more frustrating and buggy.  Things that I know I could climb in the first game were impossible to climb in the second.  The lack of story in the first game was annoying but the second game had even less of a story.  The character progression seemed a lot less fun too, they added more orbs (because more is better right?) but it just made the progression a lot less fun.  I never felt the sense of accomplishment that the first game had when you ‘leveled up’.

I started playing a new Indie game called Terraria.   It’s pretty simplistic but a lot of fun.  It follows the vein of your typical dungeon crawling Diablo/Larn/Hack game but a lot of the game follows the new genre Minecraft type game.  So far it’s pretty addicting but sadly it’s Steam enabled which means I have to be online (and not at work) to play it.

I liked the idea of a tablet but really you have to pay a decent amount of money to get anything worthwhile, that part I didn’t like.  It didn’t make sense to buy something that wasn’t supported or had glaring faults that were difficult to overlook.  These are the things I looked at regarding before buying a tablet:

1. CPU speed – if the device doesn’t have a viable CPU, that being something that is appropriately clocked (>600 mhz) or one that is older technology and poorly supported then the device will never be responsive
2. Memory – if the device doesn’t have a decent amount of memory a lot of the CPU time will be trying to manage memory slowing the device down (typically you’ll want more than 256mb)
3. Screen – if the device has a poor screen, difficult or impossible to read under certain circumstances and lighting or if the screen is not capacitive or does not allow for multi-touch then your choice for software may be limited or using the device may be difficult in many situations
4. Support – if there is no after-market or ‘hacking’ enthusiasts actively discussing or improving the device then it’s shelf life may be limited beyond what the device ships with.  Typically if there is no forum discussing your device on XDA or SlateDroid then it’s safe to say that you will get no support beyond what the device ships with.  Do NOT buy a device in hopes that it “may” get an OS improvement or has the specs to run a new OS / features because if no one writes the improvement for the device it can never had the improvement.

In many ways item #4 is the most important.  Hardware is only ever as good as the software running on it.  You can have a very advanced tablet in terms of memory, cpu, screen but if the software not well-written for it it’s response and use could be very limited.  In the same breath you can say even if the device has some glaring faults on the hardware side good software and good support can often help eke out the most from the device given it’s limited hardware.

I still need to get back to improving SudoTape.  I have some things I want to improve, the top two things:

1. reorganize some of the strings so that I can get localized versions
2. improve the performance of drawing the markers when zooming

for issue #1 I noticed that there are a number of users in Latin America using SudoTape.  To be honest the majority of comments about the app directly have been in Spanish so I think there is likely some value in getting the app ported to Spanish, by reorganizing the strings.xml that will be much easier to do.  It helps that I work with people who are natively Spanish so perhaps I can persuade them to convert the app to Spanish if the content is laid out easy in my source.

For issue #2 it bugs me that zooming in is sluggish in SudoTape if you have a few markers defined.  I have an idea where the slowdowns are but I haven’t spent much time optimizing it.  There will be some value in optimizing it as personally I have a few project images that I defined 2-3 markers on and the app seriously slows down when zooming.

I also bought a tablet this past week.  woot.com had a sale on a Viewsonic gTablet which on paper is very similar to the highly touted Motorola Xoom, except it was less than 1/2 the price.  Sadly Woot wouldn’t ship to Canada but my parents are snowbirds and live in Arizona during the winters so I had the device shipped to them.

I’m pretty excited (being your token male gadget lover) but I won’t receive the device until Easter at the earliest.  I guess it will give me time to do some reading and think of writing an app for the thing.  Luckily XDA has a great following for the device so there will be a lot of fun had modifying it as well.

I’ve been out for a while, I haven’t done any real software development outside of work for a while.. just taking a break.

I bought Mafia 2 on Steam the other week which was on sale, I hadn’t finished or played a game for a while so it was nice to take a break.

The other day a friend from work had me look at his cheap Android tablet.  It was a cheap iPad ripoff from China but being a geek I like gadgets so I took the device home to play with it.  My friend wanted to get Honeycomb on the thing but 1) Honeycomb isn’t officially released 2) there is NO XDA support for the device 3) the device is pretty slow.  It has a decent clocked CPU (1ghz) but only has 256 MB of memory and that 1ghz processor is the old Arm11 which from what I understand is slow and inefficient.  Nonetheless it was a fun experimentation and gave me a new appreciation for tablet computers.  Now if they would finally come down in price.

It seems to me that all tablet computers are overpriced.  For the amount the cheapest high end device that is being sold you could get a pretty great netbook (or if you shopped around a fully usable Laptop.  Sure you could argue that a tablet is a lot more portable but I can guarantee that the laptop is also a lot better at doing computer type things.  It’s likely the ‘it’ factor that tablets have that is driving their perceived value up.

With the release of Honeycomb there will be a lot of competition though so with luck we’ll able to pay a lot less for even more powerful device before the end of 2011.  Then it will become a matter of “is there enough tablet specific software to make the purchase a lot more attractive”.

When submitting your app to Google marketplace you’re given a nice screen that shows where people who ran your app encountered bugs.  You can use this screen to help point out problems in your code that perhaps you missed or overlooked.

SudoTape v1.2 and v1.3 now available on the market addresses a few of these issues.  Some bugs make sense and it’s pretty easy to see how the problem occurs but some bugs you can see how it would crash but it’s really difficult to envision how the code would have crashed there.  Sadly not many users actually write in the report how they encountered the crash to give you input on how to fix the bug.

I adjusted the camera media manager of SudoTape and updated CameraTest accordingly.  It seems to work even better on my device, hopefully others will agree.

I always ignored the ‘share’ option when taking a picture with the built in camera on my phone but after using it a few times with Facebook I realized how nice it worked.  I plugged this functionality into SudoTape so it’s now able to accept and use the share option as well.  Seems to work better for my Galaxy S than the camera capture that exists in SudoTape.  I think there are still timing issues in the capture process even with all the work I did regarding capturing images and the CameraTest prototype.

At any rate, go to the market and get v1.1

I finally released SudoTape to the market.  The last stretch was around testing and getting some of the final artwork done.

I initially listed it in the photography section of the market but this morning I revised it and put it in the tools section.  You don’t really need to have a camera on your device in order to use it so it makes more sense to put it in the tools section.  I don’t know if the market automatically filters stuff out so even if you don’t have a camera and the app doesn’t really need a camera I’m not sure if you’d see it as available to download or not.  Not that it matters though, I presume most devices come with at least one camera now anyway.

I had problems creating a signed APK, I never really read anything about it and Google’s information online is sketchy at best, at whatever documentation I found was related to Eclipse so it wasn’t much help since I use IntelliJ.  Luckily IntelliJ’s created signed APK wizard wasn’t too tricky so I uploaded the app and some art/screenshots last night.

Going to see if anyone downloads it to see how much I want to support it.  I’d like to add some other features like saving the files to DropBox, perhaps unit conversions on the define markers options dialog, etc.  If there is little interest I’ll hold off adding more features and think of a new project.

You can find SudoTape on the market here:  https://market.android.com/details?id=net.pixelsystems.sudotape

You can read SudoTape’s basic documentation here: http://pixelsystems.net/?page_id=66

I finally figured out how to use GitHub.  It didn’t work well at all with IntelliJ, mostly because the learning curve is pretty vertical regarding to setting up permissions and connecting github with your machine (pgp keys, etc).

You can read about my first github project here and all the trouble I had getting camera images from the camera functionality on your Android phone into my Android app.