Author Archives: Dale Nunns

About Dale Nunns

I live in Cape Town, South Africa with my awesome wife and cute cat Domino. I'm a software developer, hardware hacker, some time cook, wannabe writer, chief bottle washer and tamer of dust bunnies.

Invalid Last Name

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After Tuesday’s new MacBook announcement, I desperately wanted to find out when the new MacBook’s would be available in South Africa. I went to the official SA distributors website (http://www.core.co.za) and rummaged around trying to some kind of “contact us” email address. I finally decided, after not finding any other electronic contact method to use the feedback form. I filled in my details, wrote up a nice little message asking when the new MacBooks would be available and then clicked the “Submit” button and thats when the error message pop’d up. “Please Enter a valid lastname. A minimum of 6 characters are required” obviously this shook my world as I was suddenly being told that my lastname which I’ve had for 20something years is invalid… after some deep soul searching I decided I would change it to “Nunns.” and the feedback page accepted it. I do feel sorry for those people who’s names won’t be made valid by simply adding a character

Nomadness

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I’m putting this post here so that I don’t forget about this blog. (http://www.nomadness.com/blog/)

It’s about a Techno Nomad who travels around on a huge boat that fitted out with all kinds of cool geeky gadgets. I’ve been reading about his adventures over a number of years which started off with a Bicycle equipped with lots of cool computer gear and slowly evolved into amphibious boats and finally ending up with this huge sail boat.?

It’s an awesome site if you’re interested in gadgets, sailing or just travelling and is very well written and includes tons of pictures. I also like his cat that lives aboard the ship called “Java”.

Java on Pocket PC / Windows Mobile

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I need some help, so I’m asking the internets…?

Anyone gotten Java apps to run on PocketPC’s/Windows Mobile devices? I need a minimum of J2ME support (MIDP 2.0) but I would really like some a bit fancier, say with Swing support? Anyone know if this is possible??

I’ve done some searching and so far I haven’t found much online other than people asking the same questions.?

My awesome/crazy idea is to develop a application that runs on desktop machines (Windows, Linux Mac OSX and anything else that’ll run Java) and that will hopefully work on PocketPC’s too with minimal changes. I’m hoping for the mythical… “Compile Once, Run Anywhere” sales pitch that made Java so cool in the beginning.?

So far I’ve found this open source JRE for Pocket PC – Mysaifu JVM but I’m not sure how good it is, I plan on trying it this weekend.

I’ve also heard that there is one by IBM called J9 but that you have to pay for, I’m ideally looking for something that doesn’t cost money, so my future users don’t have to shell out even more cash.

Update: So it turns out after a little searching that PhoneME (a open source project to create a J2ME JVM) is now available on Windows Mobile too. I’ll have to try this one out over the weekend too.

Katie Melua Concert

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Lastnight (Wednesday, 24 September 2008) Claire and I went to see Katie Melua live in concert at the Grand Arena at Grandwest. It was soooo awesome!!!!

You have to understand I’m a huge! Katie Melua fan… we sat in block C and while they weren’t golden circle seats they were still good seats. She was awesome, perhaps even better than on her CD’s. She had a very good band with her too, although I really enjoyed the songs where it was just her sitting on a chair playing her guitar. A friend of mine who also went to the concert also said she was awesome and loved the way she just walked on stage and sang her heart out, no mess no fuss. It wasn’t a massive “show” no dancers, no expensive effects… just a girl who can sing unbelievalby well and her guitar and an awesome band. The concert was about 2hours long (including the “encore” bit she did) and was way too short. Continue reading →

Awwwww so cute!

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Ingrid, one of my co-workers brought in a kitten to work today that a friend of hers was going to pickup. It’s a cute little black thing with big eye’s. Obviously no work got done because we all wanted to play with the kitten.?

I took a few pictures, sorry about the quality… but they were taking in less than ideal location with a kitten climbing all over me and I had to use my cell phone.

Firefox 3.0 – Stop auto hiding the toolbars in full screen mode.

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I’m running Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron on my Asus EeePC 2G Surf with Firefox 3.0. The problem I have is that by default in Firefox 3.0 if you fullscreen Firefox (F11) it now auto hides the toolbar and address bar which gets a little annoying if you’re like me and have lots of tabs open or like using the address bar for things alot.

A bit of googling and I found the solution, which I’m writing down here in case I forget it. You need to go to the about:config page in Firefox and change browser.fullscreen.autohide to false. (Just double click it.)

Google Notebook API

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Anyone know if there is an API to access notes in Google Notebook ? I’ve been using the notebook alot lately, as I’m normally on one of 4 computers (sometimes 5) and its nice to have a central place to put all my notes about stuff or sites I want to visit etc.?

The other day though I came up with a crazy idea for a little application that I would love to link to Google Notebook (essentially I want to read & write notes) but I haven’t found an API for it yet. I guess I could perhaps reverse engineer the Firefox plugin ??

If anyone knows where to look… leave a comment.

EDIT: I was really stupid 🙁 Typed “Google Notebook API” into Google and I found this only problem is that the official API only allows reading of the public notebooks.?

Would it be possible to impersonate a user in a browser to read/write notes? Or is that just too complicated?

My Mom’s Birthday

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It was my mom’s birthday on the 8th of August and the family and a few friends went out to Panarotti’s in George for her birthday. (And no I’m not going to tell you how old she was.)

Google Chrome

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I’m jumping on the current big “band wagon” and going to review the new web browser on the block, Google Chrome. I’m a long time Firefox user, who’s tried Apple Safari and various other browsers over the years. On my Windows XP machine I mostly use Firefox 3.0 and Apple Safari.

Today I installed the new Google Chrome, after a friend said it was really cool.?

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