Thunderbird SMTP Settings for MobileMe

Finally I figured out what the settings for Thunderbird look like to send e-mails via MobileMe. Despite several other postings and support entries, these are the settings that work on my machine:

Setting	Value
Server Name	smtp.me.com
Port	25
Authentication method	Normal password
Connection Security	STARTTLS

HTH.

Strange Compile Error in Flex Builder

Yesterdy I started a small project in Flex Builder. But I was stuck in the middle of the night, since Flex Builder complained about something in my source code. The Problems View in Flex Builder displayed the following error:




Wow, what a precise error message. Right-click for more information brought me to a very generic webpage telling me, that I could have probably found a compiler error. Great! First time ever that I discovered a compiler error. But wait: I bing'ed (can you say this?) for the error message, to see if somebody already reported this. BING! Match. And here we go:

The solution was pretty easy and documented here.

I searched my source code and found this line:

Have you noticed the first "=" instead of the ":"? Lucky you! It took me far too much time to discover this typo.

Fixing this typo and the error went away.

iPhone retired in favor of my Motorola Milestone

I was thinking about this for a couple of weeks now. After a lot of people around me were joking about my two Smartphones I was carrying around all the time (iPhone 3G and Motorola Milestone). After nearly 2 years of use, I decided to retire my personal iPhone in favor of my Android based Milestone. The dicision wasn't easy, but I think that Android has a lot of potential and I want to spent more time with this OS.

This doesn't mean that I give up the iPhone completely: I still have my company iPhone. Only for the case that I really need that specific App, which is not yet available for my Milestone.

Create ProGit epub from source

A couple a days ago, I discovered that the Book Pro Git (Expert's Voice in Software Development) is available in source form on GitHub. Browsing through the repository, I found out that there is a folder called "epub" which contains a groovy script to create an epub Version of this book. Wow, that is really great! Using groovy and some other tools to create the epub. I started to clone the repository to create my own epub version of the book.


The first run of the script didn't work well on my Mac. To be honest it failed because of the missing dependencies (markdown and the path to calibre). I didn't want to download markdown and install it for this one time use. I decided to have a look into the script and find a different solution.


The creation of the epub is basically running in three steps:

1. Convert all Files from the given language directory and fix the links to the figures. Convert the files afterwards into HTML by using markdown. Write the file to the target directory
   
2. Merge all files from the target directory into one big HTML file
   
3. Call calibre's ebook-convert and create the epub out of it
   

I made some modifications to the original groovy script

• Use of markdownj instead the perl markdown implementation. I'm using groovy's @Grab annotation here to download the library on the first run of the script.
  
• Make use of groovy's great Regex support and do a one-line search and replace on the whole file content
  
• Added a custom CSS for the epub, to improve the layout of lists in the epub
  
• Reduced the overall LOC by removing unnecessary code
  

Now the solution looks like this (it's not perfect, but it works fine for me)

Running the script created now the epub that I can now read on my nook.

You can find the new version here.

One last thing to say: Even if this book has been made available freely by the Author and the Publisher, I recommend buying the printed version to support this kind of generosity. Let the epub Version of this great book be wonderful extra of the printed Book.

V1.3 software update for the nook

Last week Barnes&Noble released version 1.3 of their nook Software. I was really excited about this version, since I hoped that B&N improves the overall performance of the nook. I updated my nook and after restarting the device, I opened the last book I was reading and it opened up much faster than before (which I didn't measure, just my feeling).


The overall performance improvements in regards of page flipping and opening documents was more than I expected. I have some large PDF documents on my nook and they opened much faster than before. Great!


There much more features added then I would have asked for. My current favorite is

Add highlight or note

which works in epub and PDF documents. Even if this feature is not bug-free yet (sometimes the cursor movement is not predictable)


Click here for a complete list of improvements.

sourcecode syntax highlighting added to my blog

If you are looking for a quick solution have a look at this post: easy syntax highlighting for blogger

groovy oneliner - delete all files except those with a given extension (in this case *.tex)

Since LaTeX creates a lot of intermediary files, I use the following oneliner in groovy to wipe out all these files except the original LaTeX source:

MacPorts contribution

3 weeks ago I submitted my first Portfile to the MacPorts Project. You can find it here!
This port provides the xjobs utility to execute jobs in parallel to leverage the power of multi-processor/core machines. It works similar to the xargs tool that you can find on nearly any Un*x based system nowadays.

Bugfix for Project-Sprouts

A couple of days ago I setup Project-Sprouts on my Mac. I usually use maven with flex-mojos to build my Flex projects, but I wanted to have something that creates the TestRunner class and adds the necessary dependencies (in this case asUnit) to my project.
So I decided to give Project-Sprouts a try.

After updating my RubyGems installation I was able to install everything and create my first project.

Calling rake (per documentation) and downloading several other necessary stuff (flex sdk, flashplayer, asunit) the execution of the mxmlc failed with a weird error (at least for me). Rake failed while executing the mxmlc command. I started to investigate on this error and found out, that the mxmlc wrapper shell script had the wrong line endings (in this case for Windows). I opened the wrapper shell script and fixed this temporarily, to see if my analysis was correct (it was). Since I'm not really experienced with rake and the whole infrastructure, I postponed my further exercise with this toolchain to monday night in order to get things fixed. But now I discovered that Luke Bayes already found the problem and provided a fix for it. I updated Project-Sprouts with the latest version and now it's working "out of the Box". Thanks.

Ein nook in Deutschland

Mit der Ankündigung eines neuen digitalen Lesegeräts im letzten Jahr von Barnes & Noble, habe ich mich dazu entschlossen mir dieses Gerät zu besorgen. Obwohl der Kindle2 auch für Nicht-Amerikaner zur Verfügung stand habe ich mich gegen dieses Gerät entschieden. Ich wollte dieses neue wunderbare Gerät von B&N haben!
Ab dem 01.11.2009 konnte der nook (so der offizielle Name) bei bn.com bestellt werden. So weit, so gut. Obwohl ich bereits einen Account bei bn.com besitze, war die Bestellung eines Gerätes für mich leider nicht möglich. Der nook konnte nur von Kunden in Nord-Amerika geordert werden, bzw. von potenziellen Kunden mit Lieferanschrift in den USA oder Kanada. Ich war ein bisschen enttäuscht, weil ich mich schon auf den nook gefreut habe. Endlich mal ein offenes System (das Gerät benutzt das Google OS Android), hat eine neuartige Navigation mit dem farbigen Display am unteren Rand und sieht auch noch ganz gut aus.

Ich erzählte meiner amerikanischen Kollegin davon und sie bot mir an das Gerät an Ihre Adresse in den USA schicken zu lassen. Ich hab dann das Gerät am 01. November bestellt. Ich musste B&N zwar noch austricksen, da meine Kreditkarte aufgrund der hinterlegten nicht amerikanischen Adresse nicht akzeptiert wurde. Da ich aber per PayPal zahlen konnte, hatte ich die letzte Hürde auch genommen. Nun hieß es warten. Geplanter Auslieferungstermin war der 07. Dezember 2009. Ganze sechs Wochen Wartezeit! Dann kurz vor der Zielgeraden bekam ich eine Mail von B&N mit dem Hinweis, dass sich die Lieferung auf den 14. Dezember verschiebt. Naja, jetzt habe ich solange gewartet, dann macht die eine Woche auch nichts mehr aus. Der nook wurde planmäßig am 14. Dezember an die Adresse meiner Kollegin verschickt und kam dort einen Tag später an (wegen der Verzögerung hat B&N den nook per Overnight Express verschickt).

Der Bruder meiner Kollegin hat das Paket dann kurz umgepackt und dann nach Deutschland verschickt. Leider hat das Paket es nicht mehr bis Weihnachten geschafft. Der nook kam hier in der zweiten Januar Woche an. Das waren fast 2,5 Monate. Ich hab mich total gefreut, dass ich einer der ersten Besitzer eines nook in Deutschland bin.

Hier sind noch ein paar Bilder der Verpackung (die mich ziemlich beschäftigt hat, da nicht auf Anhieb zu erkennen war wie sie geöffnet werden soll) und des nook.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

View more presentations from Carmine Gallo.