Android Developers Blog: A Note on Google Apps for Android

I think googles stance on modded ROMs is a bit sad, since I am running one of those, and I would frankly not go back to stock ROM, because of lack of tethering. I think a totally open ROM would be awesome, but I realize it would take probably a year to replace the stuff that Google built. Hopefully I am wrong.

Android Developers Blog: A Note on Google Apps for Android

OpenAndroid

Android Scripting Environment needs Groovy!

I am wondering why Google choose not to mention Groovy for the ASE, the Android Scripting Environment.

Groovy has no trouble accessing java APIs, for one. Could it be that groovy relies too much on dynamic code to be useable on the dalvik VM? See here for example http://www.nabble.com/Anyone-got-the-groovy-running-on-Android--td15044776.html.

Xmpp server components for java

Its a bit sad that java is totally lacking any sort of embeddable or componentized server-side XMPP libraries. There is Tigase and Openfire servers, but they are just that, servers and not meant to build new servers or to be embedded, as far as I know.

I have also failed to find any examples or libraries for creating component connections to XMPP servers, although they are meant to be very similar to client connections.


Edit: Actually, seems there are ways to use PubSub from java which should be good enough for me: http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/thread/38292

LuxRender performance on AWS

Just plyaing around with LuxRender on a small Blender 2.48 testscene. On my laptop, which has a Core 2 Duo 2,2Ghz, I get about 22k samples/s. Using a "High-CPU Extra Large Instance" AWS instance I get between 120 and 300k. Average seems to be about 10 times higher than for my laptop, which is nice enough. These cost 0.8$ per instance-hour, which is pretty decent for shorter jobs. I'm not sure about the bandwidth needed, luxrender does transmit the "film" every now and then but the interval can be tweaked.

Scaling this up by using more instances is also very easy.

Lyrics for Fischerspooner - Megacolon

Just corrected a few errors in the version that are around on the net:

Document on Google docs

How to add implicit imports to an embedded GroovyConsole

I wanted to have a graphical GroovyConsole that had my own APIs automatically imported. This proved to take some time to fix up. This is how it ended up looking. I created this in my normal eclipse-project so that I can easily launch this with the correct classpath already done for me.

TestGUI.java:

package groovy.ui;

import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.net.URL;
import groovy.lang.GroovyClassLoader;
import groovy.lang.GroovyShell;

public class TestGUI extends Console
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        TestGUI gui = new TestGUI();

        gui.run();
    }

    public TestGUI()
    {
        super();
        try
        {
            setup();
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    public void setup() throws Exception
    {
        Field shell = 
           Console.class.getDeclaredField("shell");
        shell.setAccessible(true);
        shell.set(this, new OurGroovyShell());
    }
}

OurGroovyShell.java:

package groovy.ui;

import java.util.List;
import org.codehaus.groovy.control.CompilationFailedException;
import groovy.lang.GroovyShell;

public class OurGroovyShell extends GroovyShell
{
    public Object run(String scriptText, 
           String fileName, List list)
        throws CompilationFailedException
    {
        scriptText = "import whatever.*\n" + scriptText;

        String[] args = new String[list.size()];
        list.toArray(args);
        return run(scriptText, fileName, args);
    }
}

Fairly simple in the end. I was fooling around a bit to get this to work at first. This was done with Groovy 1.6.2.

Using putty (win32) to connect to vino in ubuntu 8.10

Vino, it seems, has a bug in that it only listens on the localhost ipv6 address in ubuntu 8.10, ie. ::1:5900. I've been trying to connect to this using putty for some quite some time, and googling turns up a few threads and a bug in putty, ipv6-literals, that is not yet fixed even in the snapshots. I finally found the solution, almost all by myself, I should add an hostname to use instead of the numeric ip which has the problematic ":" in it. But actually, there already is in ubuntu: ip6-localhost. So adding the tunnel 4L5900:ip6-localhost:5900 works!

Oh, by the way: I did not want to disable ipv6 in Ubuntu since I occasionally use it.

New sources of world knowledge

I am trying to develop a natural language parser using a "knowledge intensive" approach. For this I need knowledge for my application. I have a few plans for amassing it:

• Various ontologies: Freebase, UMBEL, WordNet, FrameNet, VerbNet, DbPedia etc


• Using pattern matching on Wikipedia articles to extract info


• When trivially working, using the parser itself to extract more knowledge

For pattern matching I will need to develop patterns. Others have already done this, but I believe I can do even better. In wikipedia one can successfully use links to other articles as tokens as to simplify the structure of patterns when developing/evolving ones pattern to match against. Or at least I hope so.

More Wikipedia statistics

Doing some statistics on the WEX datadump, and I am once again hitting memory limits. At least unless I filter uncommon stuff out ,which is entirely almost possible, given that you know every common word should appear a number of times if you take a chunk of wikipedia articles. Current stats are:

words 29657715 sentences: 1795296 articles: 13801 words unique: 1182046

Words are the number of whitespace-separated strings I've seen, sentences is sentences according to WEX, which by the way is way off for some articles such as Andre Agassi where it believes sentences ending with "No." means a new sentence when its Agassi's world ranking that comes next. Articles is self-explanatory, and unique words are unique words, this time with all character allowed but all lower-cased. So, from 14K articles the number of words are already more than 1M. This is very different from my older run which ignored anything that was not a-zA-Z, where it took a couple of hundred K articles to reach that number.

Making Firefox 3 play CNN videos

The fix that worked for me was to add cnn.com to the whitelist in flashblock.

Others have mentioned other fixes, such as installing mediawrap, cleaning the cache, moving from adblock to adblock plus, using ietab, not using ietab, etc. For me it was a bit simpler.

Official Google Reader Blog: Square is the new round.

I have to say the new Google Reader look is way better than before. I always hated round corners, too! I normally use the microfirefox theme in FF, so that tells you how anal I am about screenspace.


Official Google Reader Blog: Square is the new round.