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WebOS development in vim

Erik — 2010-07-13T12:42:41Z

After getting frustrated with Aptana + Eclipse I decided to start using vim for my WebOS development needs. One of the more interesting features of the WebOS Eclipse plugin is the ability to generate a new scene without having to manually call palm-generate.

So I made a vim command (put this in your ~/.vimrc):

let basedir = "/DATA/projects"

function GenerateScene(basedir, project, name)

    exe '!palm-generate -t new_scene -p "name=' . a:name . '" ' . basedir . '/' . a:project

endfunction

command -nargs=+ Newscene call GenerateScene(basedir, <f-args>)

Now whenever I call :Newscene <project> <scene-name> a new scene called scene-name will be created in /DATA/projects/project

Switching projects?

:let basedir="/path/to/new/project"

Of course, after doing some development I want to do a testrun as well. You'll need to make sure both novacomd and the emulator are running.

The command for packaging, installing and launching the app on the emulator:

:Testrun <project>

And for cleaning up (uninstall and remove the ipk file):

:Cleanup <project>

Here's the code for your ~/.vimrc file:

let domain = "be.venefyxatu.palm."

let appversion = "1.0.0"

function GenerateScene(basedir, project, name)

    exe '!palm-generate -t new_scene -p "name=' . a:name . '" ' . a:basedir . '/' . a:project

endfunction

command -nargs=+ Newscene call GenerateScene(basedir, <f-args>)

function Testrun(basedir, domain, appversion, project)

    call PackageApp(a:basedir, a:project)

    call InstallApp(a:domain, a:project, a:appversion)

    call LaunchApp(a:domain, a:project)

endfunction

function PackageApp(basedir, project)

    silent exe '!palm-package ' . a:basedir . '/' . a:project 

endfunction

function InstallApp(domain, project, appversion)

    silent exe '!palm-install ' . a:domain . a:project . '_' . a:appversion . '_all.ipk' 

endfunction

function LaunchApp(domain, project)

    silent exe '!palm-launch ' . a:domain . a:project 

endfunction

function RemoveApp(basedir, domain, appversion, project)

    silent exe '!palm-install -r ' . a:domain . a:project

    silent exe '!rm -f ' . a:basedir . '/' . a:project . '/' . a:domain . a:project . '_' . a:appversion . '_all.ipk'

endfunction

command -nargs=1 Testrun call Testrun(basedir, domain, appversion, <f-args>)

command -nargs=1 Cleanup call RemoveApp(basedir, domain, appversion, <f-args>)

Yes, there is probably a way to get the domain and version from the appinfo.json file, but I can't really be bothered :-)

This might be interesting as a vim extension as well ... but once again I can't really be bothered :-)

Project 365

Erik — 2010-06-02T08:36:57Z

OK, I'll admit: I gave up. When I realised that I had been skipping my daily picture for a week or two I decided not to pick it up again - I'd rather end it cleanly than have a gap in the series, followed inevitably by another gap later on and so on.

It was, however, fun while it lasted.

Project 365

Erik — 2010-03-31T20:49:54Z

After three months I'm almost surprised to say that I still didn't give up my project 365. Today's picture: I read a short article on macro photography with a point & shoot digital camera and decided to give it a try. It worked :-)

Pictures

Erik — 2010-03-09T20:18:38Z

When taking the bus to the train station after work today I decided to get off a few stops early go go and check out a local graveyard. I'm rather pleased with some of the pictures I made there, so I put them in a gallery...

Palm Pre in Belgium with Mobile Vikings

Erik — 2010-02-19T23:04:03Z

First of all: all credit for this trick goes to Andreas at TreoCentral. Here is the exact thread where I found it.

I've bought an unlocked Palm Pre in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, before it becomes usable, it needs to activate itself through your provider's data network. As it happens, I just switched to Mobile Vikings, a provider which the Pre doesn't know.

Oops.

Internet to the rescue!

It is said that WebOS 1.3 offers the possibility to enter custom data settings in the activation wizard. Let's upgrade this baby!

First of all: my device is originally German (the QWERTZ keyboard is a dead giveaway ;-) ), so I've downloaded the German WebOS Doctor.
To put the Pre in WebOS Doctor mode:
- Turn it off completely
- Put the wall charger into an outlet and connect the mini USB connector to the Pre. Do not connect the USB port to the wall charger yet!
- While connecting the USB port to the wall charger, keep the "volume up" key pressed. You'll see a USB logo appear on the Pre.
- Disconnect the USB port on the wall charger and plug the Pre into your computer.
- Launch WebOS Doctor and follow the instructions in the wizard (I chose German just to make sure - don't know how important it is). It will recognize your Pre and start upgrading.
When the upgrade is done, your Pre will restart and relaunch the setup wizard. When it gets to the point where account creation fails, you will be given the option to enter custom data profile settings. Enter your provider's settings et voila, one working Palm Pre.

Back!

Erik — 2010-02-05T21:23:50Z

And that's that. The people at FreeFlux were kind enough to provide me with an export of both the database and the files of my account there, I got my domain names sorted out, managed to get the import done properly et voila, I'm personally hosting my blog.

w00t!

Also, I caught up with posting my project365 pictures. Go me!

Project 365

Erik — 2010-01-21T12:31:44Z

Oops ... hadn't taken into account that pictures take up diskspace. And that my diskspace on this account is running towards "full". I'm going to see what I can do about that (either host it myself, or work something out with the Freeflux people), but in the meantime I'll stop uploading pictures. I will keep making them, however!

PageUp to irssi in Terminal (OSX)

Erik — 2009-12-29T14:17:38Z

Note to self: sending a PageUp to irssi running in an SSH session in Terminal on OSX Snow Leopard (as opposed to sending it to Terminal itself) is done via fn+shift+up.

That is all.

GPGMail on OS X Snow Leopard

Erik — 2009-12-15T19:02:11Z

With the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and the included update for AppleMail, GPGMail was broken due to it using an undocumented API which has, of course, changed.

Fortunately, people more knowledgeable than I have fixed this by now, making it relatively easy to get things going again.

First of all, close AppleMail.

The next thing to do is to get gpg up and running again. There is an excellent explanation right here (http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/docs/howto-build-gpg-osx.txt.asc), which will allow you to copy/paste your way through the whole thing. It's your basic ./configure; make; make install; except that on Snow Leopard, you need to specify that you want to compile it for 32bit mode, like so :

./configure CC="gcc -arch i386"

Next, download this GPGMail.bundle: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/20215/GPGMail-1.2.1.mailbundle.zip (see the discussion thread, there is probably a newer one by now), unzip it and place the result in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/

In my case, I had to open the bundle (Ctrl-click, "Show Package Contents") and edit Contents -> Info.plist (using Property List Editor). It was missing two GUIDs, which I found like so:

venefyxatu@Succubus$ grep -A 1 UUID /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Info.plist 
 <key>PluginCompatibilityUUID</key>
 <string>2F0CF6F9-35BA-4812-9CB2-155C0FDB9B0F</string>

venefyxatu@Succubus$ grep -A1 UUID /System/Library/Frameworks/\
Message.framework/Resources/Info.plist 
 <key>PluginCompatibilityUUID</key>
 <string>0CB5F2A0-A173-4809-86E3-9317261F1745</string>

For each of those, copy the GUID (the bit in the <string> tag) and add it as a child to SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUID.

That's it. Start AppleMail and it should load the plugin, once again giving you access to the GPG settings.

TweetDeck on Gentoo with Awesome

Erik — 2009-12-10T11:26:06Z

After seeing it in action I wanted to give TweetDeck a try so, optimist that I am, I tried their installer. It didn't work, complaining about a corrupt .air file. So I figured I'd install the AIR framework first and then see where that would get me. All the way to this error message :

Adobe AIR could not be installed because this is not a supported Linux distribution. Only RPM- and Debian-based Linux distributions are supported.

Gentoo? Source-based distros? Get lost! Fortunately, flashman already ran into the problem and figured out a way to get AIR applications running on his distro and documented it.

One more problem : I don't use Gnome. I don't use KDE. I'm an Awesome fan. AIR doesn't like it when people don't use Gnome or KDE on linux. It requires gnome-keyring or KWallet and it gets confused rather easily. According to the Adobe troubleshooting page, you can set it straight by exporting a variable.

For gnome-keyring:

$ export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=1

For KWallet:

$ export KDE_FULL_SESSION=1

If you've got a KDE4 based KWallet, you also want to do:

$ export KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4

Ka-boom! TweetDeck on Awesome on Gentoo. And I can start it with Winkey-F10 as well, like so :

awful.key({ modkey }, "F10",
    function ()
        awful.util.spawn_with_shell("export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=1; 
        /opt/air-sdk/bin/adl -nodebug \
        /opt/air-apps/TweetDeck/META-INF/AIR/application.xml \
        /opt/air-apps/TweetDeck")
    end),