Open source programming and Microsoft: two incompatible worlds? Microsoft is partnering with renowned actors of the open-source community to organise the Jump In! Developers’ Camp in an effort to combat this misperception. Twenty-five knowledge-hungry open source application developers from all over Europe will be invited to spend four unforgettable days of dialogue, networking and workshops at the beautiful Panorama Resort & Spa Feusisberg in Switzerland.

The Jump In! Developers’ Camp is designed primarily for open-source application developers who are interested in increasing their skills in a range of specific areas. Here they will be able to experiment with ways of combining open-source technologies with Microsoft products to optimize applications. But don’t worry: no one is out to ‘convert’ anybody! The aim instead is to promote interoperability, problem-solving and enhance programming skills. Software experts will be on hand to provide tips and advice, and a range of workshops will be held on topics including Azure, IIS, Silverlight and more in combination with open-source applications. Plenty of time for actual coding will be available.

Potential participants are invited to file an application at www.jumpincamp.com, outlining their profile. The 25 developers who are creating the most “buzz” for themselves and their programming abilities will then be selected. Attendees of the JumpIn! Developers’ Camp will then record their impressions and experiences in a live blog for their community of ‘followers’. The Camp will be held between 6 – 9 April 2010.

Shame that I’ve found out my bash completion is broken.

This change exploits phpBB’s hook system which allows us to execute custom code in certain phpBB functions/methods without modifying any files. To do this we need to create a new file in our phpBB installation in the includes/hooks/ directory, the file name must begin with hook_ and end with your PHP extension (usually .php.) So, basically you need to drop the below file into your includes/hooks/ directory and purge the board cache, job done!

includes/hooks/hook_disable-delayed-redirects.php

I assume you are familiar with installing packages and whatnot on the N900/Maemo OS.

1. First off I grabbed the plugin from the download page.
2. I installed it from the terminal using dpkg --install.
3. Next I entered my Gallery2 Administration interface and added a new user, I called it mobile. I configured it with a random password, which I jotted down to enter into the N900.
4. After that I enabled the Remote plugin in the administration interface.
5. I created a new album, with the title Mobile (note case is important here)
6. I adjusted the permissions on the album to permit the mobile user full access, I could probably lock this down a bit to only allow addition of new items but I’m not too worried.
7. Next I grabbed my N900 and went to configure the Gallery2 sharing service, this is where the fun began for me. I ended up using tcpdump over ssh to diagnose the problems!
8. I filled out the form with the following variables:

   User name

   mobile

   Passsword

   Pa$Sw0rd

   URL

   gallery.cs278.org (leave off the scheme, https is not supported.)

   Album

   Mobile (Case is important here, use the same as the album title you set.)

   If you get a network error, basically the plugin couldn’t authenticate to Gallery2 or you didn’t have the Remote interface enabled. Hopefully this helps somebody and saves you heading for tcpdump and some head scratching.

   
   ]]> http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/02/01/sharing-photos-from-n900-to-gallery2/feed/ 1 http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/02/01/sharing-photos-from-n900-to-gallery2/ http://feeds.cs278.org/~r/cs278/blog/~3/jpL5MRVe6io/ http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/01/31/one-enormous-footer/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:46:49 +0000 Chris http://www.cs278.org/blog/?p=518

   Lloyds TSB Bank plc. Registered Office: 25 Gresham Street, London EC2V 7HN. Registered in England and Wales, number 2065. Telephone: 020 7626 1500.

   Bank of Scotland plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 327000. Telephone: 0870 600 5000

   Lloyds TSB Scotland plc. Registered Office: Henry Duncan House, 120 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 4LH. Registered in Scotland, number 95237. Telephone: 0131 225 4555.
   Cheltenham & Gloucester plc. Registered Office: Barnett Way, Gloucester GL4 3RL. Registered in England and Wales, number 2299428. Telephone: 01452 372372.

   Lloyds TSB Bank plc, Lloyds TSB Scotland plc, Bank of Scotland plc and Cheltenham & Gloucester plc are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
   Halifax is a division of Bank of Scotland plc. Cheltenham & Gloucester Savings is a division of Lloyds TSB Bank plc.
   HBOS plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 218813. Telephone: 0870 600 5000

   Lloyds Banking Group plc. Registered Office: The Mound, Edinburgh EH1 1YZ. Registered in Scotland, number 95000. Telephone: 0131 225 4555

   This e-mail (including any attachments) is private and confidential and may contain privileged material. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender and delete it (including any attachments) immediately. You must not copy, distribute, disclose or use any of the information in it or any attachments.

   Telephone calls may be monitored or recorded.

   I removed the double line spacing as well!

   
   ]]> http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/01/31/one-enormous-footer/feed/ 0 http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/01/31/one-enormous-footer/ http://feeds.cs278.org/~r/cs278/blog/~3/8I2SYpfTzCk/ http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/01/31/why-do-i-bother/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:52:23 +0000 Chris http://www.cs278.org/blog/?p=514 Updated my desktop from Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ 9.04 to Ubuntu ‘Karmic’ 9.10, the upgrade process worked flawlessly. Sadly the number of regressions has kind of taken the shine of the various improvements to the distribution.

   The big kicker for me is the breaking of VLC and/or Gnome Screensaver, now VLC fails to suppress the screensaver in full screen which is kind of useless when you want to watching anything over 5 minutes long. To workaround this I use gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit to prevent the screensaver from activating, and set a command to kill that after 2 hours. The next problem I’ve observed is that even when the suppression and the film have both ended, the screensaver still doesn’t want to activate for ages; leaving my desktop burning the image into the screen until I lock the screen myself. Not a problem but I often hit the hay with a film on and usually fall asleep midway through, got up yesterday morning to find my desktop sat there still being projected from my display. LP #428884.

   My second gripe is Flash player under a x86-64 installation using nspluginwrapper and the x86 Flash player provided in the repositories works, what’s so bad about that? Well you can’t actually click on any controls on the Flash object, which kind of rules out embedded YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc. roll on <video> with Ogg Theora. I resolved this by purging the packaged Flash and nspluginwrapper, and then installing the native 64 bit alpha version from Adobe.

   Finally Firebug 1.5 doesn’t support 64 bit builds of Firefox, which to be fair Mozilla don’t support so I don’t really have a problem with this. You need to get an older release from the 1.4 branch, I’ve heard that the 1.6 alphas work again.

   Good grumbling done for the morning!

   
   ]]> http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/01/31/why-do-i-bother/feed/ 1 http://www.cs278.org/blog/2010/01/31/why-do-i-bother/ http://feeds.cs278.org/~r/cs278/blog/~3/wO6dLxQ-C_s/ http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/12/30/december-desktop/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:55:10 +0000 Chris http://www.cs278.org/blog/?p=512
   
   ]]> http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/12/30/december-desktop/feed/ 0 http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/12/30/december-desktop/ http://feeds.cs278.org/~r/cs278/blog/~3/ByqSUitgeNs/ http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/12/14/how-customer-service-should-be/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:49:16 +0000 Chris http://www.cs278.org/blog/?p=509 Awesome and entertaining customer service from IWOOT!

   I’m sorry to hear about this, but thank you for letting us know.

   I’ve just sent a request for a new one to be sent out to you, so you should receive it soon.

   There’s no need to return the broken one, we wouldn’t want the posties to be carrying around broken pottery in their bags – they have enough to complain about! Just take care and dispose of it safely.

   I hope this helps a wee bit?

   
   ]]> http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/12/14/how-customer-service-should-be/feed/ 1 http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/12/14/how-customer-service-should-be/ http://feeds.cs278.org/~r/cs278/blog/~3/lpAvAyz9d7I/ http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/10/23/php-function-is_serialized/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:12:32 +0000 Chris http://www.cs278.org/blog/?p=502 I needed a way to detect if some values were serialized or not, annoyingly PHP does not provide a method for this. I’d also rather not perform unserialize() on everything to check for a serialized string in the name of efficiency, so instead I came up with a simple function to detect serialized data. The result of my endeavours is a function that checks a string for basic makers of the PHP serialization form, it only checks the variables type and not any deeper values inside arrays or objects, if this preliminary testing is successful then unserialize() is invoked to provide the final proof. The unserialized form is available as an option argument passed by reference and the return value is a boolean, true for boolean or false otherwise. You can find the function on Gist or below.
   
   ]]> http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/10/23/php-function-is_serialized/feed/ 0 http://www.cs278.org/blog/2009/10/23/php-function-is_serialized/