ClickOnChris

The Palm Pre SDK, named Mojo, is not supposed to be available to the general public of developers for a few months.  Apparently it was leaked on the internets last night.  I was able to get a Hello World program running on the emulator.  Here is how I did it.

Environment:
Windows XP
Java JDK 1.6.0_11 (any 1.6 probably works)
Any modern CPU should work.  Mine is 32 bit – not sure about 64 bit.
The emulator takes ~300MB of memory so you’ll probably want at least 1GB.I’ve got 2GB

1 – Download and install VirtualBox
(http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).  I am using version 2.2.4

2 – Download and install the SDK.
I got mine from mininova( http://www.mininova.org/tor/2719050), linked from PreCentral.net. (Oh god I just linked to mininova)

3 – Start the Emulator.
When the SDK finishes installing you should see a “Palm Emulator” icon on your desktop.  Open it.

The emulator should start up and it should look like this:

Linux kernel starting

Read more…

I have recently come to discover the javascript library jQuery. My favorite feature is the window.onLoad replacement, which is actually faster than window.onLoad and can be used multiple times in one document.

  $(document).ready(function(){
    // Your code here...
  });

Any code in the Your code here.. block will execute as soon as the page is loaded. This is useful for referencing DOM elements which would have been “undefined” before the page was fully loaded by the browser.

Previous to my new job it had been a long time since I did any programming in asp. That would have been around 2003 when working on the Augustana College marketing club webapp. I was soured on it then, convinced that PHP was the superior language. To be fair, asp.net is more of a set of tools for creating a webapp (since you can use any .net language you want), where as classic asp was really its own language.

Lots of things have changed since then and I’m finding myself enjoying building apps in asp.net as opposed to PHP or Java. I will still maintain that Java lends itself better to large, scalable webapps because of ejb and its built-in transaction handling. However, if your goal is to make a complex UI and make it quickly, I’d lean towards asp.net

My website has been down for the last 2+ days. The reason: Dreamhost upgraded to Rails 2.0 without any warning. Since some of my code was not 2.0 compliant – BAM! down goes my site.

In case I can help anyone else out of a bind, or avoid this horrible fate, here are the steps I had to take to get my website back up and running with Rails 2.0:

1. Add a config.actioncontroller.session entry to my environments.rb file. I added it within the Rails::Initializer block. This was in response to the following error I found in my production.log file:
   A secret is required to generate an integrity hash for cookie session data. Use config.action_controller.session = { :session_key => “_myapp_session”, :secret => “some secret phrase of at least 30 characters” } in config/environment.rb
   Luckily the error tells you exactly what to do

1. Next, I had to fix this error:
   undefined method ‘paginate’
   I fixed it by installing the plugin ‘classic_pagination’. To do this you simply have to run
   “script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/classic_pagination” from your project root.
   Apparently they took out built-in pagination support from Rails 2.0. This will_paginate plugin is supposed to be better, but I didn’t care to figure out how to work it right now.

1. Finally, I had to fix all of my start_form_tag entries.

There was a good demo of how to do this in the what’s new in Rails2? slideshow