A short time ago Handbrake began to ship with default encoding settings for the “Normal” profile using 2-pass h264 encoding. Sadly my XBox and XBMC just weren’t up to the task of decoding all those fancy h264 bits in software anymore.
Naturally instead of adjusting the encoding parameters, I decided to begin the hunt for [...]
I’ve always been a bit confused as to what exactly the parameters to the MenuItem constructor do. Common practise for me, and others I assume, is to simply ignore the ordinal and priority parameters and override the Screen.makeMenu method to explicitly define order.
While this is effective, it has a few caveats:
makeMenu gets messy
separators must [...]
Debug session with eclipse in Linux
Disclaimer: I am not an expert with wine nor have I ever claimed to be. But if you setup an override for the msxml dll it seems as though the BlackBerry simulator is a bit more reliable in Linux. In fact, the JDWP seems to actually work for [...]
Now this process isn’t 100% ideal. If you are an experienced developer you probably already know you need four key components.
Rapc compiler
Signature tool
Simulator
Javaloader
The first two components works fabulously in Linux. The second (signature tool) needs a kick in the pants to work (shame shame shame!).
The third is hit or miss when using Wine. [...]
This was actually pretty trivial since the MDS simulator is pure Java, and a good portion of it is actually just Tomcat. Since Tomcat is not developed by RIM, the chances where pretty good that there where no hard coded backslash directory separators (no, I will never let that go)
MDS simulator log [...]
8800 Simulator in Wine/Linux
Call me crazy but I just can’t seem to accept that if you want to (or have to) write BlackBerry software you’re stuck with Windows. It bugs me.
There is good news and bad news regarding the simulator. The good news is with a recent version of Wine you can actually [...]
Being obsessive and all, I decided to sit down and figure out why the signature tool doesn’t seem to work in Linux. After all it’s a rather trivial Java application. I suspected from the start that the symptom was some sloppy programming on RIM’s part, hard coding Windows style path names and my [...]
I received an email from Keith Neufeld (awesome electronics blog) about my Arduino LCD library with some tips on how to improve it. So over the weekend I dived in and did just that.
Specifically, this version removes the hard coded delays after each command is sent to the LCD and checks the LCD’s busy [...]
I’ve written a library for interfacing the Arduino with HD44780 based LCD modules. For now it lives here on my site, but if it’s popular enough it might need to move somewhere like the Arduino Playground.
Check out the Arduino LCD Library page for more details.
Here is a short video demonstrating an animation sample.
In this two part series I’m going to try my best to describe how I use Apache Ant and Eclipse to write/debug software for the BlackBerry platform.