BlackBerry screen and icon sizes

For some reason the old link I had that contained display dimensions for BlackBerry devices is resulting in a 404 now. When you are doing BlackBerry development it is nice to be able to go to one page that just shows you the screen sizes instead of having to look at each device page so I don't know why they removed this page. After looking around a little I couldn't find a consolidated list that has just screen sizes so I figured I would put one together that replicates the old link:

BlackBerry device model Display screen size Icon image size
BlackBerry Pearl 8100 240 x 260 pixels 60 x 55 pixels Icon theme
48 x 36 pixels Zen theme
BlackBerry 7100 Series 240 x 260 pixels 60 x 55 pixels Icon theme
48 x 36 pixels Zen theme
BlackBerry Pearl 8220 240 x 320 pixels 46 x 46 pixels
BlackBerry Curve 8300 320 x 240 pixels 53 x 48 pixels Icon theme
48 x 36 pixels Zen theme
BlackBerry Curve 8900 480 x 360 pixels Unknown
BlackBerry 8800 Series 320 x 240 pixels 53 x 48 pixels Icon theme
48 x 36 pixels Zen theme
BlackBerry 8700 Series 320 x 240 pixels 53 x 48 pixels Icon theme
48 x 36 pixels Zen theme
BlackBerry Bold 9000 480 x 320 pixels 80 x 80 pixels
BlackBerry Storm 9500 360 x 480 pixels 76 x 76 pixels Home screen
24 x 24 pixels Shortcut bar

This data comes from the BlackBerry devices page.

Running Lotus Notes 8 on Linux with newer xulrunner

I recently got tired of running Lotus Notes under wine because I kept getting meeting invites that I couldn't accept. So I ventured out because I had heard that Notes now had a Linux client and sure enough it does. The install is huge but it went very smooth up until the point that I first launched to read my mail. At the point where it should have shown me the start screen I got an error dialog with the error "JVM terminated. Exit code=160" and a big stack trace.

Lotus Notes error message
(Click the image to see a larger version)

After digging around a little I found that the Eclipse framework/SWT expected an older version of xulrunner to be installed. The simple fix to get Notes running was to move the xulrunner libraries out of the way:

mv /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/ /tmp/
mv /tmp/xulrunner-1.9/  /usr/lib/

Now when I started Notes I was able to get all the way in and see the following error on the start page:

Lotus Notes start page error
(Click the image to see a larger version)

Now the key to getting Notes into a usable state is to close the "Getting Started" tab. If you don't do this you can never move xulrunner back into place. Once you have closed the tab exit out of Notes and then put the xulrunner libraries back where they belong.

Now you can start Notes without an issue, just make sure not to open anything that requires a web browser.

Lotus Notes home page
(Click the image to see a larger version)

After going through this someone pointed me towards the latest 8.5 beta 2 release of Lotus Notes for Linux and after installing that I can report that it actually has fixed the issue. So whenever 8.5 comes out this should be fixed until another incompatible version of xulrunner comes out.

Running Asterisk in the cloud with Amazon EC2

I have been sitting on a half post for a while now on setting up Asterisk on EC2 and then this past week someone else came out with a post on how to install Asterisk from scratch on EC2. I figured I would wrap up what I have since I take the path of installing Asterisk on VirtualBox first then converting that disk image to an AMI as I outlined a few weeks ago when I got serious about testing out the Asterisk on EC2 concept.

Reading over the comments on the Voxilla post you will see some concern about how cost effective putting Asterisk on EC2 would be. Even if the cost is an issue for normal use I think Asterisk on EC2 could work for bursts of outgoing calls or even temporary conferencing systems. Part of what I wanted to do was find the least resistant path to getting started so I went with Trixbox since it has a lot of tools pre-installed and support for Gizmo5 that was very easy to set up. The key with Gizmo5 is that it is cheap, works with Asterisk via SIP and you can have incoming calls for free from a land line so it is easy to test cheaply.

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VNC on OS X + Devil's Pie = seamless desktop

I've been doing iPhone development lately using a mac mini. When we first started looking at developing for the iPhone it seemed like overkill to go out and buy multiple macbooks or one macbook to share between developers so instead we got a mac mini to share using Vine VNC.

For reference we are able to share the mac mini by taking advantage of fast user switching for more information see this guide on using Multiple Desktop Sessions on Mac OS X.

The VNC part is pretty easy once you have the multiple desktop sessions working. I've been doing development on a linux box that has two monitors connected so I will open the desktop in one window and all the non-mac stuff in the other. After using the VNC desktop like that for a while I started to get annoyed by the window decorations so I looked to see what I could do to remove them and that is when I ran into Devil's Pie.

Devil's Pie runs as an application in the background and watches for window events that you set up in a configuration file. When it sees the events it can do all kinds of fancy things to the window like remove decorations and set position. It turns out there isn't a lot of documentation on the configuration language but I did find a configuration language reference, a gnome configuration file editor that kind of works depending on what you need it to do, a decent reference, some configuration examples, and best of all an example of how to remove window effects. With all that I was able to cobble together the following configuration file:

(if (contains (window_name) "VNC:") (begin (undecorate) (maximize) (geometry "+1280+0")))

This says to undecorate, maximize, and set the geometry of any window that contains the value "VNC:". The undecorate will strip the title bar and any border from the window, the maximize does what it says to the window, and the geometry in my case puts the window on the right hand screen. I tweaked the background for my account in OS X and the resulting combination of it all looks like this:


(Click the image to see a larger version)

So now I have what feels like an OS X box integrated right into my normal desktop.

Using Ruby and HTTParty to consume web services the easy way

Web services seem to be multiplying like rabbits these days. For a good sampling of just how many there are check out the Programmable Web API list. In general it is pretty easy to consume basic REST web services but after you have done it enough it starts getting old. Thankfully for those of us who like to tinker with a lot of the new APIs there is HTTParty to make it quick and easy.

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Using scrub to destroy a hard drive

Recently I had a hard drive failure that pushed me into getting a little NAS device that I could back up to S3 easily. After consolidating a lot of data to the NAS I was left with a few old hard drives that I needed to do something with as well as some existing hard drives that I've collected over the years. Some of the drives I have are from family members that I have recycled computers for but kept the hard drives out of fear that personal data might still be on them. At the same time this was happening I read an article claiming that a single drive wipe protects data.

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How to transfer a Linux image from VirtualBox to Xen

There have been times recently when I wanted to pull a VirtualBox Linux instance I had into Xen. I kept thinking it had to be fairly easy but I kept putting off trying it until recently when I ran into something I wanted to install from a CD image into an Amazon EC2 AMI. It turns out the main hurdle in transferring an image is lack of documentation.

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Converting videos (flv,wmv,avi,etc) into a format that will work with the iPhone/iTunes

I have had an iPhone for a while now and I keep running into instances where I want to have videos outside of youtube in some format that I can watch on the device. These include windows WMV formatted videos from PDC as well as FVL formatted videos on Flex. I finally broke down and found a working solution to convert pretty much any video into a iPhone/iTunes format using mencoder.

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Automounting Amazon EBS volumes on EC2 instances

I've been using S3 to store semi-transient information like log files from EC2 nodes in the past but recently decided to give Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS) a try instead. I quickly realized a downside to using EBS in that there is no mechanism for auto-attach and mounting volumes when an AMI is launched. This is probably something Amazon will fix at some point and allow you to launch a given AMI with an attached EBS volume but until then you need some way of doing it yourself. The following is a simple way of using ruby to make it happen.

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