You know the part before the upgrade where they tell you to check all of your applications before you upgrade? Well, last night I decided that it would be a great idea to upgrade my Mac from Snow Leopard to Lion. Turns out that perhaps wasn’t so great an idea after all when my Huawei USB 3G modem dongle decided that it wasn’t going to work since it wasn’t relevant for the new 64-bit only kernel. Oops, I should have checked first. But it isn’t a complete disaster!

Update: This appears to also work with Mountain Lion as well according to some comments at the bottom. It may not work for everyone but it does appear to work for some.
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For the last few months as a part of my university studies I have been writing up some course materials for a mobile device workshop. The document that I ended up writing for that grew much more than what I expected (over 100 pages) and barely scratches the surface of the topic. However this is more a review of Titanium Appcelerator.
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At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2007, Steve Jobs came on stage to announce a launch date for the very first iPhone and to announce how developers would build applications for the iPhone. His announcement was that his suggested way of developing for the iPhone was to write web apps (it is a couple of minutes in). So what was the reaction to that?
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January for me was an interesting and varied month. Here is a quick look back at what I got up to in the month.
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Today was the nail in the coffin of the Samsung Galaxy S that I use at work to do Android based testing of the library’s future work in the mobile area. The device is a stock device running Android 2.1 (Samsung’s updater app cowardly refuses to upgrade it to 2.2 for some reason) however as the device is for testing and since it has WiFi built in I’ve decided to use that. It isn’t connected to the cellular data network (or even have a SIM card) and this has lead to some interesting problems.
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The other day I finished up the work I had been doing for the the last week or so on integrating the different solutions for authenticating users at USQ. This evening I finished up the plugins and services required to handle authentication via USQ’s custom single sign-on (SSO) system (“USQAuth”), USQ’s single sign in (SSI) system (Oracle Internet Directory with an LDAP interface) and USQ Integrated Library System, Virtua) so that they all play nicely together. Something that one would think should be relatively easy to do turns out to be a non-trivial task.
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Lately I’ve come across this curious trend of web sites that try to second guess where I live. As someone who has moved into a new unit in a new suburb I get interesting suggestions to say the least.
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So in the last two days I’ve ventured onto the websites of Bunnings and Harvey Norman. Both sites use location services to help you to vary degrees but both really suck at it.
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For the last week or so I have been digging around ePrints 3.2 and been trying to work out how to add a dataset. I’d done this previously with the author ID project however ePrints 3.2 advertises that is has user defined datasets. It has to be said that adding a new dataset is easier said than documented – not to mention done. But I figured I’d document how I managed to get it to work.
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Over this weekend (Friday evening and Saturday) while watching the AFL Finals I got to work building a script to convert the standard Joomla! 1.6 beta packages into a format that would work with Microsoft’s Web Package Installer (WebPI). Early Sunday morning I managed to get everything done to the point that a Joomla! 1.6 package is automatically converted, stripping out the install and sample data scripts on the fly and reprocessing them as well as updating a WebPI feed XML file that you can use.

The long and the short is if you want to test out the latest Joomla! 1.6 beta release (beta 9 at the moment), all you have to do is add our own custom feed to the Web Platform Installer!
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