Kev's Development Toolbox

March 29, 2012

Apple sued over false advertising for Siri

About time. I’ve seen people trying to use Siri to get it to do things just like in the tv ads, and 9 times out of 10 it never works as you’d expect. Gives comic relief as everyone sniggers while said user is repeating themselves in a variety of different ways trying unsuccessfully to get it to work just like the ads and then giving up, yes, but working as in the tv ads? No. Far from it.

Android has always had support for voice actions, and while it’s more simple in that it uses simple recognized commands (‘navigate to [place name]’), and least it works the majority of the time.

March 27, 2012

Could Oracle end up losing money on their Java lawsuit against Google?

According to their original claims in 2010/2011, Oracle’s lawsuit against Google for Android violating Java related patents and copyright was worth somewhere between $1.6 billion and $6 billion in damages.

As the courts continued to throw out an increasing number of the claims, the estimated damages has come tumbling down. Right now, Oracle’s estimates are around $32 million. Google’s estimates are around $37 million.

At this rate, I wonder if it’s possible for Oracle to actually lose money on the case due to legal costs? $32 million is hardly big bucks for Google.

If Oracle had any sense, they should have licensed Android from Google as the replacement for Java ME, and not try to remove Android from the picture with legal action. Android is everything that Java ME should have been from the beginning but has always been so far from the mark.

March 22, 2012March 6, 2025

Using public keys with ssh

From the client:

mkdir ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa

By default the key files (id_rsa = private, id_rsa.pub = public) will be created here: ~/.ssh/

sftp the id_rsa.pub file to the remote machine, and drop it in ~/.ssh.

If you’re using OpenSSH on the remote machine, do this to append the file to the authorized_keys2 file (cd into your .ssh dir):

cat >> authorized_keys2 < id_rsa.pub

Alternatively use ssh-copy-id to copy to the remote machine:

ssh-copy-id -i key-file.pub user@host

March 22, 2012

Installing and hosting a Joomla site on OpenShift

OpenShift have an example Joomla app ready to deploy on github, but it’s currently not working – once you’ve deployed it, it gives you a page with this error:

Infinite loop detected in JError

Given that it’s relatively simple to setup Joomla, I set up a new app on OpenShift, downloaded the latest install for Joomla, and then pushed it up to OpenShift. Using this approach you can walk through the admin screens to configure your site and point it to your hosted MySQL, and it’s just as easy as installing it locally.

Here’s the steps:

1. Create your PHP app on OpenShift:

rhc app create -a your_app_name -t php-5.3

2. Add the MySQL cartridge:

rhc app cartridge add -a your_app_name -c mysql-5.1

3. Download Joomla. Unzip the download into the php add inside your app dir that was created by ‘rhc app create’

4. Add, commit and push your changes to OpenShift:

git add .
git commit -m "Joomla initial commit"
git push

5. Now hit your URL for your hosted app, and then walk through the setup steps as normal. When prompted for your MySQL config, use the values given in step 2 above.