Monthly Archives: February 2007

My new PocketPC – sort of

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Pocket PC emulator

Someday I’m probably going to take the plunge and replace my Treo 650 with some kind of Windows Mobile device, since the Windows Mobile devices always seem to have more features like 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, and a nice amount of RAM. Actually, “someday” might’ve gotten a bit sooner after yesterday, when my wife called me on my Treo and the device crashed and reset when I answered the call.

I’ve long been a Palm user though and when I’ve played with Windows Mobile in the store, I’ve never really felt comfortable with it. And I’d need to find new apps to replace things like Sudoku, Directory Assistant, FlightStatus, etc.

So I thought that I’d download an emulator and play with it a bit to see if I could get comfortable with the interface and the available apps.

The emulator is decent, but somewhat annoying to install. First, I had to find this page and then download the emulator and the images, which are separate downloads. Then I could install the emulator. But before you can install the images, it turns out you to have to install the Virtual Machine Network Driver for Microsoft Device Emulator. Then I ran the program but found that it would crash on startup in Virtual PC on my PowerBook. So then I repeated the process on my wife’s Windows laptop and finally, it worked.

Fixing NO_PUBKEY 2E2BCDBCB38A8516 error from Oracle Debian repository

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Folks running and Debian, Ubuntu, etc. may be aware that Oracle has a Debian repository for Oracle Express and other open-source software.

If you weren’t aware of it and wanted to use it, here’s the magic line to add to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

Recently, my apt-get updates started printing this warning:


W: GPG error: http://oss.oracle.com unstable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2E2BCDBCB38A8516

because Oracle is signing their packages with GPG and my system didn’t have their GPG public key.

First, I tried:

$ gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv 2E2BCDBCB38A8516
gpg: requesting key B38A8516 from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
gpgkeys: key 2E2BCDBCB38A8516 not found on keyserver
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
gpg: Total number processed: 0
$ gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys B38A8516
gpg: requesting key B38A8516 from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
gpgkeys: key B38A8516 not found on keyserver
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
gpg: Total number processed: 0

No dice. So I poked around a bit and found Oracle’s RPM GPG key. I wondered if they used the same GPG key for their Debian packages as they did for their RPM packages. One way to find out:

$ wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle
...
13:50:04 (356.53 KB/s) - `RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle' saved [1744/1744]
$ sudo apt-key add RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle
OK
$ sudo aptitude update
...
Fetched 194B in 2s (94B/s)
Reading package lists... Done

Cool, it worked!

New version of Del.icio.us Firefox extension

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If you tried Yahoo’s Del\.icio\.us Firefox extension in the past and didn’t like the fact that it eliminated the notion of local bookmarks, it’s time to take another look. Don’t take my word for it, as I work on it, but check out this post from Yahoo! Cool thing of the Day.

And a few choice quotes:

“Del.icio.us changed my life. Download the extension right away, get organized and share! Feel the difference.”
http://getfirefox.biz/delicious-changed-my-life.html

“I am slowly becoming a more frequent user of del.icio.us. … the recent update they rolled out appears to be borderline brilliant”
http://www.pointy-stick.com/blog/2007/02/23/upgraded-delicious-firefox-extension/

“New and improved del.icio.us extension for Firefox”
http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/archives/006372.php

“Your del.icio.us bookmarks and tags are now accessible from the Firefox bookmarks toolbar as well as the menu bar.”
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/02/delicious-bookmarks-firefox-extension.html

“Alright, it’s now official: I decided to switch from Yahoo! MyWeb to Del.icio.us. This new Firefox extension is just so sweet.”
http://insideyahoo.net/2007/02/24/switching-to-delicious/

Yahoo Search Sidebar 1.2

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I updated my Yahoo Search Sidebar Firefox extension to version 1.2. The only changes are that it works with Firefox 2.0 and I eliminated a bunch of global JavaScript symbols, which is a good Firefox extension development practice for preventing extension conflicts.

This Firefox extension adds a "Yahoo! Search" item in Firefox's View | Sidebar
menu (Alt+Y is the shortcut key) that opens a sidebar tailored for Web searching with Yahoo! Search.