Older blog entries for softkid (starting at number 289)

Runkeeper vs sports tracker

Lately I have been doing more sport in my daily life than ever before. This is a direct effect from my life style, as if you didn't know I work from home. Doing a daily period of sports, sports is good for my body and sometimes it also clears up my mind. It started by me deciding to go to the swimming pool on a weekly basis. And then I'm in Holland so I decided to bike and try to do it on a daily basis. As I don't really get any pleasure from the biking itself I started using an application on my phone to track down how much I was exercising - and I really have a things for stats (be it what kind of music I like etc ...).

Run Keeper

I started using runkeeper as some of my friends where using it. Runkeeper runs on either your iphone or android powered phone and records, your speed and your gps coordinates. So you are able afterwards to look your activity. On top of that when you break a record , they send you an email telling you that you've been the fastest this week or the furthest this month. Runkeeper is based on a fremium model - most of the services are free. But some aren't like :

• Aggregated stats (how much calories did I burn this week).
• Training lessons (ie lessons to achieve something with training.

I was very happy with it with the exception that sometimes it had issues finding the gps - which made using the app sometimes difficult. And entering swimming data was kind of a nightmare as I couldn't really use the phone in the water. And sharing to facebook was broken for me

Sports tracker

Was recommended by my cousin, so I decided to give it a try. They offer the same free services and I like them better for the following reasons:

• Gps is detected automatically
• The application as a smoother Users Interface
• The website is more polished
• I can share to facebook
• It's available on iphone, android and Nokia phones

So I recently switched to using them. I don't know what their business model is as the site is not loaded with ads. I'm not sold premium features. The only thing they seem to be selling are hardware devices to track my heart beats. So I'm a little suspicious about how they are making money but for now it really works better for me. I haven't tried swimming with it yet so I can't really say if swimming is easier to tack with this application than with the runkeeper one.

Syndicated 2011-10-10 13:21:20 (Updated 2011-10-10 13:50:48) from Ludovic's weblog

Started my day by writting an email to remeberingsteve@apple.com

Here is the verbatim copy of the email :

Message-ID:
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:48:33 +0200
From: Ludovic Hirlimann
Organization: Famille Hirlimann
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:9.0a2) Gecko/20111005 Thunderbird/9.0a2
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Ludovic Hirlimann
Subject: Thank you for the Apple II, for call -151
X-Enigmail-Version: 1.4a1pre

I would like to say a big thank you to Steve for making the Apple II,
that got me started into computers. The call -151 function embedded in
basic gave me the power and tools to understand how computer worked. And
boy that was fun , really fun, that got me into programming for my
pleasure - small and crappy projects - but still it was fun. I was
hooked and never looked back ever after.

Thank YOU
Ludo

I've removed my PGP/Mime signature to make it a bit more readable.

Syndicated 2011-10-06 06:46:07 (Updated 2011-11-10 10:30:48) from Ludovic's weblog

Flickr's Android App versus flickroid

Last week flickr announced that they were releasing an application for Android devices.

I use two devices a Tablet from Asus and a phone from Samsung. So I went to both devices and decided to install the app and see what it had to offer. I also wanted to compare it to the tools I was using on these devices to access flickr.com (a web browser and flickroid). Unfortunately the official apps is only available on phone devices and not on tablets.

So let's try to define my needs when I'm using a mobile device like a tablet or a phone and access flickr :

1. Be able to post, tag and file pictures in my sets and groups


2. Read/reply to comments made on pictures


3. See my stats

And the importance is in that order, exactly in that order. I really can wait to be front of a computer to see my stats. I prefer to use my computer to reply to comments, see other's pictures, fav pictures and comments on pictures (and I use a bunch of extensions to make those experience better at least on my desktop).

Flickroid

is more a small utility that plug itself into Android and adds flickr share buttons proposed and used by other apps. Exporting photos to flickr with it is a nice experience. You can tag, file the pictures into your sets or even create sets. It works nicely over wifi and 2g/3g. When upload fails you can retry the uploads and all the metadata that you added on the initial upload try are kept.
Flickroid has two flows that I can list :

• It's painfull to upload more than one image at a time which is what Roland does


• It remembers your tags from one photo to the other and editing tags on the phone or tablet isn't the best experience.

For all my other needs, I will use the browser (except for organizr which doesn't support tap events)

Flickr's official application

Let's me do plenty more things, like read comments easily consume my friends images. I can consume way more with it - comments are made easy.
Pros:

• Favoring is easy too.


• The UI is nice and really made to have the full flickr on the small screen.


• The application let's me use the camera from my device and upload it ( I can even add some filters to have nice effects on the pictures).


• When the image is geotagged and you are willing to share that, tags based on the location are automatically added.

Cons:

• 
  
• I can't add my pictures to sets


• Without wifi uploading fails - this might be fixed by the new version that got published today.


• Failed uploads are not easily re-try-able - you need to re-enter all the metadata - if it's available in the application - I didn't find where it was.


• Consuming photos is easier on tablets with bigger screen than phone and the app isn't present on the tablet android market.

So overall I like both for different usage. In an ideal world I would use flickroid on my phone to create content. And I would use the official flickr application on my tablet to comment and interact with my photographic social graph. For now I use my phone more than my tablet so I will stick with flickroid.

Syndicated 2011-10-03 08:33:26 (Updated 2011-10-03 09:23:42) from Ludovic's weblog

Finding firefox for Android slow ?

Then I've got good news for you, using a nightly build will make anything you do on your mobile faster. To install it just read the instructions at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#Download_Nightly. The speed difference is very, very noticeable - worth installing.

Syndicated 2011-09-27 07:50:22 (Updated 2011-09-27 07:54:09) from Ludovic's weblog

Small skype trick

I use skype to chat a lot. What i like about them is that they are persistent. If I'm not online, I won't miss any messages. I also like the fact that I have command line style utilities. And on top of that group chat are very practical.

I use skype out of a habit I caught at my previous job, where most of the communication was done via skype chats - so most of my recently active network is available on skype. Once in a while skype chats don't get through because skype's infrastructure thinks you are not online or that your correspondent is offline. This is annoying because once in a while you are online and miss messages.

To make sure that your message will get through is to call ! this will force skype's infrastructure to figure out if the person you are chatting with is online or offline as voice can't really be buffered or delayed, while messages can. So just pressing the call button will push your messages through.

Syndicated 2011-08-12 14:05:18 (Updated 2011-08-12 14:21:07) from Ludovic's weblog

BrowserID support for Movabletype ?

I'm looking for a movabletype plugin that would let me implement BrowserID on this blog. I've googled, I've twitted, and I've searched the movable type plugin directory but didn't find anything. Anybody interested in creating such a beast, to my knowledge the skills required are :

• some perl
• reading the BrowserID documentation
• the movabletype documentation

Bonus point if it supports earlier releases of Movabletype.

Syndicated 2011-07-19 11:08:05 (Updated 2011-07-19 11:16:20) from Ludovic's weblog

We need help from our users to figure out our topcrash for Thunderbird 5

We (the Thunderbird team) released Thunderbird 5.0 about a week ago. It's currently being offered to 10% of our users as an update from 3.1.11. When we release new versions we try to monitor early upgrader feedback in bugzilla, in getsatisfaction and on a crash stat reporting page. Our current top crasher is related to Lightning and Windows.

None of the developers can currently reproduce the bug, so we are counting on our users to help us debug the issue so we can fix it.

• Are you using Windows?


• Are you using Lightning?


• Did you upgrade to Thunderbird 5.0 and Lightning 1.0b4?


• Did you crash after that update?

If the answer to all these question is yes - maybe you can help us fix this issue. You'll need to locate your CrashID as explained on our knowledge base article. And look it up on the crash-stats page.

If the signature is cal::UTC() you can help us - if not we'll get to fixing your bug later.
What we need to know is:

• What were you doing when you crashed?


• Do you use tasks?


• What kind of calendar (or calendars) do you connect to?


• Do you have a calendar tab open in Thunderbird?


• Do you have a lot of events that are created in a different time zone?

Let us know those settings, by either living a comment here, or on bug 603416

• Finally, and most importantly, do you crash often due to this issue?

If the answer to that last question is yes, try to follow the instructions at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/how_to_get_a_stacktrace_with_windbg to get a more complete stack trace or leave a comment in the bug and we will ask you to do a few things and that should let us fix the crash.

Syndicated 2011-07-07 16:00:52 (Updated 2011-07-07 16:11:06) from Ludovic's weblog

Google + wish list

I've been using google+ for a few days and I really like it, I'd be ready to switch from Fb if :

• My google plus stream was at a easy to remember url (remove the uid and make it my name)


• I could easily set a default circle to broadcast to (mine would probably be +public)


• I could more easily share content from other sites (ie like FriendFeed use to work).


• Birthday notifications

Syndicated 2011-07-05 07:11:43 (Updated 2011-07-04 12:36:23) from Ludovic's weblog

My flickr wishlist

I've been a very happy flickr customer over the course of the last 4/5 years. But it seems flickr is slowing down on innovation and getting useful new features or deals out. So I'm going to publicly post what I would like flickr to bring me over the course of the coming months.

• Support for large image - ie those of us shooting panorama.


• Better cameraphone support , my Galaxy-S (I) is still not recognized after 6 month usage.


• Better maps - some of the map data is very old and should get refreshed.


• Sharing to google +


• Pushing machine tags and have more partner sites use them (here I'm thinking about tripadvisor).

Syndicated 2011-07-04 06:59:42 (Updated 2011-07-04 07:08:36) from Ludovic's weblog

landfill.bugzilla.org

A few times a day I end up getting bugmail from bugzilla.mozilla.org by someone trying and testing features of bugzilla (like the security one). People don't realize that every time a bug is open a good number of emails are going to be send to groups of people (the number of people in the group will depend on the bug, the place it's filled in bugzilla etc ...). And each of those people will loose a few seconds for each email. In the end it's a lot of time that could be used to fix issues, and make the product better.
We do understand that people want to try and test the bugzilla product - and we are offering a non production database , just designed for people who want to test features in bugzilla. That instance of bugzilla is available at http://landfill.bugzilla.org - please use it to do any testing you want.

Syndicated 2011-06-24 11:28:14 (Updated 2011-06-24 11:37:50) from Ludovic's weblog