Thushan Fernando Uncut » Software

Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released!

Thushan Fernando — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:51:51 +0000

The moment we’ve all been waiting for, the final release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK has been released! What are you waiting for, go download it and try out some cool things!

No Visual Studio installed? Not an issue, it comes with the Express edition of VS2010 and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone as well as XNA and Silverlight tools for Windows Phone and an emulator – all for free too!

For more information, see ScottGu’s great post about it!

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Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 free ebook!

Thushan Fernando — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:57:34 +0000

Free ebook compliments of Microsoft Press, you can download a PDF. or an XPS of the book and grab the book’s sample code.

The book is broken down into these parts catering for the following audiences:

Part I – for those moving from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010.
Part II – for developers moving from Visual Studio 2005.
Part III – for developers moving from Visual Studio 2008.

See the blog post about the target audience for this ebook too.

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Google Nexus update Froyo officially available!

Thushan Fernando — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 03:48:24 +0000

Quick note that the official release of Froyo (Android 2.2) is finally trickling down to Google Nexus One users. You’ll get it by the end of the week if not already. You can also download the officially signed release and update via your SD card alternatively.

UPDATE (01/07): The link above is for updating from the Google-IO Froyo release to the final.

The full OTA release is here:
http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-ota-42745.dc39ca1f.zip

The update from Froyo Google-IO to Froyo-OTA:
http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-FRF83-from-FRF50.38d66b26.zip

Rename the signed ZIP file to “update.zip” and upload it to your SD Card.
Power off your Nexus device.
Turn it on with the “Volume Down” button pressed.
When the boot loader appears, select “Recovery” using the Volume Up/Down keys to navigate and the Power button to select.
Once the Nexus has rebooted, the screen will display an exclamation mark with Android. Press and hold down Power and Volume Up, it’ll take a bit of time to register.
Navigate to “Apply SDCard:update.zip” and wait for the verification to complete and flash your phone.
After a bit of time the phone will reboot and launch your cultured Froyo release.
Verify by going to Settings > About Phone. The build number should be FRF83.
Bon Appetit!

As mentioned in my previous post from a couple of months back, this release packs a bit of punch! Yum!

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Trailer: Java 4ever

Thushan Fernando — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 04:23:56 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1zySeNpW20

In genius trailer! The .NET vs Java train left the station so long ago for me. .NET’s great for somethings, for everything else, there’s Java. Probably one of the best nerdy videos for the year!

UPDATED: First video was removed

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Oracle releases VirtualBox 3.2

Thushan Fernando — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:41:47 +0000

With the Sun now set, Oracle has released VirtualBox 3.2 finally In particular some lovely optimisations for the newer Intel Core i5/i7 processors, Large Page support (which helps significantly on Windows x64 and Linux) as well as a very welcome optimisation on the networking in VirtualBox as well as multi-monitor support for Windows Guests. Whats more RDP sessions are now accelerated (VRDP).

Amongst the changes from the changelog:

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility

Experimental support for Mac OS X guests (see the manual for more information)

Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)

Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity. Currently supported for Windows guests on 64-bit hosts (see the manual for more information)

CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)

New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)

Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running

Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests (see the manual for more information)

USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available (see the manual for more information).

LsiLogic SAS controller emulation (see the manual for more information)

RDP video acceleration (see the manual for more information)

NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage

Use of host I/O cache is now configurable (see the manual for more information)

Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system (replaces the automatic system presimparation feature; see the manual for more information)

Download from VirtualBox or get the Windows build. I’m really hoping the good Oracle keeps VirtualBox open, this is one kickass bit of kit.

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VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 Released!

Thushan Fernando — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:37:16 +0000

Finally downloaded the latest 3.2.0 release of VirtualBox today and gave it ago!

From the forum post for this pre-release.

VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:

Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.

Experimental support for Mac OS X guests

Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)

CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)

New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)

Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running

Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)

USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available

LsiLogic SAS controller emulation

RDP video acceleration

NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage

Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system

OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

VMM: fixed crash with the OpenSUSE 11.3 milestone kernel during early boot (software virtualization only)

VMM: fixed OS/2 guest crash with nested paging enabled

VMM: fixed Windows 2000 guest crash when configured with a large amount of RAM (bug 5800)

VMM: fixed massive display performance loss (AMD-V with nested paging only)

Linux/Solaris guests: PAM module for automatic logons added

GUI: guess the OS type from the OS name when creating a new VM

GUI: added VM setting for passing the time in UTC instead of passing the local host time to the guest (bug 1310)

GUI: fixed seamless mode on secondary monitors (bugs 1322 and 1669)

GUI: added –seamless and –fullscreen command line switches (bug 4220)

Settings: be more robust when saving the XML settings files

Mac OS X: rewrite of the CoreAudio driver and added support for audio input (bug 5869)

Mac OS X: external VRDP authentication module support (bug 3106)

Mac OS X: Moved the realtime dock preview settings to the VM settings (no global option anymore). Use the dock menu to configure it.

Mac OS X: added the VM menu to the dock menu

3D support: fixed corrupted surface rendering (bug 5695)

3D support: fixed VM crashes when using ARB_IMAGING (bug 6014)

3D support: fixed assertion when guest applications uses several windows with single OpenGL context (bug 4598)

3D support: added GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object support

3D support: added OpenGL 2.1 support

3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (Mac OS X only) (bug 4653)

Added support for virtual high precision event timer (HPET)

LsiLogic: Fixed detection of hard disks attached to port 0 when using the drivers from LSI

NAT: fixed ICMP latency (non-Windows hosts only; bug 6427)

Keyboard/Mouse emulation: fixed handling of simultaneous mouse/keyboard events under certain circumstances (bug 5375)

Shared folders: fixed issue with copying read-only files (Linux guests only; bug 4890)

OVF: fixed mapping between two IDE channels in OVF and the one IDE controller in VirtualBox

Bootilicious! Download links are on the site (updated for BETA2).

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Multi-tasking in style on the Android Platform

Thushan Fernando — Sun, 02 May 2010 04:42:56 +0000

An interesting article posted on the Android Developer Blog from Dianne Hackborn (born to hack!) who discusses the way multi-tasking works on Android. Recommended reading as it goes beyond how it works (and why!) and offers some suggestions on how to make the most of it!

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Ubuntu 10.04 and getting Sun JRE instead of OpenJDK

Thushan Fernando — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:26:31 +0000

If you’ve downloaded the latest Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx you’d realise that they ship with the OpenJDK instead of the Sun (Oracle) JRE. The Ubuntu team has decided to move the Sun Java bits to the partner repository which means we need to do a couple of things prior to getting it through apt-get.
First add the repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list via the add-apt-repository command, then do a full update.

$ add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
$ apt-get update

Then lets install the Sun JRE & JDK as required.

$ apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
$ apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Once installed you can verify the correct JRE is installed with:

$ java -version

I have to say, this release of Ubuntu is incredibly refreshing Its matured so well in a short period of time, its definitely got the Lynx Effect(NSFW).

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Mechwarrior 4, free download!

Thushan Fernando — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:13:53 +0000

Quick note after seeing this on Kotaku, Mektek has released MechWarrior 4 for download for free (as in totally). Bring back those memories! The site’s been MC hammered right now but grab the 1.7Gb and lock & load

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FIX: WordPress Older Posts not working in IIS with Permalinks

Thushan Fernando — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:11:07 +0000

I spent some time tweaking my blog today after moving it to some fresh hardware. You may find that everything is loading much faster now which can be attributed to two plugins in addition to the hardware upgrade – wp-super-cache and wp-widget-cache.

I’ve also fixed a long standing bug with my particular configuration of WordPress that runs on IIS which causes the “Older posts” link at the bottom does not function for the second page. The WordPress generated URL for this is

http://www.thushanfernando.com/index.php/Index.php/page/2

Which is a bit problematic, this ofcourse can be reproduced only on IIS from my musings (serves me right eh?). There are a couple of suggestions by people on the forums already, but I wasn’t too keen on them as they seemed too high-level fixes.

I’ve enabled Permalinks with this format:

http://www.thushanfernando.com/index.php/2010/04/28/sample-post/

So I looked through the sources to see why this was happening. After a bit of snooping about I got to the get_pagenum_link function in wp-includes/link-template.php file.

Heres a bit of source for reference – this is with WordPress 2.9.2:

function get_pagenum_link($pagenum = 1) {
	global $wp_rewrite;

	$pagenum = (int) $pagenum;

	$request = remove_query_arg( 'paged' );

	$home_root = parse_url(get_option('home'));
	$home_root = ( isset($home_root['path']) ) ? $home_root['path'] : '';
	$home_root = preg_quote( trailingslashit( $home_root ), '|' );

	$request = preg_replace('|^'. $home_root . '|', '', $request);
	$request = preg_replace('|^/+|', '', $request);

	if ( !$wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() || is_admin() ) {
		$base = trailingslashit( get_bloginfo( 'home' ) );

		if ( $pagenum > 1 ) {
			$result = add_query_arg( 'paged', $pagenum, $base . $request );
		} else {
			$result = $base . $request;
		}
	} else {
		$qs_regex = '|\?.*?$|';
		preg_match( $qs_regex, $request, $qs_match );

		if ( !empty( $qs_match[0] ) ) {
			$query_string = $qs_match[0];
			$request = preg_replace( $qs_regex, '', $request );
		} else {
			$query_string = '';
		}

		$request = preg_replace( '|page/\d+/?$|', '', $request);
		$request = preg_replace( '|^index\.php|', '', $request);
		$request = ltrim($request, '/');

		$base = trailingslashit( get_bloginfo( 'url' ) );

	if ( $wp_rewrite->using_index_permalinks() &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; ( $pagenum > 1 || '' != $request ) )
		$base .= 'index.php/';

		if ( $pagenum > 1 ) {
			$request = ( ( !empty( $request ) ) ? trailingslashit( $request ) : $request ) . user_trailingslashit( 'page/' . $pagenum, 'paged' );
		}

		$result = $base . $request . $query_string;
	}

	$result = apply_filters('get_pagenum_link', $result);

	return $result;
}

This function (from reading through) essentially generates the links for the page numbers & page navigation taking into account Permalinks if configured. This is all fine and dandy for Unix hosts but for Windows, unfortunately this bit of code fails us.

...
$request = preg_replace( '|page/\d+/?$|', '', $request);
$request = preg_replace( '|^index\.php|', '', $request);
$request = ltrim($request, '/');
...

As the preg_replace is case sensitive, it will not replace the invalid Index.php that is seen on IIS. So the easiest fix is to tweak the regex pattern a little bit and tell it be case insensitive.

...
$request = preg_replace( '|page/\d+/?$|', '', $request);
$request = preg_replace( '/|^index\.php|/i', '', $request);
$request = ltrim($request, '/');
...

This will then generate the (invalid) urls and the preg_replace will remove any additional Index.php’s from the request URL as its already mentioned in the $base variable a few lines below:

...
if ( $wp_rewrite->using_index_permalinks() &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; ( $pagenum > 1 || '' != $request ) )
$base .= 'index.php/';
...

Once you make the change and upload the files, your “Older posts” will start working again. ~~I’ll submit a patch to WordPress~~ I’ve submitted a patch to WordPress Trac, now its just a wait and see what they say, in the meantime here’s a patch file if you don’t want to modify sources manually. If there any issues, post a comment

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