Listening to K-LOVE on TuneIn Radio

Recently K-LOVE had their internet stream removed from the TuneIn Radio iPhone App.  I listen to K-LOVE quite often on my commute and in the office, so that was a bummer for about a week or so.  I found I can manually add it back into TuneIn and thought I would share the solution.

1. On My Presets click on Add new custom URL at the bottom.
2. Add this URL:
   rtmp://emf.mpl.miisolutions.net/sk001-high-fms-live01/sk001_mii_edge_high.stream

I’m a huge fan of the TuneIn Radio app and I respect the fact that they honor a radio station’s request to remove them from the directory, but I’m very glad I can add any custom URL I want to the app.

Resuming iPhone Course – Finally

Back in January I had this grand idea I was going to take the CS193P course and learn how to code in Objective C.  After changing jobs and being dropped in the fire at my new job there was no time to continue with the course.  But now I’ve finally got some additional free time and my company is actually allowing us to do mobile application research during some down time we have right now.

I’ve made it through the first 4 lectures and I’m finally getting familiar with the Objective C syntax for properties, memory management, and messaging (invoking methods).  If you have some skill in programming this course is great.  If you’re a noob you might as well skip it.  You really need a grasp on basic programming skills to even think about coding Objective C unless you have a ton of time on your hands.

I’ll have you know I also installed Eclipse and the Android Developers Toolkit.  I would really like to be able to build for both platforms when I finally have that awesome App idea.  Android looks pretty easy, and I already know my way around Eclipse so the learning curve shouldn’t be too bad.

incipio feather iPhone 4 case

I recently picked up an incipio feather case for my iPhone 4.  Obviously I wanted to protect the phone and get rid of the left handed antenna signal issue.  I use my phone in my left hand often when browsing or loading up new tunes in WunderRadio or Pandora.

Overall I’m very happy with this case.  Tight fit, minimal bulk, protects the back and sides of the phone, and it gets rid of the antenna issue.   I’m pretty careful with my phone, so I’m going with minimal protection this time simply to get rid of the signal issue.  I like that this case is so thin and barely noticeable when it’s in my pocket!  Check out the shots I took with my buddies Nikon D3000.  What an awesome camera!

CS 193P iPhone Application Development

I’m auditing the iPhone development class at Stanford.  So far I’ve made it through the first week and the projects have been a great introduction to Objective-C and the Foundation frameworks.  The video of the lectures are posted on iTunes U and the projects are accessible on their website.

http://cs193p.stanford.edu/

I’ll be blogging on how it’s going, and when I have an app built and on the App Store (assuming they approve my app)  I’ll be sure to let the world know.  I’ve been wanting to get started on iPhone Development since I bought my MacBook last summer and it just hasn’t happened for me yet.  This is a good way to get a great introduction with some guidance…..for free!

Visual Studio and SVN

I recently converted over to using SVN for source control for all my projects at work.  I’ve been using it at home for over a year now.  So far…..its great!  I’m primarily using Visual Studio 2008 so I needed something that would integrate cleanly, but I also wanted something that could be used by multiple platforms since I’m looking into developing for the Mac and iPhone soon.  In addition, our budget is very limited so I needed a free solution.

Solution:

VisualSVN Server:   http://www.visualsvn.com/server/

• Easy to install SVN Server for Windows that is free if you don’t have any advanced server needs.

AnkhSVN:  http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/

• Free Subversion SourceControl Provider for Visual Studio 2008.
• Super fast, easy to integrate with existing projects, and very clean implementation.

TortoiseSVN:  http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

• Integrates SVN into the shell and makes it easy to add whatever I want to source control, even if  its not in a Visual Studio project.  I used TortoiseCVS at SAS a few years ago so I figured TortoiseSVN would be of similar quality.

JIRA, Fisheye, and Greenhopper Starter:  http://www.atlassian.com/starter/

• Issue tracking, source control management and visualization, change tracking, and agile project management.
• The starter licenses are $10 each for these so the price is definitely right.  We do have a little bit of budget here and $30 is nothing.  We’re a very small team so the starter licenses are perfect for us.
• I’m just now getting this all up to speed and still in the evaluation phase, but the change tracking and issue management are top notch and installation and integration with VisualSVN server were pretty painless if you know anything about Java web applications.  I just needed to throw a little more RAM at my instances of Tomcat and its all running flawlessly now.

Google Toolbar adds Chrome New Tab Page

I especially like the Chrome new tab home page that shows your recently and frequently visited pages.  Its like a super quick visual bookmark page that automatically updates itself.  But Chrome didn’t cut it for me as a browser just yet.  I love the isolated process model they are using, especially considering how many time Firefox crashes on me, but I need access to a few toolbars for Web development and debugging that are available in Firefox, such as Firebug, Web Developer, and Colorzilla to name a few.

Luckily this new tab home page is now available in the Google Toolbar Beta version for Firefox.

Just use this as your home page:

chrome://google-toolbar/content/new-tab.html

Pandora Gadget for Vista Sidebar

Normally, I don’t have the Vista Sidebar running, but I have a new reason to have it running now:  no extra tab or Firefox window required to listen to my Pandora stations!

http://www.pandora.com/on-windowsgadget

I honestly like Vista, especially on my macked out machine I use at work.

Enabling More Than 2GB of Memory in Visual Studio 2008

I have constantly been getting errors while doing builds in Visual Studio 2008 as well as doing searches that say I’m out of storage, along the lines of:

Not enough storage is available to complete this operation.

My computer has 4GB of RAM so I shouldn’t be running out of memory.  Thanks to Google and Steven Harman my problems seem to be solved!

Hacking Visual Studio To Use More Than 2GB of Memory

The first thing to do is tell the OS to increase the amount user-mode memory from 2GB to 3GB. If you’re running a 64-bit you can skip this step.

• for Windows XP: Backup the boot.ini file and then put the /3GB switch in your boot.ini. (more information on the /3GB option)
• for Vista: run the following from the Visual Studio command prompt (Brad Rutkowski has the full scoop):

     1:  BCDEDIT /Set IncreaseUserVa 3072

Then we have to make Visual Studio large address aware.

1. Be sure to backup devenv.exe
2. Using the Visual Studio command prompt, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9\Common7\IDE\
3. execute the following command:

      1:  editbin /LARGEADDRESSAWARE devenv.exe

Finally we’ll use the old Microsoft-fix-all – reboot the machine. Bounce that box!

Enabling the DoubleBuffered Property

I have been developing a pretty extensive UI and Database for retail sales and service, and we’ve had issues with slow response of the UI and flashes when repainting.

I had read about the DoubleBuffered property and how setting it to True fixes this problem.  I set this on our main forms but it made only a minimal difference.  I just recently decided to apply this change to all the controls and forms, and that makes a huge difference.

The speed increase on loading the initial form is OK, but when switching forms and switching customers, the UI repaints super fast now.  It barely flashes at all now except a slight bit where we have a large number of controls close together over a gradient.

Artwork by Harriet Hoover

Harriet Hoover created this card for Irene for her 88th birthday.