As it’s at a stage where it works for the person I wrote it for (and a bonus user) it’s unlikely to be developed with any sort of pace, too many other fun things to hack on!

I’ve decided against trying to get it in to Palms app store as I’m fairly certain TFL won’t be too happy with me redistributing their map. There are ways around this but I don’t feel it’s worth it at this time, at the very least I’d need to support rotation and likely a couple of other features before submitting it to the app store otherwise Blunderground will just be a target for flames.

Writing apps for the Web OS is really easy, it’s just HTML and Javascript. I kept falling over the lack of static typing and my ability to create a large typo to LOC ratio but not everyone uses the compiler as a crutch like I do.

The develop/deploy/test cycle, even with the emulator, is a touch clunky. Seems to me a lot of the testing could have been done in a browser with a suitable harness but I didn’t have the inclination to develop that, I shall check out Ares if I write another WebOS application.

Finally interacting with web services wasn’t as rosy as the cloud pushers would have me believe, a significant bulk of the development time so far was spent on trying to figure out how to parse the JSON data TubeUpdates was returning. In the end I gave up and switched to using XML which I manipulated with JavaScript DOM methods and had the functionality running in minutes.

Because of this I’ve decided that I’m going to keep a set of notes against ConnMan git for budding UI developers.

These notes will sit on this here website and be updated each time there’s a change in the ConnMan interfaces.
Once the interfaces stabilise for ConnMan 1.0 I’ll write the information up nicely and post on the ConnMan website or some such.

See the first draft here: Writing connectivity UIs for ConnMan.

More specifically, I’ve been working on this component …

Now we’re open I will hopefully blog some more about my work

It really shouldn’t have been hard, I’ve done it several times before, you just go to the station from which you’ve arranged pickup and insert your credit|debit card into the collection machine.

Only this time it wanted a reference number. I vaguely remember being given one of those and told I would need it to collect the tickets. Bother.

Today I headed back, inserted my card, tapped in the reference of the first ticket. Boom. Tickets printed.

Round two, insert card again. Boom. More tickets! Wait, what?!? No reference number this time? …

That’s right - you only need to enter the reference number when you have more than one set of tickets to collect. Rubbish!

Is this really the best they could do? I’m certain I’m not the first to encounter this flaw in the system design, and surely I won’t be the last.

I can understand the potential use case where users only want to collect a certain set of tickets, leaving others for collection at a later date, but when your input method is a touchscreen UI asking the user to enter a reference number seems like perhaps the worst way of choosing which tickets to print.

What a load of pants!

As the first (of four) parts of Ghost was a free taster I went to the site and downloaded it, 3 days later I’d listened to it at least once daily and wanted to hear the rest of the collection. $10 is a paltry fee for two pressed CD’s so I ponied it up (plus another $13 for shipping, about £12 in total) and was offered a free one time download of the audio file, DRM free, in either high quality MP3, Apple Lossless Audio or FLAC.

Geek that I am I chose FLAC, for purest quality to later be encoded as I chose. The connection was mighty slow so in the mean time I researched methods for converting the FLAC files to 192kbs MP3s to go on my MP3 player. Here’s what I came up with:

Option 1: Using the command line gst-launch program with a pipeline deduced from the Brian Pepple’s blog and the gst-launch man page: gst-launch filesrc location=file.flac ! decodebin ! lame bitrate=256 ! filesink location=file.mp3

Option 2: Programatically, in Python, as explained at n3il wiki. Uses Python to call gst-launch with a similar pipeline as above but use Python to script passing all of the files in a directory.

Option 3: Using a tidy little Gtk+ application, SoundConverter, which uses uses Gstreamer to encode to one of a variety of formats (MP3, Ogg, Flac, Wav.).