Author: James Mernin

James Mernin is Director of Engineering for Cloud Services at Red Hat and the owner and administrator of the Martello blog.

General - Technology

Samsung Galaxy Tab: First Thoughts

February 24, 2011 by 0 Comments

I got the opportunity to borrow a brand new Samsung Galaxy Tab for a day this week. Nice!

The extra screen real estate really make a lot of difference when you’re trying to stay in contact with the office, and I setting up my Google account on it was a complete breeze (as it us on it’s aby brother, the Galaxy S). The absence of the physical buttons across the bottom on the front screen took a little getting used to but the power button on the side began to work better for me as the day wore on. They’ve also put a little more thought into the quick access icons which are easier to use.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

If I had any criticism really, it would be that removing my Google account settings from the device after I was finished with it was not very straightforward. In fact I had to do a complete factory reset of the device to do so, losing all the installed apps and configuration settings in the process. Now I know there are ways to speed us the recovery process here (AppBrain, for example) and that it’s probably not a very common thing to want to do with a portable device (certainly not with a mobile phone).

However, the increased screen size on this tab (and other pads) might tempt some small companies to buy a shared one for ad-hoc travelling employees to share, so perhaps it’s not that unreasonable after all.

In any case, it’s a really great device and did exactly what I needed it to on the day.

Technology

Removing email addresses from Thunderbird’s auto-complete list

February 18, 2011 by 1 Comment

Like most email clients, Mozilla Thunderbird has a very useful auto-complete function which allows you to choose from previously-used email addresses when composing a new message. However, removing entries from this list is not as easy (or obvious)  in Thunderbird as it is in Microsoft Outlook, for example, where all you have to do is press the DEL key when the auto-complete list pops up.

Instead, Thunderbird seems to store the auto-completion list in a section of the Address Book called Collected Addresses. To remove an entry you have to:

  1. Click the large Address Book button in the main (Mail Filter) toolbar
  2. Select the Collected Addresses group
  3. Locate and delete the desired addresses from there

Source: mozillaZine Forums

Technology

Hyperlinks to external URLs in Redmine

February 17, 2011 by 0 Comments

This one had caught me out on more than one occasion recently, and it relates to adding links to external websites to issues (Wiki posts) in the Redmine issue tracking system. The syntax used to cite links to other pages on the same site seems reasonably straightforward (and largely standard):

[[Some Text|Some_Other_Page]]

However, to insert a hyperlink to an external website, you need to do the following:

"SomeText":http://www.example.com

To be clear, you need to add double-quotes around the text, then insert a colon between the closing quotes and the hyper link (with no spaces in between). I kid you not!

Source: Redmine Wiki Formatting

Technology

Using Spark IM client with Google Apps

February 16, 2011 by 3 Comments

I’ve been using the Spark IM client for a number of years now and, whilst it has not been updated for quite some time, it still does the job I need it to. I recently helped a friend move to Google Apps on one of their domains, but who also happened to be a Spark user. Setting up a Gmail account in Spark is reasonably well documented but there are some subtle differences in this setup when it comes to Google Apps accounts.

So here is how to configure Spark IM to work with a Google Apps account (taking fred@example.com as the use case).

  1. On the main Spark login page, enter the following details:
    • Username: fred
    • Password: *****
    • Server: example.com
  2. Then click the Advanced button:
    • Uncheck the “Automatically discover host and port” option, and enter
    • Host: talk.google.com
    • Port: 5223
    • Tick the “Use OLD SSL port method”
  3. Click OK and login in as normal

The only slightly odd part is that, for most other things, your username is the full fred@example.com but in Spark (and some other IM clients), you need to split this apart and use the domain portion as the server name instead. It may not be perfect but this is what worked for me!

Life - Waterford

1848 Tricolor Celebration in Waterford, Ireland

January 21, 2011 by 0 Comments

Some friends of mine are part of a group that are organising a formal celebration of the history and origin of Ireland’s national flag – more commonly known as the Tricolor – in the city where it was first unveiled – Waterford.

Jonathan Brazil has also written an excellent piece that introduces the planned celebrations far more eloquently than I ever could, so feel free to read his post too.

For more information check out http://www.1848tricolour.com and join in the festivities.