pitter patter on the keyboard

Before you soil your trousers, those domains which have already been registered with a free version of google apps will continue to be free. That doesn’t make the news any less devastating to those of us whom have taken advantage of the free service for resale/value-added hosting:

Hello from Google,

Here’s some important news about Google Apps—but don’t worry, there’s no need for you to take any action. We just want you to know that we’re making a change to the packages we offer.

Starting today, we’re no longer accepting new sign-ups for the free version of Google Apps (the version you’re currently using). Because you’re already a customer, this change has no impact on your service, and you can continue to use Google Apps for free.

Should you ever want to upgrade to Google Apps for Business, you’ll enjoy benefits such as 24/7 customer support, a 25 GB inbox, business controls, our 99.9% uptime guarantee, unlimited users and more for just $5 per user, per month.

You can learn more about this change in our Help Center or on the Enterprise Blog.

Thank you for using Google Apps.

Clay Bavor
Director, Google Apps

Thanks Clay. You’re a dick. $5 per user per month is preventatively steep when taken into consideration the fact that most GoDaddy resellers can deliver 10 accounts with unlimited storage for $2.50 per month all together.

Say Alice runs a temp agency. She has 30 employees and all of them need e-mail addresses. If Alice wants to use Google Apps for her company’s e-mail service provider she will pay $150 per month ($1,500 if she pays yearly) or 38 times what her shared website hosting plan costs.

The downside to third party mail providers like GoDaddy is they are notoriously oversold and dripping with spammers. That can affect your mail’s deliverability through collateral damage (RBLs, subnet reputaion, etc.).

The other major point in Google’s favour is their first rate spam filter. Being the unfortunate administrator of a few inherited, prehistoric mail servers nothing makes my skin crawl more than the thought of making a bunch of e-mail servers and in-sourcing all of my e-mail operations. Over time, in dealing with the prehistoric mail servers, it has become necessery to put a spam firewall in front of another spam firewall just to keep the first one from overloading. Maintaining even a modern e-mail system is similarly an arms race.

I have tried to sell clients on the concept of $5/user/month e-mail accounts since Google Apps began and they all look at me like I’m an idiot. If the choice wasn’t between free and obscene I (and I would assume many others) would not have taken advantage of the system in quite the proportion that we did.

The free ride is over. For now. I’m sure it won’t take long for the next big thing in free e-mail to make itself evident – and when it does Google can take a hike.

Apache Cordova is an open source framework for rapidly generating mobile apps from HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. At present, Cordova supports 7 mobile platforms with plans to expand. Since it uses core web design languages Cordova allows web developers to become mobile phone app developers without having to learn Java, C++ or the proprietary APIs of each platform.

This write-up covers the installation steps listed but not expanded on at the top of Apache Cordova API Documentation: Getting Started with Android.

To get started using Cordova on Gentoo we must first install Eclipse:

# emerge eclipse-sdk --ask

 * IMPORTANT: 9 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
 * Use eselect news to read news items.

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "eclipse-sdk" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- dev-util/eclipse-sdk-3.5.1-r1::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
/usr/portage/profiles/package.mask:
# Ralph Sennhauser <sera@gentoo.org> (18 Jul 2012)
# Unmaintained, multiple vulnarabilities. #351626
# A more recent source build maintained by the community is available in the
# seden overlay. A more recent binary is available in the java-overlay.

Which is not going to be as easy as I had hoped. Emerge layman:

# emerge layman --ask

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild  N     ] app-portage/layman-1.4.2-r3  USE="-bazaar -cvs -darcs -git -mercurial -subversion -test"

Once layman has been installed add the following to your make.conf:

source "/var/lib/layman/make.conf"

Java-overlay uses subversion and seden uses git; you may also want to enable the mercurial USE flag if you plan on using other overlays. We’re going to use the java-overlay since when it comes to java binary and source-compiled doesn’t really make a difference (other than a lot of time).

# layman -a java-overlay
...

You may need to add eclipse-sdk-bin to package.keywords before it can be emerged:

# echo "dev-util/eclipse-sdk-bin" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

Now install the package:

# emerge eclipse-sdk-bin

Now we need to install the :

$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz
$ tar xvf android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz
$ android-sdk-linux/tools/android

Running “android” from the command line in the tools directory will bring up the Android SDK Manager in X windows. Select any additional packages you would like to install and hit the Install button.

Now we’ll download the latest version of the Android Development Tools plugin for eclipse at http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html. Start eclipse:

$ eclipse-bin-4.2

Now follow the installation guide at http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/installing-adt.html:

After restarting Eclipse you will be presented with the Welcome to Android Development dialogue, install the new SDK, and optionally 2.2. You are now ready to proceed with the rest of the Getting Started guide.

After a series of rate hikes and cuts to Telus’ service coupled with the death of my Optimus One‘s SD card reader I decided it was time to get a big shiny phone. The kind that I could brag about.

Meet the $649 Samsung Galaxy S III:

Shown here having hot sex with my Optimus

His name is George, and we’ve become very intimate friends. Here’s why:

No more lagging. No more crashes. No more having to restart to switch to 3G after leaving a hotspot. Absolutely love Ice Cream Sandwich. One giant problem: does not ship with flash.

I read about Adobe dropping flash support for Android and Linux in general a couple months ago so I wasn’t shocked to see it missing. I was perturbed by the fact that it is not possible to install it from Google Play, which automatically opens when one goes to the Get Flash page on Adobe’s site. Apparently, it’s “not available in [my] country” which I felt was a little racist against Canadians.

The good news is it’s still possible to side-load the flash .apk from their Old Version archives at http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html. The page says the last version is intended for Ice Cream Sandwich, so no clue if this will still work once Jellybean has finished rolling out. Contrary to some guides, I’m able to play flash in the stock browser without having to use Dolphin.

Another unfortunate oversight is the lack of USB Mass Storage Device support; one can either connect with the MTP or PTP protocols but this forces (at least) linux users who want to quickly mount the external SD card to use camera software instead. Fortunately, this too can be remedied by side-loading an APK provided by Kopfgeldjaeger at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1711009.

I was tickled when my USB On-The-Go cable worked as soon as I popped it in. My new memory stick launched the stock file browser and my wireless USB keyboard and mouse also worked without intervention. Using a mouse on the phone is pretty friggin cool, if not practical.