2009 – Page 4 – Stochastic Geometry

Home / 2009 (Page 4)

What platform to write mobile apps for?

A question came up on the boards.ie programming forum a week or so ago about whether to write apps for the iPhone or the Android platform. With Suura, we’ve been looking at what platforms to write clients for (and which to write for first), and it occurs to me that the data on what’s actually going on and what the hype is pushing are monumentally disparate. Believe the hype and the competition is all between Android and WebOS.

Thing is, all that noise is ignoring a few details. First off, both are tiny. In the telecoms market, even the iPhone is a niche player. Take mobile internet usage – yes, it’s growing, and at a rate noone expected, but look at how much of the overall total is made up of phone browsing compared to laptop browsing in these statistics released by Boingo in June this year:

Yes, it’s rising and I’d be surprised if it tailed off tomorrow, but it’s still only a small part of a niche market – don’t forget that the telecoms market is seeing 50% global market penetration at the moment and is looking to improve on that.… Read the rest

Mark Dennehy in 07 Oct 2009 8 Comments

VisTablet under Debian Squeeze

C General Linux

DSCF5570b

A new toy arrived today – the VisTablet, which is just a rebadged Aiptek 600U (model number WCK-C121). They sell as Aiptek or Waltop or Medion or any one of a few other names for about €65 on ebay.ie at the moment, so I thought what the heck, I do a fair bit of stuff in Gimp so maybe it’s worth a look. A few clicks and a week or so later and it arrives. Cue tearing open the box and unwrapping!

Plugging it into the laptop (Thinkpad R61 running Debian Squeeze amd64) got an instant result in that it found the device and allowed cursor movement… but no actual buttons or pressure sensor stuff, so it couldn’t work as a tablet. So off to google we go and after trying some frustrating messing about with udev rules (to create /dev/apitektablet – which isn’t necessary it turns out) and hal fdi files (to set up X.org… Read the rest

Mark Dennehy in 06 Oct 2009 5 Comments

New CS7004 hardware arrives…

Academia C CS7004

General New Toys!

So for CS7004’s labs, I wanted to have one large-ish, deep-ish, multi-step, interesting project. And I’ve thought of one and I’ll write it up as we go through it (no fair readers here learning before the students!).

But here’s a sneak peek at the hardware they’ll be using 🙂

(Assuming, of course, that I can get the sodding thing to do what it needs to do!)

DSCF5577b … Read the rest

Mark Dennehy in 06 Oct 2009 No Comments