smorgasbork

Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 6; for CentOS 5, see this series.

CentOS (and of course, it's upstream distro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has an extremely powerful, but somewhat poorly documented, tool for rapidly deploying machines and managing their configuration: kickstart. Kickstart lets you build a custom installation that can run hands-free. So not only is the installation quick and easy for you, you can be confident that your machines are configured exactly the way you want them to be.

I'm happy to report that after about 4 months of spare-time development, Hot Death for Android is in good enough shape to release.  Hot Death is a port of my Pocket PC Hot Death Uno that was in turn an update of a Windows version I encountered in the mid-90s.

I overhauled the art (the original bitmaps were too low-res for modern mobile devices), and I tried to give it a look that was distinct from the commercial Uno card game.  As fun as it would be to have "real" Uno cards in the game, I don't want to invite a lawsuit.

Anyway, check it out in the Android store, and view my Hot Death page for more about the game and the different cards used in the game. 

I'm pleased to announce the GPL-ed release of cookingwithgas, a mobile web-based recipe organizing application.  This was my own personal experiment with jquery mobile -- I wanted to move my ancient MS Access recipe database into the 21st century.  I figured that a mobile-friendly UI was vital.  It is great to be able to check the ingredients on any of our familiy recipes while I'm at the grocery store!  Anyway, the application is PHP/MySQL based, and it requires Zend Framework.  http://smorgasbork.com/cookingwithgas/ 

After using Froyo on the Epic 4G for a few weeks, I came to the conclusion that something was very wrong with the launcher.  Often, I would return to the homescreen after using an application, and I would have to wait several seconds for the icons to redraw.  This happened most frequently if I changed orientation while in the application, so that when I came back to the launcher, it needed to lay itself out in the new orientation.

I didn't see this happen on my wife's Epic (at least not as bad as on mine).  I have no idea what's different between them.  But fear not, if you're seeing this problem, too -- there is hope.

We recently rolled out a MySQL master/slave replication solution (upgrading from version 5.0 to 5.5 along the way), and we ran into a few unexpected surprises that I thought I'd share.