The little mishap with one of my Android apps this weekend forced me to announce the fact that I had written a couple of android apps before I’d had the chance to properly adorn them with a little slice of the site. So tonight, I set aside some time to throw some of the information up. You can find more about my two forays into Android development at http://www.imagitronics.org/android.

I plan to update both of the applications as time permits, and with any luck, push a few more applications out into the wild over the coming months.

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I haven’t even gotten around to creating the official site for the two Android apps I released in January, but I felt compelled to apologize for some problems with my Comic News Stand application. As stated in a previous post, I recently moved the entire imagitronics.org domain to a new hosting provider and apparently, during the move, forgot bring over the cron job that updates the list of new comics each week from Diamond. I apologize for the inconvenience. A user finally contacted me today and brought the issue to my attention.

Now that the bad news is out of the way, I feel a bit of good news is in order. I *am* working (albeit slowly, I just started a new job and moved into a new home) on an updated version of Comic News Stand that includes the much-requested cover images in the list. Here’s a picture of an early build to whet your appetites!

There is still quite a bit of work to be done on this new version. It involved a complete rewrite of the code, but it is on my short list of things to do in March.

Thanks so much for using the app, and for understanding that I am just one guy doing something fun in my spare time!

Tim

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Last night I mentioned that my wife and I recently purchased our first home, and that I had a new workshop for the imagitronics lab. I thought I would throw up a few pictures of the new shop to give you an idea of just how great my new setup is.

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I know that it’s been entirely too long since I’ve updated updated the site with any real new content, but I have a good explanation, I swear! Over the last few months I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and won, I moved from Japan all the way to the little state of Texas, and I accepted a position at Rackspace Hosting working for the Slicehost team as a Linux System Admin II. On top of all that, my wife and I just purchased our first home! It has been a busy few months indeed.

Moving back to the states and finding work with an amazing company like Slicehost / Rackspace has really inspired and motivated me. What’s more, now that I have an actual garage and not just a small table in a tiny Japanese apartment, I can really start to tackle some larger/longer term projects that just weren’t feasible in that little space. I’m unbelievably excited as the second month of the year comes to a close, and I can’t wait to see what the next couple of years have in store!

As an aside, now that I work for Slicehost, I decided to migrate imagitronics.org from it’s old GoDaddy-hosted home to a speedy new Slicehost VPS where I can have complete root access to the slice where this blog resides.

Cheers!

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Update: Per this discussion on the remastersys forums, my fix will be included in remastersys 2.0.14.

This week, I was using remastersys to create a custom ubuntu-based distribution (more info on this later). One of the things that I noticed about remastersys version 2.0.13-1 was it’s lack of compatibility with Ubuntu’s USB Startup Disk Creator utility.

I have created a simple patch to address the issue. You can download it at http://www.imagitronics.org/download/ubuntu_creator.patch.

Alternatively, you can edit the file /usr/bin/remastersys and insert the following code immediately before Step 7.

#Step 6.5 - Added by Tim Farley. Make ISO compatible with Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator (Karmic).
echo "Making disk compatible with Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator."
touch $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/ubuntu
touch $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/base_installable
echo "full_cd/single" > $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/cd_type
echo $(uname -a) > $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/info
if [ "$LIVECDURL" = "" ]; then
LIVECDURL="<a href="http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys" target="_blank">http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys</a>"
fi
echo $LIVECDURL > $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/release_notes_url

This version allows you to set an addition variable in your /etc/remastersys.conf called LIVECDURL that points to the address of your custom distribution. The LIVECDURL variable defaults to the remastersys homepage if left unset.

Enjoy!

Tim

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