Technobabble

Adobe has detailed instructions on setting up AIR on 64-bit Linux systems . However they are missing the final step on actual installation of AIR applications. They put a rather unwieldy program under /usr/bin called "Adobe AIR Application Installer". Running this from the command line against any .air file produces this error message: unexpected error: ArgumentError: Error #2004 with no other explanation. Turns out that just running the installer ("Adobe AIR Application Installer") opens a GUI where one can select the .air file and then the installation goes through without problems. Perhaps the command line interface expects arguments in some undocumented syntax.

Just days after IBM dropped their bid for Sun, Oracle’s stepped in and is acquiring Sun for $7.4 billion in an all-cash deals. The deal brings together two of the four horsemen of the dotcom era. With the acquisition, Oracle gets a lot of pieces – Solaris, SPARC, Java, MySQL, NetBeans, GlassFish, Star Office, VirtualBox. Some of these are in direct competition with existing Oracle products and there’ll be some similarity to prior acquisitions where product lines go into long term support. I don’t see GlassFish replacing Weblogic though given the latter's widespread adoption. NetBeans is a lot nicer than JDeveloper and I hope that doesn’t die. Drizzle seems like the only viable way forward for MySQL. I wonder if Oracle will spin-off the hardware businesses post-acquisition. Perhaps a joint venture with HP to expand the Exadata line? In any case, it must be a good day for a Sun shareholder to finally exit one of the worst tech stocks in the S&P 500!

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta 3 ( build 7A280f ) released yesterday fixes the YouTube bug that has been plaguing people who restored their OS 2.x based backups to their OS 3.0 phone. The bug prevented the YouTube application from connecting with the error “Cannot connect to YouTube”.

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta 2 was made available on Apple Developer Connection earlier this week (March 31st 2009). The new version is build 7A259g . The usual backup-flash-restore-sync cycle worked without a hitch but I do wish Apple would save the arrangement of apps – the sync puts them back in alphabetical order. Here are my notes from some quick testing: Beta 2 is definitely much more responsive. Apps load quickly unlike the sluggish beta 1. Typing is much faster. The copy rectangle is more responsive. YouTube is still broken (restored from backup). Skype works (on 3G) without a hitch. For some reason beta 1 had trouble on my phone. Some apps like Appigo’s ToDo had issues with text not being visible (white text on white background) – that’s fixed as well. The GPS errors (blue dot not showing location correctly) seem to have gone as well.