It's all good, from Diego to tha Bay .. Dre puttin it down for Californ-I-A
[ 'California Love' 2PAC feat. Dr. Dre ]

Hard to believe but four years have passed, since I joined the Southern California Codecamp Conference Circuit, speaking a couple times every year on various software technology related topics.
In January 2006, I spoke in Fullerton at the CSUF about "UI-Generation at Runtime with SwixML", covering the SwixML open source project that I had founded a few years earlier. This talk was refined many times, before I would eventually present it again at the Desktop Matters conference in San Jose. Many CodeCamp presentations in San Diego, OCEJUG Irvine, and Los Angeles followed but throughout the years, Fullerton remained my favorite venue. Not only do the buildings remind me of the University of Paderborn, I went to, but also because of the audience, which always seemed a little more open, more diverse, more enthusiastic, when compared to other CodeCamp locations.

This openness and the audience's excitement for new things, made the Fullerton CodeCamps the perfect venue to try a new talk for the first time, and so I spoke about "Arduino Fever - PHYSICAL COMPUTING" in early 2007. In January 2008 it was "Let's have the server call the client", where we took the accepted view that a Web-Client calls (via HTTP GET or POST) a server and turned it on its head, having the server call the client. Just like the Arduino Fever talk, the 2009 Fullerton talk "Turning a WiFi Router into a general-purpose Network Device" had a hardware component, showing off some of the new Fonera FON devices, running an OpenWRT build.

So it's January 2010 and like every year for the last couple of years, the Socal CodeCamp takes place at the California State University in Fullerton. I'm going to take a hiatus from the Southern California CodeCamp Conference Circuit, looking forward to a new exciting adventure, but not before joining the codecamp crowd at CSUF one more time. I hope to see you on Saturday 4:00 PM in lecture room H123. This time it's all about Android: "Writing a Web Service Client Application for Android"

Being born and raised in Germany, most of my extended family lives over there and even after all these years, a simple phone call easily reconnects me with family and friends. Almost like a secret handshake, dialing a number and hearing each others voice makes me part of their network over there.

With a little bit of work, the same can be had for your computer. Even if you travel, being away from home for an extended period of time, your computer can still be made part of your home-network, with just a click of a button ...

I cannot believe that it's really that long ago, but back in March 2008, I wrote about how to Protect your online privacy when on the road by using your Home Router as a Secure Socket Proxy. This is still very relevant and works just like I had written then, but using an ssh tunnel falls short when you want to turn the remote machine into an equal member of your home network; for this we need a Virtual Private Network.

"There was nothing you could have done, Luke, had you been there. You'd have been killed too, and the droids would now be in the hands of the Empire."

While the Android SDK comes with a complete set of javadocs, the source code of the SDK is missing in the SDK distribution. This is very unfortunate, since you cannot easily debug into SDK methods (at least not without running into de-compiled code) nor can you see how things actually work.
However, there is a quick fix to that problem. I downloaded the complete Android source including the Linux, drivers, libs, etc., like explained here: http://source.android.com/download and ran my short bash script on the source tree:

The nook has arrived

1st impressions of Barnes & Noble's new ebook reader

After being delayed twice, today the nook, Barnes & Nobles eBook reader finally arrived at my doorstep, (literally). The nook came nicely packaged and wrapped, almost iPod-style. After unwrapping it, it took only about an hour to complete charge the already about 70% charged battery. Hooking it up to a WIFI router was extremely easily. The nook discovered the 802.11g router quickly and all I had to do was entering the WPA2 key.