Author Archives: Erik Starck

Flash Lite to Java Midlet in 10 seconds

By Erik Starck | Published: July 2, 2009
I am currently helping Sony Ericsson as a community manager for their developer site. As part of this I’m blogging over at blogs.sonyericsson.com and just recently I wrote a short post on how to convert swf to jar for mobile phones. In case you didn’t know, Sony Ericsson has a framework embedded in most of [...]
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Firefox 3.5: huge step forward

By Erik Starck | Published: May 1, 2009
This article sums up all the new features in Firefox 3.5. An amazing list! HTML5, local data storage, vastly improved font support, location aware browsing and a bunch of new CSS-features are some of the highlight features. Adding it together sums up to a new web platform unlike anything we’ve seen before. The step forward [...]
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How to become a good programmer

By Erik Starck | Published: April 8, 2009
The blog CodeLathe offers some advice. This is true, and in line with the subtitle of this blog: Programming is purely a mental activity and has no relationship to any physical activity including typing. To become a better programmer, you will need to exercise and build up the part of the brain that deals with [...]
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SEO-friendly titles in WordPress with Atahualpa theme and Headspace plugin

By Erik Starck | Published: February 8, 2009
The Atahualpa theme for WordPress is a really powerful theme with lots of settings. But it doesn’t give you full control over the titles of posts and pages the way the Headspace plugin does. How the titles of your blog posts look like is important for search engine optimization. If you want your post to [...]
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Building a working web service in 24 hours – straight

By Erik Starck | Published: January 23, 2009
Happy business campers! It’s the middle of the night and I’m in a big hallroom full of people all of them hacking on their computers. The event is called 24 hours Business Camp and the goal is to bring 90 entrepreneurial people together and have them build a service in 24 hours. There are 52 [...]
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Copying a VirtualBox VDI file running Ubuntu Server and getting Drupal running

By Erik Starck | Published: January 19, 2009
Sigh. Things are never as easy as you want them to be. I have two computers on my desk. My MacBook and my Asus EEE B202 running Windows XP. I wanted a development environment for Drupal (a php content management framework), so I tried running PHP on my MacBook. It worked fine, but the first [...]
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Setting up PHP and web server on OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

By Erik Starck | Published: January 18, 2009
Your shiny Mac comes preinstalled with a web server and php but you need to set it up to get going. Starting the web server is as easy as enabling “Web Sharing” under networks settings. I did this but the server did not respond at http://localhost. So, what was wrong? Well, I recently upgraded my [...]
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Upgrading RAM memory on Asus EEE B202, Eee Box

By Erik Starck | Published: December 28, 2008
A short video I made showing how to replace a memory chip on the Asus EEE B202 desktop computer: Read this post for further details on how to perform the surgery. Removing the side cover was the most tricky part but putting it back together was done in a snap: The B202 supports 2 GB [...]
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Sony Ericsson G502: excellent developer phone

By Erik Starck | Published: December 14, 2008
I wrote a short review of the G502 over at the Mobile Web Tablet. If you’re looking for a cheap but functional phone to do some mobile java development, this is it.
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Running JBoss 4.2.3 on OSX

By Erik Starck | Published: October 16, 2008
A simple gotcha, but anyway… If you get an exception like: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/ejb/Stateless at org.jboss.ejb3.EJB3Util.isStateless(EJB3Util.java:42) When trying to run jboss 4.2.3 on OSX, it’s because you’re using java 1.5 in stead of 1.6. Follow the instructions here to change. Updated:…and then of course Eclipse stops working. Here’s how to update.
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