Bluetooth on the Dell Studio 15 using Opensuse 11.0

So I've been wanting to get the bluetooth working under OpenSuSE 11.0 on my dell stuide 15. I've had it working on other computers, but it did not seem to work.

I've now managed to get it working by trying some of the ideas on this page. I had to adapt things to OpenSuSE a little, but basicly all that is needed is too edit the /etc/modprobe.conf.local and add the line "options hci_usb reset=1". Now make sure the bluetooth server is running at startup, and reboot.

If things are working, the command "hcitool scan" should list the bluetooth devices near by. I was then able to transfere files and pair my phone :-)

Bomber moves into KDE Games

Work on bomber as progresses well. It was moved playground to kdereview for a bit of peer review. This turned up a few things. Most of the issues I fixed were because I'm a Java coder writing C++ :-) So I learning quite a bit about the best practices, which is good. Bomber has now moved into kdegames!! So should be in the upcomming 4.2 release. Time to start thinking about my next project.

For people reading my blogg for the first time, here is a repost of some information about bomber:

The aim of the game is to destroy the buildings below you, before you crash into them. The space ship will fly over the buildings, getting lower each time. Once the level is cleared, you start of the next, which is harder with taller buildings and a faster plane.


The game is still in development at the moment and can be found in the playground section of the KDE repository. Big thanks to Eugene who worked on the theme.

Media Info Fetcher

I was face with a problem a while back, I had quite a few media files that and the wrong names. I wished to rename these too the correct names. I wished to be able to define what I though was a correct name. The main reason for this is that they show up in my media centre. A second thing I wanted, was meta data associated with each of the media files that could be displayed in the media centre.

It was for these reasons that I hacked together some Perl scripts that used the great Perl module. This allowed me to retrieve the meta data that I was after. However I prefer to work with Java over Perl and as my application was needing more and more features, I decided to rewrite it in Java.

So Media Info Fetcher was born. This is a java application that can retrieve Film and TV Show information, and rename it according too data it looks up off the Internet. This information is then cached using configurable stores so that hopefully it can be used by media centres.

I think I've achieved my first aim so far, but my second aim of getting a media centre too use the retrieved data has yet too happen. This is probably going to involve creating a plug-in for other media centres. Though I'm open too ideas about this.

Anyway I've just made the first release of the 1.0 version of Media Info Fetcher. So check it out here.

I've some plans for the next major version. These may change, but include:

• Adding support for Films.
• Adding more stores and sources.
  

Google Code

I've been working the last few days on a new project that I wish to open source (More on this in another post when the project is in a slightly better shape) and I've been looking for somewhere to host the project. My first though was too give sourceforge a go, however a friend suggest I take a look at google code.

I'm pleased I did, I have to say that it's exactly what I was after. I was able to create a new project very quickly and the web base tools they provide are very nice. The whole site feels a snappy, clean and a lot less fussy than source forge. It's probably unfair to compare it with sourceforge from a hosting point of view as I've never used sourceforge for hosting. Howerver from the point of view of a user looking for software, I find google code much better.