Fortunately, it was relatively easy to workaround this if you have access to US-based VPN or proxy. You can get easily get a 5GB package for US$5 from AlwaysVPN which is really useful for stuff like this and is probably a much safer option than some dodgy public proxy.

On your computer

1. Connect through a US-based VPN or proxy and sign up for an invite at Google Music.
2. Wait for invite. I signed up after IO and got it just today, making it about a 3-week wait.
3. Sign up for the service through the invite link (no vpn/proxy required).
4. Follow through the sign up instructions and download Music Manager. Launch Music Manager, sign in and select music from your computer for upload.
5. Let Music Manager do its thing, and when it’s done, go to http://music.google.com, and hey presto, start streaming your music (and about 150 complimentary tracks from Google)!

If you have an Android phone, things get better. Install the latest beta version of Music (I have v3.0.1.339) and you will be able to stream music directly on your phone.

On your Android phone

1. Intall Market Enabler (free, search for “market enabler”).
2. Use Market Enabler to change the Market to a US telco (e.g. T-Mobile / AT&T / Verizon)
3. Install Music from the Android Market (free, search for “google music”).
4. The music app automatically picks up the music already in your phone and the music you have in the cloud for streaming. Enjoy!

Impressions

I’ve always hated managing playlists on the phone so I really really welcome the ability to be able to create and edit them in the browser and have them synced transparently to the phone. The beta Music app in the Android is an improvement on the existing version, but it’s still a little fiddly. For example, you cannot “pin” songs for offline listening from the song list view or from the “Now playing” screen. However, if you have a decent connection on the phone, the streaming works pretty darn well.

The Music Manager, in its present incarnation, is really just a glorified sync/upload client. It really doesn’t do much else. While I’m grateful that it is not a bloated beast like iTunes, I wonder if why it’s needed in the first place. Why can’t I just drop my music for upload through the browser, like how attachments are done in Gmail?

Google provides some useful help online, which also gives you a good idea of what the service can do.

1. Music Beta on your computer
2. Music Beta on your Android device

There’s a number of rough edges on the service but overall, a competent start to storing and accessing your music on the cloud. I only hope it doesn’t go the way of Wave before it gets a chance to get better. :p

So thanks to some ingenious folks, I managed to install, what feels like a pre-release version, Froyo onto my Nexus One. The link to the upgrade image on the Google server is gone, but if you search hard enough, you will probably find a mirror somewhere.

There are already too many blog posts, videos out there on the broad improvements in Froyo, but for me, it was a little fix that brought a smile to my face.

Gtalk synch (almost)! I love that Gtalk messages typed on the laptop browser now appears in the mobile version automatically. It’s not a biggie like having Flash or a faster browser but it was rather annoying when it didn’t before. I frequently connect on both the laptop and the mobile at the same time and it’s nice to be able to pick up the mobile and continue the conversation without skipping a beat.

I do wish that the Gtalk messages from the mobile will sync automatically back to the browser chat window but half a loaf is heck-a-lot more than none.

Another cool feature, which incidentally was demo-ed during Google I/O 2010, is the Google Phone to Chrome function. This is supposedly arriving with the next version of Android, 3.0 “Gingerbread”, but an alpha-ish implementation is already available for Froyo with the Chrome to Phone extension. A really handy method to send website links to the phone and the setup instructions are relatively easy to follow.

First up was a long dip in the Google Maps API developer documentation and API references. Mike William’s Google Maps API Tutorials were a god-send for getting up to speed on what’s possible with the API and a treasure trove of sample code for reference.

After a few days of intensive reading, I felt somewhat assured that my ideas were feasible and it was time to figure what I need. One of the first things I needed to get working was an overlay of the administrative districts and borders on GMaps.

Converting Shapefiles

I forget how, but I knew I needed shapefiles. Thanks to some references, we lucked out and managed to get the shapefiles needed. What was left was to figure out a way to convert them to a format I could use with Google Maps.

This was where the Finder! utility on GeoCommons.com came through for me. I was able to convert the shapefile into a usable javascript-friendly JSON format for use with GMaps.

Finder GeoCommons Formats

Simply upload the shapefiles as instructed on Finder as a layer and in the layer details page, download the JSON format. To use the geo data in the json file, save it with a .js extension, e.g. japan_boundaries.js.

Open up the .js file with a text editor and prepend a javascript variable declaration (“var japan = ” like so to the json object:

var japan ={“features”: [{"PERIMETER": 2.733, "ADMIN_NAME": "Osaka"...

Include the .js file in your page, and you can access the "features" as an associative array in javascript.

// loop through each feature
for (var i = 0; i < japan.features.length; i++) {
	var feature = japan.features[i];
	if (feature.geometry.coordinates) {
		var xys = new Array(feature.geometry.coordinates.length);
		// loop through each pair of coordinates
		for (var x = 0; x < feature.geometry.coordinates.length; x++) {
			xys[x] = new GLatLng(
				// yes, the coords are “inverted”
				feature.geometry.coordinates[x][1]
				, feature.geometry.coordinates[x][0]);
		}
		// create a polygon from the coordinates
		var polygon = createMapPoly(i, xys);
		_map.addOverlay(polygon);
	}
}

With this, you should be pretty much on the way to rendering each area as a polygon on the map.

Test Overlay for Japan

Simplifying Shapefiles

A word of warning, depending on your shapefile source, you may end up with an extremely complex polygon (with many points). Multiply this by the number of the number of polygons you are rendering on a single map, the rendering can be painfully slow in the browser (particularly in IE, even IE8).

This was the case for me, and because we had such great shapefiles, each polygon had a few hundred points to render. To improve performance, the shapefiles had to be simplified to reduce the number of coordinate points.

I found a dead simple flash tool online called MapShaper which worked great for me. Just upload your original shapefile and select the level of simplification you need. I had to use a fairly aggressive setting of 80 to bring down the number of points but your mileage may vary.

Mapshaper Simplification Settings

Export the simplified shapefiles and upload them to Finder again. You should notice that the json file is much smaller after simplification.

1. Go to System > Administration > Language Support > Install / Remove Languages
2. Select Chinese (simplified) and check all the components available
3. From Synaptic Package Manager, install scim and scim-pinyin
4. Start Terminal and run im-switch -c and choose “scim-bridge”
5. Reboot
6. Use control-space to toggle the Chinese/pinyin IME 就可以写中文了！

Help gleaned from here mainly.

sudo apt-get install vim

For starters, this will allow you to use the cursor keys (up/down/left/right) properly in insert mode and you will be able to use custom colour schemes for syntax colouring. My favourite scheme so far is the wombat.

There are probably much better editors available if you do a lot of coding. I use Eclipse when I need a full IDE, but for my dabble-ish codes on the laptop, vim is usually quite sufficient.

Karmic Koala popped out of the oven recently, and I decided to do my first upgrade. My gut told me that it was not a great idea to jump on Karmic so early, but my itchy fingers got ahead of me.

It was a Bad Idea™.

I should have done a trial run with the Live CD, but against my better judgement, I decided to do a direct upgrade. Unfortunately, the upgrade through the Update Manager did not work for some reason (some silly reason I cannot remember). I then downloaded a copy of the alternate installer and upgraded from the mounted iso.

Perhaps it was the tweaking on Jaunty that did me in, but the new 2.6.31-14 kernel just wouldn’t go beyond the loading screen, not even in Recovery mode. I was able to get further with the original 2.6.28 kernel but had strange problems like the screen occasionally blanking out on me after logging in. Hibernate also stopped working completely. No amount of tweaking helped.

Sigh, not good. My only option was to do a fresh install; but will it be Jaunty or Karmic?

Being a sucker for punishment, I grit my teeth, backed up my home folder and started with Karmic from scratch. With a little hindsight from my previous Jaunty install, I set aside a swap partition this time to save myself a little heartburn and it seemed to have worked. Hibernate/sleep worked perfectly this time. I had to install configure-trackpoint again to fix the sluggish trackpoint but a major consolation was that settings stayed this time! No more lost settings after waking up from hibernate. Yay!

Lots of little stuff here and there I had to tweak again.

• configure-trackpoint
• Shiki-Colors – theme
• tp_smapi – for HDAPS (Thinkpad only)
• tpb – for hotkeys (Thinkpad only)
• Workaround to turn off the laptop backlight
• msttcorefonts – fonts
• Compiz Config Settings Manager
• Media streaming
• Google Chrome

There’s probably more to do over the next couple of days, but I am grateful for the little improvements I’ve noticed in Karmic over Jaunty:

• Boot up / hibernate / wake seems a little faster After a couple of reboots later, no it was not really faster. If anything, it actually felt slower. And there’s still a weird momentary flicker now and then
• Intel graphics worked better – no hack needed so far
• Windows key worked OOTB
• No more irritating beeps!

I am slightly bummed that there’s no option to customise the login screen anymore in Karmic, and I am not too comfortable with having the username displayed by default.

Overall, Karmic does feel a little improved over Jaunty, probably due in no small part to the Hundred Paper Cuts project (I love this definition of a paper cut). I really wished the upgrade wasn’t such a disaster personally, but I did know better than to jump in so early.

Fortunately, this was my personal laptop and didn’t really have that much data or software installed. So a wipeout upgrade was more annoying than painful for me. Still, I can’t recommend that if any “Joe Schmoe” do this without some technical assistance on standby.

In the meantime, if you intend to upgrade to Karmic, earn some karma points first and go read the release notes will ya?

All you need to do is to setup a sync profile with these simple steps and it’s good to go. You have to manually trigger the sync though, but that’s just fine by me since the battery life for my E66 is average at best.

A quick note, contacts synchronised through this method will show up in the “My Contacts” group in your Gmail contacts. If you want to add a contact to your phone, it has to also go into the same “My Contacts” group.

What I love most about this setup is that it allows me to easily edit or add contacts through my Gmail account. Way faster than fiddling around with the phone.

This method works only for Contacts. If you need to sync up your calendar as well, there is a somewhat more involved method documented here.

If you’re multibooting, you may need to tweak Grub / System > Administrator > StartUp-Manager (tutorial).

As a side effect of the kernel cleaning, I had to rebuild the tp_smapi / hdaps modules for the updated kernel. Good tutorial here worked for my X60. I took the chance to also install the gnome-hdaps-applet (instructions) to get a visual indicator of the APS in action. Yay!

I got a Google Wave Sandbox account a little while back and started a small side project (which, as too many others did, fell wayside). Admittedly, it was rather confusing at the start and you really need to have a real-life network on the same platform for it to deliver on the value it promises.

If you haven’t lived under a rock in the last week, you would have heard about the opening up of Google Wave for limited preview. Those already on the Sandbox got invites, and I decided to pop in for a look. The preview instance feels definitely more stable compared to Sandbox. However, being logged on to both instances at the same time on Firefox 3.5, for some reason really slowed things down.

The word is that Wave runs best on Chrome, so I took the chance to check out Google Chrome on Ubuntu. Chrome is currently officially supported on Windows only but an early access version is available for Ubuntu (32/64-bit) and Debian (32-bit only). This version (my current installed build: 4.0.220.1) is a wee bit rough around the edges but generally worked well for me so far.

Wave, both Sandbox and Preview, felt snappier and more stable on Chrome. If not for the relative lack of extensions for Chrome (compared to Firefox), I would seriously consider switching browsers permanently. This is a seriously speedy browser.

Back to the Wave, if you want to give it spin and prepared for a little beta chaos, request for an invitation here.

Update: Found this nice short video on why you might want to use Wave.

So I decided to give it another stab at reverting drivers. I don’t know what’s different, but for some reason, it worked this time. No 100% CPU scaling or overheating. Hmm. Oh well, at least it works now!