Sure it doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes you might need to change the IP number of your machine running Ubuntu. Either to configure it with a static IP number on your LAN or temporarily to configure a Wifi router - the latter being my case.

The first shot at changing the ip number, was going to the “System” menu, choosing Administration and Network Tools. It sounded just about right - but it’s wrong. Sure you view settings and some statistics, but it’s all read only.

Picking up from the last post, I’d share a little more of my Android experience.

Once I had configured the phone with my basic settings – voicemail number, wifi networks and so on – and moving my contacts to the phone, installing software is probably the next step. There is an Android market, but it’s just as good (or bad) as the Apple Apps store – finding the best applications may be a pain.

I’ve been using SonyEricsson mobile phones ever since the launch of the P800 some years ago – all with the Symbian OS. Until a few days ago that is. Now I’m on Android. I’m still in the process of finding my way around Android, but I’ll try to post some of the tips and tricks of running Android here. This first post covers the very basics.

The Phone

My Android phone is the HTC Hero. It seems well build and solid – and the case seem to be crammed full with just about any imaginable feature available in a mobile phone. The only exception seems to be an FM radio, but frankly I doubt I’ll miss it much. I didn’t really use it on my most recent P1i.

In user interfaces, it’s sometimes the case, that you need to have dropdowns with content dynamically loaded from a database, and sure you can query the database and place the content in the HTML-source as regular markup, but you can also write a few lines of jQuery powered javascript, and provide the data from an ajax-source.

Here’s how to do it.

First make the drop-down and as the single option make a “loading” message - just to let the user know something is happening.

In this mordern web 2.0 age, javascript includes are used more and more - and in some cases solutions often depend on included content from 3rd parties. While it is nice these 3rd parties may provide us with data (such as the latest tweets from twitter), it would be quite nice, if issues on their server didn’t break the fancy page we’re building.

So the question is this: If you build a page and include javascript from foreign scripts, will error messages on their part break your site? We’ve made the assumption, that the Web2.0 page will degrade gracefully, so that the content/functionality of the javascript-includes is just extra frosting, not needed to use the page