BangBits

NOTE: This is an old article that I never got around to finishing. So it might or might not still be relevant. Turns out iGala is about to launch Android support for the frame, but until then, I suspect the following could still be of interest to some. One of the most geeky of shopping sites must be thinkgeek.com. They have many wonderful and useless items to appeal to the geek inside of you, hell even my wife had a blast reading their catalog. Anyway, one of the items they sell (exclusively apparently) is the iGala digital picture frame, from Aequitas Technologies. Now I've come across countless of these, but the iGala is one of the few ones running an easy-to-access embedded Linux. In the following I will show what I mean and provide some documentation that I have collected. Probing the frame from outside It's an 8" LCD, capable of a 800x600 resolution and with a resistive touch membrane in front. Apart from that, not much info is given to the consumer - in spite...

It turns out the latest Ubuntu release makes it a bit more difficult to connect the multi purpose Android debug bridge to your Android device. The following is really just an update of my older entry , to remind myself of the changes in Ubuntu 9.10. This stuff is pieced together from various other sources online (mostly android-discuss ) and thus not particularly original. Ok so first of all, there are quite a few more vendors and devices now (yay). In order to identify your device, make sure your device is not connected and then execute the Linux command lsusb. casper@workstation:~$ lsusb Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 07cc:0501 Carry Computer Eng., Co., Ltd Mass Storage Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp. HighSpeed Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 051d:0002 American Power Conversion Uninterruptible Power ...

While a great fan of type-safety and static checking, I also like a certain amount of leniency from compilers. Sun's Java compiler is a good example of one that goes overboard in some anal, misunderstood attempt at servicing the developer. In the following I will explain why I think so and how to fix it by modifying the publicly available source code for the compiler. Note that although I have done something similar before, I am no compiler expert and never will be. The modifications shown in this post are mere tweaks and I will stay far away from anything below semantic analysis. "Exception is never thrown" Have you ever had a good coding session, with design, implementation and refactoring happening at an immense speed as you try to perfect the internals of a piece of code? All of a sudden you are distracted because a try block no longer contains any methods that declares a checked exception. So now, in order to satisfy the compiler, you'll have to focus on removin...

While it may no longer be so much for reference purposes as in the past, I still really like to have good books at my disposal as a software developer. The DPI of a book still beats that of any screen and I can bring a book to the restroom without raising eyebrows from my girlfriend. In the following I will come with a brief but hopefully useful review of the 3 Android books I have in my library. O'Reilly's Android Application Development The book covers Android 1.1 stuff and is thus already a little dated. The content and organization is a odd and lackluster I find, for instance there's a chapter on signing and publishing your application which comes before chapters on basic views and widgets. It also doesn't come with an ebook/PDF so there's really not a whole lot going for this book, you are probably better of looking elsewhere. Manning's Unlocking Android Also covers 1.1 stuff, but better content and definitely better organized than the O'Reilly book. It...

The Android SDK comes with a pretty nice suite of tools, one of these is the Dalvik Debug Monitor Service (DDMS). However, it seems like the Android SDK is distributed with some 32bit SWT libraries so if you are on a 64bit Linux, running a 64bit Java default, you might run into this little message: casper@workstation:/$ dbms 43:27 E/ddms: shutting down due to uncaught exception 43:27 E/ddms: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r2/tools/lib/libswt-pi-gtk-3236.so: /android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r2/tools/lib/libswt-pi-gtk-3236.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32 (Possible cause: architecture word width mismatch) at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1778) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1687) at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:823) at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1030) at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java:123) ... This is f...

Well today the much anticipated speedy Firefox 3.5 arrived. Ubuntu probably won't push this one out as an update and I am not sure when Firefox's own auto-update would provide this upgrade, so if you're impatient as I, this is how to install it manually. Do read the whole thing through before deciding whether to do this, as there are some potential plugin issues involved! Installation procedure First you need to download and extract in an appropriate place. I'm extracting to /opt/firefox-3.5 such as to avoid collisions later when an official Ubuntu version is available: casper@workstation/$ cd /opt/ casper@workstation/opt/$ sudo wget http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.5.tar.bz2 casper@workstation/opt/$ sudo tar -xjf firefox-3.5.tar.bz2 casper@workstation/opt/$ sudo mv firefox firefox-3.5 casper@workstation/opt/$ sudo rm firefox-3.5.tar.bz2 -f Perhaps you notice that the download is a i686/32bit Linux release, this...

To perform general debugging and install alternative ROM's on the HTC Magic in Ubuntu 9.04, you will need a little more footwork than the documentation mentions. First, I assume you have installed the SDK and added it to path so that you can perform ADB commands from everywhere. Then, you need to have USB debugging enabled on the phone, do this by going under Settings > Applications > Development and check the "USB Debugging" item. Now, add a udev rule for your device: gksudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/51.android.rules Add the following to the file and save it: SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666" Reload USB devices by issuing the command: sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload Unplug and plug the device. Check if you can see the device: casper@workstation:~$ adb devices * daemon not running. starting it now * * daemon started successfully * List of devices attached HT95PKF00221 device There, now you can browse your phone with the ...

So I started playing with Android development, just received "Unlocking Android" and "Android Application Development" from Amazon. However before getting to do any real development, I got sidetracked in trying to create a skin for the Android Emulator that matches my new fancy HTC Magic. There actually exists one , but it's branded Vodafone, looks silvery and has the buttons all wrong so I decided this would be a good way to brush up on some Gimp skills. And here it is, I am no graphics artist so I am moderately pleased. You may use images and skin as you please, under the creative commons license. You can download the skin by clicking here . To install, simply extract the files to {android_install_dir}/platforms/android-1.5/skins/HTCMagic/. If you can not select the skin in Eclipse, you may have to edit the config.ini file of your virtual android device setting manually (under ~/.android/avd/), simply set the skin.path property to point to HTCMagic. You can al...

So I finally got an Android device, in the form of the second generation hardware from HTC known as the Magic, G2, Ion and Saphire. Since the original HTC Dream (G1) this phone received a major visual overhaul and now boosts a soft keyboard rather than a physical one making it a loss less clunky. And let me admit right away, I fell in love at once and have hardly put it down since. It is not my intention here to write any kind of throughough or balanced review, but merely to showcase Android and the applications to others contemplating getting one of these phones as well. Initial impression The phone looks and feels sturdy and quality, thankfully not branded like appears to be the case in the US. The 3.2" touch screen is glass just like the iPhone and the body is thick scratch-proof plastic. It has what amounts to 11 buttons (incl. a joypad) below the screen such as well as volume buttons on the side. Having played with an iPhone a few times, my impression is that the Magic is ver...

While preparing to do a backup recently, I realized that I had over 2GB in 110.000 files which was the result of either an Ant build or Maven target. It occured to me that with Maven especially, this is nothing more than garbage to keep around, since Maven will copy the artefacts to its /.m2 folder anyway! In a previous blog entry , I explained how to mount a RAM-drive on Ubuntu and use it as a development folder for much higher performance in the compile-test-run cycle. I have to admit, I don't use this for each and every project since it's a little complex and fragile. But there's an interesting compromise to be had here. It turns out it is possible to instruct Maven to build artefacts to a RAM-drive. That way you not only gain some performance but also some automatic "garbage collection" in that by the next boot, you will have no traces of these build steps laying around. It would also be a very healthy thing to do if you're running from of an SSD drive, wh...