This Old Blog

My 2012 Nexus 7, which is barely a year old, updated over-the-air to Android 4.4 yesterday. This occurred after a long home commute across Orlando through some fairly heavy (and welcome) rain. When I finally plopped down in my La-Z-Boy and reached for my tablet, I was greeted with a notification that the full upgrade had downloaded to the tablet and the tablet was ready to reboot and install Android 4.4. It took around 30 minutes for the installation to finish, but when it was done the Nexus 7 actually looked a bit better and was better behaved than it had been when I first bought it back in October of last year. My tablet, which has been discontinued and replaced by the 2013 version of the Nexus 7, has been faithfully upgraded by Google over the past year. The 2012 Nexus 7 first shipped with Jelly Bean, Android 4.1. Since that time my Nexus 7 has been upgraded with every successive release of Jelly Bean. Over the year I've owned it my 7 has been the best value for a tablet I...

I started the month of May off with a simple post about developing for Android on Windows 8. I'd made a Big Promise to do a lot more than I've actually wound up doing. It's not that I've given up, it's that an awful lot has happened over the last 31 days. I did do some more development, less than I certainly anticipated, but I've not completely stopped. I'm just going at a slower rate than I anticipated. One of the better ways to dive and and get to know any complex software system is to take code previously written against an older version of an application and port it to the latest release of a compiler, software framework, operating system, or other complex software environment. Every complex system provides code examples to illustrate features and capabilities and to act as a starting point for other developers. And every example is always written against the earliest release, and more often than not, is never revisited and brought up to date against...

Nexus 7 emulation on left, Eclipse on the right, all hosted on Windows 8 With some time on my hands I'm building a new Android development capability, this time with Android 4.2.2 and my Nexus 7 tablet as the target device. In the past I was targeting Android 2.3 and my Android smartphone, the HTC myTouch 4G. I have several Android projects I'm pursuing that require a tablet as the platform. I intend to target Android 4.2.2 and later; there'll be no backwards compatibility. So far I'm using the emulator that ships with the SDK. I've yet to try to tie my Nexus 7 hardware into this. I will say this, when the directions on the Google site say not to build the device from the command line with the SDK, but build it from the Eclipse IDE, they mean it. I tried to build everything from the command line, and when it came time to try it from the IDE it kept failing because it couldn't find the emulator image. I had to delete both the initial SDK and Eclipse install...

You're looking at a screenshot from my Nexus 7, Google's 7" reference Android tablet. It's a screenshot of my blog with the tablet in its default portrait orientation. I changed my blog's default layout from 'magazine' to 'classic' because 'classic' displays best on the tablet. In magazine mode the blog crammed everything onto the page, regardless of its orientation. It made it very difficult to read and navagate. If you selected a story, it made it very hard to scroll up the story. If I may borrow a phrase and mangle it a bit, magazine layout is very finger unfriendly, while classic isn't. This layout also has the added benefit of showing the blog's navigation bar off to the right. There's just a smidge of irony in this selection of classic, as it was never originally designed for touch in mind, but for an earlier time on the web when simplicity was held in higher regard. I changed up the color a bit from tan to green. It...

This is going to be a tough one to write. From Christmas Day until New Years Day, my wife and I were owners of the Barnes & Noble HD+, their entry into the 10" high definition table contest. I in particular really wanted this to work, but in the end I deregistered my HD+ and returned it to Barnes & Noble. The Good First and foremost was the build quality of the table. Compared to my older Nook Tablet and even my Nexus 7, the HD+ is a very well-built table that exudes quality. It never flexed or creaked when handled, especially when it was put into and then taken out of it's book-style cover. The external frame looks to be made of metal (either aluminum or magnesium), with an excellent glass display on the front and non-skid back. From a material and construction viewpoint it stands head and shoulders above everything, including the Apple iPad. The version of Android used on the HD+ was a customized version of Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with Barnes & Nob...

Apple's iPhone 5 This is turning into a Weekend of Decision for me. First I'm wrestling with what kind of 35mm DSLR to move to, now it's a new smartphone and provider. I got on the new smartphone kick because I've just about had enough of the poor customer support and lousy service coming out of T-Mobile. Saturday's latest shenanigans with T-Mobile were the last straw. In September 2011 I purchased a T-Mobile hotspot. I got this for my youngest daughter so that she could have internet connectivity at the house she'd moved into, as well as being able to carry it with her around Tallahassee. In spite of the glowing ads, service has been mediocre at best, but at least it gave her connectivity to check her email and Facebook. In late August she finally found a decent (read: affordable) wired connectivity solution in Tallahassee, so she didn't need the wireless hotspot anymore. I called T-Mobile to turn off the mobile hotspot feature only to discover that i...

It's been a while since I touched my personal Android 4 repository hosted on my aging Latitude D630 and its Fedora 14 installation. I started hosting (and building) Android 4 just to get the experience in handling that particular project, as well as creating my own version of ICL to run on my Nook Color (Encore). The directions were initially written for CyanogenMod 7.x (Gingerbread) but are still pretty accurate (for the most part) for CyanogenMod 9.x (Ice Cream Sandwich). The only problem being the following: After performing repo sync (which is what I started with this time), during the build process, I ran into a build-halting error where libjackpal-androidterm4.so could not be found. Sure enough I didn't have that, just the earlier libjackpal-androidterm3.so. Looking around a bit on the internets I found the solution: right before build cd into cm/vendor and execute get-prebuilts . This will unpack term.apk and give you the correct library to build against. DO NOT d...

I wanted to wait a while and let the dust settle before wading in with my own not-so-unique comments regarding Microsoft's Surface tablets/slates/whatever-you-want-to-label-them. Current commentary is deeply divided over the obvious business perspective about how Microsoft had to do this because the OEMs had failed vs the perspective of labeling what Microsoft did as " one of the largest and most unethical industrial espionage campaigns of the last few decades ." I'm not here to take one side or the other, but to point out examples from Microsoft's long history why I believe these new machines are doomed to failure. I have long experience of Microsoft products stretching back to MS-DOS and further back to the original Altair Basic for CP/M and the Microsoft Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II, forward through a whole series of mice, keyboards, and X-Box gaming consoles as well as their ill-fate Zune player. But I also remember, from the software side, Blackcomb and...

Father's Day was mellow this year, just like it was last year. I called my dad, who will be 80 this year, and we spoke for a few moments. We exchanged pleasantries and give the ritual "happy father's day" greeting to one another. In all the years we've done this I've never quite gotten used to hearing the echo come back across the phone line, separated by 22 years. Later in the morning I had brunch at a local First Watch with my wife and my oldest daughter. I set some sort of record for the hostess when I ordered three of their pancakes (with blue berries) and ate the whole stack. She warned me they were large (plate-covering) and that maybe I wanted just two. Since it was brunch I was a bit hungry and ordered three. She was impressed when I finished them off. Outside the First Watch, the former Samba Room is evolving into Rocco's Taco's and Tequila Bar. I haven't a clue what the menu will be like, but it looks to be a fancy Tex-Mex restaurant....

Yes, I finally succumbed. Right before Facebook announced their billion dollar purchase of Instagram and right after the announcement of an Android version of the app, I went out to Google's Play Store (how so appropriate) and installed the free app. Then I started to play around with it. The biggest annoyance, and the reason it came off almost as quick as it went on, was the insistence of the app to upload the photo to the cloud. Being Old School and such, I tend to gather together a whole mess of photos and then look at them all before sharing anything. If you've seen my Flickr stream you may well argue that really doesn't help much, but still, it's my "work flow", and I do try to practice some minute modesty. While the camera on the HTC myTouch 4G isn't all that good, I have tried valiantly to produce reasonably mediocre photographs with it as apposed to blatantly crappy work. When I looked at what Instagram produced I was reminded I hadn't seen...

It was only a matter of time before the siren's call lured me to install the source for Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS, Android 4) and attempt to create my own version for my Nook Color. There are two links I've been following to install ICS from its git repository and then building from the repository. I need to list several caveats before we go much futher; I am a complete novice (otherwise known as "a noob") when it comes to the use of git[1] and building Android. So I'm depending on a lot of hand-holding at this point in time, meaning reading lots of xda forum threads and wiki pages to piece together a process that works with my Fedora setup. My Dell Latitude D630 isn't some awesome build machine. It's now considered a modest little notebook powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 processor running at 2.4GHz. It took a long time to pull the git repository, and it's going to take a long time to build the project. Right now as I type this the system load is ...

Looking at the Android devices that now litter my house (the Motorola Xoom, the Asus Transformer, my wife's and my Android smartphone, our Nook Tablets, and my latest, the re-purposed Nook Color), I'm reminded what I had 10 years ago. I had one new computer. It was a Compaq Presario 5WV280 running Windows ME. It had a 900 MHz AMD 32-bit Athlon with 256MB of memory and a 20GB hard drive. It came complete with color CRT monitor and speakers, and set me back some $2,000. I'd purchased it at downtown Circuit City, a store that eventually died seven years later in 2009 along with the entire chain. It was the last major purchase I ever made at a Circuit City. Where I purchased my Compaq in 2002 I really used that Presario. I quickly replaced Windows ME with Windows 2000. Soon after I added a second drive and started dual-booting Linux on it, starting with Redhat and later moving to Suse and then to Ubuntu. The other computer I had in the house was an ancient Compaq Presar...

Executive Summary In which I detail how I installed CyanogenMod 7 onto a Nook Color via an 8GB µSDHC card, added the modified Nook Color to my Android SDK development environment running under Fedora 14, and discovered that Foxconn was involved in the Nook Color's manufacture. Installation of CyanogenMod 7 I have, since around the first of February, been hacking around with the Barnes & Noble Nook Color. This is the same Nook Color I rather reluctantly returned a little over a year ago, and wrote about it on Matthew's Reviews [LINK] . What changed my mind enough to re-purchase another Color? Three events: Barnes & Noble released the Nook Tablet November 2011. I received a copy for Christmas and have been completely happy with it (a review is forthcoming on Matthew's Reviews). It cost $250. Which lead to the next event; When the Tablet was released, Barnes & Noble reduced the price of the Nook Color to $200. Which led finally to; In late January, Barne...

First comfort stop, Ocala, Florida My mostly-annual January trip to see my family in Atlanta started around 1:15 am this morning at the Orlando Greyhound terminal at John Young Parkway. I got to the terminal around 11pm so I wouldn't be late and to be able to queue up early enough to get a decent chance at picking my seat on the bus. Normally I fly up, but this year the prices out of Orlando to Atlanta were trending towards the outrageous (Delta flights had hit $500 round trip and were going higher each day). So I booked a round trip bus trip between Orlando and Atlanta on Greyhound for a rather inexpensive $90. It's been a while (years, really) since the last time I traveled Greyhound anywhere; the last trip was up to Tallahassee so I could ride back to Orlando with number 2 daughter in the Volvo (which we still own). Traveling by bus was simple back then; walk in, purchase the ticket, wait for the bus, board the bus, and then get off at your destination. This time I h...

To hear the infinite echo chamber known as the Internet, the fine folks at Carrier IQ sacrificed sweet little puppies and kittens in some black mass before writing the root-kit code that allegedly infects every smartphone on the planet. Right. Two of the alleged bad guys using Carrier IQ are T-Mobile and HTC. So out of curiosity I went bebopping over to the Android Marketplace and typed 'carrier iq detector' into its search to see what popped up. I found six apps. I installed three of the free ones to try out. The results from running them are below. The astute reader will note that all three indicate my T-Mobile HTC myTouch 4G, running Android 2.2.1, does not have Carrier IQ. Test results So I will sleep the sleep of the innocents tonight, secure in the knowledge that my fabulous Android smartphone is safe from the prying eyes of nefarious black government agents flying about in their black helicopters. Or something. Whatever.

I finally got around to adding the Asus Transformer to 51-android.rules (under /etc/udev/rules.d). Here's the complete list of the devices I've set up in Fedora 14. I'm now trying to experiment with Android 3 (Honeycomb) specific features as well as get comfortable with tablets as apposed to my smartphone. # HTC myTouch 4G SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4",SYMLINK+="android_adb",MODE="0666" # Motorola Xoom SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTRS{idVendor}=="22b8",SYMLINK+="android_adb",MODE="0666" # ASUS Transformer SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTRS{idVendor}=="0b05",SYMLINK+="android_adb",MODE="0666" As a reminder, to determine what to add to a udev rule, plug in your Android device and run 'lsusb' in a terminal. Look for your device in the list. Once you've identified it you use the major USB ID number (in this case 0b05 on the ASUSTek Computer line) in...

In a word: manners. In particular, cell-phone etiquette. How many times have you been annoyed by somebody talking on their cellphone, at some very inappropriate time and/or place? With Siri/Iris/etc, not only are you given multiple opportunities to hear the caller talk loudly about personal issues you really didn't need to know about, you get even more opportunities to hear the smartphone owner ask all sorts of questions, thus increasing verbal pollution. And if you're really unlucky you get to hear Siri/Iris answer back in their sweet, artificial voice. Oh what fun. The more I think this through, the more I believe that any voice-operated input on a smartphone is a boondoggle, yet another useless gotta-have-it-feature created by cynical marketeers for a gullible buying public. Via: Cell Phones

Iris was a response to Siri, created during an eight hour "hackathon" at Dexetra , the creators of Iris. It's available on the Android Marketplace . I installed Iris and decided to have a little fun with it. And in return I guess Iris decided to have a little fun with me. I tried to ask it two questions: Who is Matthew Robertson Who is Kirk Tuck It missed both. I can see how it missed identifying Matthew with such an unbounded question, but it missed identifying Kirk by a country mile. Apparentely I have an accent ( must be my Scottish ancestry ). Iris kept confusing 'Tuck' with 'Talk', with the amusing results you see. While Siri is still in beta, Iris is definitely in alpha. While I've only shown a few questions, Iris, when you're careful what you ask, is surprisingly good at finding answers (which, come to think if it, is the way most flesh-and-blood people are as well). I wonder if Iris is capable of passing the Turing test in its c...

To hear folks enthuse about Apple's latest wünderapp, Siri, you would have thought Apple had produced an application so sublime that nothing could stand before its sheer awesomeness, so powerful that it could slay a multi-billion dollar technology titan such as Google. Or at least that's what Eric Jackson of Forbes would desperately like for you to believe . The problem with such prognostications is how easily they look like the ravings of a fool under the harsh light of reality. For example, this past week every instance of Siri stopped working for five hours because of an outage somewhere in the iCloud. I find it amazing as well as disconcerting that for Siri to properly function it needs to be eternally connected to another service external to the iPhone. And that's not good, especially when it stops and delivers the equivalent of " I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that " when it looses access to its back-end services. But before I continue...