Paralipsis

Pro-tip: Always have a terminal running and showing the output of adb logcat. That’s where all your System.out.println()s will show up as well as stack dumps of your fatal exceptions.
Not that I ever get fatal exceptions, that is.
Second protip: The ID being assigned in the layout MUST be the android namespace id [...]

I may be really dumb, but it took me forever to figure out how to simply get an app installed on a physical phone. When I finally found out the tools to use, I was getting errors like the one below when I tried to actually copy the app over.

$ adb install ~/sandbox/HelloAndroid/bin/HelloAndroid-debug.apk
123 KB/s [...]

I just received my Android DEV phone in the mail and discovered it’s a bit tricky to set up without purchasing the special service plan that T-Mobile wants you to buy at around $40/month. Unfortunately you CAN NOT setup your android phone without first logging in and syncing to a google account. This [...]

I held off for as long as I could before purchasing an Android phone. Frankly once they offered an unlocked restriction free developer version, it was hard to resist.
Next is to get the build environment working and start tinkering with the OS. Top on my list is figuring out if vpnc can be made [...]

There’s really nothing like some new hardware to get the blood pumping. I’ve been converting my sad, old, NFS + LDAP serving cluster over to a fancy new Kerberos + AFS + LDAP + XEN environment. Virtualization is truly awesome, being able to create and reboot hosts at will without concern for the [...]

reCAPTCHA is awesome and I’m shocked I haven’t heard about it before. This is an absolutely brilliant example of distributing a little bit of work to many people in a socially productive way. Whomever is behind this is a genius and deserves a firm handshake.
In a nutshell, reCAPTCHA provides a free (!) [...]

I suppose it’s entirely indicative of the software industry, but I was still saddened when I noticed that the embedded ‘title’ field of the PDF version of the IEEE Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, is “Microsoft Word - Title_page 2004.rtf”.
The meta-data shows that the file was created using version FIVE of adobe’s [...]

Marc Balmer has a wonderful writeup of a bug in the BSD directory handling code that laid dormant for 25 years. The only tragic thing was that Samba programmers encountered and worked around the bug several years ago and somehow the message never got back to the BSD folks.

The other day, I got an [...]

The game of levers is a wonderful little toy where the goal is to keep the stuff out of the water. Each time you succeed, the ante is raised by giving you more things to balance. Like a mobile, the key to winning is evening out the weight among all the hooks you [...]

I’ve started a new website, Daily UML which is intended to serve as a regularly updated site giving examples and discussion of UML issues. The first post is up and with luck I’ll be able to keep up a five-posts/week schedule. Since it has a specific technical focus, I’m hoping the update schedule [...]