I recently picked up a new Sony VAIO T15 ultrabook laptop. A really nicely designed laptop for a good price. After repartitioning, I was able to install Ubuntu 12.10 in a dual-boot arrangement fairly easily and Ubuntu worked well out of the box. However, screen brightness controls using Gnome power manager did not work out of the box and I had to to some hacking to get at least a bit of control.
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Recently, I was seeing severe battery drain on my Samsung Galaxy SII. Using the most awesome BetterBatteryStats application I was able to see that my phone was not being able to go into deep sleep due to WakeLocks from the LocationManagerService. Android’s LocationManagerService, is responsible for managing LocationProviders and issues location updates and alerts. If applications are requesting location updates too frequently, the LocationManagerService may be forced to keep the phone awake to provide those updates.
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When I started hacking on EclipseME way back in 2001, I never would have guessed that it would still be going in 2012 in use in the form of the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ) project and a shipping product. A few days ago, Gorkem Ercan of Nokia announced that the latest version of Nokia SDK for Java is now based on Eclipse MTJ. Even though I don’t really spend any time on the MTJ project these days, it is very cool to see the software still being put to good use.
While I haven’t entirely given up on my Android Clock Widget project, it has definitely stalled out for the time being. I have some potential ideas on how to move that project forward, but between work and coaching soccer I just don’t have much time at the moment to play around. In the meantime, I wanted a nice analog clock on my phone’s homescreen. While looking around the Google Play store, I came across the awesome Analog Clock Collection. For anyone looking for an analog clock widget, I’d recommend taking a look.
Wow… three months since my last post about my Android Clock Widget Project. While I’ve failed to bring stability to the clock selector during that time, I have figured out that the problem is not actually due to a deadlock. Instead, it appears that my project is tickling a bug in the Dalvik VM’s garbage collector.
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I recently started spending more time on my Android Clock Widget Project. I’ve implemented some much needed caching of the SVG definitions, speeding performance of clock rendering substantially. In addition, I’ve been working on building a nice graphical clock selector. Unfortunately, this selector is causing me lots of frustration due to a race condition that keeps deadlocking the application’s UI thread.
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When I initially set up my Samsung Captivate, I used my work email as the primary email address for the device. This caused my Android Market applications to be associated with my work email. When Google started allowing multiple accounts, I added my personal GMail account to the device and managed to get a confusing mix of installed applications associated with each account. After being frustrated with this for a while, I decided I needed to fix this.
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One of these days I may actually learn my lesson when it comes to installing new software. Lately I’ve been busy with work and recovering from some surgery, so I haven’t really had the energy to focus on any of my personal programming projects. Instead, I’ve been doing a lot of home network administration and software updates. In a multiple cases, I’m reminded of why being on the leading (bleeding?) edge of software may not always be the easiest place to be.
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In my last post about inertia I mentioned that I had started to take a look at Android App Widgets. I’ve long had the idea that it would be interesting to create a widget capable of consuming themes for MacSlow’s Cairo Clock project. This very cool analog clock uses a set of SVG graphics to theme the clock in such a way that it can be scaled to various sizes. While I’m not there quite yet, the ultimate goal is that the widget is capable of rendering all of the themes found at gnome-look.org.
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Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion.
For me, this also describes my tendencies toward side projects like my Pingus project. When I last worked on Pingus a couple of months ago, I updated the underlying AndEngine libraries and found a ton of breaking changes. I put Pingus on the shelf until I had more time to look at the breakage and how to solve it. The AndEngine changes are pretty significant and I’m going to need to rethink portions of Pingus in order to get things running correctly again.
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