kugelfish

One of my latest favorite discoveries in the Android market is aLogcat , a must-have for Android developers and power users, who want to know more about what is going on on the device. It is named after the logcat command which can be run in the debug shell, typically via the adb tool from the Android SDK, which requires the device to be connected to a host PC through a USB cable. aLogcat allows to display a log console on the device itself, color coded by levels with options to filter by levels or arbitrary substrings. By default the console updates continuously with new messages as they appear in the log, but it can also be frozen to allow scrolling back through the log history without interfering screen updates. Since logs can also be sent via email, it subsumes the functionality of earlier log collector apps. Now that the number of devices, configurations and version of Android are exploding, it is less and less likely that a developer can reproduce a particular problem, since t...

Since we recently moved, my current backup system has become some what undone. I have not been able yet, to reactive my linux home-server , since neither its power input nor its TV signal output works in the new environment. But since backing up to an aging piece of low-cost hardware running an obsolete version of an OS, which I also happen to use for experimentation does not leave the kind of warm fuzzy feelings which one typically expects from a backup solution, maybe it was time again to look around for another solution. From a maintainable and reliability point of view, it would be better to store the backups in the cloud, rather than on a single computer in the same room. On the other hand, sending the data out of the room opens up some serious privacy concerns The solutions for online backups on mac are still a bit limited. There are some portable solutions using Amazon's S3 cloud storage service or the very open-protocol based rsync.net service, which could have supporte...

I now have a cellphone plan, where all outgoing calls are metered and very expensive, except for unlimited calls to 3 favorite numbers, which are included in the plan. For our international calling, we are already using a discount carrier activated through a dial prefix, which also supports a local land-line dial-in access to be usable from mobile phones. By declaring the access number as one of my favorites, I can make unlimited calls from my mobile phone at the substantially lower rate of the discount carrier. The only problems is that making calls through the indirection of a voice-prompt menu is very cumbersome! This is where Phonecard Express comes in. This highly customizeable application inserts itself almost transparently as a filter between the Android system dialer and the telephony subsystem. Whether a call is made from the dialer, the address book or any other intent, the call setup is intercepted and potentially routed through a calling card service. In addition to suppo...

I started using the new Google Voice service as my standard US phone number. Since they currently only support international calling (billed rate), but not international forwarding, the current setup is a bit suboptimal and roundabout: from Google Voice, calls are forwarded to my US based Skype online number, with my skype account itself being forwarded to my current cellphone. The only catch is that the post-dial-delay of this whole contraption is too long for me to pick up the call before it goes to voicemail and since the voicemail delay is not configurable there isn't much I can do. I once managed to catch a call today, by leaping at the answer button on the first ring - it was a wrong number... At least I get an email notification right away, when somebody leaves a message. I could probably just as well turn off forwarding and just use it as a email based voicemail-box.

Some people seem to be using NetMeter for continuously monitoring their network usage against a limited volume data-plan. Since we are now moving to Europe, where stingy data plans with only a few 100Mbs included per month are the norm, I now also have a sudden interest in measuring my monthly data usage. Since NetMeter is a trouble-shooting tool, oriented towards very detailed tracking of network usage over the last few minutes to see what is going on right now, it is not really very suitable as long-term bandwidh counter. The ideal network usage counter should be low overhead and run continuously in the background - e.g. start itself at boot time. In its most basic form, it should show the current monthly total of cellular data usage. It would also be nice to enter the specs of the data-plan to track agains: how much is included per month, what is the rate above that limit and when does the monthly limit reset. For the current month, the ideal application should always show how curr...

One of the problems debugging Android apps in the field is that the system error messages are quite generic and meaningless - e.g. Application not responding or application has stopped unexpectedly. All the interesting details like the java exception stack trace in the case of crashing apps are logged to the system log. This log can be looked at by running the "logcat" command from the background debug shell, usually by connecting over USB via the "adb" command from the Android SDK. But what to do if a problem occurs in the field, when you don't have a computer handy with USB cable and Android SDK installed? I recently came across a few apps on the market which address this issue by running logcat in the background from the application, capture the output and bringing up an email message with the output to be sent to somebody - either yourself or the developer of the crashing app, who had been desperately asked to see the logs. The source of one of the Log Col...

Similar to the virtual postal address setup , we are looking to keep a virtual US phone number while being overseas. Reasons for this are to give our friends and family in the US a permanent local number to call, no matter where are at a particular point in time. Having a US number for outbound calls is can also be useful to call US based 1-800 numbers - e.g. to call a credit card company and yell at them to stop sending spam to our vitual mailbox for example... The simplest way to do that would be to get VoIP phone service from a provider like Vonage and the simply pack up the VoIP adapter and US phone and install it wherever we are - using the proper power converters. However, we are doing something slightly more convoluted. Even though Skype became famous for offering free computer to computer calling using a peer-peer, the now also offer gateways to the plain-old telephone service at a fraction of the cost of most other VoIP providers. For $9 per month, we have unlimited callin...

There are two crucial pieces information related to every change to the project's codebase: the what and the why. Thanks to using svn for version control, all the details regarding what a change is are being automatically recorded in the form of an atomic changeset which moves the codebase from one (hopefully) consistent state to another. Recording the why requires a bit more work. In this simple workflow, we are using Track tickets to document and track every single legitimate reason for making a change to the codebase - whether they are bugfixes or work items related to new features or enhancements. If every legitimate reason to change the code is represented by a ticket, then for each svn changeset there should be one or more tickets which shows why this change was made. Code changes shoudl be done in small incremental steps, but the reason for these changes may be a fairly large an complicated project requiring many small code changes. Tickets can also be used as threads for re...

We are about to move to Europe for a few years and during that time, we need to be able to maintain a virtual presence here in the US, to make going back and forth more easy, to stay in touch with friends and family and to take advantage of the greatest consumer paradise on earth, where everything is available for a buck or two. An important part of maintaining a presence is to have a US mailing address - e.g. this required to have a US credit card and to have stuff shipped to you. For certain things a PO box would do, for others you need a real street address - e.g. to accept packages. Traditional mail forwarding places have existed for a long time, basically private mailbox operators who also provide the service to periodically mail the content of the mailbox to a forwarding address. Shipping overseas is really expensive and the idea of getting a box of junk-mail sent to us every months or so does not seem too appealing. Also if something is really important, it might also be urgent ...

Today was the second occurrence of Manhattanhenge this year - both equally before and after the summer solstice (June 21). I didn't take any pictures this time, largely because it was cloudy and rainy tonight.

Android has a nifty component framework, where each screen - called " activities " should be self-contain can be called up by anybody through an event distribution mechanism called " intents ". Activities can also register to handle arbitrary intents, which allows applications to delete certain functionality without even knowing which app is going to provide this functionality. Certain intents are pre-defined - e.g. the NoiseAlert app uses the ACTION_CALL system intent to delegate the making of a phone call to the dialer app typically, or whoever can handle it. Anybody can define new intents, but to pull off useful delegation of functionality between completely unrelated apps is usually a bit harder to pull off. But here is an example of that. A while ago, a user of the BistroMath tip calculator was asking whether I could add the functionality of recording and tracking dining expenses over time. I can see this would be a very useful functionality. But I also thin...

As the number of apps on the Android Market is growing, finding interesting apps is increasingly becoming harder. Developers have a very limited opportunity to promote their apps - a name, an icon and 325 characters are all there is to tell the user what the app is about. No screen-shots, no release notes, no FAQ, no back-channel to respond to user's comments. And worst of all, there is still no web interface which puts whatever little information there is on the market online and available to search engines. However useful smart phones are supposed to be the speed, power and comfort of a full-size laptop or desktop computer are hard to beat when it comes to searching and browsing large amounts of data. The quality of the built-in search function in the Android market is a bit spotty to say the least - why not let people use real powertools like an Internet search engine to find android apps? For a while there has been Cyrket to expose the content of the market online - presumably...

Much of the email I get is actually not from users directly, but generated by some automated system in response to some event. We are all used to getting these kind of emails - if we sign up on a new Internet sit, buy tickets online or somebody throws a sheep at us on Facebook . Since email is nearly ubiquitous and has many powerful tools for sorting, filtering, archiving or processing messages, it is a natural channel for delivering such automated notifications. Since we set up an email distribution system in the last 2 episodes of our series on startup software development infrastructure, we can make use of it as well to distribute event notifications from the key systems in our software development workflow, which are the issue tracking and source code version control systems - Trac tickets and svn respectively in our case. To enable email notification for every change to a trac ticket which concerns us, we only need to edit the notification section in the Trac config file at /dat...

In the previous episode of our series on startup software development infrastructure, we have setup the basic email deliver system. The next step is to provide a solution for archived mailing lists. Mailing lists have long been a backbone of the Internet community and there are mature solutions for managing very large-scale mailing lists. The classics are Listserv and Majordomo where users can manage their own subscriptions by sending emails with embedded commands and more recently Mailman has become very popular because of its web interface for managing mailing list settings for both users and administrators. Mailman even has a built-in web-based email archive. Since we are targeting our solution for very small teams, we can get away with an even simpler approach. We expect our teams to only have a handful of members and where people joining and leaving are very rare events. In this case, we can simply use the mail alias functionality built into the email server. To maintain th...

After setting up Subversion and Trac for managing source code, the next episode in our series on startup software development infrastructure is about email. Email or some other form of archived group communication is essential for a team to remain in sync on any of the important details of the project. Using email for remote collaboration is about as old as the Internet itself and benefits from well established habits and usage pattern. Most open source projects are using mailing lists as their main or sole channel of communication, which means that most open-source software development tools are well integrated with an email centric work flow. Systematically conducting all important technical discussions on archived mailing lists can bridge gaps in both space and time. Email can reach team members who are not here right now - traveling or in a remote location as well as future team members who can read up on old discussion threads to figure out why things were done a certain way. T...

I just noticed that Rietveld, one of the open-source code-review applications dicussed in an earlier post is now availalbe as a hosted virtual private application to any organization which uses the Google Apps service. Since I use Google Apps for the @kugelfish.com domain, I tried out the new service by adding it to my domain from the link at this page . As for all virtualized apps, the administrator needs to create a new CNAME in the domains DNS records under which the new service will be mapped - e.g. reviews.kugelfish.com. While there are many good arguments for an organization to use a hosted solution like Google Apps for providing their public email service, I am a bit more skeptical about outsourcing critical development infrastructure. Specially as in this case the SLA explicitly says that there is no SLA, since these are experimental labs applications - a step down even from the usual Google Beta label. But for organizations where code reviews are not yet a fully integrated a...

Today is a geeky holiday: the particular celestial alignment called Manhattanhenge where the sun sets exactly in line with the Manhattan street grid, which is about 30 degrees off from perfect east-west orientation. This picture which is taken from 5th avenue, shows the sun setting at the end of 22nd Street. Not exactly at street level and somewhat before the astronomical time of sunset, since the mathematical horizon is obstructed the coastline of New Jersey in the background. Some more pictures on flickr from 23rd st and 22nd st .

One of the biggest problems in embedded software development is how to most effectively test while the final target hardware is either not built yet or is too rare, unwieldy or expensive to give every software developer unlimited and unrestricted access to. Typical approaches include software simulation of the target on some general purpose computer or to find some suitable stand-in for the final hardware platform. Simulation by running the target OS on another CPU architecture (e.g. PowerPC target on an Intel based PC) is inaccurate for some of the important differences between CPU architectures like endianness and memory alignment . Simulation including the target processor architecture can be very slow unless the speed difference between the target platform (e.g. a low powered mobile device) and the host platform (e.g. a standard desktop PC or server) is sufficiently large to make the experience usable for developers - e.g. for the Android emulator included in the SDK. The often s...

I understand that one of the Google's ulterior motives with Android is to promote a mobile experience where the user is always connected to the Internet and the G1 is pretty much built around that "always on" networking paradigm - including the special flat-rate data plans from T-Mobile. On the other hand, data services are not universally cheap yet everywhere in the world and it would be nice to give the user more control over the mobile data usage. Both current commercial Android phones (HTC G1/Dream and G2/Magic) have two types of radio for data usage: GPRS/EDGE/3G cellular data connection IEEE 802.11 WiFi wireless LAN interface Since the Wifi interface is faster and was not exactly invented with power saving mobile devices in mind, it is presumably more power hungry than the cellular interface. In the implementation on the G1, Android gives precedence to the Wifi connection if enabled and available when the phone is active - i.e. when the screen is on. Once the screen...

In this episde of the series on creating a minimal software development infrastructure, we are dealing with the centerpiece of the solution: setting up Subversion as the version control system and Trac to provide a unified and integrated system for bug/issue tracking, collaborative document editing (wiki) and source control repository browsing as well as a platform for further integration and extension . All the necessary packages are already installed on the server as part of the previous episode . Assuming that our infrastructure server has a payload partition mounted under /data and our fictitious project is called "sdi07", we are setting up the disk space for our project as follows: mkdir /data/ mkdir /data/sdi07/svn mkdir /data/sdi07/trac To properly initialize the databases for svn and trac, we need to run the following commands, svnadmin create /data/sdi07/svn trac-admin /data/sdi07/trac initenv and answer a few basic questions for trac-admin . In particular we n...