HTC messed up (Incredible 2, missing Clock app)

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Aug 312011
 

I have a Droid Incredible 2 – and I’m really enjoying it. I got an OTA update to 2.3 right about the time I was going to root it, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll get Gingerbread. It’s all I really wanted anyway.

Last week, at some point, the clock app disappeared. I noticed because the alarm stopped ringing. It didn’t really bother me, because sometimes I sleep through it — but then I checked and it’s … not there. I mean, in “Manage Apps” it’s there, with a size of 0, but it’s not the app drawer.

… There’s a bug that causes the clock app to randomly appear / disappear. And it’s been happening for about two months, based on the research I’ve been doing.
Someone on a forum said that if this happened on an iPhone, it’d be in all the newspapers. They’re right. iPhones are held to a different standard — and the standard should be the same. If Android wants to be taken seriously, then it’s time to get some real development going behind it.

And don’t give me that crap about a single platform versus many platforms (different phones, etc). You’re a distributor, you know your hardware. How come other ROMs are stable on YOUR hardware? Hmmmm ?

Grepping a single file for ‘dynamic’ content

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Aug 312011
 

You can use xargs to grep the same word through different files. But how do you use xargs to grep different words through the same file?
Like this:

echo “your fancy word finder stuff here” | xargs -i bash -c ‘grep -n “{}” your/file/here’

Not something that’s useful every day, but when you want it, hot damn is it nice to have.

git usage conventions

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Aug 302011
 

We’ve been using git at work for a greenfield project and, so far, this has worked for us. It could be a useful template to get another team started.
We have gotten rid of the name ‘master’, which is only a convention anyway, and instead are using a few permanent branches:

  • production (only stable code which gets deployed to production goes there. The only branch to be merged in, EVER, is ‘stable’)
  • stable (only stable code which goes to the staging environment goes there. The only branch to be merged in, EVER, is ‘integration’))
  • integration (code from other branches goes here – tests should, of course, pass before merging in.)

And then we have, of course, other branches for work in progress and other stuff. we’ve used these prefixes to help with the naming, and called this the ‘buffers’ convention (look at the first letters – BFRS):

  • bug_
  • feature_
  • refactor_
  • spike_
How have you organized your git repositories?
 Posted by at 12:46 pm  Tagged with:

Gentoo Prefix on Lion: gettext problem

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Aug 082011
 

So, you can’t install gettext?
Here’s a hack to get you past it.
do your
$ emerge –oneshot gettext

When it’s all unpacked, Ctrl+z (this will pause the job), go to the work directory, something like this:
/Users/you/Gentoo/var/tmp/portage/sys-devel/gettext-0.18.1.1-r2/work/gettext-0.18.1.1

From there, go in here:
cd gettext-tools/gnulib-lib
and in here..

edit “stpncpy.c” with your favorite text editor, find
“# define __stpncpy stpncpy”
And add // at the beginning of the line, like so:
“//# define __stpncpy stpncpy”

Save and quit, then type “fg 1″ and return, this will resume the job.

This hack bypasses the stpncpy problem. Someone more serious than me needs to create a new ebuild for this though…

Matt Damon’s Speech at the Save Our Schools Rally

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Aug 042011
 

I flew overnight from Vancouver to be with you today. I landed in New York a few hours ago and caught a flight down here because I needed to tell you all in person that I think you’re awesome.
I was raised by a teacher. My mother is a professor of early childhood education. And from the time I went to kindergarten through my senior year in high school, I went to public schools. I wouldn’t trade that education and experience for anything.
I had incredible teachers. As I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself — my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity — all come from how I was parented and taught.
And none of these qualities that I’ve just mentioned — none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success — none of these qualities that make me who I am … can be tested.
I said before that I had incredible teachers. And that’s true. But it’s more than that. My teachers were EMPOWERED to teach me. Their time wasn’t taken up with a bunch of test prep — this silly drill and kill nonsense that any serious person knows doesn’t promote real learning. No, my teachers were free to approach me and every other kid in that classroom like an individual puzzle. They took so much care in figuring out who we were and how to best make the lessons resonate with each of us. They were empowered to unlock our potential. They were allowed to be teachers.
Now don’t get me wrong. I did have a brush with standardized tests at one point. I remember because my mom went to the principal’s office and said, ‘My kid ain’t taking that. It’s stupid, it won’t tell you anything and it’ll just make him nervous.’ That was in the ’70s when you could talk like that.
I shudder to think that these tests are being used today to control where funding goes.
I don’t know where I would be today if my teachers’ job security was based on how I performed on some standardized test. If their very survival as teachers was based on whether I actually fell in love with the process of learning but rather if I could fill in the right bubble on a test. If they had to spend most of their time desperately drilling us and less time encouraging creativity and original ideas; less time knowing who we were, seeing our strengths and helping us realize our talents.
I honestly don’t know where I’d be today if that was the type of education I had. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here. I do know that.
This has been a horrible decade for teachers. I can’t imagine how demoralized you must feel. But I came here today to deliver an important message to you: As I get older, I appreciate more and more the teachers that I had growing up. And I’m not alone. There are millions of people just like me.
So the next time you’re feeling down, or exhausted, or unappreciated, or at the end of your rope; the next time you turn on the TV and see yourself called “overpaid;” the next time you encounter some simple-minded, punitive policy that’s been driven into your life by some corporate reformer who has literally never taught anyone anything. … Please know that there are millions of us behind you. You have an army of regular people standing right behind you, and our appreciation for what you do is so deeply felt. We love you, we thank you and we will always have your back.