asksven blog

Android GTalk and googlemail vs. gmail account

2010-06-13T17:35:55+02:00

Android GTalk and googlemail vs. gmail account

Yesterday I discoverered an option in my googlemail settings offering me to switch from my @googlemail.com to @gmail.com account. I did something stupid and clicked on that link….. and went to bed. Half an hour later I got notified by my GTalk Android client that it couldn't reconnect to my account because of a credential error.

After lots of reading and some tests I was able to revert it back…

Here's what worked for me:

Change my gmail account password in order for the gtalk client to notice there's something wrong with its cached data.
Install eBuddy to be able to test GTalk independentely from any cached account info (eBuddy allows multiple accounts)
Create a second account in eBuddy for my @gmail.com account and make sure it works
Go to my google account settings (from gcal) and verify it's @gmail.com there to
Take a break of an hour (I believe that was decisive)
Go back to gmail settings and revert back to @googlemail.com
Check that the @googlemail.com account works again using eBuddy
Kill GTalk service in Android and restart GTalk
Voila!

I've read many posts suggesting reverting back to @googlemail.com and some people seemed to have problems with that. As a matter of fact I did all this twice as it didn't work the first time. I believe the break (maybe for the account info to get synced) was decisive.

android

Android on HTC Pro

2009-11-22T02:49:27+02:00

Android on HTC Pro

Now what do you say about that?

I have been following the thread about running Android on HTC Pro aka Raphael for a while here xda developer and there has been pretty much of a movement since both HTC and Google have opened their sourcecode.

The benefit of the current solution is that it's not intrusive: you don't have to flash your phone; instead it uses Haret, a linux boot loader for Windows Mobile and Android on top of it.

My personal summary: it's a breaktrough! Besides using it for testing the software I develop I had Android running the whole days without hickups so I would say it's almost as stable as Windows Mobile.

The installation is pretty simple:

Download the files from here
unzip the content to the root on your SD card
find out the model of your phone by looking at the tag below the battery (mine says RAPH100)
copy the corresponding file from /startups to / and rename it STARTUP.TXT
run haret.exe and enjoy

What I found working / not working:

Android does not support unlocking the phone by entering PIN yet so you must disable it in Windows Mobile
The battery life is still pretty short: 4-8 hours for me
GSM/3G access works by adding APN data in settings
The layout of the hardware keyboard does not support the Fn key
Calling and receiving calls works
Receiving SMS works
Resume from suspend (energy save) is a little erratic but my phone wakes up on hardware buttons press or at last when I slide up the keyboard
Installing apps from the Android Market works fine

android

Android update 2009-11-22

2009-11-28T01:32:21+02:00

Android update 2009-11-22

There is a new version out since 22. november. I just installed it and tested a little.

WLAN: works like a charm after having added wifi.mac to the boot string. WLAN survives suspends and is quite stable. I noticed that my GSM 3G was gone once after switching WLAN off/on but it didn't happen since so I guess it was rather my mobile provider
Battery charging now works even if Android was not booted on USB/charger power (great)
UI is a little less responsive than version from 15. november
Resume from suspend still works only by opening the keyboard and pression Menu (the Home key)
The power button pops up a list of running apps (didn't notice that on previous version)

Now that was for the first impression. I'm excited spending my weekend on Android and do some more tests.

android

Desktop passthrough on Windows Vista with Windows Mobile Device Center

2009-09-27T13:20:57+02:00

Desktop passthrough on Windows Vista with Windows Mobile Device Center

I've been fighting for a few days trying to connect my HTC pro through my desktop's internet connect on Windows Vista. My mobile had no problems connecting to Windows Mobile Device Center but I couldn't access the internet.

The solution is to add a reg key to Vista:

  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows CE Services]
  "AllowLSP"=dword:00000000

With this entry and after a restart everything was fine.

Further Links

http://www.mobilepractices.com/2007/10/internet-pass-through-connectivity.html

ppc

Debugging Nagios plugins

2010-01-16T19:19:49+02:00

Debugging Nagios plugins

Wolfgang Wagner has written this really good how-to about debugging Nagios plugins. It can be a pain to find out when you add or write a new check. The solution is to let a script (capture.pl) that takes care of redirecting STDOUT and STDERR to a logfile make the call.

This is how it works

Download capture.pl
Redefine the check command so that catpture.pl is called and passed the rest of the check
get the log in /tmp/captured-plugins.log

Syntax

So this is how the check I wanted to debug was looking like:

  # 'check_alive_by_ssh_login' command definition
  define command{
      command_name    check_alive_by_ssh_login
      command_line    $USER1$/capture_plugin.pl /usr/bin/ssh -q -p $ARG1$ $HOSTADDRESS$
      }

And the output looked like this:

  2009-7-24 11:14:4 ------ debugging
  cmd=[/usr/bin/ssh '-q' '-p' '220' 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx']
  output=[Permission denied, please try again.
  Permission denied (publickey,password,keyboard-interactive).
  ]

… meaning basically there was something wrong with the ssh public key for that host. This tool has already saved me hours of testing so I'm happy to link it.

nagios, linux

Eclipse mouse behaviour

2009-11-18T00:07:16+02:00

Eclipse mouse behaviour

I have had a hard time with erratic mouse behaviour in eclipse Galileo (Build M20090917-0800). Most of the time in dialogs moving the mouse over buttons would focus and press them them but due to that left click did not do anything.

I found an easy solution here: run eclipse from a shell-script:

  #!/bin/sh
  export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
  /home/[your eclipse directory]/eclipse

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 did the trick for me!

Update 2009-11-17 when Eclipse restarts itself the setting gets lots so I close/start eclipse instead of using the restart function

linux, eclipse

ezInput 2.0 from HTC Touch Pro

2009-06-20T10:08:44+02:00

Flawed Android email client

2009-11-28T01:40:27+02:00

Flawed Android email client

After having read my mail from IMAP I noticed that the mails I had deleted were still in the folder on my desktop client (Thunderbird). Now that's strange but obviously noting new if I refer to this bug. Impressive to see a bug in a core application open since 2008!

So I followed the recommendations in multiple forums and installed K9.

And now I'm happy again:

no more undeleted mails
mark as read works like a charm

Well that's a five stars from my at Android Market for K9…

android

Going Android

2009-11-07T10:29:51+02:00

Going Android

Well I obviously had some free time lately as I can't do much outside of my house so I spend some time thinking about doing something usefull. I am not unhappy about not coding anymore for a living but I still feel the need to explore and learn; on the other hand I have specific requirements about software for my mobile phone so I decided to combine both needs and to start developing for my mobile.

Now I own a WiMo HTC Pro so the first intention was obviously to set up a development environment and start developing with the Windows Mobile SDK. After a few hours of not being really happy with what I had it occured to me that it would be usefull to check other mobile OSes and see which one would suit me the best. Here's the story

I've not done this really scientifically as I'm no requirement engineer but I tried to come up with a few GOs ans no-GOs:

The development environment shall be free and run on my Linux Desktop no matter of hosted or as a virtual guest in VMWare or VirtualBox
The target mobile OS shall offer enough standard application for me not to have to develop everything from scratch. My standard needs are a contact/calendar, email, web

And this is how I ranked.

iPhone

I must admit before having this crazy idea I was dreaming of an iPhone because I really like the concept. Unfortunately having a second look showed me that from a developer perspective it's a no-GO:

Developing for iPhone required a Mac and I don't have the money for that nor is there a viable way to run it virtualized
The concept of the Apple Store is nice but I don't like the policy of censorship Apple is showing us these days
I used to be a big fan of Next so I know the IDE but I dislike C and objective-C is not that much better in my eyes

Windows Mobile

That was the first idea and I really wanted to start there as I already own the phone. After looking at it a little close I came to following result:

Visual Studio express come for free but unfortunately the requirement for the Windows Mobile SDK is the plain Visual Studio and didn't want to live from trials
.NET is powerfull and comes with different programming languages so I guess I would have been happy with C#

The hurdle of the IDE lead me to explore further as it was kind of a no-GO.

Maemo

Well the N900 looks really great and I liked the idea of having a Linux without any restrictions. but:

The Platform is too new or I am to early. I remember the days of the Sharp Zaurus that was a really cool device but the standard apps sucked and no-one ever started developing/delivering serious apps for that platform
Did I mention I dislike C

Android

Now it gets interesting:

The default programming language for the SDK is Java, I like Java a lot
There is a NDK for native development just in case
It runs on Linux even if hardly restricted for a normal user
The IDE is Eclipse (getting more and more interesting)

Obviously quite some good arguments to look at Android a little closer and I did:

It took me one hour to install the IDE, the SDK, load and modify my first “Hello world” project and run it in the emulator
After a day I was proudly running my first application, a one timee password generator in its version 0.1
I started using the emu to read my emails and kindof liked the look and feel (version 1.6)

android

Handling unexpected errors in perl

2009-11-05T23:01:36+02:00

Handling unexpected errors in perl

I have been writing some code again (it's been a long time) and I stumbled upon a situation dealing with unknown/unexpected errors (die) in code I didn't write. Now I remembered having used some code looking like this a while ago:

  $SIG{qq{__DIE__}} = sub
  {
    # display stack trace here
    ...
  }

Now that snipped didn't work anymore as it seemes that the perl implementations has deprecated this kind of handling. So what's next?

Fortunately ex::override and Devel::StackTrace rescued me.

I added following snippet at the beginning of the code as it seems logical to override die before it happens.

  use Devel::StackTrace;
  
  use ex::override GLOBAL_die => sub
  {
    local *__ANON__ = "custom_die";
    print
      'Error: ', @_, "\n",
      "Stack trace:\n",
      Devel::StackTrace->new(no_refs => 1)->as_string, "\n";
    exit 1;
  };

That is not a 100% solution as this does not handle undef errors but it gave me enough information about what I did wrong to be able to fix it.

perl

iPhone-like slider unlock

2009-06-06T09:58:34+02:00

iPhone-like slider unlock

ppc

While browsing for new skins for phonealarm I bumped into a nice tool called S2U2. It's a nice screen saver with an iPhone unlock slider and many configuration options like caller-id, password lock, changing background pics. It's an eye catcher and a nice digital picture frame.

Linux kernel for Android update 2009-11-29

2009-11-30T22:07:35+02:00

Linux kernel for Android update 2009-11-29

Well, I've spent some time with the update of 2009-11-22 testing WIFI. For that part everything is really fine but I found Android quite unresponsive and got a lot of messages telling me that this or that application was not responding. That's past now thanks the kernel update of 2009-11-29 21:25.

The installation of the kernel is quite simple:

download the tar.gz file and unzip it to the root of the SD card (on RAPH)
edit startup.txt to point to the fresh zImage (zImage.20091129_212534 instead of zImage)

My observations after a few minutes of using:

far more responsive than the older kernel
incoming calls do not hang my phone

I'm looking forward testing the battery life as part of the announcements of that kernel were that the overheating had dissapered, sign of fixed powersaving options.

More to come….

android

My mobile requirements

2009-11-12T23:06:57+02:00

My mobile requirements

So here we go… I decided to move from Windows Mobile to Android. I'm going to leave a set of well known apps for the unknown and that's something I want to plan. I'll report my findings here so let's start with my favorites.

Domain	App	Description
PIM	Pocket informant	For me the ultimate PIM is pocket informant. I use contacts, calendar and todos. Cal must sync with multiple google calendars, todos must provide categories and priorities to get things done, contacts must have categories/filters to split views between privateand professional
Mail	Flexmail	Nothing fancy, IMAP, multiple accounts, idle mode and scheduled updates for different accounts
Profiles	PhoneAlarm	Skins (optional) location and time based profiles to manage ringtones and volumes depending on my location. Location should be detected based upon cell info and/or GPS
ssh	Pocket Putty	I always need a ssh client handy, it would be great if it could provide tunels

ppc, android

New style

2009-06-20T10:53:14+02:00

New style

news

Today I added a new style to the website. It's supposed to be less boring and I hope everyone likes it.

New Website

2009-06-06T09:47:22+02:00

New Website

news

After spending so much time on wikis for collaboration I decided to use one for my home page as well. I hope I will spend less on formatting and more on content now.

Opera Mobil 9.7b1 available

2009-06-20T10:08:44+02:00

Pin down what is eating up your Android battery

2010-05-30T11:26:08+02:00

Pin down what is eating up your Android battery

I found an interesting thread on XDA: what seems to be a bug leads under certain conditions to the Calendar app preventing the phone to go to sleep on HTC Desire. The known workaround is to remove Flickr sync.

Now that does not affect my phone but the method for finding out is interesting any may help you understand what is going on by analysing your battery stats. To do so:

dial *#*#4636#*#*
go to Battery history
Display Partial wake usage

Now if there is anything responsible for the partial wake in large proportions you should try to get rid of it as it is for sure counter productive: your phone's battery life is all about sleeping for long periods of time when you don't use it so whatever prevents that is not meant to be. These conditions are due by wakelock conditions, a status where an application (or the system) explicitely tells the system to stay awake.

android

Running dropbear on Android

2010-02-14T00:57:35+02:00

Running dropbear on Android

Telnet is lame so we will have a look at setting up dropbear as sshd on Android. This how-to will show you how to install configure and run dropbear as sshd and how to connect with a ssh client.

Prerequisites

This obviously requires you to have full rights (root) on your Android.
busybox is required as well

Building dropbear

A dropbear built from the original sources won't run properly on Android; the reason is that Android has no proper user support (/etc/passwd). There are two solutions for getting the proper changes to the sources:

check out the changed sources from e.g. http://github.com/cyanogen/android_external_dropbear/
get the original sources and apply the patch yourself. The patch can be found here: http://wiki.androidx86.org/index.php?title=Installing_Dropbear

Once the sources are fixed you now need to crosscompile them. This requires a cross compiler to be setup (this process is not covered here).

The cross compilation and build goes like this:

   ./configure --host=arm-none-linux-gnueabi --disable-zlib
   make CC=arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc

Once built the output is following 3 binaries:

dropbear: the sshd
dropbearkey: the keygen
dropbearconvert: a key converter between dropbear and openssh key format

Installing

The installation is quite simple: copy the binaries to your favorite dir to android, e.g. /sdcard

Setup

Server

First we need a server key. Keys are generated using dropbearkey. To generate a RSA server key:

  dropbearkey -t rsa -f dropbear_rsa_host_key

Now create a dir /data/dropbear and copy dropbear_rsa_host_key there.

Test dropbear:

/sdcard/dropbear -r dropbear_rsa_host_key -F -E -v -s

This should show you the debuglog of dropbear starting in non-daemon mode (-F).

Now we need to generate a key/pair for the client to connect with (theoretically the client can connect using password but as stated above there is no read user/password support in Android and we don't want to use any hardcoded passwords (that's the reason why we run dropbear with the option -s (no-password).

To generate a key-pair we do:

  dropbearkey -t rsa -f /sdcard/id_rsa
  dropbearkey -f /sdcard/id_rsa -y > /sdcard/id_rsa.pub

This first command generates a private key, the second step extracts the public-key.

Now we jst need to create /data/dropbear/.ssh and cat the public-key to authorized_keys:

  mkdir /data/dropbear/.ssh
  cat /sdcard/id_rsa.pub > /data/dropbear/.ssh/authorized_keys

now check the perms of /data/dropbear/.ssh and /data/dropbear/.ssh/authorized_keys and make sure they are only readable/writable by root.

Client

Now it's time to take care of the client. As dropbear and openssh use different key formats we first need to convert id_rsa (private key) to openssh-format:

  /sdcard/dropbearconvert dropbear openssh /sdcard/id_rsa /sdcard/id_rsa_openssh

Now move /sdcard/id_rsa and /sdcard/id_rsa_openssh to your desktop (e.g. to your home). We move them instead of copying them as leaving a private key on the phone may compromise it.

Finally connect to the phone:

  ssh -i id_rsa_openssh <phone-ip>

If the connection fails check the Troubleshooting section.

That's it!

Troubleshooting

As stated before both the client and the server are quite sensitive to the sensitive files having the right perms. You can use -vv for both the client and the server to see debug info and fix whatever is wrong.

Common errors are:

.ssh, authorized_keys or your private key have wrong perms
the sshd does not find the public sig. of the key you use to connect with in authorized_keys
there is a mismatch in the key formats between the client (openssh) and the server (dropbear)
a missing /etc/shells file with the path to your shell (e.g. /system/bin/sh) will prevent dropbear from opening a session

Download

Download binaries

android

Streaming last.fm to non proprietary clients

2010-08-01T10:10:43+02:00

Streaming last.fm to non proprietary clients

I'M a big fan of last.fm and have always wished to be able to listen to my favorite streams on the devices that don't offer the possibility to install the proprietary client (e.g. my Asus O!Play). I've been using lastfmproxy in the past and decided to put all the info together. Fortunately there are some guys keeping lastfm proxy up-to-date. (hang-on, more to come)

Sources

Let's start by putting the sources of information together:

linux, oplay

Task based context with Eclipse and Mylyn

2009-11-18T00:06:40+02:00

Task based context with Eclipse and Mylyn

I've been exploring Eclipse Galileo's new features today and bumped into Mylyn. I've been missing latest Eclipse developments since I didn't have time to code for the last few years so I decided to get up to pace and checked this [[http://tasktop.com/videos/w-jax/kersten-keynote.html|webinar] about Mylyn.

What I heard/saw seemed quite interesting so decided to hava a closer look.

After watching the webinar and working on a few tasks on small java projects I must say I'm really impressed by the concepts behind Mylyn:

Everything is about working in the context of a task and seeing only information relevant to that task
Switching tasks becomes fast as the IDE does that for you; you decide to switch tasks, the IDE updates the context to where you left it
It is all about hiding what is not relevant to the task to let you focus on what's relevant
A context stores perspectives and views as well as open packages/files and whatever you have been browsing in the process of completing a task, e.g. files, webpages, javadoc, etc.
Whatever you open in Eclipse while working on a task is automatically added to the context of that task
The context can be shared and by doing so you will share knowledge

Well I must say really cool! No more switching perspectives and opening/closing tabs to get the overview on what I need to e.g. fix JUnit tests and quickly jump to some layout rework and cluttering my view by opening yet more files to answer an email. Instead I added the tasks I am working on right now (new layout, logging, fixing PDT and checkstyle findings and profiling). Now each task has it's context and I can switch from one context to another in no time.

While contexts can be stored locally - what I used for the last hour - I have now moved to bugzilla based tasks. Not really because I need that for organizing my own work but there are a few projects I work on with a firiend of mine and I want to experiment on sharing knowledge using the above mentioned contexts.

So there is more to follow

eclipse

Testing Android kernels

2009-12-22T18:02:18+02:00

Testing Android kernels

Well I've decided to get a little bit more systematic on testing and documenting my results. This page will get an update as soon as I test a new kernel. I'm running a HTC Pro RAPH110 (Vodafone branding) with ROM 1.90.162.5 GER and radio 1.02.25.19.

The Kernels I run are from phhusson (great work). You can get them from here: http://glemsom.anapnea.net/android/htc-msm-android/. Make sure to visit the support site and give some feedback: http://pjottrr.no-ip.org:81/redmine/projects/show/androidphh

Apps I'm running besides the standard ones are:

k9-mail
locale
Weather widget
Calendar widget

Update: I've moved my test results to the belonging forum here

android

Update

2009-06-21T09:57:26+02:00

Update

news

I've updated the wiki today. If something looks weird to you please give me a feedback for me to fix it asap.