Category Archives: Android

bidorbuy looking for mobile developers

Posted by on February 25, 2011 No comments

This just in:

Are you one of those people who knows that apple, gingerbread and cupcake are not just edibles? Do you want to be part of a new mobile initiative where we will build an exciting mobile platform for our 700,000 users?

You are? Great – if you have working experience developing mobile applications on iOS, Android and J2ME, keep on reading.

The bidorbuy geek-lab is looking for people passionate about building mobile applications. You’ll need experience in Objective-C, Cocoa, XCode and should have submitted at least one application to the Apple iPhone App Store. You will be responsible for building bidorbuy mobile applications to extend our current channel reach.

Interested? Of course you are – drop us an email with your CV & portfolio – [email protected]



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Google URL shortener fail

Posted by on October 4, 2010 2 comments

Google launched their URL shortener service over at goo.gl:



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Fifa concert: Desmond-Pokemon-Tutu

Posted by on June 10, 2010 1 comment

Wow – what a disappointment: Not just did Zuma, Blatter and Radebe get booed out during the Fifa 2010 worldcup opening concert, the Black Eyed Peas managed to suck horribly and Fergie sounded like she had a few Klippies & coke too many.

If it was not for Desmond Tutu who showed some awesome energy as part of his speech. I shall officially name him DESMOND-POKEMON-TUTU:

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Android: Connect to an enterprise LAN via LEAP/802.1X

Posted by on February 18, 2010 4 comments

If you work in an environment where Wifi connectivity is through LEAP/PEAP/802.1X and you have a rooted Android phone, you can use the following mechanism:

Modify the file /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf and add your Wifi APN as follows:

network={
ssid=”your_ssid”
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=IEEE8021X
auth_alg=OPEN SHARED LEAP
eap=LEAP
identity=”your_username”
password=”your_password”
}

This will connect perfectly on my HTC Dream and should work on any other Android platform as well. Only thing missing now is the proxy support (Google – how can you miss this????)

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Potholes – Bring ‘n Tar

Posted by on February 5, 2010 No comments

This will be a new initiative I am trying to kick off “Bring ‘n Tar”. The muncipalities, traffic departments, road agencies are all not capable of using our tax money in fixing and maintaining our roads, and when initiative is required, I will now seek ways of privately fixing those road hazards which endanger daily thousands of tax-payers.

Not an easy task, as I have not come across a single company willing to fix a government road without explicit permission. So the first hurdle to overcome is to ask the same people who could care less about fixing our roads to actually lift a finger and allow a tax-payer to fix common property.

Here a visual reminder:

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NDrive for Android released

Posted by on December 18, 2009 No comments

I was pleasantly surprised to find that NDrive has been released on the Android market today.

NDrive turns your Android phone into a powerful navigation system up to house number accuracy! The download of the navigation-software is free and once you install NDrive you are able to purchase and download maps within the application. The South African map-set (includes South Africa, Mauritius, Swaziland, Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) weighs in at about 150MB and at least the South African map is up-to-date (Malibongwe instead of Hans Strydom is a safe verification). The South African map costs EUR 70,00 and considering the convenience of having proper navigation on your phone is well worth it.

After a short plug & play installation, turn-by-turn voice instructions and on-screen directions will guide you from your current position to the destination that you have entered. In addition to all this, you can navigate to any of the many points-of-interest like hotels, restaurants and petrol stations. You can even dial them directly to make for example a hotel reservation or inquiry before going there!

The GPS locks in faster than my Garmin nuvi 710 and navigation works very well. The turn-by-turn voice instructions are not as loud as from the Garmin, but I attribute this more to my phone (HTC Dream) than the application.

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OS X: Install JDeveloper 11g on OS X 10.6

Posted by on November 27, 2009 7 comments

If you start development against the Oracle Fusion middleware set, it only makes sense to pick an IDE which supports those middleware products out of the box. While I still enjoy Eclipse and MyEclipseIDE, JDeveloper 11g becomes the natural choice for Oracle development. The JDeveloper 11g download is free and supports the main distributions such as Windows, Linux and Mac. The download itself weighs in at a hefty 1,4GB.

The installation on OS X is however not straightforward and running on OS X 10.6.2, I had to make the following adjustments to make the install work:

  1. Ensure that you are running JDK 1.6: Pop into a terminal session and the command java -version should show you:
    java version "1.6.0_15"
    Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-219)
    Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-90, mixed mode)
  2. If the 1.6 JVM is not your default, open the Java Preferences (via /Applications/Utilities/Java) and move the Java SE (64 Bit) to the top of the Java application versions list.
  3. JDeveloper will stil not install as it requires a symbolic link in your Java directory. Execute the following commands from terminal:
    cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home/
    sudo mkdir jre
    cd jre
    sudo mkdir lib
    cd lib
    sudo ln -s ../../Classes/classes.jar rt.jar
  4. Once the symlink has been created, start the JDeveloper installer and select the following the directory “/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0″ in the JDK selection:
  5. Installation will start and as a last action, drag the JDeveloper runtime from $HOME/Oracle/Middleware/JDeveloper onto your quickstart bar
  6. There seems to be another installation issue, and although the install knows about the JDK selection, JDeveloper requires a further config file. From the terminal issue the following:
    echo /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home >~/.jdev_jdk
     (This will configure the default JDK for JDevloper – don’t ask, I was equally stunned about this)
  7. Oracle also managed to stuff up the JDeveloper package and it’s Info.plist. Go to ~/Oracle/Middleware and right click on JDeveloper and then “Show Package Contents”. Edit the Info.plist and replace with content below:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key> <string>6.0</string> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>English</string> <key>CFBundlePackageType</key> <string>APPL</string> <key>CFBundleName</key> <string>JDeveloper</string> <key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key> <string>11g</string> <key>CFBundleGetInfoString</key> <string>JDeveloper 11g</string> <key>CFBundleExecutable</key> <string>JDeveloper</string> <key>CFBundleIconFile</key> <string>JDeveloperIcons.icns</string> <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key> <string>oracle.ide.boot.Launcher</string> <key>CFBundleSignature</key> <string>JDEV</string> <key>CFBundleVersion</key> <string>11.1.1.0</string> <key>Java</key> <dict> <key>ClassPath</key> <string>../../ide/lib/ide-boot.jar</string> <key>JVMVersion</key> <string>1.6+</string> <key>MainClass</key> <string>oracle.ide.boot.Launcher</string> <key>VMOptions</key> <string>-Xmx512M -Xms256M -Xverify:none -XX:JavaPriority10_To_OSPriority=10 -XX:JavaPriority9_To_OSPriority=9 -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -Xbootclasspath/p:../lib/lwawt.jar -Dsun.awt.keepWorkingSetOnMinimize=true -Doracle.macosx.disableWebBrowser=true -Xdock:name=JDeveloper -Xdock:icon=JDeveloperIcons.icns -Xbootclasspath/a:../../rdbms/jlib/ojdi.jar -Dide.conf=../bin/jdev.conf -Dide.startingcwd=.</string> <key>WorkingDirectory</key> <string>$APP_PACKAGE/Contents/Resources/jdev/jdeveloper/jdev/bin</string> <key>Properties</key> <dict> <key>apple.awt.textantialiasing</key> <string>true</string> <key>apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar</key> <string>true</string> <key>apple.awt.antialiasing</key> <string>true</string> </dict> </dict> </dict> </plist>

     

  8. The above will fix the installation and JDeveloper will now start normally (you will also be able to use the Info.plist to adjust JVM arguments)
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The Friday Picture: The Truth

Posted by on November 6, 2009 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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Android: 3G Watchdog

Posted by on September 22, 2009 3 comments

I try to avoid 3G usage as much as possible, especially since I am not on a data-bundle. There are the few cases, where I need to hop onto the internet via 3G, but would still like to monitor the bandwidth usage.

A nifty little Android tool called 3G Watchdog is available, which installs as a notification-bar icon and monitors your usage:

You are able to customise tresholds and alerts for your data-plan and monitor your mobile internet traffic usage (3G / Edge / GPRS) and get detailed status of your daily, weekly and monthly usage. The notification icon will only show when connected via mobile internet. In conjunction with APNDroid, probably the two best (small and free) tools for any Android phone.

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Android: Avoid excessive data usage

Posted by on September 19, 2009 No comments

APNDroid is one of those free, must-have applications (scan the barcode below to download on your Android phone):

A simple, little program which switches mobile data access on/off by just appending/removing “apndroid” to/from your APN-name. If you mainly work off a wireless network and rarely (but sometimes really need to) use a 3G/Edge/GPRS connection, this saves you the hassle of adding/deleting the APN manually.

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