Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

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Kubuntu KDE 4.5.0 Glitches

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

When it comes to upgrading my Kubuntu environment I am typically an early adopter. This includes backported KDE releases. Naturally, this also means that I am regularly bitten by bugs (which are most common in .0 releases).

Unfortunately, this just happened with KDE 4.5.0 where the systray is completely unusable when hosting icons for non-KDE applications (such as Skype or Google Desktop). As it turned out, a Qt bug is responsible for the mess-up and a fix is already available in the Qt 4.7.x development branch.

To put things short, a fixed Qt version is now available in my PPA until the fix is integrated into the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

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Posted in KDE, OSS, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Bugs, bugs, bugs…

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

Well, it seems that some ugly bugs made it into version 1.2.0 of Hash It!. Unfortunately, it took five days to notice…

Anyway, a new version (1.2.1) is out now, which should hopefully solve these issues. If any force closes remain, please drop me a mail.

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Posted in Android, Java, OSS, Security, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Asterisk for FRITZ!Box 7270 Updated to Version 1.6.2.9

Monday, July 5th, 2010

It has been a while since I published my guide to cross-compile Asterisk for the FRITZ!Box 7270. This guide and build script was based on Asterisk 1.6.0.19.

Asterisk development has not stopped, though, so the current Asterisk branch – currently at revision 1.6.2.9 – got out of sync with the asterisk-freetz-build script.

Now, what is so great about community-based software is that it facilitates contributions by others: Recently, I received an e-mail from Thomas Rueter, who provided me with a set of patches to compile Asterisk 1.6.2.8 using asterisk-freetz-build. His patches served as a basis for a revamped asterisk-freetz-build v0.2 package, which is capable of cross-compiling Asterisk 1.6.2.9 and chan_capi 1.1.5 for Freetz 1.1.x.

If you just want the updated package, you can grab it here. In case you are interested into contributing to its development, a copy of it is now available on GitHub.

And if this executive summary does not make too much sense to you ;-) , feel free to read my original blog post, which I also updated to reflect the version change.

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Posted in Hacking, OSS, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Hash It! 1.2.0 Adds Site Tag History and FroYo Apps2SD Support

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Today marks another important milestone for Hash It!, your friendly password memorization brain extension. ;-)

While you can conveniently use Hash It! from your preferred mobile web browser via its “Share” feature, some people prefer starting Hash It! from the launcher, which requires manual entry of the site tag. So far, Hash It! did not remember these manually entered site tags, which required repeated re-entry of the respective tag over time. To close this usability gap, Hash It! will remember the site tag in a history from this release on. Just type the first few characters of the desired tag and the history of matching tags will be shown. Users concerned with the privacy implications of this feature can easily disable it in the settings.

Furthermore, Hash It! did not support FroYo’s (Android 2.2) Apps2SD feature. While Hash It! is pretty small (< 100 kB) compared to other Android applications (so this feature is probably not vital), I would still like to leave this decision to the end-user, which is why starting with Hash It! 1.2.0 you can move it to your SD card (given that your phone is running Android 2.2).

Hash It! 1.2.0 is available via the Android Market. Details are also available at: http://android.ginkel.com/

Have fun!

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Posted in Android, Java, OSS, Security, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Android Power Management Statistics

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Note to self: To dump the low-level Android power management statistics, use

dumpsys power

from an adb shell.

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Posted in Android, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Google Groups Redirect Loop

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Apparently some people started experiencing a redirect loop when accessing Google Groups while being signed in to their Google (Apps) account. I also did and and started – well – googling for a solution. There were a couple of solution attempts documented, such as erasing your profile and clearing all your cookies, which seemed a little random and came with significant side-effects. This post is supposed to document the minimal set of changes required o get Google Groups working again (if Google does not fix the issue on their end):

Just delete all cookies for the groups.google.{com|de|<yourtld>} hostname and everything should be back to normal.

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Posted in Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | 2 Comments »

US International Keyboard Layout w/o Dead Keys for Microsoft Windows

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

As much as I would like to completely switch over to Linux, for some tasks I am unfortunately still stuck with Microsoft Windows. This comes with the issue that Windows natively does not ship with the keyboard layout that I am routinely using under Linux: US International (No Dead Keys).

Fortunately, there is an easy solution available: Using the The Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator it was a matter of seconds to remove the dead keys from the the stock US International keyboard layout.

The resulting keyboard layout file is available for download for your convenience. You can easily import this file into the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and turn it into installable keyboard layout DLLs.

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Posted in Hacking, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | 4 Comments »

Hash It! 1.1.0 adds ccSLD support

Friday, April 30th, 2010

A couple of days ago I visited the UK and also took my Android smartphone with me. After accessing some loal .co.uk web sites I quickly noticed that Hash It! would not figure out the right site tag for them when it was invoked from the Android web browser via the “Share” intent.

So, I just rolled an update, Hash It! 1.1.0, which adds support for the most common ccSLDs (country code second-level domains), such as .co.uk, .ac.uk or .com.sg.

Hash It! 1.1.0 is available via the Android Market. Details are also available at: http://android.ginkel.com/

Enjoy!

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Posted in Android, Hacking, Java, OSS, Security, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Hash It! Updated to Version 1.0.2

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

It has been a while since I last worked on Hash It!, but thanks to the bug report of an attentive user I just uploaded a new version (1.0.2) of Hash It! to the Android Market. Bottom line: Hash It! now works correctly on Android 1.5.

Hash It! is licensed under the GPLv3 and as such comes with full source code for your entertainment.

Further details on how to download it to your mobile phone as well as the changelog are available at: http://android.ginkel.com/

Get it while it is still hot! ;-)

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Posted in Android, Hacking, Java, OSS, Security, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

Android: Maps API Key Issues

Monday, April 19th, 2010

When using Google Maps from within your Android application you need to obtain an API key in order to be able to retrieve Maps data at run-time. This API key is derived from the fingerprint of the signature key used to sign the application’s APK. Consequently, if the signature key used by your application at a given point in time no longer matches the one used to register the Maps API key, using the MapView will silently fail (the map will just display a gray grid instead of the expected map data). So far, so good.

As it seems, the Android ADT Eclipse plug-in also comes with an undocumented “feature”: If no “Custom debug keystore” is set in the Android Build Preferences, it will apparently use a different key to sign the APK when deploying it to a phone connected via USB than when deploying it to the Emulator. So, all your Maps applications will suddenly start to fail displaying map data once they are deployed on a real device for testing purposes.

To work around this issue, set the “Custom debug keystore” setting (empty by default) to the same value as the “Default debug keystore”.

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Posted in Android, Hacking, Java, Tech by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel | No Comments »

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