Technology

Some good points on the state of affairs in the web development world today ...

In the old days there was a respected profession of application programming. There was a minority of elite system programmers who built infrastructure and tools that empowered the majority of application programmers. Our goal was to allow regular people without extensive training to easily and quickly build useful software. This was the spirit of languages like COBOL, Visual Basic, and HyperCard. Elegant tools for a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web.

This article describes how to install an HD TV Antenna to get free over the air channels, so you can get rid of the cable or satellite subscription.

Here is my TV Fool report. Note that some channels are not listed (e.g. CBC), but it provides you with an approximate list of what channels you can get, what power each is at, and which direction to face.

The nearest intersection for me is Fischer Hallman and Erb St W, in the west end of Waterloo.

Home-made Attempt: Coat Hanger Antenna

If your Android phone is suffering from suboptimal battery life, you may be suffering from suspend_backoff problems. This happens when the phone is woken up by applications in quick succession, so it decides to keep the phone awake for a little while. For example, there is data to be sent over WiFi, so the WiFi connection is kept awake, which keeps the phone awake.

I use a 15.6" laptop for daily work, but it is kind of heavy lugging it to conferences and talks. This is aggravated by the roller case for it which has some weight in it. Add a power supply, and other sundry items, and it becomes inconvenient when I am not traveling.

So, when I saw someone givining a presentation off of an Apple iPad, I was jealous and thought: why can't I do the same from my Android tablet? Turns out that the iPad has a display port, and Apple sells a display port to VGA adapter.

Manually copying the photos you take using your phone can be a tedious task. You need to find the time, connect the cable, find the last photo that you synced, and sync everything after it.

However, there is a useful and automated solution: the FolderSync Lite app.

This app is targeted towards cloud storage services, including several popular ones, such as Amazon S3, DropBox, Google Drive and UbuntuOne.

Anyone who used Android knows that it does not, by default, repeat notifications for important events, such as missed called, text messages, email or calendar. One has to manually switch the screen on and look at the notification bar on the top to see what they missed. Ideally, Android needs to have a visual or audible notification that there is a notification that happened in the past.

Luckily there are many apps that provide this, and I review some that I have tried in the past, with the pros and cons for each.

Light Flow

After I upgraded my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc from 2.3.4 (GingerBread) to 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich), I noticed that it was laggy and slow.

With Gingerbread 2.3.4, and ADW Launcher as the home screen, everything was fine.

Upon using the "top" command, either from ConnectBot, or from adb via the USB case, I noticed that com.google.media and com.google.acore are eating up most of the CPU time.

You can also go into Settings Developer Options and turn on the CPU overlay which will tell you the top processes eating up CPU.

Just what I have been saying all along.

Spectrum fragmentation means pricier mobile handsets, customer lock-in by carrier, and reduce the ability for global roaming.

This is mostly a USA/Canada problem only, since the rest of the world do not auction spectrum to specific networks.

Note: This article is Android version dependent. Before you do it, you have to upgrade your phone. Use the article on Making your Sony Xperia Arc faster using Android 2.3.4 Global Generic 4.0.2.A.0.42.

Root your phone

Root your phone using zergRush.

Remove the junk applications

$ adb shell
$ su
#

If you have a slow Sony Xperia Arc, then probably you have Timescape and carrier bloatware that makes your phone slow (e.g. Rogers in Canada). In this tutorial, I will explain the steps that I did to make the phone considerably faster.

Install PC Companion and Update Service

In order to flash a new ROM on your phone, you will need first to install Sony Ericsson's PC Companion as well as Update Service on your Windows computer. This is needed so that the required USB drivers are installed and configured.

Install Flashtool