BoraDev Software Technology

With a complete lack of personal time and the long awaited Linux version of AIR still awaited (come on Adobe, the Mono boys will get Silverlight running on Linux before you get a proper non Beta release out) I’ve parked development of it.

Also, having found on-line guides like this one: Sky TV Listings, I hardly use my own application. They’ve done a great job of reproducing almost everything I have all in JavaScript in a browser. Very nice!

I think I shall move on to mobile apps now. I fancy an Android phone but can’t really afford the G1. £40 a month for 18 months. Thats an expensive phone. An iPhone would be nice but equally expensive and I don’t like the fact that you have to pay Apple just to get your own application on your own phone. I’m hoping for a few more Google phones next year, then the price will come down a bit.

Applications like ShopSavvy really raise the bar IMO.

Filed under: AIR, AirWaves | No Comments »

Haven’t posted in a while. Been very busy working long hours on site implementing a new software system. I’m getting code withdrawal symptoms
Haven’t had any time to do any coding at all on my own side projects.

About a month ago a Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop I had bought 53 weeks before, started gettng graphics problems, 1 week out of warrranty. The BIOS loading screen had many artifacts and Vista would not boot except in safe mode. The Nvidia 7900 GS Go graphics card had given up. I read around and found a few people with similar problems so thought I might have a case under UK consumer law as the laptop was not fit for purpose.

I then spent over a week corresponding via e-mail with Dell support. In all fairness they always responded the same day and were always very professional and polite. But that was the only good thing. They obviously use a decision tree for all support and cant vary from it. They requested I run all manner of tests which I did. All tests pointed to the graphics card. The card in this system is not soldered to the board and can be replaced. Dell told me that the system was out of warranty and that I could pay for the repair which would involve replacing the motherboard and memory.

Oddly I refused this option as, aside from their unfathomable diagnosis, I believed the machine was not fit for purpose. Dell then requested I perform further tests and insisted I would have to pay for the repairs. This went on for a week while I continued to insist they repair it free of charge. They finally told me to run the system restore facility which I flatly refused to do as I could guarantee it would have no effect and I asked to escalate the matter to someone with the authority to decide whether Dell would cover the cost of the repair.

The next day I received an e-mail saying Dell would, as a one off good will gesture repair the laptop free of charge! It was quickly collected and returned a week later all fixed. Result! I knew it was a heat problem so I installed I8KFANGUI and now run the fans at max all the time. It’s noisy but always keeps the GPU temp below 70.

This was a couple of weeks ago.

In my regular trawl around the tech sites I have just seen this exact issue really blowing up in Nvidia’s face:

Laptops With Certain NVidia Chips Failing

Potentially 18 million affected units from the big manufacturers. Wow.
I know that my laptop could go again as the replacement part still has the manufacturing flaw but at least I managed to get it fixed outside the warranty period. What is Dell going to do? Replace all these machines? Their interim fix of a BIOS update to turn on the fans can’t be their final solution can it?

I shall be watching this site with interest over the coming days:

Direct2Dell

And for anyone else with a broken laptop just out side warranty period - be persistent, very persistent, with a little luck they might repair it for free.

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Another odd piece of data from the Radio Times website meant that a film director had HTML code in the datastring. This screwed up the XML which then failed to parse. I have now added some code to strip out problematic data like this.

Now at version 0.6

Filed under: AirWaves | No Comments »

When they released the new version of Ubuntu I fancied a clearout so I copied my whole home folder to a second disk and did a fresh install of Hardy.

USB keyboards aren’t handled very well. It’s a good job I wanted the installation to be in English because I had no way of changing it on the very first screen. It’s just as well it assumes English after a couple of minutes.

The install went well. Firefox 3 is very nice. Then a few problems started appearing:

• Reboot doesn’t work, it just hangs when it’s finished shutting down
• Sound is flakey. This is a surprise as it’s bread and butter stuff. Apparently they have chosen to use PulseAudio by default to control desktop sound. This is known to be dodgy in it’s current version. The result is that playing videos, or sounds sometimes runs incredibly slowly, appearing to hang. Where possible you can select to use alsa instead and it all works again! This meant I had to switch from Totem to MPlayer for videos.
• USB drives do not get mounted. My card reader doesn’t work, and when I plug my camera in it does not get mounted. The workaround is to plug the device in and use dmesg to find the device name when it gets recognised (sdf in my case). Then you can use “sudo fdisk -l” to find the file type of the USB device (FaT32 in my case). Finally you can create a folder to mount the drive to and then manually mount it with a “sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdf1 /media/camera/“. When you’ve finished you can run “sudo umount /dev/sdf1” to dismount it.

These are the only problems so far but they aren’t exactly unique to my configuration. Although I’ve found workarounds to every problem it’s a bit naff really. And this is an LTS version as well!

Having said all that, it’s still a cracking operating system

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I have for some time been plagued with problems when web browsing, particularly on sites like YouTube. Firefox would simply die without warning and I would have to restart it. Fortunately, it allows the session to be resumed so I lived with it for a while. As with a lot of minor issues it started getting really annoying so I googled around for it. It seems that quite a few people are having problems with Flash and Ubuntu.

Navigating to the “about:plugins” page (literally typing that into the address bar without the quotes and hitting enter) I noticed that Firefox was reporting 2 Shockwave Flash Plugins. One libflashplayer.so at version 9.0 r115 which is the latest version and a second libflashplayer.so at an earlier version.

I searched my hard disc for files with this name and it came back with two of them. One in my ~/.mozilla/plugins folder (where ~ is my home folder) and one in /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree

I didn’t know which was which so deleted the version in my home folder and restarted Firefox. The plugins page then only showed the latest version of the Flash plugin.

Since then I have not have a single crash in Firefox. I’m still not sure how the older plugin version came to be on my system.

If you have Firefox 2 problems with Flash try this out. It seems a bit of a simple solution so there may be other factors involved but it’s worth a shot.

I haven’t rebooted into Vista for several months now. I might try installing SP1 if I get bored

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I haven’t updated this site for ages due to free time issues but I have finally managed to update the application for the released version of AIR. I have also taken this opportunity to open source the whole lot (except for the auto updater code which isn’t mine).

You can find the latest version of the application (0.5) from the AirWaves page linked on the left and also in there is a new link to the whole FlexBuilder project. You may find it useful if you want to see how to do transparent windows or minimise to tray etc. Or you could fix a few of my bugs (the date time drop down isn’t working properly…) or enhance the functionality if you fancy it but please follow the GPL license restrictions (basically any derivative works have to be GPL’ed as well, with the source available).

I have noticed that any TV guide relying on XMLTV has been broken recently due to null characters in the Radio Times data, but as I’ve written my own data formatter it doesn’t suffer from this problem

Filed under: AIR, AirWaves | No Comments »

Finally I have gotten around to upgrading AirWaves TV Guide to the latest version of the AIR runtime: Beta 3.

Unfortunately they have changed the application descriptor so that the version number is no longer an attribute of the top level node but rather an XML node in it’s own right. Basically this means that the auto updater will no longer work. So if you want the latest version you will have to download the AIR file and install it manually. Hopefully they wont break it again as it must be getting close to a release candidate version soon.

I have also tuned the classic EPG style programme view a little further. We are now down to about 3-4 seconds and way less memory consumption.

That’s about it really.

Merry Christmas!

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I had a quick look at the Android SDK the other day and immediately hit what appears to be a common problem.

ActivityManager: Error: Activity class blah does not exist.

All I did was create a new Android project and run it without any customisation code at all.  I then spent an evening searching for a solution but nothing appeared to work. I tried re-creating the project but since I hadn’t modified the project in any way this was unlikely, I tried killing the debug process “{SDK_Location}/tools/adb kill-server”, deleting the userdata.img file. No change. I finally found a post suggesting to login to the adb shell and remove the deployed applications manually.

So I ran “./adb shell” in the SDK Tools folder and then cd’ed into the /data/app folder. I found in there all the old projects that I had created and run, i.e. several apk files. I deleted each one leaving the ApiDemos.apk which comes with Android. When I ran my project from Eclipse again, it started working

I am assuming the issue was caused as I had created a previous project for trying stuff out and subsequently deleted it and somehow adb got confused along the way.

It’s all fine now though so all I have to do is think of a killer app Anybody want a mobile TV Guide? Maybe I could sms back to MythTV to record shows???? That positioning LocationManager looks cool as well, but how’s it going to work on a security level? Will a user opt to have their location tracked?

I think Android is going to be big next year.

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The version I uploaded yesterday had a bug in the alerts that meant they could not be closed. I have rectified this issue and uploaded a new version.

We are now at version 0.3.

Whilst digging around the code I also moved the update functionality into the code that downloads new TV Data (so it will only happen once every week or 2 and you can still opt out). There was also a couple of minor style changes but nothing of great note.

Filed under: AIR, AirWaves, flex | No Comments »

It took longer than I hoped (if you need to replace your central heating pump and mid-position valve I am now the man ), but I will be able to release the new version this weekend. It will now be at V0.2 and the auto-updater should handle the upgrade once I have uploaded the new file.

It can now be resized. I have added a resize handle to the bottom right corner.

New Electronic Programme Guide style view. You can now view the TV data in the classic EPG style with horizontal boxes for programmes and a current time marker.

A few minor issues fixed, such as alarm sounds continuing to be triggered after closing the reminder dialog etc

Oustanding stuff to sort out:

• Now it can be resized I’d like to get the application to remember what size it was when next opened.
• Faster: it still takes 4-5 seconds to open the EPG view. I would like to halve this if possible.
• I still want to make it open source so I’ll look into doing that soon as well

Filed under: AIR, AirWaves, flex | No Comments »