Older blog entries for bradfitz (starting at number 256)

Travel

After 5 nights in lovely Barcelona and a night in Casablanca, Sierra and I are currently in Marrakesh at the most ridiculous hotel I've ever seen.

Marrakesh is ridiculous(ly awesome) from what I've seen. Time to go see more. And get foods. Foooood.

P.S. Everything is in Arabic and French. I speak neither of these languages, but I understand the French letters and a lot of the words. I know like 5 French phrases. They don't get me very far.

Syndicated 2009-02-13 14:52:24 (Updated 2009-02-13 14:54:42) from Brad Fitzpatrick

Pictiondrunkery

Tessa liked my proposal for birthday bar hopping beginning by meeting at my house with some drunken Pictionary, which she calls "Pictiondrunkery".

But yeah --- if I know you and/or you've ever been over to my house, come by tonight. We'll be drinking and playing board games while people arrive between 7 and 9 or so, and then head out after that.

Syndicated 2009-02-05 23:59:48 from Brad Fitzpatrick

age++

29.

Tonight's plan is/was to go out and get drinks with friends, but I've got a fever+sore throat that may interfere. Seems to be getting better, but we'll see.

Hmm, I kinda forgot to post anything all throughout January, including a 2008-in-review post. I should do that still.

Syndicated 2009-02-05 15:02:04 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Seattle in a nutshell

Brrr. Love it.

Syndicated 2008-12-20 21:13:00 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Android, Debian, Linux, remote keyboard to G1, ...

I'm loving Android more and more. I keep finding (and filing) bugs, but they're all fixable, and this is only going to keep getting better.

Today I installed Debian on my G1. I followed those instructions up until the unionfs part, where I opted to use bind mounts instead, letting me have a /android/data and /android/system inside my Debian chroot.

Anyway, I now have openssh, perl, python, sqlite3, emacs, git, svn, gcc, screen, nmap, tcpdump, iftop, etc... all running on my phone in a little 2GB filesystem. (I have a 16GB SD card). Then using ConnectBot, I just keep an ssh connection from the phone to localhost all the time, so Debian is accessible when I'm out and about.

But when I'm at home and want to ssh in, I have a bash alias which forwards a port over USB:

alias droid='$ANDSDK/tools/adb forward tcp:1622 tcp:22 && ssh -p 1622 root@localhost'

... so then my openssh server only needs to listen on localhost.

Now that I can just ssh into my phone to work on stuff, I was getting annoyed having to reply to SMSes by using the little phone keyboard when I was sitting in front of a real keyboard.

So I wrote this:
http://github.com/bradfitz/android-misc/tree/master/type.pl [mirror]

That's an app which captures my keystrokes in my ssh session (I have it running in a screen window), and then injects them into the Linux input layer, so Android thinks I'm typing them on the keyboard.

Even cooler: I wrote that all ssh'd into my phone, over ssh in Emacs in screen, including git-push'ing it to github.com.

Fun stuff.

(Don't worry --- I'm not just working on useless stuff. dan_erat and I were hacking on an Android app today which everybody can use....)

Syndicated 2008-12-15 07:15:18 (Updated 2008-12-15 07:17:11) from Brad Fitzpatrick

K-9 SMS: v2

Updated K-9 SMS. Same download URL:

http://bradfitz.com/android/K9Sms.apk

Changes:
*) fix duplication issues with system SMS service/notifications also running.
*) enter key now inserts a literal newline instead of sending the SMS. (by request, and because I accidentally send too many SMSes too that way)
*) little about menu with version number

Syndicated 2008-12-09 07:58:54 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Android Developer Phones

Get an SIM-unlocked, bootloader-unlocked, kernel-unlocked, fully flashable Android phone for $399, with free shipping in the US:

http://code.google.com/android/dev-devices.html

(plus $25 if you're not already registered as an Android developer, which is probably the case.)

Awesome. This removes one of my ever-dwindling list of Android complaints, that no open phone has been available that matches the openness of the software.

Syndicated 2008-12-08 19:50:50 from Brad Fitzpatrick

K-9 SMS: faster SMS for Android

I pulled the latest Android git code and fixed some performance bugs in the SMS app. Here's the improved SMS app:

http://bradfitz.com/android/K9Sms.apk

It's a lot faster to scroll around and stuff now. No more repetitive, uncached, blocking SQL queries in the UI thread when each list items comes in/out of view.

With permission from Jesse Vincent, I named it after k9mail, as it's in a similar spirit. We'll probably put it in k9mail's svn repo until all the changes get merged into mainline. Consider this a temporary, experimental fork.

Syndicated 2008-12-08 06:12:40 from Brad Fitzpatrick

This Just In: Forbes Clueless!

Oh man. Worst article ever. Count the inaccuracies and stupidities within.

Some of the highlights:

• they reference my Android garage door opener app but confuse it and say that Android was ported to run on a garage door opener. I mean, almost the same, right? :P
• they call X11 an old version of Unix:

  Google employees not using the secret OS are employing various versions of Unix, such as Linux or Ubuntu, and some older operating systems, like X11, he says.

Love it.

Syndicated 2008-12-07 07:29:00 from Brad Fitzpatrick

JavaFX Fail

I go to look at the JavaFX demos. I'm redirected by javafx.com to a URL that contains /mac-player.jsp. Write-once-run-anywhere, my ass. Sun's own URL is calling an end to that lie.



Then, after a long hang, my browser goes white and all the other windows and tabs hang and start spinning rainbow beachballs and I get a trust dialog:



After that Safari hung so hard I hand to force kill it a few times.

Good job.

I still don't know what JavaFX is.

Syndicated 2008-12-05 07:24:10 (Updated 2008-12-05 07:24:49) from Brad Fitzpatrick