Friday, September 16, 2011

Good day for Developers

It seems that today is a very good day for Developers!
On one hand, Google, launched its APIs for the Google+ platform here.
On the other, Windows is offering a free download of its' latest Win8 build here.
Hmmm ... decision, decisions, time crunch!

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

State of Mobile OSes

What with Android, webOS, MeeGo, bada, WinMo7 in the race to become stable and the de-facto standard after iOS, things don't look very good for end-users. QuiksMode blog has a very nice entry summarizing the current fragmented & cloudy (pun intended) state of affairs for mobile OSes here. From this report - it seems that Apple may continue to be the winner unless webOS or MeeGo manage to turn the tables around.

Happy Programmers' Day!

Today is 13th September - the 256th day of the year. The number 256 holds a special place in the eyes of (most) programmers as it is the highest value that can be represented with a byte: 2^8 or 0b11111111. Since this is the highest integer less than 365 (days in a year) that can be represented with powers of 2, this is celebrated as Programmers' Day. Read more on the history of Programmers' Day at Wikipedia.
Sadly - Google does not have any Doodles for this on their home page even though they are a very techie company.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Better Blogger Interface

Blogger is working on a vastly improved interface and I got a preview of it recently.
The new interface is really nice and am hoping it will become the standard interface soon.

HomeBrew on HP TouchPad

On HP TouchPad, side loading of apps - referred to as HomeBrew - is very simple and consists of a few simple steps! No complicated rooting, jail-breaking or difficult procedures as all. As detailed in this site, the steps are as follows:
  1. Enable "Developer Mode" by typing webos20090606 in the "Just Type" box at the top of the home screen and enabling it
  2. Download webOS Quick Install (WOSQI) developed by Jason Robitaille from here and install it on your computer.
  3. Connect TP to this computer and click on close when prompted to enable USB Drive mode
  4. Launch WOSQI on the computer and click on the globe like button on the right to install the Package Browser/Installer (note that it may take some time to load all the feeds and you may be prompted to load drivers from NovaCom - this is ok)
  5. Launch Preware from Downloads and read through the notices - you can safely skim to the end
  6. Search for and then Install the following patches to improve performance of your TP - note that you can restart after you have installed all these apps instead of once each time each app is installed:
    1. Unset CFQ IO Scheduler
    2. Muffle System Logging
    3. Remove Dropped Packet Logging
    4. Unthrottle Download Manager
    5. Quiet powerd Messages
    6. Faster Card Animations HYPER Version
  7.  Reduce logging level - you can safely ignore the warnings that pop-up:
    1. Open the Phone application and dial ##5647# followed by the green send button to open the logging menu
    2. Clear the existing logs
    3. Set logging level to minimal
    4. You can also delete the trace/dump file from the menu on the top left
All of this took me only 15 minutes from beginning till very end!
Hopefully after reducing logging levels and speeding up the card animations, performance on TP should be vastly better.

Note that for reducing logging level, you do not need to pair to a phone or setup a phone application. Just open the included Phone app and select your own webOs account.

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