Using Google Maps in your Android Applications – Part 1

This tutorial was created using the Google Maps API v1 and as it is not possible to obtain a v1 key anymore this series of posts is pretty much obsolete. I’ve been looking at creating an updated set of tutorials and I’ll post them as soon as they are ready.

I’m currently working on an Android application which displays points of interest on a map and allows the user to see additional details by tapping on the associated marker. This sounds like a straight forward requirement for an Android application and so you would have thought that there would be a wealth of resources on the web to guide a developer on his way – but that’s not been my experience.

Recovering deleted files on Fedora 15 using the photorec utility

So here is the scenario; I’d taken some photos of a special occasion and wanted to copy them to my usb key so that my girlfriend could take them to be printed. Simple stuff huh.? Well normally yes, but when I gave my girlfriend the usb key last time instead of finding just the handful of photos on there that she expected there were dozens of them displayed when she plugged it into the kiosk.

These were of course in the hidden .Trash folder on the device but I didn’t think to clear down the recycle bin. Well, I was not going to be caught out like that again so this time I deleted everything on the key, opened the Trash folder and clicked ‘Empty Trash’. Now all I had to do was drag and drop the photos from the camera and drop them onto the usb key. A fraction of a second too late I realised that I was not dropping the files into the usb key folder but into the trash instead!

Backing up and Restoring to Dropbox on Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS

In my previous couple of posts I’ve been configuring Dropbox on my Virtual Private server running a headless installation of Ubuntu 10.04. The main reason for this was to enable me to use it for storing backups without having to rely in the Dropbox Web API which has proven to be somewhat flaky – or at least that’s my experience. With the Dropbox daemon now installed, configured and running all I need now is a script to perform the actual backups and save in the appropriate location. Initially I’ll do this using bash script but it is my intention to look at using Python when I have some time on my hands.

Configuring Dropbox on an Ubuntu Server – Pt 2

In Part 1 I clarified a few points on the Dropbox tutorial for getting the server running on a headless Linux server and while I had it running it was ‘locked’ to an ssh session, i.e. close the session and the Dropbox server also stopped. The same tutorial provides links to sample init.d files which can be used to start the Dropbox server on boot. This works well enough but there were a couple of things that, again, could have done with a bit more detail.

Configuring Dropbox on an Ubuntu Server – Pt 1

If you’ve been reading any of my recent posts you will know that I have been moving from a shared server host to a virtual private server and that I have also experienced issues with my backups. Well with the blog configured and running well the migration was almost complete, but what about backing up my data? I’d already seen how easy it was to run into problems so this time I wanted to be a little bit more in control and not just blindly rely on third party plugins. I was keen to use Dropbox but was unsure about installing and configuring it on a headless Ubuntu Server. As it happens it was not really that difficult to get it up and running.