Android: Not Free as in Speech, but does it really matter?

So I was at work the other day and a tweet grabbed my attention. It said “Steve Jobs vindicated: Google Android is not Open” and linked to an article on The Register. After reading through the article I was reminded of my childhood when kids would say things like “yeah, well you eat snails!“. Steve Jobs vindicated!! Well I bet he’ll sleep better for all of that!

It’s not that I am an Apple basher, I have an iPod Nano after all, but how can a company with no Open Source culture to speak of start pointing the finger at another? It’s like being back in the playground!

Upgrading my HTC Hero to Android 2.2 (CyanogenMod-6)

When I bought my HTC Hero I was both impressed and disappointed. Yes it was the best phone I’d even owned but as it was running Android 1.5 it didn’t do some of the whizzy things that I’d read about; things like Turn-By-Turn Navigation, Speech to Text etc. When the official upgrade to Android 2.1 was released I was pleasently surprised to find that Google Navigation (along with Turn-By-Turn) was now available but again disappointed that Speech to Text was not. Indeed, contacting HTC they confirmed that it would not be available for the Hero. Nevermind I thought, I’ll survive – and until recently I have.

Accessing my Netgear Stora from Ubuntu

Like many tech-savy people these days I’ve been thinking about buying a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) for some time but being more into software than hardware I’ve never really understood enough about them to lay down my hard earned cash. Well recently my hand was forced by my external hard drive starting to act up and my girlfriends son filling his 70GB HDD with downloaded Flight Simulator extensions (and god knows what else!). After quizzing the infrastructure guy at work about his thoughts I ended up buying the Netgear Stora enclosure along with a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive (another drive to follow next month).

Configuring Android Debug Bridge Server to start as root

In my previous post my previous post I mentioned that one of the problems I faced when trying to install and debug my first Android application was that the Android Debug Bridge (adb) was not running as root. Now shutting the service down and restarting it with sudo was all that was required but that’s a bit of a faff, there had to be a way to configure adb to be started with root privileges – and there is.

Android Development : Moving from Emulator to Device

So I wanted to roll my sleeves up and get going with Android and have come up with a suitable ‘pet project’ to work towards. Now that I’ve got my development environment sorted out, and with my pet project in mind, I decided to do something with the accelerometer. In the Android Development book that I bought there is a sample application to display the current G being experienced by the device as well as the maximum G experienced.

Now the keying in of the code was a useful exercise in itself but there was an obvious flaw in my selection of project – can you guess what it is? That’s right my laptop doesn’t have an accelerometer so even if the code builds (and it does) and runs in the emulator (and it did) the G readings are not going to change no matter how much I shake the laptop around! Doh!