What this plugin does is update each product page with the equivalent Euro price. The GBP to EUR rate is retrieved in real time from Yahoo Finance. The Irish VAT rate of 21% is included except on books which are exempt from VAT.

Now available on Chrome.

The original Firefox version is still available here.

From the release notes…

• Added the ability to export/import from/to a CSV file
• Added a random password generator
• Removed the dependency on JCE Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files
• Added support for using HTTPS URLs with database sharing
• Set focus on the password field on all enter master password dialogs
• Added Spanish translation (courtesy of Victor Alfonso Pineda)
• Resize the “Notes” text area when the Account Details dialog is resized

• Shared Database support
• Delete Database support
• Lots of bugs fixes and improvements

The shared database feature was the primary focus of 1.1. With this it’s now possible to sync your password database with the desktop version. For full details on how to setup and use database sharing see the user guide.

You can upgrade from the Android Marketplace or download the APK directly from Sourceforge.

If you have any problems post please use the Help Forum.

UPDATE: When you upgrade you may get an error telling you UPM is no longer available when you try to start it. To fix this you should restart your phone and recreate any shortcut you have to UPM on your Home screen.

For those who are interested this seems to be a problem with Android 1.5 and how it handles a change to the main Activity after an upgrade. If you have any experience or details on this problem I’d be interested hear about it.

Oracle DBMS_CHANGE_NOTIFICATION
An interesting way of subscribing to events in an Oracle db. Could be used as an alternative to triggers where the work to be carried out is not possible from a trigger or needs to be done async to the trigger.

QuickSharp
MonoDevelop
SharpDevelop IDE for C#
A few opensource C# IDEs.

As it happens writing a solution from scratch (at the HTTP layer that is) is pretty straight forward. The main challenge is understanding how the POST request should be structured. Once you know that it’s simply a matter of putting all the pieces together.

The connection is managed using the java.net.HttpURLConnection class. There’s a few properties that need to set on the connection to ensure it can be written to and read from,

HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setDoOutput(true);
conn.setDoInput(true);
conn.setUseCaches(false);

A special header informs the server that this will be a multipart form submission.

conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "multipart/form-data; boundary=xxxxxxxxxx");

The “boundry” can be any string. In this example it’s “xxxxxxxxxx”. It’s used in the body of the request to seperate each field being submitted.

Next comes the main body of the request. Each field being submitted follows the same pattern. For example, to submit a text file called “helloworld.txt” with the contents “Hello World” and using the boundry string “xxxxxxxxxx” here’s what the request would look like,

--xxxxxxxxxx
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="filetoupload"; filename="helloworld.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

Hello World
--xxxxxxxxxx--

The final -- is important. It tells the server it’s the end of the submission.

Here’s a full method that’s used to upload a file to a URL. It can optionally take a username and password which is used to perform BASIC authentication.

    public static void put(String targetURL, File file, String username, String password) throws Exception {

        String BOUNDRY = "==================================";
        HttpURLConnection conn = null; 

        try {

            // These strings are sent in the request body. They provide information about the file being uploaded
            String contentDisposition = "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"userfile\"; filename=\"" + file.getName() + "\"";
            String contentType = "Content-Type: application/octet-stream";

            // This is the standard format for a multipart request
            StringBuffer requestBody = new StringBuffer();
            requestBody.append("--");
            requestBody.append(BOUNDRY);
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append(contentDisposition);
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append(contentType);
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append('\n');
            requestBody.append(new String(Util.getBytesFromFile(file)));
            requestBody.append("--");
            requestBody.append(BOUNDRY);
            requestBody.append("--");

            // Make a connect to the server
            URL url = new URL(targetURL);
            conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

            // Put the authentication details in the request
            if (username != null) {
                String usernamePassword = username + ":" + password;
                String encodedUsernamePassword = Base64.encodeBytes(usernamePassword.getBytes());
                conn.setRequestProperty ("Authorization", "Basic " + encodedUsernamePassword);
            }

            conn.setDoOutput(true);
            conn.setDoInput(true);
            conn.setUseCaches(false);
            conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
            conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "multipart/form-data; boundary=" + BOUNDRY);

            // Send the body
            DataOutputStream dataOS = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream());
            dataOS.writeBytes(requestBody.toString());
            dataOS.flush();
            dataOS.close();

            // Ensure we got the HTTP 200 response code
            int responseCode = conn.getResponseCode();
            if (responseCode != 200) {
                throw new Exception(String.format("Received the response code %d from the URL %s", responseCode, url));
            }

            // Read the response
            InputStream is = conn.getInputStream();
            ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            byte[] bytes = new byte[1024];
            int bytesRead;
            while((bytesRead = is.read(bytes)) != -1) {
                baos.write(bytes, 0, bytesRead);
            }
            byte[] bytesReceived = baos.toByteArray();
            baos.close();

            is.close();
            String response = new String(bytesReceived);
            
            // TODO: Do something here to handle the 'response' string

        } finally {
            if (conn != null) {
                conn.disconnect();
            }
        }

    }

There’s nothing in this code particular to Android so it will work in any java application.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank
"Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company."

Steak: How to Turn Cheap “Choice” Steak into Gucci “Prime” Steak
How to cook a really tasty steak using a *lot* of salt. I'll definitely be trying this one out.

Design 0.101 for Programmers
A nice step by step guide describing how to build a simple but nicely styled set of web pages. I usually use YUI or Blueprint to give me the basics but sometimes they can be a bit heavy if all you want is a simple page or two.

Fiddler Web Debugger
Useful proxy based tool for inspecting and "fiddling" with HTTP requests and responses.

This problem came to the fore for me recently as I was porting UPM to the Android platform. Since UPM is a Java application I was able to reuse quite a bit of the code with little or no modification (all bar the SWING code actually).

During the porting process I found that opening the password database on the Android Emulator took about 12 seconds. This was a sub-second operation on the PC version so there was obviously a problem. Using Traceview, the profiling tool that comes with the Android SDK, the problem soon became apparent.

UPM stores all it’s data in an encrypted file. This file is read into memory where it’s decrypted. Here’s the code that was reading in the file…

    FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(databaseFile);
    ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    int i = 0;
    while ((i = fis.read()) != -1) {
        baos.write(i);
    }
    byte[] fullDatabase = baos.toByteArray();
    baos.close();
    fis.close();

Looking at it now it’s obviously bad code from a performance point of view as it’s reading in the file byte by byte. The reason I never replaced it was that it simply wasn’t a problem when running on a PC. The database file it reads is only a few kilobytes in size so it ran in under a second.

After identifying the bad code I replaced it with the following which runs in under a second.

        InputStream is = new FileInputStream(file);
    
        // Get the size of the file
        long length = file.length();
    
        // Create the byte array to hold the data
        byte[] bytes = new byte[(int)length];
    
        // Read in the bytes
        int offset = 0;
        int numRead = 0;
        while (offset < bytes.length
               && (numRead=is.read(bytes, offset, bytes.length-offset)) >= 0) {
            offset += numRead;
        }
    
        // Ensure all the bytes have been read in
        if (offset < bytes.length) {
            throw new IOException("Could not completely read file " + file.getName());
        }
    
        is.close();

The lesson here is that Android, and mobile platforms in general, require you think a little bit more about elements of your design and code than you might normally.

Some useful Android links:
Designing for Performance
Designing for Responsiveness

Patchbin – Share and collaborate on patches
An open source code review / code sharing app. Looks nice and simple. It’s written in Python and runs on Django.

South Dublin County Libraries
Homepage for the Tallaght and other south Dublin libraries.

Android Source Code Git Repositories
Looking for the Android source code? This is the Android Git homepage with references to all repositories. Useful if you’re developing an app and would like to see the source for some of the packaged apps.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a version of UPM for Android. This was mainly an exploratory exercise so that I could get a feel for Android but it’s nice to have something useful at the end of it.

UPM is cross platform, easy to use password manager. It runs on Windows, OS X (native L&F), Linux and now Android. It’s available on the Android Market or by direct download.

I hope you find it useful.