atyoung's Development Blog

So what's going on?

2012-09-09T00:50:00.000-07:00

I'll let this speak for itself. Those thinking I'm dead, think again. Dragons are coming... That is all.

Links...

2012-08-13T20:55:00.001-07:00

Sorry guys, I'll try to sort this shortly. Today was my first day at my new job so, you can imagine that it's not the best timing for this kind of issue.

Atyoung

Lack of contact...

2012-07-23T21:09:00.002-07:00

I feel as though I must apologize for the lack of communication recently, as I'm sure you have heard, life has gotten in the way of hobbies. I had sever major vehicle malfunctions all almost simultaneously to the tune of some 3000 bucks or more (transmissions are bastards btw). Additionally I have been talking to a rather major company about a new job so I might be making a change here soon professionally, which should be for the better, but it's consuming a bit of my off time as I have to bone up on the product a bit.

Progress on the hobby projects still goes, just quite a bit more slowly and leaving not much time for the social aspects of it I'm afraid. Those of you with kids full time jobs and spouses I'm sure can relate. I have 4 kids so you can do the math time wise. Anyhow, things are moving, I'm paying close attention to Jelly Bean developments, and still in contact with many great developers, including mazdarider23 who's working on the cm10 port, among other projects. So sit back relax, don't fret, good things are coming.

~atyoung

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - Java 6

2012-07-05T14:43:00.001-07:00

So a conversation with smelkus sparked my interest in discovering just what is the best and most proper method. So without further adeu:

chmod +x jdk-6u33-linux-x64.bin
./jdk-6u33-linux-x64.bin
sudo chown root. -R jdk1.6.0_33/

sudo mkdir /usr/lib/jvm

sudo mv jdk1.6.0_33/ /usr/lib/jvm/

sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" \
"/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_33/bin/java" 1

sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" \
"/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_33/bin/javac" 1

sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javaws" "javaws" \
"/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_33/bin/javaws" 1

sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo update-alternatives --config javac
sudo update-alternatives --config javaws

This should be adjusted to the i586 if you're on 32bit.

You can download the bin here. I'm thinking of wrapping that up into a self downloading script that allows you to swap them on the fly, which would be nice for many things not the least of which is android development. It's not that many of us are still doing froyo building, but hey you never know. It'll also determine the arch automatically, clean out the old stuff etc ala slackware slackbuild style, which I'll post a little later.

Batch snippet to check ip address.

2012-06-28T09:20:00.001-07:00

Little bit of code to grab the current ip address. Made so that I can adjust the proxy settigns based on network location. Sure there are better ways to do this, but my deployment options are limited be corporate.

@echo off
for /f "usebackq tokens=2 delims=:" %%f in (`ipconfig ^| findstr /c:"IP Address"`) do (
    echo %IP% |find "10.45." > nul
    if errorlevel 1 goto :external

    REG add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyOverride /d "<local>" /f
    REG add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyServer /d 0.0.0.0:80 /f
    REG add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

    REG add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyOverride /d "<local>" /f
    REG add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyServer /d 0.0.0.0:80 /f
    REG add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

    REG export "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections" c:\oldconfig.reg

    goto :eof
)

:external

REG add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyOverride /f
REG add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyServer /f
REG add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

REG add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyOverride /f
REG add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyServer /f
REG add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" /v ProxyEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Meh... That export in the end is where I started to deal with my hacking of the binary, that part is a work in progress. This fix doesn't do anything for firefox users, however, so I have to write something else to fix that as well.

Info regarding HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections\DefaultConnectionSettings

2012-06-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

Stuff that I've learned so far about the connection settings binary, I'm placing it here in for my reference later so I don't forget.

1) Byte number zero always has a 3C or 46 - I couldn't find more information about this byte.The next three bytes are zeros.

2) Byte number 4 is a counter used by the 'Internet Options' property sheet (Internet explorer->Tools->Internet Options...).
As you manually change the internet setting (such as LAN settings in the Connections tab), this counter increments.Its not very useful byte.But it MUST have a value.I keep it zero always.The next three bytes are zeros (Bytes 5 to 7).

3) Byte number 8 can take different values as per your settings.
The value is :
09 when only 'Automatically detect settings' is enabled
03 when only 'Use a proxy server for your LAN' is enabled
0B when both are enabled
05 when only 'Use automatic configuration script' is enabled
0D when 'Automatically detect settings' and 'Use automatic configuration script' are enabled
07 when 'Use a proxy server for your LAN' and 'Use automatic configuration script' are enabled
0F when all the three are enabled.
01 when none of them are enabled.
The next three bytes are zeros (Bytes 9 to B).

4) Byte number C (12 in decimal) contains the length of the proxy server address.For example a proxy server '127.0.0.1:80' has length 12 (length includes the dots and the colon).The next three bytes are zeros (Bytes D to F).

5) Byte 10 (or 16 in decimal) contains the proxy server address - like '127.0.0.1:80' (where 80 is obviously the port number)

6) the byte immediatley after the address contians the length of additional information.The next three bytes are zeros. For example if the 'Bypass proxy server for local addresses' is ticked, then this byte is 07,the next three bytes are zeros and then comes a string i.e. '<local>' (<local> indicates that you are bypassing the proxy server.Now since <local> has 7 characters, the length is 07!).
You will have to experiment on your own for finding more about this.
If you dont have any additional info then the length is 0 and no information is added.

7) The byte immediately after the additional info, is the length of the automatic configuration script address (If you dont have a script address then you dont need to add anything,skip this step and goto step 8).The next three bytes are zeros,then comes the address.

8) Finally, 32 zeros are appended.(I dont know why! Presumably to fill the binary blob, perhaps it is expected to be a certain length by something, don't you wish windows had some source?)

It's been quiet.

2012-06-28T08:49:00.001-07:00

Yep I know haven't heard much from me lately. My work ( the stuff I do for a living ) changed buildings last Friday about a mile from where we were previously. Sooo it's pruddy much chaos, I'm typing to you now from a workstation covered in boxs and what not. Our network stuff is dodgy at best, lot's of things not working, so I have been tied up in that, along with our dodgy avaya phone system that is giving me greif.

I actually had to write a batch script yesterday to make internet on the new system work for our laptop users because the visual basic stuff the corporate IT department has ( which is a questionable hack at best ) doesn't work correctly. If you aren't familiar let me tell you, findstr is no substitute for sed and hacking windows registry binary entries with a batch file? Yeah... Fun stuff.

There still enough blocked at the upper corporate level that are tools that our HR department use a on daily basis, that I actually make another proxy here that utilizes tor , polipo, and squid, so people can actually get work done.

Ill get back to hacking phones, but frankly this move thing has occupied almost all my real free time.

The first of the RC5's

2012-06-13T10:49:00.002-07:00

So some of you may have looked into the testbuild yesterday, it was a precursor to the RC5's being pushed out. We are getting super close to a 15 final so, you might also notice a couple cosmetic changes, and naming changes, version number changes.

What's in RC5 you ask, well I drug in a ton of good caf code. This means changes to all kinds of things, power management, i/o, adjustments across the board here. This also means this kernel should support the more recent evervolv stuff that Mason stopped working on a while ago when they merged up newer kgsl code. Additionally updated some of the governor code that was getting dated, and unified some things to do it our way. RC5 might be the last RC for this point release. You'll note that the numbering pattern went from v0.15 to 0.1.5. I think I understand now why Linus went to that scheme. It's really the only way to track changes.

Thanks to smelkus and mazdarider23 from Team D.I.R.T for taking that kgsl test build for a early spin for me, you can thank them for doing the leg work to make RC5's drop today as opposed to sometime later this week.

If you want to help the project along and want to test, I higly recommend you drop into #masonic on IRC freenode and idle there, so that I can reach you easy. I'm on too many forums and in too many places, to coordinate that kind of thing via PM. My gtalk has too many people to keep strait, much easier to just ask for a tester on IRC and respond to whoever sticks their hand up.

Mason EI 0.1.5 RC5 sbc

~atyoung

AOKP Progress

2012-06-12T19:31:00.002-07:00

So I have been playing around with a few different builds, I finally decided to continue with the evervolv tree, and merge in the good stuff from theplayground. There are any number of reasons for this, but the primary one is, drewis is a mad genius and throws some crazy hacks out that boggle my mind for the 8x50 which is you supersonic people. So much good stuff is coming out of caf at the moment, I feel like that's where the future is for the supersonic so there it is.

That said, I still have a ton of work to do, AOKP has been plagued by random reboots in so many places, I'm trying to resolve some of them. So just because your seeing updates to Mason doesn't mean I'm not working on AOKP, quite the opposite, some of the changes coming to Mason are a direct result of working on the AOKP supersonic tree. So there it is, keep the faith, you'll be hearing from me soon.

When there is something worth testing publicly, you'll here it here first.

~atyoung

Testbuild with new Evervolv caf additions

2012-06-12T19:06:00.002-07:00

So this build is based off Mason I 15, but it has all that fun stuff you may have been hearing about from evervolv that may be making things not work on a couple roms that are based off the very current evervolv. So here's your chance to give my latest stab and making that all work, so hit it if your one of the people plagued by that issue. Yes this is ICS only, you're out of luck Mason G users almost none of this applies to you.

I fergot to mention there there are some small tidbits that will be in RC5 across the board cause that branch wasn't entirely clean cause I'm lazy.

Testbuild-kgsl06

Thats all for now.

~atyoung

How bout some RC4 FSO love

2012-06-11T11:05:00.001-07:00

I know you were waiting for these.

Mason I 0.15 RC4 sbc fso
Mason G 0.15 RC4 sbc fso

Enjoy. :)

~atyoung

Introducing RC4 into the mix.

2012-06-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

What another RC? Yeah, pumping another one out for you to try. This one shouldn't break, but it's not as extensively tested as the previous ones. This is mostly due to time constraints, so if you're feeling scrappy give it a shot, it shouldn't eat your phone. I series for now, G a little later.

Mason I 0.15RC4 - sbc
Mason G 0.15RC4 - sbc

Mason I RC3 sbc + fso

2012-06-06T14:35:00.001-07:00

So until today I hadden't noticed I didn't put one of these out for the I series so here you go. Flash away you ICS users you. FSO love is a good thing for hump day right? Thanks to mazdarider23 of Team D.I.R.T for calling my attention to it and testing the build prior to posting.

Download

TaTa for now.

~atyoung

AOKP development.

2012-06-06T10:18:00.002-07:00

So by now you might have heard, I'm going to be maintaining the supersonic build of the official AOKP. With that comes a ton of work, and I do mean a ton. Things in the works, I'm going to be using what was being used for the decks previews, which should bring in the features everyone is looking for. The rom will also run on a specialized Mason, which should actually bring even more customization options, that the already impressive amounts available in the AOKP rom. I will also be looking at whats been broken for some time on the supersonic for AOKP and taking a stab at cleaning it up.

There is lots of work to be done here, and I do have a real life too, so if the speed on the supersonic releases is not strait in line with the other AOKP releases, I apologize in advance, but I feel like quality should come before quantity in this case. For way to long, the supersonic builds have had semi regular breakage, I'd like to restore some faith to the community here.

What wont happen: You will not find me pushing a versions that hasn't tested out solid and bootable and functional on my supersonic personally, from full clean wipe. Which means, when there's a release, it's going to be legit. That's all for now, more when I get there.

~atyoung

FYI. You might find checking in here every so often a teaser tester much like I've done with the Mason kernels.

Delay in the 15 final.

2012-06-05T12:31:00.001-07:00

So yet another project has caught my attention, so at least for a short time I'm going to be working on unclustering that issue. You'll here more about this publicly I'm sure as the day goes on. Anyhow doesn't mean development has ceased, in fact far from it, just that I need to focus on fixing the brokenness with this other project before I pour every little bit of effort back into finalizing 15. I know it's been a bit now, but the 15RC's are good enough for daily drivers right now, as opposed to the other project which from my understanding only somewhat boots... More on the subject soon.

~atyoung

The 15 waiting game.

2012-06-04T15:31:00.002-07:00

I know you are all just clamoring at the bit for some 15 news. Rest assured it's being worked on. I have a few things I have to fix for the CM9 ports to make things happy there.

In other news, major major major patching to the entire block layer of the kernel, this is responsible for our I/O people, and the code we've been using is easily 2 years old. There have been a ton of improvements, so I'm trying to get us a little performance boost, at the cost of thousands and thousands of lines of code. Much of this code is from the Linux 3.0.y line so it takes a bit of work to get it in there gracefully. But in theory should improve our disk I/O a bit, which translates to speed, which is why we're all here. Sit tight, it will be worth the wait.

Changing the naming scheme... Again.

2012-05-30T16:14:00.000-07:00

So mason ginger G, ice I and sense S made fairly good sense, when dealing with one device, but I'm staring down the barrel of 2 more in the very immediate future. So now I'm faced with some naming difficulty. There's no reason to re-brand the kernel itself, it's already recognizable as is, so the letter scheme will need looking at. The first letter will be representative of the device, the second what android version it's made for. G for gingerbread aosp, I for ICS aosp, S is for sense, SI for sense ICS so it would be as follows:

For the Galaxy Nexus: NG, NI
For the Epic Touch 4G: TG, TI
For the Evo4G: EG, EI, ES
For the Evo4G LTE: LI, LSI

A new type or two might pop up as well. Type R which will stand for Mason builds for specific roms, so flashing them elsewhere would be a bad idea, and type D which you may have seen here in there that stands for a development kernel, so again not something you flash without explicitly knowing what its for or where. Hopefully this will be the last major change to how I tell you what kernel you're getting. We'll see how this works out. I'll be rolling that scheme out with 0.15 final. Hopefully that won't be too confusing.

~atyoung

Nightly builds

2012-05-28T11:05:00.001-07:00

Soon here I will be automating nightly builds, hows that for fun. Granted they wont always work very well but that way those of you who are looking to play with the latest, can without me having to maintain it.

~atyoung

Mason expansion and plans for the future.

2012-05-27T11:00:00.001-07:00

So I've been getting a bit of questions regarding my recent interest in expanding Masons scope to other devices. The reasons are simple, the supersonic (evo4g) is like it or not a eol (end of life) phone. Current Mason users are going to upgrade sooner rather than later, and are expressing their want to have Mason on the devices they are moving to. I want to support my users as best I can, so why not expand to the devices they are at least likely to upgrade to.

In short I will be supporting the galaxy nexus, the epic touch 4g, the supersonic, and the evo4glte at some point here in the future. I might expand my focus more as time progresses but those are definitely in the planned supported devices. Additionally I'm already working on the Sense port of Mason, agreeably more problematic than I would like, but it's progressing, and will put mason out on the HTC devices that I will support.

By no means will this interfere with the development on the supersonic, which will likely be my baseline for anything I am doing. Not because I'm and obsessive fan boy of the supersonic,but because I know my roots, and the device is very versatile, anyone who claims otherwise is full of it. The supersonic can still hang tough with the big boy dual core 1gig of ram phones, and the performance benchmarks that have come out with Mason running on a evo4g support this claim. So there it is, no need to sweat. Mason 15 proper might be bigger than everyone has originally thought.

I would also like to take a moment to point out that Team D.I.R.T is doing some very interesting stuff on the supersonic, and if you haven't yet given their roms a shot you should. I fully support what they are doing, and I hear they are baking Mason into anything they can. I will be providing them with custom builds of Mason for all of their roms that what such a thing. They call tincandroid.com their home, and you should so them some support, go sign up and help them hit the ground running. I foresee them being huge in the android community in the near future.

~atyoung

Mason G RC3 sbc and fso

2012-05-17T17:12:00.002-07:00

Here is a little fso love for the G series.

~atyoung

Donations

2012-05-17T11:54:00.003-07:00

I really appreciate the support, and want to tell you what they are going to. Instead of beer, I'm going to put them towards a build machine to help me push out stuff a little more efficiently, and so I can build my rom in a reasonable amount of time. So every dollar you toss my way is going to that.

Mason G 0.15 RC3

2012-05-08T09:02:00.003-07:00

Said I would put this out today, so here it is. There are quite a few changes from the previous RC including some changes to RCU that I thought was in previous one which I noted were decidedly not in there.

Mason I 0.15 RC3

2012-05-07T16:07:00.001-07:00

Moving right along to Mason I 0.15 RC3 after the failures of RC2. I believe those issues were directly linked to the inclusion of lulzactive, which is conspicuously absent on this one. Other optimizations have been made, and it's starting to lean out as one would expect when pushing towards a version release.

I think I'm at a feature freeze as far as 15 goes at this point. It's time for clean up, the compile is still quite dirty, and there are a couple rough edges to clean out.

Have fun.

~atyoung

Some progress.

2012-05-04T16:58:00.001-07:00

New RC. This one is I series only cause that's what I primarily develop on and then backport.

Mason I 0.15rc2 link

Some new toys in there. lulzactive is back for a minute. It's still a little tricky to get it configured correctly, so yeah your mileage may very. If your not into hacking at the command line throwing commands at its sys interface, don't bother. I've also found it's not very responsive to those changes until you switch to another gov and back. Enjoy the new govs, and have fun.

Road to Mason S 15

2012-04-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

I never really intended to start from scratch on this one. However after playing around with the few established kernels out there, I found them wanting. Miscellaneous implementations of the HAVS code, different ideas about performance patching to various sub systems. All together unsavory, so I went back to the HTC source and started patching up from there.

What to expect from this upcoming is a brand spanking new kernel derived from the HTC source. So with this it means, you might not find the what looks to be commonly pass around weird patches that I can't seem to actually find the source of. If I can't see where it came from, or determine why it's in there. I'm not going to put it in. This also means Mason S might be rougher than the other lines of mason due to it's infancy. I will probably be releasing a test build of this kernel later today.