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User-level proxy support

Proxy support under Android is somewhat of a mixed bag. What you will find is that is it possible to setup a proxy server for your 3G connection, but that it is not possible to setup a proxy connection for your WiFi or VPN connection. A system-wide proxy cannot be setup as well. Mind you, this is based on what is possible under the default Android settings. The Samsung Galaxy S, for example, does support the use of a system-wide proxy, but this is a Samsung-addition.

A 3G proxy can be set via the APN settings (Settings →Wireless Controls→Mobile Networks→Access Point Names, then select the active APN):

Edit APN settings

This does give you a proxy for the 3G connection you are currently using, but most probably you want to use a proxy for your WiFi. As  of this moment (September 2010), this is not possible without rooting your handset. I won’t go into the details of that operation, as there are many sites dealing with that issue. Instead, I’d like to point you to Xda Developers, whose many forums are bound to contain rooting instructions for your particular Android handset.

If you do have a rooted phone, you can use a tool called.
It is possible to have a UI popup that handles the configuration of a proxy for wifi but the settings that it stores are harshly discarded by Android when it configures a network connection.

One thing is for certain: Google needs to step up to the plate to make Android proxy friendly if it wants to break into the enterprise market.

Related posts:

1. Git through proxy….

As both networks were configured to use the same SSID, theoretically they should both be visible to the laptop and the strongest signal should have been chosen. Indeed, an ‘iwconfig wlan0 scan’ command showed that both access points were visible. As I had configured them with the same WPA2 passkey, I could not figure out why it refused to connect to the nearest access point.

After a few days, it suddenly hit me: I had one access point configured to allow for WPA/WPA2 connections and the other access point for WPA2 only. This is enough of a difference to force Ubuntu into thinking that these are different access points. What is strange though, is that they do not should up in the wireless network browser as two different networks. I know that my Android phone has no problem connecting to the nearest network, regardless of WPA settings.

Anyway, fixed now…

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Running Android on your HTC Diamond means installing 3 different things to the internal storage of the Diamond (or an SD-card for the Topaz  and Rhodium):

1. A Linux kernel (found here)
2. A rootfs for booting the kernel and Android (found here)
3. An Android distribution (found here).
4. Oh, and a configuration file for configuring the Android build (you are probably best off getting the first version out of the full build linked below).

If you’re not familiar with booting Linux or Android, you may want to download everything in one package, which can be found in this thread on XDA. After downloading, unzip everything in the root of the Internal Storage (for HTC Diamond) or in the root of your SD-card for all the other models. Copy the startup config for your device

A few attention points:

• Disable the PIN-code on your SIM-card! The current ported version does not handle SIM PIN-requests properly (it gives a pop-up but does not unlock the SIM properly) No longer applicable, with the current rootfs PIN requests are handled properly.
• On the HTC Diamond, change the file in <tbd> (while running Windows Mobile) and look for the line with cc-cache=100 in it. Change this to cc-cache=20. This prevents Android from pre-loading a lot of applications upon startup, slowing down your phone
• The clock will start drifting a bit, about half an hour a day. This is annoying, but the developers are aware of this.

For me, this is the end of the line, as I have sold my HTC and instead opted to go the Android route entirely, buying myself a SonyEricsson Xperia X10

Related posts:

1. How-to install Android on your HTC Touch Diamond

Edit: and that is running again as well.

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1. Blog restart

While Apple may have opened the proverbial Walled Garden, it is Google, with its aggressive Android offering, that aims to obliterate it. Make no mistake about it; Apple was the pioneer with the amazing revolutionary product. Also, with no iPhone, there is no Android. This is not to say that Android copied iPhone, but rather the impetus to adopt and trust Google’s Android offering was driven by a market dynamic that resulted directly from the iPhone’s success.

via Android or iPhone? Wrong Question « abovethecrowd.com.

Indeed, the iPhone represents only a very small portion of the global phone market. But it is the other portion of that same phone market that is the target for Google/Android. Google does not necessarily want to compete with the iPhone head-to-head (although they can!), but is more looking towards converting people that use a heavy feature-phone these days but may make the switch to a smartphone if a compelling enough offer comes along.

Related posts:

1. Android Proxy support

Now, this puts me into a bit of a bind. This is an olderly PC that I scrapped together from a Dell Dimension 8400 and an additional HD and SATA card. As it doubles as the media-server for my XBox, it has to have some additional storage, hence the extra harddisk. The extra harddisk was a 300Gb one, the system harddisk it came with (which started failing) was a 160Gb one. I’ve routinely run LVM2 on my system exactly for this case, being able to add additional diskspace easily without fiddling with mounting additional drives, running out of space on one partition while swimming in space on another one. This time, that may have gotten the better of me though. I don’t run LVM in a RAID setup, so if one drive fails, I’m up sh*t creek. My only luck may have been that I only very recently added that disk, and I hadn’t really started using it.

So, now I need to recover this data somehow. My plan of attack is as follows:

• Put in another drive
• Move the entire contents of the failing drive to the new drive
• Try to reconstruct the LVM data from there.
• Profit!

Step 1: find a new drive

We need a donor drive to transfer the data too. Preferably, use a drive that is bigger than the original drive. Nothing would be worse when you try to rescue your precious data and finding out that you are a few sectors short on the new drive. Even if both drives are advertised as being 160Gb drive, that doesn’t mean they will have the exact same sector count! When we have the drive, hook it up to the system

In my case, I bought a 250Gb Samsung drive, only to find out after I built it into my machine that it was a) refurbished (it had a complete Vista install on it) and b) dying! I immediately got a warning from Ubuntu that the SMART data indicated that the drive was failing… Not good. I removed the drive and replaced it with a slightly larger 160Gb drive I had lying around. I will replace that drive when I get a replacement for the refurbed drive, but by then, I can hopefully use the ‘pvmove’ commands.

When connecting the drives, make sure that you hook up the donor drive to the cable that was originally connected to the failing drive and connect the failing drive with an extra cable. This way, the device enumeration under Linux would be identical and the partitions we salvage will appear on the device files that LVM expects.

Step 2: re-create the partitions you had on the drive

This step, in retrospect, may not have been necessary. I booted the mediaserver into a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 CD-image and re-created the partitions using Gparted, ensuring that each partition was slightly larger than the corresponding partition on the failing disk. Note: gparted will complain that it is not capable of working with LVM2, but you can ignore that.

Step 3: get a copy of dd_rescue

For the copying of the data to succeed, we need a copy of dd_rescue. Dd_rescue is a clone of dd, that copies data from a file or device and does not abort when it encounters a read error. Instead, it will fall back to a ‘sector-at-the-time’ reading mode, log the error and continue. Additionally, it has the option of reverse-copying, starting at the end of a device and working its way backwards, so that you can approach a problem area from both sides, maximizing the amount of a file or device that can be read.

Ubuntu 9.10 does not come with this by default, but the sources are tiny and luckily our live-CD includes a working gcc compiler. Compiling it is a breeze, just consisting of a ‘make’ call. We run it is follows:

$ sudo ./dd_rescue /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdb1

Of course, you will need to change /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdb1 into their appropriate device files. Also, be very careful about the order  of these arguments. The first is the input file, the second argument is the output file. Mess these up and you are overwriting the data you want to recover with whatever was on the donor drive!

I had two partitions, so I executed this command twice. In retrospect I could have just specified the device files for the entire harddisk (i.e. /dev/sdc and /dev/sdb) and dd_rescue would have duplicated everything (including the partition table).

I got around 40 read-errors on the first partition, and about 520 on the second partition. Now we have the drives duplicated, but don’t throw the faulty drive away just yet! If we manage to cock up the LVM restore, we can re-attempt the saving.

Step 4: start salvaging using LVM

Now we have a copy of our physical volumes. We will try to activate the volumegroups they belong to by executing vgscan:

$ sudo vgscan -v
Wiping cache of LVM-capable devices
Wiping internal VG cache
Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
Finding all volume groups
Finding volume group "htpc-server"
Found volume group "htpc-server" using metadata type lvm2

After this is done and our volumegroups have been found, we execute a vgchange:

$ sudo vgchange -a y
2 logical volume(s) in volume group “htpc-server” now active

vgdisplay will give us the names of all volumes and volumegroups:

$ sudo vgdisplay
— Volume group —
VG Name               htpc-server
System ID
Format                lvm2
Metadata Areas        3
Metadata Sequence No  5
VG Access             read/write
VG Status             resizable
MAX LV                0
Cur LV                2
Open LV               0
Max PV                0
Cur PV                3
Act PV                3
VG Size               428.24 GB
PE Size               4.00 MB
Total PE              109629
Alloc PE / Size       109629 / 428.24 GB
Free  PE / Size       0 / 0
VG UUID               2arhGV-xkVa-MUXt-38PD-XOmE-TaYN-tpPJBT

Finally, we can execute a full fsck on the volumegroups involved and if no unfixable errors are found, we can mount the filesystems and start assessing the real data-loss.

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Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon&apos;s history. On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.

via Amazon.com — News Release.

Related posts:

1. Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book – Forbes.com

I bought a CD, not a licensing agreement – “Where words fail, music speaks”.

Nuff said…

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• Android on my HTC Touch Diamond has become much more useable
• I bought an E-reader ( a Sony PRS-300)

Both items will be covered in more detail in the future here. Very soon I will have some more time to give out some more details on both matters.

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