Norio's Blog

Interviewed by The Mobile Revolution about Devoxx

litrik — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:52:21 +0000

I was interviewed by the guys at The Mobile Revolution about the recent Devoxx conference where a lot sessions were about Android development and the brand new Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) release.

You can read the full interview here.

Topic:

Problem upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

litrik — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:59:04 +0000

Earlier today I upgraded my main laptop to Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). The upgrade did not go very smooth.

Almost immediately during the upgrade, even before the download of all new packages, the upgrade failed with the following message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/oneiric", line 7, in 
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/DistUpgradeMain.py", line 199, in main
    if app.run():
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1670, in run
    return self.fullUpgrade()
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1627, in fullUpgrade
    if not self.askDistUpgrade():
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/DistUpgradeController.py", line 895, in askDistUpgrade
    if not self._checkFreeSpace():
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/DistUpgradeController.py", line 861, in _checkFreeSpace
    with_snapshots = self._is_apt_btrfs_snapshot_supported()
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/DistUpgradeController.py", line 1005, in _is_apt_btrfs_snapshot_supported
    apt_btrfs = apt_btrfs_snapshot.AptBtrfsSnapshot()
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/apt_btrfs_snapshot.py", line 85, in __init__
    self.fstab = Fstab(fstab)
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/apt_btrfs_snapshot.py", line 53, in __init__
    entry = FstabEntry.from_line(line)
  File "/tmp/update-manager-Np9Td4/apt_btrfs_snapshot.py", line 31, in from_line
    return FstabEntry(*line.split())
TypeError: __init__() takes at most 7 arguments (9 given)

I'm not sure what the upgrade process is trying to do with my /etc/fstab file but it clearly did not like the contents.

Fortunately the upgrade did start without any problem, after disabling the fstab entries of some network drives.

Topic:

Java Print Services requires cups-bsd

litrik — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 12:23:02 +0000

Recently I've lost way too much time trying to figure out why Java Print services was not working on one of my Ubuntu machines.

When I tried to print from a Java application the spool never showed up in CUPS. There was no exception in Java and there was no trace in the CUPS logs.

After a lot of trial and error I was able to fix the situation by installing the cups-bsd package:
sudo aptitude install cups-bsd

Worth remembering...

Topic:

Alternatives to the Android Market. Is it worth it?

litrik — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:31:44 +0000

Initially I released my free Android app Movie Quiz only in Google's official Android Market. After a couple of weeks I decided to upload the app to alternative sites/stores/marketplaces as well.

Here's an overview of the number of downloads in the different Android app stores:

Location	Downloads	%
Android Market	3993	79.7
SlideMe	347	6.9
GetJar	256	5.1
AndAppStore	237	4.7
Handster	103	2.1
AppsLib	75	1.5
Total	5011

Some important remarks:

Movie quiz was published in the Android Market on September 24th (about 3 months ago) while I only started uploading the app in the other stores late October (about 2 months ago).
Not all app stores support the same metadata. There are differences in number of screen shots, the size of screenshots, the length of the description field, the length of the changelog field and so on.
Uploading a new version of the app to all the alternative stores is a pain. It's a tedious process of going through plenty of HTML form to upload new APK files, update descriptions and changelogs.
Personally I have never used any of the clients of the alternative app stores so I can't comment on their usability.

Is it worth it?

Yes. Without a lot of effort - I didn't spend too much time making screenshots and description texts for each app store - I got an 25% increase in downloads from the alternative app stores.

Topic:

android

Android development peculiarities

litrik — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 11:51:57 +0000

During the development of Movie Quiz I bumped into a couple of peculiarities of the Android platform.

AssetManager.readAsset() throws an IOException when you try to read from a file larger than 1 MB. This is mentioned here. Compressing the file might help.
AssetManager.open() throws a FileNotFoundException when you try to open a file with a .gz extension. This is discussed here. Renaming the file does work ;)

And the Google Analytics SDK for Android adds its own quirks:

GoogleAnalyticsTracker.trackEvent() does nothing if one of its parameters contains a space. This is mentioned here.

Topic:

Movie Quiz released

litrik — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:57:54 +0000

Just a quick note to let everybody know that my free Movie Quiz app for Android is now available in the Android market. Check it out.

During the development of the app I did encounter a couple of serious WTF-moments. Food for more blog posts ;)

Topic:

Interviewed by Tech45 podcast

litrik — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:55:26 +0000

After my presentation at BarCamp Anwerp I was interviewed by the team of Tech45 podcast.

We talked about my upcoming Android app Movie Quiz and Android development in general. My interview starts at 13:25 in their BarCamp special podcast.

Topic:

Movie Quiz

litrik — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 18:05:05 +0000

During Barcamp Antwerp I talked about a new Android app "Movie Quiz" I am working on. The app is currently in beta and will be released into the Android Market in a couple of weeks.

Movie Quiz

View more presentations from Litrik De Roy.

Topic:

GWT and Ext GWT gotchas

litrik — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:44:28 +0000

GWT and Ext GWT (GXT) are interesting platforms to develop complex web applications using Java. It supports fancy UIs and all client-side code gets compiled into JavaScript.

There are a couple of non-obvious gotchas though that will make your application crash and burn without a clear error message.

Make sure you add your GWT/GXT LayoutContainer to a <div>. If you add it to a <p> it will result in an "Unknown runtime error" in Internet Explorer.
Make sure that the id of the <div> you are adding your LayoutContainer to is not the same as the name of your GWT module or you'll run into GWT issue 4003.

Topic:

Dynamic working sets

litrik — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:28:41 +0000

If you have a lot of projects in your Eclipse workspace you should check out the Dynamic Working Sets plug-in.

It allows you to define working sets based on a regular expression. If a project name matches the regex it will be included in the working set.

It sure beats adding new projects to existing working sets all the time. Really handy to keep your workspace organized.