Got root? You bet ya! My impressions on rooting my Android phone

"Got Root?" is a greeting in unix nerd circles and like most puns it has made it onto t-shirts, posters and mugs. Root is the name of the administrators account on a Unix system and therefore having Root means that you have administrators privileges. In the era of smart phones, iPhones, thingamabobs and do-hickeys Root has been made into a verb.

Rooting means getting root access on your Android OS smartphone. So far so good but rooting your phone allows you to do all kinds of neat stuff that you can't otherwise such as enable tethering (using your phone as a modem), move apps to the SD card to save space, install new versions of the OS, set the phone to the language you want and run all kinds of cool/geeky apps. For a more in depth info on the benefits check out this page over at Android Police. On a side note: rooting is somewhat different to jailbreaking on iOS because jailbreaking allows you to circumvent the limitations set by Apple such as only being able to install apps from the official distribution channel - the iTunes App Store. Android OS does not have the same restrictions.

Thhaar she blows! running the su command to test root access.

I rooted my HTC Hero back in june. I grew more and more impatient with HTC promising to release an official update to Android OS 2.1. I had the phone since November 2009 and it was increasingly becoming evident that Android OS 1.5 wasn't as polished as I wanted it to be: The Phone interface lagged so much that I missed calls, the LED indicators didn't work and the headphone jack was a plug and pray experience. Rumours about the update started circulating sometime in April then HTC said they would release it in June, then July, then August and so on. So I took the step over to the dark side.

Now rooting isn't for the faint of heart since it can potentially brick your phone and it will probably void your warranty. But as an early adopter took it upon myself to try. I read up a little on rooting on the internet and followed the instructions here.

Since I had basically no experience with using custom ROMs (modified versions of the OS) I chose VillainRom because it was used in the example I followed. Installation was easy and within half an hour I was running Android OS 2.1 and the lag was much improved and the LEDs and the headphone jack worked as advertised. However the first couple of releases of VillainRom that I tried had their fair share of problems. I began with version 10 but it was only when I installed 10.3 that I got a phone with the same level of stability and battery performance that I had before the upgrade. Yesterday I upgraded to version 12 and it works really really well and the few issues I had with 10.3 have all been resolved (such as the sketchy notification function).

So would I advice anyone else to Root? If you just want 2.1 on your Hero you can use the official update (it was finally released in September in the Netherlands) but depending on your needs I would still recommend it for fellow early adopters out there.

After all it's a nice feeling being able to stick it to the man!

Me vs. Windows XP: Setting the default printer

I installed Bullzip PDF printer since I was lacking the built in print-to-pdf functionality that Mac OS X has had since it's first release. After the installation I discovered that the PDF printer now was my deafult printer and there was no way of changing that in the print dialogue (where I expected to find it).

Turns out that you need to open Printers & Faxes in the Start Menu and in that dialogue right click on the printer of your choosing and set it to default in the contextual menu. Nifty!

My next project will be to figure out how to set up profiles for economy printing en full colour printing like you can in Mac OS X, but that's for another day.

Me vs. Windows XP: Stop Outlook 2007 from auto-archiving and more

At work we use Microsoft Outlook. It's a pretty competent mail program although lightyears behind Apple Mail.

Disabling auto-archive in Outlook 2007

After a couple of weeks I noticed that Outlook did strange things to my old emails. They suddenly got a weird symbol and attachments could no longer be viewed. After some googling I found out that this was actually a feature called "auto-archive". I'm sure that it makes sense from a system administrator's perspective but for me as an end-user I suddenly had to open Internet Explorer and connect to the server to view old emails. Needless to say, it was really really really annoying. After some googling I found the answer.

So, if you like me find it a nuisance just:

Go to Tools -> Options -> Other (great name) -> Click the auto-archive button

there you uncheck the first check box and you shall be bothered no more.

Making your emails available offline

Ever since the upgrade to Outlook 2007 I haven't been able to access my emails offline. This too requires mastery of the treacherous Microsoft Outlook menu system.

To make Outlook 2007 download the mails from the server so that you can read them offline repeat the following step for each folder (haven't found a quicker way):

Go to Tools -> Send/Receive Setttings -> Click "Make available offline".

Then click Send/Receive and it will download your emails. Fantastic!

Me vs. Windows XP: Getting rid of the annoying beep

Moving from Mac to Windows can sometimes be bewildering. Since I got my Dell laptop I have been annoyed on a daily basis by the PC speaker "beep" that the computer emits when the volume is changed. The beep is set to increadibly loud no matter the volume. This breaks quite a number of usability principles but also causes me to jump out of my chair when I'm in the middle of editing using headphones as not to disturb my colleagues, and without thinking decide to change the volume.

On Mac OS X the beep that is emitted correlates to the new volume that you set: turning down the volume emits a lower beep and turning up a higher. But not on Windows there the beep is always set to "blast your eardrums out" level (at least on the Dell that I have).

So today after doing the same mistake of changing the volume with headphones on I went searching for a solution and after reading some forum posts by self thought ninjas suggesting that I resort to registry hacking I finally found it.

Basically you need to go into the Device Manger in the Control Panel. Change the View to show all devices, click on the Non-plug and play- drivers and right click on the Beep (yes, that is the name of the device). There in the dialogue you can turn it off by disabling the device.

Surely, a master Information Architecht was used because I cannot even begin to comprehend how someone could have dreamt up such a usable solution.

Redmond I salute thee!

Me vs. Windows XP: Sorting the Programmes menu

Still getting used to having to use Windows XP as my main productivity tool. It is very obvious that it is a 9 year old operating system.

When installing programs they just get appended at the end of the programmes menu. This means that after a while it gets really hard to find anything unless you have fantastic spatial memory. To use the famous bucket metaphor: my bucket finally flowed over and I decided to find a solution.

After some googling it turns out you can sort the program menu alphabetically by right-clicking on an object in the menu when expanded and select "Sort by name". There is a registry hack to enable this permanently but for now I do it every time I do something new and it works reasonably well.

Laziness is the mother of all inventions (VNC Windows to Mac OS X)

Today has been an eventful day in front of the computer. I need to finish up a lot of stuff before going UX-LX since I'll be gone for a week (if the Icelanders permit).

However at home I use my girlfriends iMac as a stereo. Back when I had a MacBook as a work laptop I would just have a Apple Remote Desktop session running and change the music remotely. Now I have a standard issue Dell Latitude and Apple Remote Desktop is a thing of the past.

I started out using TightVNC but it was not a pleasant experience since the connection kept dropping and there was no support for scaling which is a necessity when you are trying to view the contents of a 24-inch monitor on a 15-incher. So I moved to RealVNC and now I had scaling but the connection kept dropping just the same. After some googling I found out that a lot of people have problems with the built in VNC server that comes with Apple Remote Desktop.

So my new solution is to use Putty to restart the damn thing whenever it goes down with:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -agent -restart -console

It's a workaround but at least it works and I don't have to move.

Me vs. Windows XP: Clearing out the temp files

It's very nice to be working at a big mature organisation however there are also drawbacks. One such drawback is the rigorous security of which one part is having to work against a server all the time and the other is having to use Windows XP. When I work from home all my files need to be synced to the server. Since this includes all files it also includes all the temp files (temp files are temporary backup files that applications write and then usually forget to clean up afterwards).

To minimize the wait I have written a small script that removes all the temp files in the Windows\Temp directory as well as my own Temp catalogue.

So if you are in a similar position or just don't like having your computer cluttered with thousands of small abandoned files, fire up Notepad and enter:

del /f /s /q C:\windows\temp\

del /f /s /q "C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Temp\"

Save the file with the ending .bat (you need to select all files in the Save As dialogue) and drop it into your Start up items directory. You'll find it by accessing the start menu and right click explore on it.

Now every time you log in all those files will be a thing of the past. But don't try this if you don't know what you are doing.

Tomcat Manager for Mac OS X 0.9 released

Download and enjoy, it is bundled and works like a standard Mac OS X app. The UI is not so nice right now but we have major changes planned. The core functionality is working fine however. We have also considered porting it to various Linux flavours just for fun (would require little change).

Download

Tomcat Manager for Mac OS X released to the public

Tomat Manager for Mac OS X is a minimalistic application for starting and stopping Tomcat on (you guessed it) Mac OS X I started developing it internally at Knowledge Values for business people who needed to use Tomcat for demoing purposes. Instead of typing obscure commands in the terminal the application would allow them to start and stop the server with the click of a button. Knowledge Values was nice enough to release the source on Source Forge. My colleague Leonard van Driel has joined me and we intend to continue developing the application but hopefully we will get some help from the nice people in the open source community.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/tomcatmanager/

I'll post a runnable version of the application shortly which doesn't require subversion and Eclipse. The shebang is released under GPL 3.0.