September 29, 2009

How to gain root in a HTC Hero (aka G2 Touch) phone

DISCLAIMER: I am not recommending you to root your phone and if you are not sure what for or what are the consequences of doing it (including your warranty), then don’t do it. This post is only an explanation on how to do it. Also I am not responsible for any damage to your phone, including bricking it.

First, download Android SDK 1.5 from here, unpack it and go to the tools/ directory.

My first problem:

./adb shell
error: device not found

./adb devices                        
List of devices attached

Reading around I found out how to fix it, and then realized it was documented here

Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules with the following content:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",ATTR{idProduct}=="0c02",SYMLINK+="android_adb"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",ATTR{idProduct}=="0c01",SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"

And restart udev by doing killall -HUP udevd, then unplug and plug the phone.

Now, get Recovery-RA-HERO-v1.2.2.img and fastboot (unpack and chmod +x this one), and put them somewhere, or as this example assumes, in the same tools/ directory.

Now boot the recovery image:

./adb shell reboot bootloader
./fastboot boot Recovery-RA-HERO-v1.2.2.img

You can use the NDroid Backup option to backup your phone to the SDCard.

Get Superuser.zip (requires registration in the xda-developers phorum) and unpack it. You will get two files from there: “Superuser.apk” and “su”.

./adb shell mount /system
./adb push su /system/bin/
./adb shell chmod 4755 /system/bin/su
./adb push Superuser.apk /system/app/
./adb shell reboot

Now confirm that it worked:

./adb shell
su

(Click Always allow on the phone)

And that is!.

If you need to restore your NDroid backup, I haven’t tried, but you can do it from the recovery image or manually pointing it to the images:

fastboot flash boot /boot.img
fastboot flash system /system.img
fastboot flash userdata /data.img
fastboot reboot
February 1, 2009

Geo-Enabled todo list

While being in Barcelona like a year ago, I was playing with Android’s SDK and trying to implement a todo-list that could make a phone vibrate when you walk nearby the grocery store, and you had a todo item saying “remind me about buying tomatoes if I walk nearby”.

When I googled for it, I found Naggie (link dead), but it was dead, which was quite strange. After googling more, I think I found out why the site may have been dead.

Then I had the opportunity to play with an Android phone for first time (Martin’s phone), and I asked him whether such application existed. Well Martin, it does, but I could not find the download link.

However, today I found a free app for BlackBerry called got-2. I installed it. However, it claims it has some problems with OS 4.5, which is the one I use. Lets see how it works.

January 28, 2008

Nokia To Acquire Trolltech

From OSNews:

Trolltech, the originator of Qt, which forms the basis of the Linux KDE desktop environment, is being acquired by Nokia, the world’s number-one mobile phone vendor. Nokia expects its acquisition of Trolltech to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and to enhance its Internet services business. The original press release is also available. Update: “We will continue to actively develop Qt and Qtopia. We also want to underline that we will continue to support the open source community by continuing to release these technologies under the GPL.”

Some gnomies are already starting to panic. What will happen to Maemo? Has Symbian reason to panic too? ;-)

Was this move motivated by Android ?

January 5, 2008

Welcome 2008

Some random thoughts about the world, and the past and following years.

Digital society

2007 was quite active on the digital rights topic.

The inability of the industry to catch up with the current society has created a war on digital rights. Software patents on one side. Digital music transformed music labels into mafias and consumers into rival groups. Politicians trying to implement surveillance systems everywhere.

I have the feeling that we will see some progress on the music topic. Record labels will give up, but it will be too late, and if a bunch of major artists start to use some fair system. Something like amiestreet.com or direct selling comes to my mind.

I don’t think something will happen on patents.

It was funny, some weeks ago I got an idea about using gps to associate location to todo items. This plays well with the getting things done methodology where you organize by contexts and not categories. I started prototyping some stuff on android.

Sadly, I found out this simple idea was patented by Fujitsu. Not only that. But I found a program which does that, and the website dissapeared. Another news article about someone researching on the topic and developing a product on that also dissapeared from the map. However, I haven’t yet seen a product from Fujitsu on the topic (the patent is 7 years old). Software patents destroy innovation. Thanks to that stupid patent, you won’t see any product (unless free software) using that.

The web 2.0

Everybody is sick of the Web 2.0 buzz. The Web 2.0 exists.

It is normal that consultants/analysts start to invent new terms because their business depends on the next “big thing” that will “cut costs” and “save millions” to your company. They repeat the same year after year just replacing the term itself.

However the amount of services on the web is growing really fast, and they are all accessible by really standard protocols. Software is becoming just a support medium and the value is being transfered to services: information, storage, security, etc.

Now, there are new layers over that. Phones with gps will bring a new dimension of services based on our location. This is very important. The information we store on the web becomes more relevant if we map it over real-world dimensions: location, time, mood, energy, context. Open source fits here, you can see companies like Google taking advantage of it.

Question: How services will affect open source and/or free software itself? Google contributes quite a lot to open source software. But once you don’t distribute the software, you are not forced to publish modifications. Will other companies follow this path?

Amazon Web Services is another topic. The way they sell on demand “computing power”, “human processing”, “databases” and “storage” is simply amazing.

I would like to see more about “distributed” environments. I am disappointed on how I have to manage my information having 3 computers and one cell phone. There has to be something better than either being off-line and centralized or being online and ubiquitous (where network is available). I want to be ubiquitous, distributed, fail tolerant, and in a simple, pragmatic way. (I don’t want to setup a cluster on my devices).

What about the bubble?. Yes, there is a bubble. There are a bunch of companies that know what they are doing. And thousands of venture capital groups funding whoolalalhzuzu.com ajax websites which implement a calculator or whatever. Those dying is not a bubble, it is natural selection. Most people already know which ones will die after using them for 2 minutes.

I am really excited about the developments in this area and looking forward what is coming here. The direction is clear.

Software

  • openSUSE / YaST

    I will leave this for a separate post.

  • KDE 4.0

    4.0 is being released in a few days and you will see the most brave release of free software ever. A big bunch of new technologies and visions collected, cooked and packed inside a great community. And better, there is still no big place for politics in KDE, but technical arguments and user experience. Not that all desktops could say the same.

Software Development

Wow, what happened on 2007?

  • Software configuration / Version Control

    The growing complexity of open source codebases, plus the need to maintain them for enterprise purposes, brought the topic of version control really hard on the blog sphere. Every blog and developer talked about git. Lot of talk about mercurial and bzr too. 3 version control systems being popular at the same time? The point is that being “distributed” is “the thing”. I personally switched to git, and it solved the “being distributed” part of working with 3 computers in different places. I want to see something like code.google.com with git support.

  • Android

    Brilliant. I am waiting for the first phone. Some APIs are ugly. But still prettier than uggly guys that reinvent the wheel poorly, and worse, only on Windows.

Nothing that spectacular on other old topics:

  • Java

    While Eclipse is a jewel. Sun is getting better but too slow to move. So slow that it is getting boring to watch.

  • Ruby

    We saw the release of ruby 1.9 on December, a very important milestone. At the same time, JRuby is now fast and very compatible, and other implementations are also very active.

  • C++

    Even more boring than Java eh?

Politics

  • Chile

    The goverment of Michelle Bachelet whose goverment improvisation has made the country again miss the opportunity to develop quickly. Michelle has no strategy at all, so the hope for 2008 is that his sucking team don’t make more mistakes. The public transport system ( Transantiago ) has to start working somehow (both in operation and budget), because till now, it is a joke.

    The opposition hasn’t a good alternative. Nobody is willing to make the important change: universal free and good education, health and social care. Even Michelle, being a socialist, uses the private health and education system.

  • Europa

    Spain’s election coming. Seems that Zapatero will be reelected, which seems reasonable. I am a little lost with german politics and I feel like living in a fantasy world. Time to change that. Still, Europe’s economy is going good and living here is awesome. I love it.

  • USA

    Discussions on whether they should teach non-science on science class?. War. etc. Uhm… was I writing about a middle west country? I am sad, really sad to see a beautiful country being destroyed, destroying, hating and being hated by almost the entire world, and even worse, considered the biggest threat to the rest of the world.

    From latimes.com:

    36% of European poll respondents — who come from Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and Spain consider America as the No. 1 danger to world peace. Even 35% of American 16- to 24-year-olds identify their own country as the chief danger to peace. The poll was consistent with findings by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, which found that favorable ratings of the U.S. had declined in 26 of 33 countries over the last five years. Europeans next concerns are China, 19%; Iran 17%; Iraq 11%; North Korea 9%; Russia 5%.

    Elections aren’t this year. Lets see how it goes.

December 31, 2007

On Google’s Android mobile platform

I have spent quite some time studying and testing Android, the new mobile platform from Google.

It is hard to understand people complaining about Java fragmentation because Google’s technical decisions like not using a standard virtual machine.

Just at the same time, I was trying to create an application for Blackberry. Oh yes, Blackberry uses the standard J2ME plus some proprietary APIs. But they of course did not think about Eclipse and instead offer a crappy self-made Windows IDE that nobody likes. There are hacks to use the blackberry APIs (a .jar file) inside Eclipse or Netbeans, but things are not easy if Research in Motion (Blackberry makers) offers the files inside a Windows .exe setup. I did not even try to install the Sun stuff. It was not clear what I needed to download. Which VM? which Eclipse plugin? Which emulator? Where are the docs.

Forget about that. Enter Android.

After downloading the files and extracting them to a directory, I installed the Eclipse plugin adding an remote update site to the configuration. Then I configured the plugin to look for the Android SDK in the directory where I extracted it.

Working with Eclipse is a pleasure. I always become depressed when working with Eclipse because it reminds me how crappy is the life of a C++ programmer when it comes to decent tools. Real time compilation and completion would make me happy in the C++ world.

The documentation is good. Not at the level of Trolltech’s Qt docs but enough. There are some examples in the site, and the amount of Android related projects on code.google.com hosting is impressive. This makes easy learning by looking different examples.

I like the design of the framework, based on concepts such as Activity, Intent, Content (modeled after URIs), etc. The user interface API looks like a normal toolkit, but the XML way of creating layouts is not intuitive. One simple google search and I found Droiddraw, a tool to draw screens and generate XML files from them.

The android sqlite API sucks. I figured out how to wrap a database to expose a content provider url based API, by looking other examples, and at the end I was copy pasting code. Where is DRY ?. However the content provider API is really nice and a clever way to expose data across applications.

Other APIs are really good. Location services, Google apps views, and the way you can use XML files as resources (layouts, strings, etc) is also interesting. Android generates a Java class called R, which you use to access the resources, this allows you to autocomplete the resources in Eclipse.

The emulator rocks, I press “run” in Eclipse and it works, and debugging support is also complete. The emulator is based on qemu. It support different skins and can simulate network speeds and latencies.

In conclusion, Android provides a easy to use framework that work out of the box on your Linux box. It integrates with Eclipse, and the amount of existing code for the platform is enough to start learning.

I will post again as soon as I discover more ;-)