I need to order an oil filter for next weekend so I can also do an oil change next weekend the bikes not having had one since I brought it and paranoia/guilt is starting to cut in.

After over 10 years I’m back on two wheels. I’m the proud owner of a 1998 Honda CB450 DX. The last of the Super Dream series she may not be the most exciting ride in the world but she’s mine and has turned the daily commute into a grin factor 10 experience.Good it feel good to be back on two wheels again.

Some very interesting demo’s of what can be done are available around the web but I’m in need of some good tutorial recommendations. So what you got that offers more than http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_reference.asp

Please share your links in the comments

With the emulator running I managed to get through some of the chapters in Pro Android by Apress , I now have a better understanding of the android architecture and the development environment and I’m now starting to get my head around Resources, content providers and Intents and how they tie together.

One of the reasons  I wanted an Android based smart phone was that I was feeling the need to try something different from the daily php based work . It was time to learn something new , something a little exiting and on the forward edge.

Any time access to the web from mobile platform’s is without doubt the culmination of the dream. This is the killer app aspect of the Internet and people are waking up to this reality. Smart phones , net book’s and in the near future pad style devices will change the way we interact with the cloud. By its open nature I believe android will play a big part in this.

First task then was to get the environment set-up.

To do this we need two pieces of software installed eclipse the popular cross platform IDE and  the Android SDK. You will also need to ensure you have Java installed and set-up on your machine.

I tried to set this up using the version of eclipse available to FC10 via Yum but encountered real issues late in the process so I downloaded the classic version from the eclipse website http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/, which just needs extracting and then runs with out any futher installation .

Download the Android SDK from Google and install it

This is easy enough just unpack the download into a directory. Like eclipse the software runs in place

Set up your path

While not an essential step adding the location of the CLI android tools to your path will probably make life a little easier.

To do this edit your ~/.bashrc file and add a line to the bottom:

export PATH=${PATH}:/home/matt/android/android-sdk-linux_86/tools

Install the Android Development Tools (ADT) for Eclipse

Firstly launch Eclipse.

Follow the excellent instructions at http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html to install the development tools.

Install packages for eclipse

Next you need to install a bunch of packages . In Eclipse, click “Window->Android SDK and AVD Manager.” In the resulting window, on the left-hand side will be an “Available Packages” option. Click that, then click the checkbox beside the “repository.xml” package to select all available packages and then click “Install Selected“. Once this has completed your ready to begin developing your first android application

Create you first application

The traditional starting point for learning any new language is the humble ‘Hello world’ and is android is no different. Follow the tutorial at
http://developer.android.com/guide/tutorials/hello-world.html for a nice introduction to the android architecture.

Set up a connection to your hardware

The hello world tutorial introduces you to the emulator included with the SDK. But if you have an Android powered handset you’ll find it a lot less pain to set up a debug/test connection to your hardware.

To do this first, set your phone for USB debugging.
In your Android phone, go to Settings -> Applications -> Development menu, and make sure “USB debugging” is checked (activated).

Connect the phone to your computer via USB cable.
In a terminal type the lsusb command to list all USB devices.

Identify the VendorID and ProductID of your device

Bus 001 Device 065: ID 22b8:2d66 Motorola PCS

VendorID in my case is 22b8 the ProductID is 2d66

As root type

vi  /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
to create a new file and paste the following rule into the file

UBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="22b8", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2d66", MODE="0666"

Re-connect your phone.
Your phone should be detected if you unplug and reconnect it to the computer.

Restart the ADB server

adb kill-server
adb devices

You should see your device listed.
You can now access your phone from the Eclipse IDE and run/debug applications on it.

Useful links

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/install-android-on-ubuntu/

http://developer.android.com/guide/tutorials/hello-world.html

http://www.futuredesktop.org/developing_android_apps_on_ubuntu.html

OK its just a glorified hello world but we all got to start some where

Use JavaScript to move items between two select lists

Html multiple selects are probably the most unfriendly form elements in the html specification as they provide no visual clues on how to interact with them. By applying some JavaScript however you can use them to create an intuitive user experience for selecting  multiple values. The link below will take you to a nice tutorial with code samples and downloads that can easily be integrated with some CSS and back end scripting to produce a powerful select control.

http://www.mredkj.com/tutorials/tutorial_mixed2b.html

Fixing your footer with CSS

One of the most frustrating aspects of CSS based layout is getting the footer of a site to stick to the bottom of the page no matter the screen size or content on the page. This link will take you to a great article that describes how to achieve this in a cross-browser friendly way. It even works with IE6.

http://fortysevenmedia.com/blog/archives/making_your_footer_stay_put_with_css/

Fixed table headers

Tables are an essential tool for displaying data in web applications but can become difficult to understand and interpret if you have to scroll down to see lots of data. By fixing the header if a table in place and just scrolling the data your tabular data will be far more user friendly and easier to understand.  The example located at this link will show you how to achieve this by applying some CSS to your table header and body.

http://www.imaputz.com/cssStuff/bigFourVersion.html

Toggle visibility of a page element

Some times you  need to make the display of information optional . This link illustrates a number of methods to do this.

http://www.dustindiaz.com/seven-togglers/

Maximum and Minimum height and width support in Internet Explorer

IE6 doesn’t support them and IE 7 only supports them when you declare a strict DocType. This article describes how you can use some proprietary IE features to simulate these incredibly useful features.

http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/01/16/maximum-and-minimum-height-and-width-in-internet-explorer

Test your PHP regular expressions

Regular expressions are a powerful programming tool . I’ve used many test platforms when creating regular expressions but for designing expressions for use with PHP’s  regular expression functions this tool rocks.

http://www.spaweditor.com/scripts/regex/index.php

Do you have a useful tool or tip you’d like to share? Why not add a link into the commonts of this post.

motorola dext

The DEXT is  a nicely sized handset that comes complete with  a slide out physical qwerty keyboard with nicely bevelled buttons that allows for easy two thumb typing. The touch screen interface provides access to 5 home screens much like the multiple desktops that are a feature of many Linux  Desktops. This provides and easy to organise and uncluttered interface to access your most used applications.

It has all the features you would expect to find on a modern mobile phone, such as a camera for still and video and a decent media player as well as some nice extras like  GPS and WiFi support.

Billed as the ‘first social phone’  the phones address book and messaging systems are fully integrated with a number of social media and cloud based services making the whole social networking experience seamless and the thousands of applications available in the Android market place allow you to easily expand the phones social networking functionality. Obviously being an Android phone integration with Google’s services such as Gmail, Google Calender and Google maps is excellent. It will interesting to see how the new Buzz service Google launched this week and supported in android version 2 will  integrate in any future  upgrades to the installed operating system.

My only criticism is that the battery can take a pounding due to its always connected nature especially if using the WiFi or you have the GPS turned on. However this is helped by the fact that charging is via the new micro USB standard so at work or home  I can easily keep the battery topped up by leaving it connected to a USB port on the PC. An in car charger will be a wise buy if you intend to make use of the GPS with any SatNav application.

In the earlier post I highlighted what I felt were some of the limitations of using the mobile web on a handset rather than via a netbook as my colleague does. So does this new generation of handsets address these limitations? The answer would have to a very resounding yes.

Using the new phone with some additional applications downloaded from the market place I have been able to do the following.

• Surf the web using the built in browser either via the 3G network or on any available WiFi network A simple but effective zoom option even allows for the resizing of non fluid pages to avoid the horror of horizontal scrolling .
• Read and manage all my personal email through my Gmail account.
• Write this and other posts via the Wordpress Android application.
• Login to and control my home server via a SSH terminal application.
• Carry out some work for a friend on his remote web server again via the SSH terminal application.
• Upload pictures taken on the phones camera to my Flickr and Facebook accounts.
• Carry out micro blogging tasks such as posting to Twitter  or updating my Facebook status.

Offline I’m now using the phone to store all my passwords in an encrypted vault application and to read and edit documents in common formats such as .doc and .pdf.

With the hardware in place I am now looking forward to getting an android development enviroment setup on my home machine so I can investigate the writting and building of some homebrew applications to fulfill some perosnal wants. It’s definatly an interesting time to be a web developer.

Firstly Xbox live makes use of port 80 and every time he turned it on my web server, with this site on it, would drop out despite the port forwarding rules set-up in the router. This was solved by editing the httpd.conf so that the server only listened for requests on port 80 of the servers internal ip address.

The other problem encountered was that every so often the Xbox live service would just die and the only way to get it back was to restart the router. This in turn would lead to the isp assigning a new public IP address. At this point obviously my DNS record would become stale. Getting rather fed up with losing access to the server while at work I decided to write a php cli script that would run every 15 minutes via cron to check the public IP address of the connection and if needed update the remote dynamic DNS service I use.

The script works by storing the last set IP address in a file on the local file system. Using php’s curl functions it retrieves the current public IP address from a remote page and then compares these two values. If there is no change then the script exits however if the values differ then it again uses curl to call the update script at afraid.org to update the record before changing the stored address on the local file system.
Logging is done via a user defined syslog.

With the script in place and called by cron every 15 minutes down time for the server is now far more limited.

#!/usr/bin/php
/*##############################################################################
# A cli script called by cron for checking the public facing ip address of
#  my home server & updating the dns records when required
##############################################################################*/
// define the vars we will use
$stored_ip = "";
$public_ip = "";
$log_file = LOG_LOCAL0;
$ip_store_file = "/PATH_TO/ipfile";
$timestamp = date("Y-m-d:H:i:s");
//setup the syslog stuff
define_syslog_variables();
openlog("DNSupdateLog", LOG_PID, $log_file);
// read in the stored ip address setting for the server from file
$handle = fopen($ip_store_file, "r");
$stored_ip = fread($handle, filesize($ip_store_file));
fclose($handle);
// obtain the current public ip address using curl
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "checkip.dyndns.org");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$public_ip = preg_match('^\b([0-9]{1,3})\.([0-9]{1,3})\.([0-9]{1,3})\.([0-9]{1,3})\b^',$output,$result);
$public_ip = $result[0];
// compare the value of the stored ip address with the current public ip address
if(!$stored_ip || $stored_ip !== $public_ip) {
// if values differ call the update script at the dns site using curl
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?YOUR UNIQUE KEY");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
//write to the log that the dns has been updated
syslog(LOG_INFO,"Message: DNS Record updated to $public_ip at $timestamp");
//write the new public ip address to the ip_store_file
$handle = fopen($ip_store_file, "w");
$ret = fwrite($handle, $public_ip);
fclose($handle);
syslog(LOG_INFO,"Message: ipfile updated to $public_ip at $timestamp");
exit(0);
}else{
//else exit as we need to do nothing
exit(0);
}
?>

Further reading
10 awesome things to do with cURL
PHP regular expressions examples
Refine and debug PHP applications with syslog
Newbie: Intro to cron