Inventing schemes is not really cool

Android Developers Blog: Integrating Application with Intents — a nice writeup about really, seriously underappreciated Android feature, Intents. Somehow it's reminiscient of the revolutionary Magic Ink proposal, albeit on a push, not pull basis.

Having said that, I can't shake the feeling that making up URI schemes is not cool. Especially when they're made up to go with an Intent action which is actually redundant with the scheme. URI should point to a location, not embody action; actions should go in the action field (hey, action–action, ya see? almost like it was designed for that!).

OpenSuSE 11.2, ath5k and channel 13

Kernel 2.6.28 adds brand new WiFi regulatory domain handling; so if you upgrade from OpenSuSE 11.1 to 11.2 (and so from 2.6.27 to 2.6.31) you get this shiny new (FCC) sheriff's badge right there too. This is all fine and cool, only the userspace part is utterly broken in SuSE, so you're limited to world regulatory domain.

Ah, well, downloading Lineville's regulatory.bin fixes it. (Only it's a bit hard if you have NO FREAKING NETWORK because you use channel 13 on your AP and your OS decides that it's no channel 13 for you.) Or does it? Wait, it only gets better.

Now, apparently, your network card feels a citizen of the world. It doesn't matter you're an EU citizen in the EU and that the computer has been bought in the EU. EEPROM says world regdom, the kernel must obey. So you end up patching the driver to report correct regdom to kernel (because it obviously won't just let you override it, you malicious, evil bastard, you). I sure hope you have that kernel source around! And development tools. And stuff. Although I'd advise against those -s in the patch, they seem to break it further, dunno why.

Apparently you can use ath_info to patch up your EEPROM to report correct regdom, so you don't have to patch up ath.ko every time a kernel upgrade comes down the line. Fortunately the 11.1 repo's version still works. (It's regdom 0x37 for EU.) Just that... the card refuses to write it. So you're stuck with patching. Or just shut up and don't use channel 13. Which might explain exactly why it's usually less crowded. (Which, incidentally, is exactly why you'd want to use it.)

Oh, wait, you can enable EEPROM writing on AR5110. You just need to pull the GPIO EEPROM write enable pin. Of course, there's no datasheet anywhere in sight. You're lucky your humble editor took the risk and brute-forced all 10 pins (ok, not all, but he was ready to) and found the magic combination. It's # ath_info -g 1:0 -w <base-address> regdomain 0x37. lspci -v will tell you the address.

Broken SPAA on Radeons with analog panels

If you have a Radeon with analog LCD panel and after upgrading something (possibly the radeon driver) SPAA suddenly no longer works for you in Qt4, try the following:

$ echo Xft.rgba: rgb >> ~/.Xresources
$ xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

I'm too pissed off by this and debugging it for two days to offer any explanation (just to note, radeon's Option "SubPixelOrder" doesn't work; if you feel like digging, see qfontengine_ft.cpp, libXrender's and libXrandr's source). Also, YMMV. If it works you're on your own to make sure it gets loaded properly.

Hunky Punk — crawl dungeon on the bus

Interactive fiction interpreter for Android released! Look at the code or just grab the package at Market.

HTC Dream's notification LED color.

Android documentation says:

public int ledARGB

The color of the led. The hardware will do its best approximation.

Best approximation my ass. I wanted #fb2a0c, I got pink. To get the orange color, I needed #080800, for which orange is most certainly not what I'd call best approximation. It seems that Dreams' drivers just feed the raw RGB values to the hardware without bothering to do any processing on them.

To make it easier to find out which color to feed your device to get the real best approximation of color you want, I made this quick and dirty android LED tester. Just slide the sliders until you're satisfied, note the values and get on with it.

As a note, you might want to only serve the fake colors to devices you tested them on, in case other devices handle this properly and your app would turn out to blink the LED in real #080800, which is to say, almost black. I do this with if (Build.DEVICE.equals("dream")) color = 0xff080800; else color = 0xfffb2a0c; obviously if you test on more devices and they're all equally quirky, you need to add more checks.

Making Android application icons

Making application icons which would fit in style of the original icons on Android isn't at all easy. I've found it's easiest to model icon in 3D and render it. In the best interest of aesthetically-sensitive android users worldwide, I'm making available this android application icon template you can use to make your new beautiful icon.

It's got the camera, lights and whatnot setup just the proper way. It's still a little bit off the original icons—the shadow could be softer, for instance—but works good enough for me after some time struggling with blender's clunky interface. If you can fix it, great—the drop has guest upload enabled, so feel free to share your improved version.

Extracting 9-patches from apk files

As you may or may not know, 9.png files in compiled android packages have the nine patch metadata info rolled from the image OOB into the PNG file. Following quick and dirty ruby script extracts it back.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Rafał Rzepecki 
# public domain
#
# deserializes metadata of 9-patch png file
# optionally writes out png with 9-patch info embedded (needs imagemagick for that)
#
# quick and dirty hack, no error handling, almost no test, YMMV
#
# for format specs see android/platform/frameworks/base/libs/utils/ResourceTypes.cpp
# (in android platform source)

if ARGV.length == 0
    print "Usage: #{__FILE__} <serialized nine-patch png file> [optional output png with inline 9-patch info]\n"
    exit 1
end

filename = ARGV[0]
png = File.open(filename) { |f|f.read }
index = png.index 'npTc'
data = png[(index+4)..-1]
wasDeserialized, numXDivs, numYDivs, numColors = data[0...4].unpack('C4')
paddings = data[12...(12+16)].unpack('N4') #left right top bottom
data.slice!(0...32)
xDivs = data.unpack("N#{numXDivs}")
data.slice!(0...(4*numXDivs))
yDivs = data.unpack("N#{numYDivs}")
data.slice!(0...(4*numYDivs))
colors = data.unpack("N#{numColors}")

print "was deserialized: #{wasDeserialized}
paddings: #{paddings.join(', ')}
xdivs: #{xDivs.join(', ')}
ydivs: #{yDivs.join(', ')}
colors: #{colors.map{|c| "#%08x"%c}.join(', ')}
"

if ARGV.length == 1
    exit 0
end

# quick and dirty
`identify #{filename}` =~ /PNG (\d+)x(\d+)/
w, h = $1.to_i, $2.to_i
`convert #{filename} -bordercolor white -compose Copy -border 1x1 -stroke black \
-draw 'line #{xDivs[0] + 1},0 #{xDivs[1] + 1},0' \
-draw 'line 0,#{yDivs[0] + 1} 0,#{yDivs[1] + 1}' \
-draw 'line #{paddings[0] + 1},#{h + 1} #{w - paddings[1]},#{h+1}' \
-draw 'line #{w+1},#{paddings[2] + 1} #{w+1},#{h - paddings[3]}' \
#{ARGV[1]}`