Tag: android

Facebook problem

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I was alerted to a potential problem on here by blog addict regular reader Veronica Cobley who panicked when not being able to get her hit of 6000 miles… on her cellphone yesterday.

After some rudimentary investigations, it became evident that the issue wasn’t with the blog per se, but rather getting from Facebook  to the blog, especially on a mobile device. This message came up:

Either this application has not configured its Mobile Web URL or the URL could not be verified as owned by the application. Unable to redirect.

That’s not good.

But it’s not my fault, nor is it a new thing as this page from stackoverflow.com indicates:

I think this is something Facebook broke very recently (perhaps even today?). When a user clicks on any links to our app from inside the Facebook native iOS app, they get this error “Either this application has not configured its Mobile Web URL or the URL could not be verified as owned by the application. Unable to redirect.” We had never set a Mobile Web URL previously, and everything had been fine since we launched the app over a year ago. We sent all mobile clicks to the same URL’s as desktop browsers and handled the mobile rendering server-side. We have not changed our application domain inside the App Settings or anything like that.

In the App Settings, can set a Mobile Web URL to our homepage and the link works (and the error message goes away) but that’s not the desired behavior at all – it would mean that all links end up at the same Mobile Web URL regardless of what the link was!

Was this change made on purpose by Facebook and if so why? There’s been no mention of this whatsoever on the Developer Blog.

Update: I’ve since found this to be a widespread problem, not just for a few apps. Just by clicking around I’ve seen this error on posts to weather.com, youtube, msn.com and a dozen others. It happens on both clicks from the Timeline as well as the News Feed (although strangely sometimes the same post works on one, but not the other!), and from the m.facebook.com mobile web app as well as the native iOS app.

I commented on http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/302635863137683 but no word from Facebook yet. I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about this right now, this is a major bug.

That page is from March this year, and it seems to have been fixed since then, as this has only surfaced again recently.
Hopefully then, Facebook can fix it again.

The irony is that those people who link to the blog via Facebook won’t be able to read this because they won’t be able to link to the blog via Facebook. This makes me sad and I will be demanding a full refund of my Facebook fees from Mark Zuckerberg.

Phone news…

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Apparently, some company is in the process of releasing the latest model of a smartphone that they make. I think that this clever advert eludes to that announcement and release, but I can’t be absolutely sure because they don’t explicitly name it.

When all is said and done, it’s just a phone. They’re both just phones. I’m not going to shoot you down for choosing one over the other. Neither will I worship the ground you walk on just because you went the other way.

The advert is clever though and does sum up the blinkered attitudes that some individuals display when this sort of annual announcement comes around, as it does, annually.

I particularly recognise the ‘headphone jack is going to be on the bottom’ character.
Hello [redacted].

London 2012 – Want to take your camera?

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Some interesting news via PetaPixel on the rules surrounding non-professionals taking their cameras along to events at the upcoming London Olympics:

While larger venues might be more lenient, camera equipment over 30cm long (about 12in), including tripods and monopods, will not be allowed in most of the venues. In addition, attendees have also be warned that there is no storage available, so if you surrender your camera equipment to security, you’re not getting it back. If you have any doubts regarding your equipment, it’s better to leave it in your room.
The most interesting rule, however, has nothing to do with the camera equipment you use, but rather with your smartphone. Attendees, while they will be allowed to bring iPhones and Android phones into the venues, will not be allowed to use them as WiFi hotspots — in other words, if you wanted to connect your SLR (with an acceptably short lens) or WiFi enabled camera to social networks via your phone to do some on-the-fly uploading, you will not be allowed to do so.

Those size rules compare favourably with those at even minor events at the Cape Town Stadium. 30cm is assuredly big enough to satisfy anyone’s needs (said the actress to the Bishop). But the wifi thing is not only rather odd, but also surely completely unenforceable, especially since they also state that they are fine with live uploads to Facebook and the like on smartphones.

At the end of the day (or indeed at any other time), it really doesn’t bother me, since I’m not going along. But overall, I think the restrictions are a lot less draconian than many people would have expected.

RAM: What it is, how it’s used, and why you shouldn’t care

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I’ve been playing with my new Samsung Galaxy P7500 tablet and I noticed that I was already critically short (my words) on RAM, despite having nothing of huge significance running. It seemed that the device was using about 80% of its available RAM just to run.

I was naturally concerned.

At times of natural concern, we all have someone to whom we turn. Lois Lane had Superman, Commissioner Gordon had Batman, I have The Guru. My initial attempts to raise him by projecting a giant Android symbol onto the moon failed due to intermittent cloud cover over the Southern Suburbs, so I sent him an email instead, asking whether I should perhaps employ some sort of task manager to manage my tasks.

His reply was enlightening:

No – it’s a bad idea, which in almost all cases slows your phone.
Windows people use them, but there are extensive treatises, including by Google engineers, explaining how Linux/Android uses memory, and how task managers screw up the OS’s attempts to do so efficiently.

The “not much RAM to spare” is exactly the Windows-thinking I am talking about. Unused RAM is wasted RAM for Android.
If you want to read more:

http://www.androidcentral.com/ram-what-it-how-its-used-and-why-you-shouldnt-care

I was enlightened. Literally.

If you have an Android device, the article above makes very interesting reading and it is at a suitable level for you and I (ie. basic). The comments, less so on both counts, as geeks take each other on in who can use the most confusing terminology, much of which includes parentheses.

Suffice to say that The Guru has allayed my fears that I have purchased a dud device (which, I have to point out, never faltered in its service to me). I can now enjoy my tablet with a relaxed and untroubled mind.

Viva, The Guru. Viva!

Mind. Blown. (Episode 47)

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Here is a robot made of lego and powered by a cellphone.

CubeStormer II solves the Rubik’s Cube puzzle faster than the human world record.

This ARM Powered robot was designed, built and programmed by Mike Dobson and David Gilday, creators respectively of CubeStormer http://youtu.be/eaRcWB3jwMo and Android Speedcuber http://youtu.be/ylFb4pqAUd8.

Ja right? Ja. Right.

 

Look, I’m no expert, but it looks to me as if:

The mechanics are constructed entirely from LEGO, including four MINDSTORMS NXT kits, with the addition of a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone running a custom Android app as the robot’s brain. Both the MINDSTORMS NXT kits and the Samsung Galaxy SII use a variety of ARM –based processors.

The app uses the phone’s camera to capture images of each face of the Rubik’s Cube which it processes to determine the scrambled colours. The solution is found using an advanced two-phase algorithm, originally developed for Speedcuber, enhanced to be multi-threaded to make effective use of the smartphone’s dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.2GHz processor. The software finds an efficient solution to the puzzle which is optimised specifically for the capabilities of the four-grip mechanism. The app communicates via Bluetooth with software running on the ARM microprocessors in the LEGO NXT Intelligent Bricks which controls the motors driving the robot. During the physical solve, the app uses OpenGL ES on the phone’s ARM Mali-400 MP GPU to display a graphical version of the cube being solved in real time.

Human speedcubers’ solve times only include the physical manipulation of the cube and don’t include some time which is allowed to “inspect” the cube beforehand. Times recorded by CubeStormer II are for the total solve including: image capture, software solution calculation and physical solve.

Now I just need an Android-powered lego robot to pick my jaw up off the floor.

(thanks Jerm)