Category Archives: Technology

Articles relating to technology and how it applies to us. I cover a broad range of technologies and often with a critical view.

Technology

Documentum and Canopy (vs EMC OnDemand)

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Disclaimer: I’m an Atos employee and Atos are part owners of the Canopy solution. I also work on a client site using Documentum in an EMC OnDemand environment.

EMC have made quite a sales pitch around their OnDemand environments. The idea is that you can hand over the running of the environment to EMC in either a cloud or on premise solution. Using standard building blocks they can deploy environments quicker and manage them easier. In the Documentum world this is a pretty fantastic thing as bringing together the server and database teams and finding a consultant who has had time to test install the latest release is quite a feat.

Before WindowLogic were acquired by Atos I hadn’t even heard much about Canopy. It’s mainly a European based solution with data centers in Germany, France, Spain, UK and most likely many more. It turns out that they also host Documentum environments out of their German data center.

Canopy Cloud
Canopy Cloud – another choice for Documentum

Continue reading Documentum and Canopy (vs EMC OnDemand) →

Technology

The Fix For My AR-VS7 Fujitsu Air Conditioner Remote

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It is stinking hot. I’ve been able to cope fairly easily up till now but not today. I even jumped in the pool about 10 minutes before bed. According to the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) it is 32 degrees Celsius outside at almost 11 pm at night. For a bigger number that is apparently almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Nice and toasty. Now I know 30 Celsius is my limit.

Some how I scored the master bedroom in our house with the his and hers bathroom with his and hers mirrors and his and hers shower. Plus I got an air conditioner. I’m the only room in the house to have one. Everyone else in the house would have been using it religiously for the last few weeks but I actually love the heat so tonight was the first time that I’ve turned it on.

One issue: The remote didn’t work.

I don’t know who designs an electrical appliance without a manual keyboard but the answer I now know is Fujitsu. Thanks Mark Taylor.

Luckily there is a fix which I figure out from the help of a few blogs which weren’t exactly clear. This works for a AR-VS7M remote at least. I believe there are other version of the AR-VS7 air conditioner so check which remote type you have.

  1. Take out the old batteries and find some new ones
  2. Find a pen or tooth pick or similar implement and hold down the ACL button inside the little hole under the battery cover.
  3. Put new batteries in
  4. Turn it on and frig around with it till it works for me.

Worked a charm for me and hopefully it works for you too!

Technology

Errors and Issues Found While Adding AdMob for Android

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On my to do list for a while was to add advertisements to my application, CountView. I’m not really interested in making a profit in any way but I wanted to see how hard it was to do and if you could expect any kind of profit at all. If I’m ever going to make a career of this app and custom development career then it’s best to
start small and work up from there.

Given how common ad platforms are I was expecting that adding them to my app was going to be very straight forward. And in some ways it was. The first choice was between AdSense and AdMob, both provided by Google. Google makes it quite clear that they believe AdMob is the platform of choice for Android apps and apps in general. There’s definitely nothing stopping you using AdSense and importing it into a web container but I have to agree that the concept behind AdMob makes sense.

AdMob recently released a new version 4.3.1 that I think came out in October 2011. My first issue was that you needed at least Android 3.2 (the tablet version) to compile it against and for some reason that refused to deploy to my Nexus One running 2.3.3 even though it was supposed to be backward compatible to Android 1.5. I got round most of this by installing the Ice Cream Sandwich Emulator which seemed a lot better than the earlier versions that I had use previously. The even better fix for this was that I bought a Galaxy Nexus. All problems solved!

Then the real problems started. I deployed it and the ad just refused to show. No errors. It said that an ad was being received and then nothing. Added some house ads and still nothing. Added my device multiple ways as a test device and still no luck. Had me stumped for ages. Eventually I found the following errors:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{com.fozziewossie.android/com.fozziewossie.android.CountViewActivity}: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.google.ads.AdView cannot be cast to android.widget.TextView
…
Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.google.ads.AdView cannot be cast to android.widget.TextView

And I was like, what the? All I was doing at that line was:

TextView countTextView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.CountField);

That made no sense at all to me. I did some extensive Googling and none of it seemed to help. Eventually I just did my standard response when things refused to work and just fecked around.

My solution. Wrap the com.google.ads.AdView component in the XML in a Linear Layout and move it to the top of the application. Why that fixes it I have no idea. I’m results driven, it works!

The new version of CountView is being released tonight and includes one other change to have the background colour default to black with white text. It’s much more sophisticated.

Technology

CountView – Part 3 – CountView on the Android Market

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CountView has now reached the pinnacle that an Android application can reach – it’s made it to the Android Marketplace! Okay, well, that might not quite be the pinnacle. Angry Birds has probably taken that with the number of downloads and popular references. Getting on the market is still pretty cool though even if it cost me
US$25 to get a developer account.

So there’s new steps now and it’s not much easier really although they are a little more standard since nearly everyone has installed an app from the market.

Steps:

  1. Open the market
  2. Press the search button
  3. Type in CountView
  4. Press Enter
  5. Click on the CountView application
  6. Select Install
  7. Select the very minimal permissions
  8. Done!

And how’s the app doing? I’ve had fourteen people install it and nine are still using it. Here’s my favourite graph that Google provides:

Active installs of CounView by country

Technology

CountView – Part 2

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I’ve finally convinced some people (poor suckers!) that my app has some relevance and they are keen to install it. Unfortunately the first person I tried to help install CountView it ran into a big fat error that I had never seen before. So, one day later I’ve actually tested the install myself (which I probably should have done in the first place) and I can now give you the full instructions on how to download and install the application.

1. Allow unknown source (ie. other than the Android Market to be installed):
First step is to let installation happen straight from your SD card. To do this from your home screen click then options/settings button, select Settings, select Applications and tick the Unknown sources check box accepting any warnings that it gives. You can uncheck this after you finish installing if you’re worried about security.

2. Download the CountView installer:
The installer is called AndroidCountViews.apk
and you’ll need to get this onto your phone so that it can be installed. The easiest way to do this is to probably open up your browser in your phone and find this blog page, click the link:  AndroidCountViews.apk
and whallah! you’re done. Downloaded and ready for install. If that’s no good then you can download it to your PC and transfer it using the USB cord.

3. Download a file manager application:
I’ve tried a couple of these and they’ve both seemed good. First on the list is Adao File Manager. The second is Android File Manager. You can find both of them on the market – just search by name.

4. Install the application:
Now that you’ve installed your file manager you’ll be able to install the CountView APK. To do this open up your file manager of choice, navigate to the Download (could be in lower case – download) folder. This is where all your downloaded files from your browser go. Then just click on the AndroidCountViews.apk file that we downloaded in step 1, and install it. You can then open the application up and away you go.

You might want to add the icon do your desktop area so you can quickly retrieve it and see your stats but that’s about it. The application will launch itself if you ever restart your phone and it should just sit away in the background checking when ever your screen comes on.

If you still find these steps a bit confronting and you don’t want to help me beta test the application, then hold on a bit longer while I work on getting my Android Market page up. Aim is to have it up and running by the end of June. And here’s some screen shots that you’ll be seeing shortly:

Application in motionIcon on my desktop

Edit: You can now get this off the Android Play store.