Wifi issues on HP Touchpad

I got an HP Touchpad and put Cyanogenmod 7 on it for Jenni to play around with. She used it a tiny bit over Christmas break but then when we got back it wouldn't allow me access to the Market and some other apps once it was connected to our wifi.

Our router had been acting a little odd with the new laptop we had gotten so I assumed it was because of the router. I got a new router and it still had problems, so I did a little digging. I tried playing around with a bunch of settings and doing all sorts of crazy things, but in the end it turns out that the date was reset to the unix epoch and setting it to the current date seems to have fixed the issue. Don't access me why that has anything to do with stuff like this, but apparently it does.

Whether it's a good idea or not...

As the title implies, this may or may not be a good idea, but here's the story of how I drug my pager into the 21st century.
So I used to have an iPhone and used Google Voice but at the time there wasn't an official Google Voice app (which ended up being a bit of a dud in my opinion) and the best jailbreak app that I could find at the time (GVMobile+) didn't support push notifications. There were some solutions out there, but they usually involved routing your data through a 3rd party server and that made me feel a little uncomfortable. So I looked into Google App Engine and made my own forwarding server. Yes, it was still going through a 3rd party server, but it was one that I at least had the warm fuzzy of having control over (who knows what Google may or may not be doing with all the data my app receives, processes and sends).
Shortly after getting this all up and running, the official Google Voice app came out and not too long after that I switched to an Android phone, so this project became useless and just sat on the shelf...
That is until I resurrected it to send all my Google Voice notifications to my pager. Most of the time it's unnecessary because I have my phone, but when I don't, it's nice to still get timely notification of texts, voicemails and missed calls. But the best part about it is that to everyone else in the world, they don't have to worry about whether they should call my phone or my pager. I just give out my Google Voice number and it now can act as the single point of contact for me whether I have my phone or not.
So, if you're interested in using this, then check out the new gvpush4pager project.

LDS Tools for Android

So I wanted to start working on the LDS Tools app for Android and it was a bit of a pain to get it all setup, so here's the list of stuff that I had to do to get it to work and hopefully it will help someone else out. I did it with Ubuntu 10.10, but the same general steps should apply to any OS.

1. Install Eclipse (sudo apt-get install eclipse)
2. Verify that Eclipse Update repo setup correctly (instructions here) (this was actually only a problem for me in Fedora and not Ubuntu)
3. Install Android SDK (instructions found here)
4. Create a Virtual Device (instructions here)
5. Checkout the code (Instructions here)
6. Change JDK Compliance to 1.6 in Windows->Preferences->Java->Compiler
7. Create a new Android Project in Eclipse using the checked out source
8. Install Checkstyle (Instructions here) (I had to set it to exclude the "files not open in editor" to avoid a ton of places that didn't match the style file. Hopefully, that can be resolved as people start to write compliant code)
9. Add the checkstyle-config-1.0.0.xml as an "External Configuration File" in the Checkstyle section of the Project Properties
10. In the Java Code Style->Formatter section of the Project Properties, import the ldssa.codestyle.xml file and select that as the Active Profile

Automatic build is enabled by default, so let it do its thing and then you should be able to run the generated executable. For me to get the Android emulator to connect to the internet on my laptop I had to disable my ethernet connection so it would use the wireless, but other than that the compiled app ran great.

Why didn't I think of that?

As much as I love C++, I've also thought that formatted output was a bit of a pain. Every time I have to do it, I spend tons of time looking things up and getting everything to work the way I expect. It's the only time that I long for a C feature (printf). Well, today I stumbled along this article, and I have to say that the guy is a genius. It's definitely one of those "oh ya" type of things that's almost so simple that it's stupid and makes you wonder why you didn't think of it, but is also so profound that it's amazingly powerful. I tip my hat to the wonderful beauty and power contained in this simple solution.