Mp3s

So out of box install of Ubuntu 12.04 now includes mp3 encoding (as well as decoding using fluendo decoder).

But theres this issue with VBR encoding (which is set in default gstreamer pipeline for mp3 encoding). And yes its been open just over 6 years!

Still I learnt about a handy tool called "mp3check" (and id3v2), exactly the kind of toold I'd been looking after for ages.

Of course the correct solution is to use a decent cdripper like the cli-based abcde.

Getting Android Emulator accelerated

On Ubuntu 10.04 or later install KVM as follows:

1. sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder bridge-utils
2. install 2.3.3 Intel Atom Image via Android SDK Manager
3. run:   emulator-x86 -avd <avd_name> -nosound -qemu -m 1024 -enable-kvm

NOTE:  the -nosound is necessary due to current bug with android emulator on Ubuntu

Plain Text Please

Can't believe I only noticed this feature in Chrome this morning to paste plain text into any input field.

Firefox has the functionality in a add-on.

Countdown and android.os.*

So I needed a countdown timer for an Android project I'm working on and after building a simple one myself, a came across android.os.CountDownTimer - who knew android shipped with one!

That got me interested in having a browse through andriod.os.* package to see what else the Android devs had squirreled away in there...

Turns out a whole bunch of handy stuff!  Like:

• An simple API inotify
• PowerManager
• Filesystem stats
• a persistent, system-wide, blob-oriented "logcat"
• the very handy AysncTask

Easy search of Stackoverflow in Chrome (and Firefox)

To easily search opensearch enabled sites (like StackOverflow) in Chrome, just start typing the name of the site in Chromes address bar, when the site name is matched, press TAB, it will then convert into a site search for that site and you can then keep typing in your search query.

To do something simliar with Firefox "awesome bar" using a feature called  "Add a keyword for this search" its a slightly different procedure. Thought the nice thing with firefoxes method is it works with any search input field and not just opensearch enabled sites.

And don't forget that if you want to access your local dev machine from an app running in the emulator, you need to use 10.0.2.2.

Android testing with ant

When running android tests using ant, you can specify a specific device to run the tests on when you have more than 1 device available to adb on your system. The property is: adb.device.arg so you can do:

ant -Dadb.device.arg="-s emulator-5554"

Or even better use a script like this gist.

Jenkins, adb, ant, oh my!

So this bug, who's root cause is this bug (yes reported in Jul '09 and still not fixed!), means that if you want to have a unit test failure cause your whole Ant build to fail and thus show up on your Jenkins/Hudson CI server, you need to do put this macro override into your build.xml.