While it is well known that I’m a huge Gnome (classic) fan, I recently dipped into KDE grounds, again.

Because Dropbox continues to ignore the Dolphin File Manager, I decided to give SparkleShare a try, and following Mairin‘s most excellent How-To, I set up sparkle.k3rnel.net for my public files. (As a note, you need to chmod +x the post-receive git hook, otherwise it won’t work.)

My favorite Dropbox usage was dropping a file onto the Public folder, and right clicking it on Nautilus to get a Public Link. Sparkleshare doesn’t have a way to do this, but since I mounted my Public Sparkle folder, I wanted needed a way to get the public link.

I ended up investigating on KDE’s Service Menus, and created this Service Menu for the purpose. You need to place it in your ~/.kde/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/ folder, modify ‘your.site.here’ and possibly killall dolphin if it doesn’t load at first.

Now, there are some serious flaws on my script (I’m new here, have some patience). For starters, the menu entry will show up in all folders, rather than just your Public Sparkleshare folder. The way I envisioned this is that it should detect if there’s a “.public” file in the folder, read its contents (something like http://your.site.here) and append that to the filename, otherwise, don’t show the entry.

The other flaw I have is that if you create public folders, and try to get a file from within a public folder, it’ll ignore the folder and end up with your.site.here/file.txt instead of your.site.here/folder/file.txt.

Finally, the other issue I have is that files with spaces need %20. It currently gives you the link with spaces, and it isn’t clickable in most cases.  If someone could help me with the script, I’d really appreciate the help.

I created one other script, this one’s much simpler. It’s an Android ADB Push Menu. If you’ve got adb set up, it pushes any file to your phone’s /sdcard. It’ll fail if you have 2 or more devices hooked up at once, but I haven’t had time to investigate on how to display submenus for each adb device.

Anyway, I’m liking KDE so far. I love how easy it is to create the Service Menus and I thought I’d share.

Based on Tom Callaway’s “Fail Scale” and inspired by a recent tweet by Ryan Rix I decided to measure just how much Fail does Android have in its project.

Size

• This doesn’t count for insanely huge projects like Android, Gnome, KDE or the Linux Kernel.

Source Control

• There is a publicly available source control.
  • There is a web viewer for it.
  • There is documentation on how to use it for new users.
  • They use git for source control.
  • They made this open source script called “repo” to sync all individual git repositories.

Building From Source

• There is documentation on how to build from source.
• The source is pre-configured depending on the device. You can make your own make files.
• The source builds:
  • using GNU Make.
  • It also requires third-party proprietary build tools (Ora-Sun’s JDK) [ +50 points of FAIL ]
  • As of AOSP 2.3, it requires 64bit packages to build. (CyanogenMod patches this though)

Bundling

• The source only comes with other code projects that it depends on. (Android depends on a lot of parts.)
• If your source code cannot be built without first building the bundled code bits. (Sure, there’s build orders. )
• If you have modified those other bundled code bits [ +40 points of FAIL ] (SQLite comes to mind)

Libraries

• I’m not entirely sure how to count these. Android builds its own libraries, but I’m not sure if they’re static or not.

System Install

• The code has “mka bacon” [ -20 points of FAIL ] (Okay, only CyanogenMod does this )

Code Oddities

• No code oddities on Android afaik.

Communication

• The project announces releases on a mailing list.
• The project does have a bug tracker.
• The project does have a website.

Releases

• The project does sanely versioned releases (Major, Minor)
• The project’s releases have tasty codenames [-10 points of FAIL]
• The project does releases. (You can just grab from a git branch)
• Your releases are only in .zip format [ +5 points of FAIL ] (At least for OTA Upgrades. Should this even count? )

History

• Android was founded in 2003. As far as I know, the first code drop happened in 2008.
• 3-5 years [ +20 points of FAIL ]

Licensing

• The code does have per-file licensing
• The code does include a copy of the license text.

Documentation

• The code does have a changelog
• The code does have documentation
• The website does have any documentation

FAIL METER: 85 Points

• 0 points of FAIL: Perfect! All signs point to success!
• 5-25 points of FAIL: You’re probably doing okay, but you could be better.
• 30-60 points of FAIL: Babies cry when your code is downloaded
• 65-90 points of FAIL: Kittens die when your code is downloaded
• 95-130 points of FAIL: HONK HONK. THE FAILBOAT HAS ARRIVED!
• 135+ points of FAIL: So much fail, your code should have its own reality TV show.

Update: DrMacinyasha pointed out a couple of Fails in Android that I missed. Christoph also pointed something that it does ‘release’ code, though not in the usual way. Hmm.

This is a reply to Ryan’s Why I’m a Bad Freetard — Or the Quest for a New Phone.

It’s no secret that I’m an Android Fanboy, I really like the platform, and the idea of an “open” cellphone, but I’m well aware of its flaws.

For starters… Google has yet to ship Honeycomb’s source code, to which I say “What Honeycomb?”.

I’m sticking to CyanogenMod (Gingerbread / 2.3.4) whose code I can recompile (And have recompiled in several occasions), and I won’t migrate to Honeycomb until I can actually build it. Sure, I’m not smart enough to port Android or rebuilt without using a wiki, but I’m also not recompiling my KDE packages or my Kernel and yet I still manage to use my laptop.

And to say that there’s no community of Android enthusiasts is just wrong. There is a real community of both Android users and Android developers.

CyanogenMod is the closest we can get of an “Android Distro”. There’s others, but I’m proud to say that I’ve contributed one thing to CyanogenMod: Trackball Answer.

Sure, my contribution will never be accepted by Upstream (Google), but then again, I also never considered BlueBubble to be accepted by Fedora either, and that’s not stopping me from trying to help others.

And Android also has its fair share of Users. There’s a Facebook-like site dedicated around them, an awesome online store and even its own kind of hat. Hell, a bunch of Android Users got together to have an awesome Barbecue last year (And are planning on repeating it), and even managed to get about 1000 bucks towards a Cancer Research. Sorry, but I’ve never seen Apple fans do any of this.

Yes, Carriers are really screwing over their customers. Yeah, some hardware manufacturers really hate Freedom. Yes, Google is evil and is trying to datamine our every move. Yes, Android doesn’t follow The Open Source Way. Yes, you have to “root” the phone to make it kick-ass.

I’ve seen a lot of people complain about having to “Jailbreak” iPhones or “rooting” Androids to make’em awesome. I had to do the same with my laptop.
It came with Windows 7, and there’s no way I would’ve bought it if I couldn’t replace it with Fedora. And it wasn’t “Stock Windows 7″ either. It came with a lot of annoying crapware, and trialware too, so this isn’t something that’s exclusive to Android.

Would I have rather bought a laptop that came with no Windows? Hell yes I would’ve. But they’re so hard to find, I might as well just pick one I can wipe, and move on. The same logic applies to my phones, tablets, etc.  I won’t purchase an Android device that I can’t easily root.

I guess there’s a huge difference between Fedora and Android, and that’s fine. At the end of the day, my cellphone, like my laptop, is just a tool I use to do stuff. And I’ll pick the best damned tool I can get to do it.

One of the main reasons people visit this site is to get the latest CyanogenMod-based Android Emulator.

While I can’t say performance has gotten any better (The Android Emulator for Android 2.0 and above sucks, with 3.0 sucking hardcore), I updated the unofficial CyangenMod emulator images to a CyanogenMod 7.1.0 nightly build (Which is based on Android 2.3.4).

You can grab’em at http://nushio.fedorapeople.org/cyanogenmod/repository.xml and if you’ve already set it up, just go to the Android SDK Manager, and check your User Add-ons. It should display the updated package there.

As I’ve said before, this project is entirely unofficial, comes with no support, and will probably haunt you while you sleep. Use at your own comfort.

Missed the list? I’m doing a 30 day geek challenge, and It’s almost done…

The Google Nexus One is my favorite gadget. It’s extremely moddable, and mine’s currently running CyanogenMod 7, which adds a plethora of features that Google should’ve built-in. 

Missed the list? I’m doing a 30 day geek challenge, and I’m growing tired of writing these!

When I think of “Developers”, “Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers” comes to mind, but not that Steve.

Steve Kondik. better known as Cyanogen, is probably the reason I got started in Android modding. Although I haven’t modded much.

I really appreciate the work he (And his team) have put together despite legal issues that have arisen here and there, he continued his hacking.

Thanks, Steve.

P.S. I really tried

Google likes to shove its head in the sand and pretend there’s no such thing as “fragmentation” in Android, then goes and does something like this.

You’d think that buying an App in the Android Market would mean that you’d be able to use it on any Android device, and you’d be wrong.

Missed the list? I’m doing a 30 day geek challenge.

Everyone’s got a favorite jacket, shirt, shoes or hat. Here’s mine:

I really like my Android Beanie. There’s a *lot* of different colors and models, but I really like mine: CyanogenMod-colored.

It’s been well known that “Ultimate Droid” steals from CyanogenMod, and in fact, a summary of previous… confrontations… has already been documented, however I couldn’t help but notice that their rom seems to be using my Trackball Answer code, and doesn’t state anywhere that I’m the author.

I thought that removing the Credits List was an mistake, so I decided to file a bug report:

He then tried to impersonate me on his own system, which apparently is smarter than him:

UltimateDroid has since taken down the entire Bugzilla interface, while he figures out how to delete my bug, I guess.

The mustard represents progress

It’s no secret that I’m a Fedora / Android fan, so I decided to mix things up.

The BEEFY result?

Want to try it on your device? Just download this zip file. Overwrite your /system/media/bootanimation.zip with that one.