Monthly Archives: March 2012

Mac OSX Lion problem – wifi connection drops after sleep

Updated – 18 April 2012 - Problem seems to have gone now, between my fix and the Apple update on 5 April.

Updated – 5 April 2012 – Apple released an update for iMac titled ‘iMac Wifi Update’ today, which I’ve now updated my system with. Hopefully this will completely fix the issue.

Original Post: Since upgrading to Lion (via App Store) I’ve had this issue on my iMac where wifi connection is always lost when come back from Sleep and have to reconnect – which didn’t happen in previous OSX versions. Annoying but the fact the workaround was simple meant I never looked into getting a fix, until today…

My fix was pretty simple – worked for me, maybe won’t work for everyones setup/situation:-

- System Prefs / Network / then Turn WiFi off
- Press Advanced button, it will probably show your usual WiFi network in Preferred Networks list
- Delete your usual WiFi network in this list (make sure you have your connection details/password first!!!)
- Press OK and will then need your System password to ok the change

After this, it then worked fine, auto-connecting after each Sleep.

So far tested with a short Sleep (2 mins) and a longer Sleep (about 30 mins)
Haven’t yet tested with an ‘overnight’ sleep.

I’ve added this info to Apple Support forum, as there seemed to be a lot of people with the same issue (20 pages worth!)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3193100?start=285&tstart=0

 

Working on first Android App

I’m currently working on my first Android App, which is more a way of practicing Android SDK / Java development than anything.
It’s something fairly simple and also useful – a bet calculator to calculate bet winnings – currently called BetCalc.

Turning off comments for static pages in WordPress

Took a while to figure out how to turn off comments on static pages in WordPress.
Found the answer via WordPress support pages.
-  Edit the Page in question
-  In the top right of screen there should be ‘Screen Options’ menu. Click this.
-  A drop-down menu (or similar) should then appear, allowing you to tick/untick lots of selections which will then be available when you’re editing Pages. One of these selections should be ‘Discussion’ and ‘Comments’. Tick both of these – and any others you want.
-  Should then have lots of extra options added to your ‘Edit Page’ editing options, including ‘Discussion’ where you can turn off ‘Allow Comments’

Its a bit hidden away, so no wonder people (including me) have had trouble finding it.

patwalsh.co.uk site and DevBlog now moved to WordPress

Have now moved the patwalsh.co.uk site and the DevBlog blog to WordPress, hosted on my one.com account. This includes all the existing content of the DevBlog which I’ve also moved.

The install and setup of WordPress was quite easy – following a support guide – and then having experimented with the various options found I could set it up so that there’s a mix of ‘static’ pages and blog type pages.

So far, I can recommend WordPress highly, especially as its open-source – and free.

WordPress

I’ve now installed WordPress onto my patwalsh.co.uk site. The process took about half an hour, following the instructions provided.

At the moment I’m experimenting with WordPress, seeing whether or not to use it as the main platform for this site. Its easy to maintain blog entries, pages etc in WordPress and you can also customise it quite a lot and add things like Widgets.

Learning Android Development – next book ‘Android for Programmers’

Next book to work through is ‘Android for Programmers’ – from the Deitel Developer Series. This book contains 16 fully coded Android apps, giving explanations of how various functionality has been achieved. Apps areas include – Twitter searches, slideshow, quiz, games, calculator, drawing, weather and pizza ordering(!)

Learning Android Development – completed first book

I’ve now finished working through my first book on Android Development – ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ by Wrox.

This book has given me a good introduction to Android development and I’d definitely recommend this book to those beginning Android Development. I really like the way its all based around coding examples, which all give working examples that you can run in the Android emulator, so you can see your coding at work straight away. If you then want to tweak the examples a little more you can and can see the effects straight away.

One slight issue was that the latest version of Android SDK is v4.x and the book is from the time of v2.3 so there are some issues when using the examples from the book. Using the Wrox P2P forums you can get answers to most issues and once I’d found a few problems early on I then knew how to get around them.

One main problem was the name of the application icon file – called icon in 2.3 but now ic_launcher – and there are other similar issues.

Next book to work through is ‘Android for Programmers’ – from the Deitel Developer Series. This book contains 16 fully coded Android apps, giving explanations of how various functionality has been achieved. Apps areas include – Twitter searches, slideshow, quiz, games, calculator, drawing, weather and pizza ordering(!)

Learning Android Development – continued – Chapter 11 completed

Continuing learning Android Development using the book ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ from Wrox.

Today, completed Chapter 11 – Publishing Android Applications.

This featured:

- How to prepare your apps for deployment
- Exporting your app as an APK file and signing it with a new certificate
- How to distribute your Android app
- Publishing your Android app on the Android Market

Useful information in this Chapter, though I’m not really ready to publish any Android apps yet.

Learning Android Development – continued – Chapter 10 completed

Continuing learning Android Development using the book ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ from Wrox.

Yesterday, completed Chapter 10 – Developing Android Services.

This featured:

- Reasons for needing a service
- Creating services that run in the background
- How to perform long-running tasks in a separate thread
- How to perform repeated tasks in a service
- How an activity and a service communicate

 

Learning Android Development – continued – Chapter 9 completed

Continuing learning Android Development using the book ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ from Wrox.

Just completed Chapter 9 – Location-Based Services -

This featured:

- displaying Google Maps in your Android application
- obtaining a Google Maps API key
- using MapView in your app – from com.google.android.maps.MapView
- get the address location touched on the map by user
- how to perform geocoding and reverse geocoding
- obtaining geographical data using GPS, mobile triangulation, wi-fi triangulation
- monitoring for a location
- using DDMS in Eclipse to alter GPS location inside your Android emulator, so you can trigger location monitoring