Mathieu C.'s wonderful ideas emporium!

Seems like every Rogers APN have "brown-outs" once in a while...

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:00:00 -0400

It is my new hypothesis concerning my application’s intermittent failures over 2G. I had the same kind of problems this morning with the internet.com APN and now it works… I have no other clues now but I suspect that it’s a provider thing.

EDIT It seems like I can trigger the problem by shutting down the phone and fix it by “visiting” the “Access Point” in the settings without changing anything.

Following up on the 2G-only bug

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:04:00 -0400

First thing in the morning I try my application to see if the bug is really fixed and it doesn’t work anymore!!! I was a bit sceptic about yesterday’s solution and it now confirms my doubts. One more thing I tried now is switching the APN to internet.com versus rogers-core-appl1.apn which is supposed to be an Android-optimized APN and now it works again… Strange. I shall report that problem to my technical contact @Rogers.

Battery life

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:11:00 -0400

Battery life is a serious matter when developing a mobile app.The following video has been of great use for me to optimize my application power usage: Coding for Life — Battery Life, that is. The autonomy of my app. went from barely 5-6 hours to 10-12 hours just by implementing a few of his tips. Thank you Google I/O and thank you Jeffrey Sharkey! :D

An interesting insight on our methods of software...

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:53:32 -0400

An interesting insight on our methods of software development… Keep it simple, stupid.

Google Wave

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:29:00 -0400

It has been 2 weeks already since I received my Google Wave “dev preview” invite. I haven’t looked into it much (one night it looked like a modern day Far West) but I started to code a bot with the help of the wonderful tutorials that Google offers for free online. It doesn’t do much yet. The platform has rough edges but what do you expect from a “dev preview”? Can’t wait to share the good news with everyone though! :-) A Twitter contact (@pierrotbergeron) and me are contemplating the idea of starting a Wave Québec community soon… keep an eye out for us!

Android and 2G-only mode

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:10:00 -0400

I harshly discovered today that you should always specify a timeout when using Apache’s DefaultHttpClient on Android. I don’t know if it is a Rogers specific issue but if I didn’t specify a timeout my program would hang at some cryptic level without any exceptions being thrown or any other notices. The problem was not appearing when over 3G or Wifi. The problem suddenly disappeared when I specified a timeout… I should probably file a bug or something.