beer planet

Updated: December 16th, 2009

It's not a secret that my Sprint HTC Hero has been having trouble keeping battery charge – by the time I came home from work, the battery level would oftentimes be at 10% or the phone would be simply dead.

One would give up and accept this futility but I had 2 reasons to keep trying to figure out why:

• my co-worker's battery would consistently hold

…

When I visited Mozilla's offices about 6 months ago, I saw a mobile testing station which included about 20-30 different phones lounging around, with their chargers plugged in. I knew something serious was coming soon. There were rumors about Firefox for Mobile for a while but nothing to really show for it. That was then…

Today, however, we know a lot more. Firefox for Mobile, codenamed Fennec, is coming…

Only 2 days after I posted the list of problems with my HTC Hero (The Not So Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: My List Of 20+ Problems With HTC Hero) Sprint and HTC released the first firmware update.

The Update

To update your Hero, go to Settings->About phone->System updates->Firmware update.

The update took about 10 minutes to install, weighed 3.7MB or so, and rebooted the phone…

Updated: November 27th, 2009

Alright, I was really excited to get the HTC Hero. REALLY. I had extremely high hopes for the Hero (those are long gone) and Android (which I still do – I even began developing for it) but the Hero has so many ridiculous bugs that I am *this* close to bringing it down to the Pre level (I'm not going to dare though – Pre still leads…

In this article I will describe the problem I've had with Eclipse's handling of XML file formatting as well as the best way to fix it.

I use Eclipse to do my Android development for a few reasons:

• it's the only IDE fully supported by the Android dev team
• it has a visual Layout/Resources builder that transforms XML files into corresponding visual representations
• it's free

…

I just got back from the StackOverflow's DevDays conference in the rainy (at least today) San Francisco.

I was really glad to see Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, and the whole StackOverflow team in person, as well as listen to great talks in the following topics:

9:00 – 9:50    Joel Spolsky Opening Keynote
9:50…

So, I just got me a new phone that I've wanted for a long time – HTC Hero running the Android OS.

It's a great phone, no doubt, but I think mine has homosexual inclinations.

Bad Android. Bad.

Updated: October 16th, 2009

Today is my first day looking at Android development. My first encounter with the Android plugin for Eclipse has not been very smooth, to say the least. I am not sure if it's Android's or Eclipse's fault but I just wasted 2 hours on errors during the plugin installation and would like to pass on the time savings to you.

The plugin install page provides…

Updated: September 8th, 2009

Well, it looks like the wait is over. I have been waiting for almost 5 years for a new phone that is good enough to make the switch from Samsung A900 (which has free tethering). Don't even get me started on the iPhone and its outrageous monopoly with AT&T. Android and the growing multitude of devices running it is, however, completely different business. Android offers unparallel freedom and I…