The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is answered somewhere else. This is just about IT.
One of my articles was published in Java Magazin 9.17. I wrote it while working on the nusic android app, about how to use SLF4J in Android using logback-android. It also features an example and a small library for android.
Triology GmbH provides an English version of this article, and also acquired the original article PDF (in German), which can be found here: Android Logging für Java-Profis – SLF4J und Logback in Android. I’d like to thank my colleagues there for their support.
A 5-year-old phone is not going to the kindergarden, it is more likely to be found on the phone graveryard. One important reason for this is that its manufacturer stopped caring for it at least three years ago. Fortunately, there are other caretakers – people that maintain the latest android version also for five-year-old phone grannies – in form of custom ROMs.
So, is it possible to run the latest Android version on a device that’s 5 years old? Hell, yes! This article shows how.
My old HTC One S (aka ville, the older S4 processor not the “C2” with S3 processor), launched April 2012 runs terribly laggy on its latest stock anroid 4 firmware, last update 2013 – four years ago! That’s why it was retired a long time ago. At the beginning of 2017, when the first unofficial builds of lineage OS turned up, I was surprised to see that HTC One S was among them. I was wondering, how can such an old device run the latest android version? I had to see for myself.
TLDR; Android Nougat works surprisingly well, way better than the latest Stock version but HTC makes it a hell of a way to get there. Lets see what has to be done.
Note that all files on your device will be deleted during the process!
To be able to flash software to our HTC devices, HTC forces us create an account on htcdev.com and register our device there. Then we receive an unlock code as zip file which we can flash on our device.
adb reboot bootloader fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
For all Windows 8 (and also Windows 10, apparently) users who have problems getting the fastboot driver to work, whereas ADB works, this little registry edit did the trick for me.
In the bootloader make sure to remember your HBoot version, it will be required during the process.
Download from here to your PC and flash as follows
fastboot flash recovery twrp.img fastboot reboot
I had to find out the hard way by flashing lineage 14.1 that there are requirements regarding the HBoot (HTC Bootloader) version: HBoot 2.16 is required.
So better check in advance. If you’re on HBoot 2.16 flash lineage and enjoy. If not, let the games beginn.
Upgrading HBoot needs S-OFF (Security off, enables writing to /system directory). On top of unlocking our bootloader at htcdev.com we need to risk bricking our phone to enalbe writing in the /system directory of our device.
Those two things are the reasons why I most likely won’t ever buy an HTC device again.
Anyway, with the One S, we’re lucky! S-OFF takes a bit of time but not much effort and comes at almost no risk, thanks to rumrunner (a good overview of other S-OFF Mechanisms is described here). Rumrunner makes it easy to get S-OFF, but it needs root access.
What? Why are we doing this again? We want to Upgrade HBoot, that’s why we need S-OFF, in order to get S-OFF, we need root. That’s the last unpleasant surpise, promise!
Lucky again, root access can be gained easily on HTC One S. I used Superboot: Just Download, execute Script on PC while Phone phone is in bootloader mode. Root done. More detailed description here.
Then just download rumrunner follow the instructions, wait for about 10 minutes (don’t worry, your phone is restarting about one million times) and you’re S-OFF!
We’re getting closer. Now, with S-OFF we can flash HBoot 2.16. I followed these instructions, and found the firmware here.
Caution: After flashing HBoot 2.16, the internal memory is really small, only 50 MB left. Obviously Android 4 and Hboot 2.16 are not good friends. Don’t worry, this is solved once Android 7 is flashed.
It’s finally gonna happen. We’ll flash Lineage 14.1, Android 7.1.2 (maintained by moozon, thanks so much!). But how, the internal memory is only 50MB, but the image is almost 300MB? I copied the image to an USB thumb drive, connected it to the phone via an USB OTG adapter and flashed via TWRP Recovery. TWRP also offers ADB sideloading, which might be an alternative, it you don’t have an USB OTG Adapter at hand.
Once flashed, you finally can enjoy the latest android version on your “antique” phone. 🥂
Root is built-in but disabled by default. If you want root access, you can enable it in developer options.
If you need google services, get ARM | 7.1 | pico (my recommendation) from opengapps.org and flash via TWRP.
If you need more info, you might get started here: [LINEAGE OS] HTC One S Lineage OS 14.1, Android Nougat 7.1 ROM
The One S with Android 7.1.2 almost works better than my HTC One M8 with Android 6! Why must HTC make it so hard to get there? And why are manufacturers not able to support their devices longer than 2 years, while the community or even single indivudals are able to do so for more than 5 years??
[EDIT 2017/06/13: Google just published the guaranteed updates for its devices: two years of upgrades and another year of security updates. While this is at least some formal guarantee (other manufacturer just don’t guarantee anything) it still is far from the five years provided by the community for my HTC One S… ]
I’m still waiting for a manufacturer that guarantees support for its devices for many years. That would really be a unique selling point! I can’t believe no manufacturer uses this USP on the highly competitive market for mobile devices. In addition, this would be so much more sustainable, and contribute to a green(er) IT. While the whole world complaints about planned obsolescence, why is there no manufacturer that uses this fact for positive marketing?
[EDIT 2017/07/01: HMD Global (owner of the Nokia brand) just announced that they intend to provide plain vanilla android phones with support “even after two years“. I looking forward to their next anouncements. My calls might just have been heard 👂]
[EDIT 2017/10/05: Google talks about four android version upgrades being possible from Android O and releases Pixel 2 with three years of support. See More sutainable Android Software with Project Treble and 6-y LTS Kernels with Android O?]
What is Google doing, by the way? They introduce Safety Net, providing the oportunity for developers to hide their apps on Google Play from specific devices, such as the ones running custom ROMs. So now, no more Netflix, etc. for custom ROMs. Effectively, this is another punch for the custom ROM scene after the death of CyanogenMod.
Lets just hope custom ROM developers will not be discouraged by these facts and continue their imporant work, making success stories such as the one of my HTC One granny possible.
Thank you android community, XDA forums, custom ROM developers, etc. for sharing your work and never giving up! 👍
Java aktuell published an article I wrote on a topic at work for TRIOLOGY GmbH.
You can find an English version on the TRIOLOGY Blog: Automatic checks for vulnerabilities in Java project dependencies. The article shows an approach to keeping your Java project dependencies free of known vulnarabilities (e.g. CVEs) using the OWASP Dependency check with Jenkins and Maven. There also is an example project on GitHub.
The original article PDF (in German) is available for download here: Automatisierte Überprüfung von Sicherheitslücken in Abhängigkeiten von Java-Projekten.
TRIOLOGY also published a short Q&A on the article, which can be found here.
Earlier this year, while working on a project for TRIOLOGY GmbH, I once again used maven to write a version name into an application, using the mechanism described in my post Maven: Create a simple build number. As a more sophisticated version name was required for this project, we expanded it by a time stamp, SCM information (branch and commit), build number and a also created a special name for releases. You can find a how-to here – Version names with Maven: Creating the version name – which is the first part of a small series of blog posts on this topic.
The second part shows how the version name can be read from within the application. While writing the examples for the post, I wondered how many times I must have implemeted reading a version name from a file in Java. Way too often! So I decided that this would be the very last time I had to do it, and extracted the logic into a small library: versionName, availble on GitHub. What it does and how to use it is described in the second part of the post: Version names with Maven: Reading the version name.
Hopefully, this will be useful for someone else. Funny enough, in the new project I’m on, I’m about to reuse it once again. I’m glad I don’t have to write it again. Here’s to reusability 🍺
Time for an update of the post Building GitHub projects with Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube 4.1.1 on OpenShift, because SonarQube 5.2 is out: It’s the first version since 4.1.1 that can be run on OpenShift. That is, it’s the first version of SonarQube 5 and the first one that contains Elasticsearch and many other features that are now available on OpenShift!
Interested? Then let’s see how to set up SonarQube on OpenShift.
rhc snapshot save -a --filepath ssh @-.rhcloud.com 'snapshot' > sonar.tar.gzhttps://sonar-.rhcloud.com/setup
SonarQube will update it’s database during the process.
To install SonarQube 5.2, execute the following steps on your machine:
rhc app create sonar diy-0.1 postgresql-9.2
Make sure to remember the login and passwords!
git rm -r diy .openshift misc README.md git remote add upstream -m master https://github.com/schnatterer/openshift-sonarqube.git git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master git push
http://sonar-.rhcloud.com/
Note that the initial setup may take some minutes. So be patient.
The default login and passwords are admin / admin.
You might want to change the password right away!
Basically, the following is an updated (and a lot simpler) version of my post about SonarQube 4.1.1.
rhc app create jenkins jenkins-1
Update Center
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/pluginManager/advanced
and hit Check Now (as described here).
Then go to the Available tab and install
Then hit Install without restart or Download and install after restart. If necessary, you can restart your app anytime like so
rhc app restart -a jenkins
mkdir $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2 echo -e "<settings><localRepository>$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2</localRepository></settings>" > $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml
Configure System
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure
Default settings provider: Settings file in file system
File path=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml
Configure System
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure
and set
# of executors: 1
Configure System
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure
Global properties,Environment variablesAddname=SONAR_USER_HOMEvalue=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIRSonarQube RunnerAdd SonarQube RunnerName=SonarQubeEnable injection of SonarQube server configuration as build environment variablesName=Server URL:
http://sonar-.rhcloud.com/
Sonar account login: admin
Sonar account password: (default: admin)
SaveNow lets set up our first build.
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/view/All/newJob
Item name:
(Unfortunately, Maven projects do not work due to OpenShift’s restrictions.)
Hit OK
GitHub project:
https://github.com///
Source Code Management:
https://github.com//.git
Branch Specifier (blank for 'any'): origin/master
Build Triggers: Tick Build when a change is pushed to GitHub
Build Environment: Tick Prepare SonarQube Scanner environment
Build | Execute Shell
cd $WORKSPACE # Start the actual build mvn clean package $SONAR_MAVEN_GOAL --settings $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml -Dsonar.host.url=$SONAR_HOST_URL
Post-build Actions| Add post-build action| Publish JUnit test result report
Test report XMLs=target/surefire-reports/TEST-.xml*
Post-build Actions| Add post-build action| E-mail Notification
Recipients=Apply.Save and start you first build. Check Jenkins console output for errors. If everything succeeds you should see the result of the project’s analysis on SonarQube’s dashboard.[EDIT (2016-06-02): OpenShift now provides different JDK “alternatives”, e.g.
/etc/alternatives/java_sdk_1.8.0So you might want to skip the steps bellow, regarding a custom JDK. The steps described for using a custom maven still apply, however.
]
In previous posts I pointed out how to build GitHub projects with Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube and how to run these builds on dedicated Jenkins slaves. The following shows how to replace the “stock” versions of maven and JDK that are provided by OpenShift.
At the time of writing OpenShift features Maven 3.0.4 and OpenJDK Server 1.7.0_85. Why would you want to change those? Best example is a Java8 project to be build on Jenkins. Can we just advise Jenkins to download the newest Oracle JDK and we’re good to go? Nope, it’s not that simple on OpenShift! Jenkins does download the new JDK, sets the JAVA_HOME variable and the correct PATH, but maven is always going to use the stock JDK. Why? Running this command provides the answer
$ cat `which mvn` #!/bin/sh prog=$(basename $0) export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java export JAVACMD=$JAVA_HOME/bin/java export M2_HOME=/usr/share/java/apache-maven-3.0.4 exec $M2_HOME/bin/$prog "$@"
The stock maven is setting its own environment variables that cannot be overridden by Jenkins!
So, in order to exchange the JDK, we need to exchange maven first.
cd $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR mkdir maven cd maven wget http://apache.lauf-forum.at/maven/maven-3/3.3.3/binaries/apache-maven-3.3.3-bin.tar.gz tar -xvf apache-maven-3.3.3-bin.tar.gz rm apache-maven-3.3.3-bin.tar.gz
vi $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/maven/apache-maven-3.3.3/conf/settings.xml
Add the following to the tag (replace by your OpenShift UID first)
/var/lib/openshift//app-root/data/.m2
(press i button for edit mode, insert, then press esc button, enter :wq, finally press return button)
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure
Set Environment variables
PATH=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/maven/apache-maven-3.3.3/bin:$PATH
M2_HOME=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/maven/apache-maven-3.3.3
However, In case you’re running a small gear with only 1GB of memory, you might want to save a bit of your precious memory. The following example shows how to do so for JDK 8 update 51 build 16.
On SSH:
cd $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR mkdir jdk cd jdk wget --no-check-certificate --no-cookies --header "Cookie: oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u51-b16/jdk-8u51-linux-x64.tar.gz tar -xvf jdk-8u51-linux-x64.tar.gz rm jdk-8u51-linux-x64.tar.gz
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure
JDK installations | JDK
Name=SlaveOnly-Custom-JDK8u51
JAVA_HOME=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/jdk/jdk-8u51-linux-x64
This post showed how to build GitHub projects with Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube 4 on OpenShift. For starters, it used the Jenkins master node for running build jobs. However, when running on a small gear, the master node might run out of memory pretty fast, resulting in a reboot of the node during builds.
In order to resolve this issue, there are two options:
As spawning additional nodes is easy in a PaaS context such as OpenShift and provides a better performance than running builds with small memory, the slave solution seems to be the better approach.
This post shows how.
slavehttps://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/computer/new
Remote FS root:/app-root/data folder on slave. Typically this is /var/lib/openshift//app-root/data/jenkins, you can find out by SSHing to the slave node and calling
echo $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/app-root/data/jenkins
Labels: Some label to use within builds to refer the node, e.g. OS Slave #1
Host: the slave’s hostname, e.g. slave-.rhcloud.com
username: Private Key File:Path to a private key file that is authorized for your OpenShift account. In the <a href="https://itaffinity.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/building-github-projects-with-jenkins-maven-and-sonarqube-4-1-1-on-openshift/”>first post this path was used: /var/lib/openshift//app-root/data/git-ssh/id_rsa. Note: $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR seems not to work here.https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/credentials/
mkdir $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/jenkins mkdir $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2 echo -e "<settings><localRepository>$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2</localRepository></settings>" > $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.m2/settings.xml
scp -rp -i $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.ssh $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/.ssh <slave's UID>@slave-<your account>.rhcloud.com:app-root/data/.ssh
$OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IP vs $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP) we’ll have to improvise at this point. There are two options: Either
$OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IPhttps://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure
Sonar | Sonar installations
Database URL: jdbc:postgresql://$OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP:15555/sonarqube
or
$OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IP environment variable on your slave machine
rhc env set OPENSHIFT_JENKINS_IP=<value of $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP> -a slave
You can find out the value of $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP by SSHing to the slave and execute
echo $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP
https://jenkins-.rhcloud.com/configure
and set # of executors to 0.
Hit Apply
Global properties | Environment variablesname: MAVEN_OPTSvalue: -Xmx512mSave.See also Libor Krzyzanek’s Blog: Jenkins on Openshift wi… | JBoss Developer
After finishing the migration from Actionbarsherlock to appcompat described in the first Post on modernizing android UIs, it turns out there are even more things to modernize in terms of android UIs.
If you used Tabs within the ActionBar, after migrating to appcompat-v7 API 22 you might recognize a warning, that tells you that they are now deprecated.
In order to modernize those, you should use the design support library that was added to the Android SDK with API level 22. Similar to the appcompat -v7, the design support library provides backports of material design components of Android lollipop (5.x) for older versions of Android.
Here’s the steps that rid you of the deprecation warning
sdkdir>/extras/android/support/design.Existing Android Code Into Workspace, change the build target to level 22, and link the appcompat project with it.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.android.support</groupId>
<artifactId>design</artifactId>
<version>${android.compatibility.version}</version>
<type>aar</type>
</dependency>
The screenshots bellow show a before-after comparison – deprecated tabs vs material design tabs.
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Android API level 14 introduces the switch component, that according to google should be used when only one option is available. For API levels < 14 there’s no such thing as switches. So we’ll have to rely on checkboxes there. Here’s how to replace checkbox preferences by switches for devices running API level 14 and above
CheckBoxPreference by SwitchPreference (see commit ab16eb1997dfba743abcd488b6b20de71b5c3ff0 for an example).res/xml/ that contains the preferences with CheckBoxPreferences andres/xml-v14/ that contains the same file with SwitchPreferences.Another before-after comparison is shown bellow – checkboxes vs switches.
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Action Buttons are icons that realize the most important actions on the actionBar if there is enough room to display them. These could have been used in Actionbarsherlock already, but if you still didn’t modernized them then it’s about time 🙂
One reason for not using action buttons might be that you don’t have suitable icons. Here’s the solution: Google provides a huge amount of material design icons under open source (CC-BY) license. They can be found on this site, or you can just clone their git repository.
So it’s as easy as that
res/drawable-xyz folders<item android:id="@+id/action_refresh" android:icon="@drawable/ic_refresh_white_24dp" android:title="@string/action_refresh" app:showAsAction="ifRoom"/>
And that’s it. See bellow for an example. For an example see the commit that realized this change.
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This post shows by example the steps that are necessary for migrating an android application from Actionbarsherlock to Material Design (introduced in android KitKat/Version 5.x/API level 21/22), while keeping compatibility with at least android Gingerbread/Version 2.3 /API level 9). It uses the appcompat-v7 library on API level 22. The app that was migrated (nusic) in this example is developed using Eclipse, Maven and RoboGuice.
Let’s begin with some before-after screenshots:
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The following lists the steps that were implemented in order to change the app as depicted in the screenshots above.
Properties | Android | Library | Add
<repositories>
<repository>
<id>android</id>
<url>file://${env.ANDROID_HOME}/extras/android/m2repository</url>
</repository>
</repositories>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.android.support</groupId>
<artifactId>appcompat-v7</artifactId>
<version>${android.compatibility-v7.version}</version>
<type>aar</type>
</dependency>
styles.xml
<!-- <style name="AppBaseTheme" parent="@style/Theme.Sherlock"> --> <style name="AppBaseTheme" parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat">
RoboSherlockFragment -> RoboFragmentRoboSherlockFragmentActivity -> RoboActionBarActivityRoboSherlockPreferenceActivity -> Write your own RoboAppCompatPreferenceActivity that looks like this (or as described here) but is derived from RoboPreferenceActivity (see here for the class that was used in the example).RoboSherlockPreferenceActivity.getSherlockActivity() -> getActivity()getSupportMenuInflater() -> getMenuInflater()android.view.Menuandroid.support.v7.app.ActionBarproguard.cfg
# support4, appcompat-v7, design support
-dontwarn android.support.**
-keep class android.support.** { *; }
-keep interface android.support.** { *; }
For further info please see
TL;DR; A way of exporting iTunes playlists with relative paths is described here.
Once upon a time I wrote a little tool for exporting playlists from Songbird/Nightinale. After migrating to iTunes, I was looking for a tool that provides the same functionality for iTunes. Fortunately, there already is one: iTunes Export. It’s twofold – you can either use a UI or a console version. I’m more the console type of guy, so my choice is clear. The latest release, version 2.2.2, was released in 2010, almost 5 years ago… and it still works with iTunes 12.1.2 – it’s a miracle! And it’s fast – my approximately 100 playlists are exported in less than 2 minutes.
Among all those parameters of iTunes export, there is none for creating relative playlists, though. However, we can use a workaround for achieving this, by combining the musicPath and musicPathOld parameters. Here’s what the doc says:
musicPathjava -jar itunesexport.jar -musicPath="c:\My Music Directory"
musicPathOldjava -jar itunesexport.jar -musicPathOld="c:\My Old Path"
A bit complicated, eh?!
I’ll point out how we can use those parameters by a small example. Imagine the following folder structure
D:\Music\
Playlists\
Artist1\
Song1.ext
Artist2\
Album\
Song2.ext
iTunes
iTunes Library.xml
If we had a playlist call playlistX that contained Song1 and Song2 (anyone remember a band called Blur? 🙂 ) and we would export it without further parameters to the Playlists folder, it would look like this:
D:\Music\Artist1\Song1.ext D:\Music\Artist2\Album\Song2.ext
What we’re going to do is replace the absolute part with a relative one (in respect to the destination folder for playlists). In our example: Replace “D:\Music” by “..” because it’s the parent folder of “D:\Music\Playlists“. That’s exactly what the parameters mentioned above are for! musicPathOld is the the part that is going to be replaced by musicPath. Speaking of which, our call to iTunesExport looks like this:
java -jar itunesexport.jar -library="D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.xml" -outputDir="D:\Music\Playlists" -musicPath=".." -musicPathOld="D:\Music"
and results in the file D:\Music\Playlists\playlistX.m3u
..\Artist1\Song1.ext ..\Artist2\Album\Song2.ext
IT affinity! 