Convert M4A/AAC file to and from WAV file on Linux

May be useful to create M4A/ACC files for phone ringtones, use faad and faac command line utilities :

• faad foo.aac creates a foo.wav file
• faac foo.wav create a foo.acc file
  

Writing zippy Android apps Google IO Video

A Must-see presentation for development on Android : Writing zippy Android apps

I really liked the part where Brad Fitzpatrick explains what the difference is between an AsyncTask and IntentService :

• AsyncTask : for non blocking "fire and forget" operations outside of the UI Thread (the OS may kill the AsyncTask upon certain conditions and the task may not be able to finish its job)
• IntentService : use for non blocking operations that must not be interrupted outside of the UI Thread

Checked exceptions : really, the debat is not over

Whao, I knew that it was not over, but I did not suspect how much.

And even though I disagree with the conclusion of his article, we can be thankful to Elliotte Rusty Harold for having provided us with a thorough thread of discussion about checked vs unchecked exception.

(By the way, did I mentioned that I did not like checked exceptions ?)

Barbara Liskov : The Power of Abstraction

Great, great talk

Ho ! By the way, didn't she sort of tell that Checked Exceptions was not a good idea ? (at around 37:30 during the talk). And it was known 30 years ago...

Manages Linux devices with HAL

HAL, the Hardware Abstraction Layer of most recent Linux distros really is an impressive piece of architecture.

I'm impressed by how easy it is to take control of any low level parameter of any hardware.

Two example I've recently used :

A workaround to prevent nautilus in Ubuntu 9.04 from automatically mounting my MTP player :
I've added a no-automount.fdi file in directory /etc/hal/fdi/policy<br /><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- --><br /><deviceinfo version="0.2"><br /> <device><br /> <match key="info.product" string="ZEN V Plus"><br /> <remove key="info.capabilities" type="strlist">portable_audio_player</remove><br /> </match><br /> </device><br /></deviceinfo><br />(See my answer "stephg said on 2009-11-09" in this post for more details)

An other example to slow down the cursor speed of my high resolution mouse. As the xorg configuration file is not used anymore in Ubuntu, the X11 options can be set with a HAL configuration file.
I've added a 10-x11-input.fdi file in directory /etc/hal/fdi/policy : <br /><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- --><br /><deviceinfo version="0.2"><br /> <device><br /> <match key="info.product" string="Logitech USB Laser Mouse"><br /> <merge key="input.x11_options.ConstantDeceleration" type="string">2</merge><br /> </match><br /> </device><br /></deviceinfo><br />This "merge" scheme really is brilliant because it allows to go back to a default configuration by deleting a file.

My "Hello World" Scala script

My first Scala project, a simple Scala script to download podcasts and sync with an Mp3 player : Jonction

Delete all tracks from MTP device

My MTP MP3 player does not allow to delete all albums with one command (yes I really wanted to delete all tracks ! )

Bash to the rescue :
mtp-tracks | grep 'Track ID' | awk '{print $3}' | xargs mtp-delfile -n

Of course you must install the mtp-tools, on Ubuntu :
sudo apt-get install mtp-tools