Continue reading »]]> Normally migrating data from an older, smaller SD card to a bigger one on any Android phone is a simple affair:

• Connect USB cable to phone
• Choose “Connect as drive” on phone
• Backup files from USB device onto PC/Mac using your favourite file manager on your PC/Mac
• Disconnect device from PC/Mac
• Disconnect USB cable
• Unmount SD card (Main menu -> SD card storage -> Unmount
• Replace old SD card with new SD card
• Reconnect USB cable
• Choose “Connect as drive” on phone
• Copy data back
• Disconnect device from PC/Mac
• Disconnect USB

All well and good, nice and simple.
BUT! What if you’ve been toying with your phone and flashing custom roms and, here’s the big one, what if you have apps2sd enabled?  Those apps are installed on an ext partition which you can’t just easily get access to.

Well, it’s not that difficult actually. Two assumptions here are that you’ve rooted your phone, and also installed (a relatively recent) version of the Amon Ra Recovery Image for your phone.

Here’s the simplicity of it, very similar to the steps above, with a slight detour into our Recovery Image.

• Reboot the phone into your Amon Ra recovery image (Switch off, switch on while holding Home button down)
• Do a full Nandroid+ext backup (Takes a minute or 5)
• Connect USB cable to phone
• Choose “Enable USB” on the recovery image main menu
• Backup files from USB device onto PC/Mac
• Press the Home button on phone to switch off USB
• Remove the back cover of the phone, remove the old SD card, and put the new blank SD card in
• Choose “Partition SD card” to partition your SD card the way you want, splitting between swap, ext size, and the rest. Default values are usually just fine.
• Once the SD card is partitioned, choose “Enable USB” on the main menu
• Copy all your data back to your phone
• Press the Home button on phone to switch off USB
• Now do a nandroid restore, choosing the backup file you made earlier
• Choose “Reboot” on the recovery main menu

And that’s it. This all in all doesn’t take much longer than 10 minutes, depending on how many apps you have on your ext partition, and how much data you have on your SD card. And it’s perfectly safe for your data, as you have multiple backups now, including your original SD card that you can just pop back in if you really want to.

I did the above steps on my HTC Hero that has SenseHero 2.2 installed, migrating from the stock 2GB SD card to a new Transcend 8GB Class 6 SD card without issues.

Good luck, and let me know if you find this useful.

Continue reading »]]> I recently acquired myself a 13″ Macbook Pro, one of those new shiny unibody ones, which I now use as my primary work and freelance machine. I used to run Ubuntu on my laptop to ease freelance web development that I do with Zend Framework and WordPress etc. Mostly PHP type work.

With the Mac comes a whole host of new issues to get things going, where the more hardcore Mac fundi will install things like DarwinPorts or Fink or some such. Previously I had fink installed, and never really found that I absolutely *required* it, so this time around I’m not installing anything like DarwinPorts of Fink.

However, the underlying components to do LAMP-type development are all open-source and free, and the nice folks at MAMP put together a stellar package to ease the pain. The MAMP installer gives you everything you need, to get local web development going on a Mac. It includes Apache 2.x, Mysql 5.x, PHP 4 and PHP 5, Postfix for mail delivery, and if you’re OK with paying $$$ for MAMP Pro, you’ll get virtual hosts, PHPMyadmin, Dynamic DNS support and a whole host more features. MAMP Pro is available for a 14-day trial as well.

In summary, MAMP is a one-click-to-download one-stop app for everything you need to run a fully functional local web development setup, for all values where “P=PHP”. Perl and Python support inside MAMP is not there, for those you’ll likely need to do some hacking around, but I’m sure it’s possible. Oh, there’s one thing MAMP doesn’t give you, and that’s naturally an editing environment for your projects. IDEs for [L|W|M]AMP development is a personal choice, some people prefer gvim, others use bbedit, or textmate, or Eclipse PDT. I still use the Zend IDE, as it has nice built-in support for Zend Framework, and I’ve been testing out the beta version of the 7.0.x version, and so far it looks very good.

Continue reading »]]> Ai, so I’ve not updated this blog for many moons. Yes, I’ve been lazy, and I’ve kind of been keeping busy writing twice a week (mostly, twice a week…) for The Incredible Blog, so my blog’s been taking a backseat.

I’ve always threatened myself that one day when I have a portable-enough laptop, I’ll be *that* guy that goes to sit in a coffee shop, sips a Latte while churning out a blog post or something. Well, I traded in my ugly 15″ HP work-laptop for a new 13″ Macbook Pro, which at some point in the future I will fully own. So, now I’ve got the “portable enough” laptop part done, and hell, it’s pretty enough, so now I just need to find that (a) time, and (b) motivation and (c) coffee shop, and (d) topic to write a blog post. Or ten. I really don’t want to become a “I had Marmite toast for breakfast” blogger, I’d rather write about thing topical and interesting and about things that I love. That’s what this new Docile Tree home was going to be, so, look forward to more Linux, Mac, gaming, development, movie, gadget, techie and geeky blog posts in the near future.

I also decided to update the theme of my blog along with the upgrade to WordPress 2.8, browsed through the new WordPress themes, and came across this one. It’s called “Inanis Glass”, I love the boxes around everything, even though it does make the page load time a bit heavy, I dig it. The “Start Menu” thing at the bottom is a bit overkill, but it’s sufficiently out the way to not be a bother.

Here’s to new beginnings! Again!

Continue reading »]]> I was recently approached by Jason Bagley to write some gaming-related articles for The Incredible Blog, Incredible Connections online blog where they connect online with gamers, techies, gadgetphiles and more. Now, before you starting throwing up your arms and going wild, this is actually a good thing. I don’t see any other major retailers doing any kind of attempt to connect with *their* loyal and/or pottential customers, things can only go well from here on out, and I’m happy to be part of the team that is giving them that edge.

At the moment, I will be contributing about two blog posts per week to The Incredible Blog, so go on, look over there and subscribe to the RSS feed, you’ll find a nice steady source of gaming, gadget, hardware and software news, and every now and again you’re sure to find some news on incredible specials and great competitions for lovely prizes.

I’ ve written two posts for them so far, firstly a “confirmation” of Harry Potter and a second Indiana Jones outing into the Lego world, and then a note about Halo Wars being the best-selling strategy game on the XBox 360 by selling over a million copies in less than 3 weeks.

Continue reading »]]> I had to add a column to a database table on an MSSQL server today. It had to have the most recent update/insert time that the row was inserted/updated. MySQL has a very easy way of doing this with a TIMESTAMP column type, with a DEFAULT value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, and then also an additional ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP clause in the column definition to auto-update the value when the row is updated.
So I thought that if MySQL could do it, so should MSSQL be able too, right? Wrong. I’m not expert in MSSQL, I know MySQL fairly well, so my first surprise was to find out that the TIMESTAMP column type in MSSQL is *so* not the same as in MySQL, and in fact is rather completely useless in this example.

The solution turned out to be external to the table definition, by using a trigger.
So here’s how you update a column in your table with the current time whenever that row is update. I’m assuming you know your way around MSSQL and it’s multitudes of tools available, so I won’t be giving you screenshots.

First, add a column to your table as either a DATETIME or SMALLDATETIME, make the default value be: (GETDATE())
The default value takes care of setting the value of the column to the current date/time when a new record is inserted.

Then, add a trigger onto your table, that looks similar to this:

CREATE TRIGGER trg_updateLastUpdated ON [dbo].[your_table_name]
FOR UPDATE
AS
if not update(last_updated)
UPDATE your_table_name
SET last_updated = GETDATE()
FROM your_table_name
INNER JOIN Inserted
ON your_table_name.unique_id = Inserted.unique_id

And that’s that. The trigger makes sure to check that it’s not the last_updated column’s UPDATE that triggers the trigger, as without it, it will cause some nasty recursion to happen.
Your INNER JOIN can be on multiple columns too, if you have more than one column that is required to uniquely identify the single row that you’re updating.

Yes, you could probably update the last_updated column’s value from within whatever code you’ve got, that is an alternative, depending on exactly what you use that column for.
Anyway, this solution worked for me. Did it work for you?

Continue reading »]]> It seems like for a limited period only, the fantastic Braid on XBLA, a game that I’ve been avoiding paying fullprice of 1200 MSPoints for, will be discounted by 33% to 800 MSPoints!

Rocking! It seems this is an Exclusive Gold-Only deal, and forms part of a new “Deal of the Week” feature on XBox Live. The Deal of the Week feature seems to be available in all territories, to see what is the most recent deal for US accounts, here is the link for that.

If you’ve been like me and put off buying Braid due to it’s higher price-point, now’s your chance to own it for only 800 points. Hurry, the deal starts today (23 February 2009), and will end this Sunday.

If you’ve been like me and were put off by the higher price-point for Braid previously, now’s your chance to own it at a nice discount. Don’t delay, go now.

Continue reading »]]> Sheena (aka SheBee of www.shebee.co.za), decided to start an online magazine, and via Twitter, and practically every other medium she had at her disposal, called for contributors. And so launched NerdMag. 9am this morning the site was unveiled, and if you look carefully, you might see a familiar name.

Yes, mine. I opted to reply to the call for contributors only ‘cos I find that I like writing, almost as much as I like gaming, and I’d like to write about games more than just reviews, you know? So SheBee gave the go ahead, gave me some ideas, and I started. My first article became so big that I had to abandon it, verbal diarrhoea is not the best way to start for a first article on a new online mag. So, off you go, go enjoy the new kid on the block that is NerdMag, and don’t forget to read, and comment on all the cool content there, especially my article.

And to Sheena, good luck with the venture, you’re doing something lots of people dream about but never actually execute, so that makes you one step ahead of a lot of people. All the best. And thanks for the opportunity to smear my content on your project.

Continue reading »]]> UPDATE: I recently had issues with Air and Twhirl again, and thanks to @smmehadi I found there was two steps I didn’t do to *completely* get rid of all traces of Air. I added that step into the list below. For reference, here’s the official Adobe Air Linux troubleshooting page.

Adobe recently released the final version of their Adobe Air 1.5 desktop web application framework for Linux. It was a great day, and a lot of people immediately upgraded. Problems occurred immediately when people tried to run or upgrade their Air applications, and found Air was complaining about damaged applications or .air files.
I had the same, I couldn’t install the latest version of Twhirl, my number one choice for Twitter client. After several attempts and to-ing and fro-ing on Google and reading forums and even bitching about it on Twitter, I finally managed to get Twhirl running on Ubuntu, using Adobe Air 1.5
Here’s how I did it using Ubuntu (YMMV):

• Firstly, to make 100% that you’re going to succeed here, make peace with the fact that you’re going to have to reconfigure whatever Air applications you had.
• Update your system’s repositories to the latest by running “sudo apt-get update” and then “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”
• Uninstall Adobe Air. There’s an uninstall option on your Applications menu.
• Delete any Air applications you may have installed, they usually reside in /opt/ on the disk.
• Delete your ~/.appdata/ folder
• Delete your ~/.adobe/AIR folder – NEW STEP
• Delete your ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/www.macromedia.com/bin/air* folders – NEW STEP
• Make sure there is no /opt/Adobe/ folder, delete it if it’s there.
• Run “sudo apt-get autoremove adobeair1.0″ in a Terminal window.
  This will likely moan about packages having unmet dependencies. This is fine.
• Run “sudo apt-get -f install”, this will list the Adobe Air applications you remove in a previous step here, press Enter to allow Apt to clean up the files.
• Your system should now be suitably void of all Adobe Air traces.
• Head to http://get.adobe.com/air/ and download the AdobeAIRInstaller.bin file.
• In a Terminal window, make the file executable by running “chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin” in a Terminal window
• Run the file with “./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin” or double-click the file in your Nautilus/File Browser window
  This will install the base Adobe Air 1.5 framework
• After Air is finished installing, you need to make sure you have the latest Adobe Flash plugin installed. In a Terminal window, run this “sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree”
• You are now ready to install your favourite Air applications. I installed Twhirl.
• Head to www.twhirl.org – Notice that, as of writing, the Twhirl guys made a special Linux build of the Twhirl client (Currently it is here http://www.twhirl.org/files/twhirl-0.8.7-air11.air)
• Allow Air to Open and install the application

And that’s it, it might seem like many steps, but really, it’s just a simple way of cleansing your system from any unwanted Air leftovers of previous installations, and installing the latest version of Air and your favourite Air applications.
It’s worth noting too, that this seems to only affect currently installed Air applications. Any new applications that I installed after upgrading to Air 1.5 seemed to work just fine, so it seemed to have something to do with either leftover config files, or application files, or possibly the way Adobe Air interfaces with the Apt package management setup. I have a suspicion it’s the latter, but I don’t know the system well enough to provide proof. But at least what I did above worked.

Continue reading »]]> Man oh man oh man. This is such a cool game.
I’ve been waiting for Mirror’s Edge since May this year when I first saw the teaser trailer for the game.
And now, finally, I managed to play it, and review it. Check my review of the game at IOLTechnology.co.za.
I really do wish at some point in time that I’ll have an HDTV to play these games on, one day.

I finished the game, and will definitely play it again on the Hard difficulty when I have some more free time and not review other games…