Tag: little bit

ICS expe­ri­ence on the Sama­sung Galaxy Tab 10.1

As told before, I have the ICS as pro­vid­ed by Sam­sung (to it is not the stock ICS, it is the Samsung-version of ICS)  on the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Now that it is near­ly two months of using it, I want to share a lit­tle bit of my experience.

Basi­cal­ly it just works. If you know ICS already, you more or less know how it is on the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

The cal­en­dar app is dif­fer­ent, it is the Sam­sung app, not the native ICS one. I have a prob­lem to sync it with the exchange-connector as it is in Horde 4, but I did not take the time to inves­ti­gate the issue. My Nexus S con­nects just fine, so it must be some mod­i­fi­ca­tion by Sam­sung which is caus­ing the issue.

Some­times the tablet hangs, and I have to shut­down by press­ing the pow­er but­ton for some sec­onds. This only hap­pens when con­nect­ed via WLAN. When I start the tablet again, it will hang again if I am not fast enough to enter the PIN of the SIM, unlock the screen and to deac­ti­vate the WLAN. But even then it will hang after the deac­ti­va­tion of the WLAN. After reboot­ing the sec­ond time (with WLAN already deac­ti­vat­ed), every­thing works again.

The email app is also stut­ter­ing some­times. This hap­pens when I open a fold­er with a lot of emails and the email app is try­ing to deter­mine if there are attach­ments or not. Either the app is not multi-threaded, or it is not well done.

Apart from that it just works.

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Email app from Android 3.1 in Android 3.2?

As pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed, I tried the update to Android 3.2 on my Tab and was not hap­py about the new EMail app. At the week­end I had a lit­tle bit of time, so I tried to get the Email.apk from Android 3.1 into Android 3.2.

Long sto­ry short, I failed.

Tita­ni­um­Back­up PRO was restor­ing or hours (the option to migrate from a dif­fer­ent ROM ver­sion was enabled) until I killed the app, and it did not get any­where (I just emailed their sup­port if I did some­thing com­plete­ly stu­pid, or of this is a bug in TB). And a copy by hand into /system/apps did not work (app fails to start).

Ideas wel­come.

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Lin­ux­u­la­tor D‑Trace probes com­mit­ted to current

A while ago I com­mit­ted the lin­ux­u­la­tor D‑Trace probes I talked about ear­li­er. I wait­ed a lit­tle bit for this announce­ment to make sure I have not bro­ken any­thing. Nobody com­plained so far, so I assume noth­ing obvi­ous­ly bad crept in.

The >500 probes I com­mit­ted do not cov­er the entire lin­ux­u­la­tor, but are a good start. Adding new ones is straight for­ward, if some­one is inter­est­ed in a junior-kernel-hacker task, this would be one. Just ask me (or ask on emulation@), and I can guide you through it.

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Speed traps with chmod

I have the habit to chmod with the rel­a­tive nota­tion (e.g. g+w or a+r or go‑w or sim­i­lar) instead of the absolute one (e.g. 0640 or u=rw,g=r,o=). Recent­ly I had to chmod a lot of files. As usu­al I was using the rel­a­tive nota­tion. With a lot of files, this took a lot of time. Time was not real­ly an issue, so I did not stop it to restart with a bet­ter per­form­ing com­mand (e.g. find /path ‑type f ‑print0 | xargs ‑0 chmod 0644; find /path ‑type d ‑print0 | xargs ‑0 chmod 0755), but I thought a lit­tle tips&tricks post­ing may be in order, as not every­one knows the difference.

The rel­a­tive notation

When you spec­i­fy g+w, it means to remove the write access for the group, but keep every­thing else like it is. Nat­u­ral­ly this means that chmod first has to lookup the cur­rent access rights. So for each async write request, there has to be a read-request first.

The absolute notation

The absolute nota­tion is what most peo­ple are used to (at least the numer­ic one). It does not need to read the access rights before chang­ing them, so there is less I/O to be done to get what you want. The draw­back is that it is not so nice for recur­sive changes. You do not want to have the x‑bit for data files, but you need it for direc­to­ries. If you only have a tree with data files where you want to have an uni­form access, the exam­ple above via find is prob­a­bly faster (for sure if the direc­to­ry meta-data is still in RAM).

If you have a mix of bina­ries and data, it is a lit­tle bit more tricky to come up with a way which is faster. If the data has a name-pattern, you could use it in the find.

And if you have a non-uniform access for the group bits and want to make sure the own­er has write access to every­thing, it may be faster to use the rel­a­tive nota­tion than to find a replace­ment command-sequence with the absolute notation.

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Sam­sung HMX-H200 camcorder

My wife decid­ed that we need a cam­corder. As I am a good hus­band, I do not com­plain (she pays 😀 ).

There was an offer in a super mar­ket near­by. Not as low as you can find in the inter­net, but if there is a prob­lem, it is much more easy to com­plain. For some­thing like this, I/we pre­fer this and am-are OK to spend a lit­tle bit more mon­ey for this convenience.

This cam­corder is record­ing to SDHC cards. Such cards have a speed rat­ing, and you need to take some min-speed one, to be able to record videos with a cam­corder. Unfor­tu­nate­ly Sam­sung does not list the speed rat­ing some­where. I searched on the Sam­sung site in the spec­i­fi­ca­tions and in the FAQ. Noth­ing. After a lit­tle bit of googling I at least found a review where the record­ing time for spe­cif­ic card-sizes where listed.

So I took the card-size in MB, divid­ed it by the record­ing time in sec­onds, and got the data trans­fer rate per sec­ond for the spec­i­fied res­o­lu­tions. The 1080i res­o­lu­tion has the high­est trans­fer rate and as such it is the most inter­est­ing one to decide what kind of card one needs.

The high­est trans­fer rate seems to be less than 2.2 MB/s, so a class 4 SDHC card should be enough.

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