Javier Aguirre

Flashing Firefox OS in the Geeksphone Peak

javaguirre — 2013-05-06 00:00:00 +0200

The official tutorial is excellent to do all the process smoothly, you will need to read it first. I wanted to share with you some problems I found building Firefox OS for the Geeksphone Peak. I am using ArchLinux, but some of the problems aren’t OS related.

After getting the B2G code you will need to use the ./config.sh to build it for the Peak, It’s not in the documentation but you actually can build the peak (the options are there for this device).

To do it you will need its manifest, you can find it in.

git clone git://github.com/mozilla-b2g/b2g-manifest.git

So when you want to build it for Peak without the manifest it will crash, but you can just get the peak.xml from the previous repository.

./config.sh peak route_for_b2g-manifest/peak.xml

Following the official instructions and doing this for the Peak you will be able to config B2G for your device.

When this is finished you will need to have your device connected to run

./build.sh

Keep in mind you need to create the udev rule as It’s documented in the Mozilla instructions.

When the build is done you can flash it, so having the Android SDK correctly installed and in the PATH, you can just.

./flash.sh

If it doesn’t work(it just freezes in waiting for device) I realised I would need root permissions for one of the commands in the script, the one unlocking the Bootloader, fastboot oem unlock, so If It doesn’t work for you try with…

sudo ./flash.sh

This didnt’t work for me because the bootloader was still locked, so this was what I did to fix that.

adb reboot bootloader
sudo fastboot oem unlock

In the chinese page you can push Vol+ to change the checkbox, once is changed you just push the Power button. That’s it! You have your phone unlocked! :-)

Now we could flash the phone, the OS image has changed, so you need to activate the developer remote debugging again to use the flash script.

Once you do that, you just…

./flash.sh # or sudo ./flash.sh

And that will be it! Have fun!

Note: I couldn’t record the errors I had in the process, sorry, but If you have any doubts don’t hesitate to ask, I will try to answer when I have time.

Geeksphone out of stock, again

javaguirre — 2013-05-03 00:00:00 +0200

It seems the geeksphone is out of stock again! Firefox OS is having the attention it deserves and I’m happy for it.

When I was waiting for the shop to open, I create a small script to know when was opened again, just for fun. If you are eager to get one like I was, maybe you would like to use it. :-)

import requests
import time

WAIT = 600
r = requests.get('http://shop.geeksphone.com')
while True:
    if r.status_code == 200:
        print 'Geeksphone available'
    time.sleep(WAIT)

You can change the print to send you an email for example.

import requests
import time
import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

WAIT = 600
r = requests.get('http://shop.geeksphone.com')
while True:
    if r.status_code == 200:
        server = 'mymachine@localhost'
        client = 'youremail@whatever.com'
        msg = MIMEText('Geeksphone available!')
        msg['Subject'] = 'Important message'
        msg['From'] = server
        msg['To'] = client
        s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
        s.sendmail(server, [client], msg.as_string())
        s.quit()
        break
    time.sleep(WAIT)

If you want to send an email to yourself, install an application like Postfix or Exim for Python to be able to send it.

Continuous Integration, important and fun

javaguirre — 2013-05-02 00:00:00 +0200

Three months ago I installed a server in my place, a month ago I installed my own continuous integration service with Jenkins.

It’s the first time I’m using my own CI service and I couldn’t be happier, I’m saving time and money with this service even when I’m just alone in some of the projects. It helps me being much more careful with my projects and to keep a log of the projects status. I have it here listening in localhost, so It doesn’t have connection to the outside, when I want to see it from the outside I just create a ssh tunnel for that moment.

I have always been very interested in improving my development skills, usually learning new technologies, but I’ve been thinking how to save time and control it this last months and I’m very happy about it. Productivity is always an important matter for a freelance and a difficult one to measure if you don’t have certain discipline. That’s why I’m using Vimwiki and gtimelog every day to control it and create reports of the hours I’m working. My clients want to know too, so I could use the same tool for their reports.

I love the command line and gtimelog is GTK+, so I’m using a tweaked version from Reinout Van Rees to achieve that.

Squid y túnel SSH para estar como en casa, Firefox mediante

javaguirre — 2013-03-25 00:00:00 +0100

Esta semana he puesto a funcionar un proxy vía un servidor en España, al principio fue una tarea ardua, porque no tenía ni idea de lo que necesitaba y no le estaba preguntando los términos correctos a Google, pero tras pelearme y poner en funcionamiento OpenVPN y algunas cosas más me di cuenta que tenía un problema de concepto y que lo que yo necesitaba para ver las motos y la F1 como si estuviera allí era otra cosa.

En Holanda no tenemos televisión en la casa y para ver algo tienes que pagar, mi actual compañía de Internet me ofrecía un paquete por 38.50(IVA de aquí incluido) que es menos que lo que pagaba en Madrid sólo por internet, pero nuestra negativa a no tener televisión es más de convivencia y deshacernos de cosas innecesarias.

Después de entender conceptos y saber lo que necesitaba, montar el proxy para que Firefox entrara con Ip española fue la mar de fácil, voy a comentar aquí lo que se necesita, aunque en muchos lugares podéis encontrar una solucion parecida, eso sí en inglés. El sistema que me sirve a mí es el siguiente:

En el servidor instalar Squid apt-get install squid o pacman -S squid, el paquete puede llamarse también squid3.

La configuración de squid, como sabréis estará normalmente en /etc/squid(3) y no habrá que tocarla mucho, son unas 5000 líneas, pero sin comentar yo tenía poquitas, lo ideal es tener la aplicación escuchando únicamente en localhost por seguridad, y que ssh se encargue de la conexión de los puertos entre el servidor y nuestra máquina local.

Una vez instalado y comprobado que Squid funciona (viendo que el puerto está activo con netstat, mirando con ps ax si el proceso se ha lanzado y si no tenemos ningún firewall incordiando), hacemos el túnel ssh. Si lo pusimos en el puerto por defecto de Squid bastará usar un comando del tipo:

ssh -C2TNvg -L 3128:localhost:3128 usuario@servidor

Si todo ha ido bien podemos probar el proxy con la siguiente orden.

curl --proxy 127.0.0.1:3128 http://javaguirre.net

Si no hay ningún problema recibirás el html de la página principal de esta web.

Una vez funcione la llamada curl podemos introducir los datos del proxy en la configuración de Firefox. Elegimos Preferencias, Avanzado, Configuración en Conexión y dentro Configuración Manual en Firefox, en el SOCKS y en HTTP Host tenemos que meter 127.0.0.1 y el puerto el 3128. También se puede poner las mismas opciones (Ip, puerto) en SSL y FTP si queremos usar el proxy para esos servicios.

Con esto ya tenemos el proxy funcionando y deberíamos poder acceder a las webs que queramos. :-P

Referencias:

https://calomel.org/firefox_ssh_proxy.html

/dev/haag meeting and Gitlab

javaguirre — 2013-02-25 00:00:00 +0100

Last Friday I had the opportunity to go to my first /dev/haag meeting, It is a really serious and well organized event with well-prepared talks.

The first one was about Reverse Launching and Gitlab, Sytse Sijbrandij gave us an interesting talk about trying to get feedback even before starting to ship anything, just feeding discussion about a possible market and checking the interest of people in that project in case it would came to reality.

The second one was about the beautiful RijksMuseum new website, Elaine Oliver gave us a talk about how important is to be responsive nowadays and their approach to get it for this site.

The last talk was about a topic I’m concern about, DrWhax tried to immerse us in the world of cryptography in Internet and told us about the Cryptoparties and a more securized world.

It was interesting to talk about Gitlab and its possibilities with Sytse, I had a really good time there and I will repeat next time for sure.

I also got some conclusions about what we are missing in Wadobo without a real project of our own, I think we need to improve that, explore options and try to put more efforts in our projects and less in consulting.

After FOSDEM 2013

javaguirre — 2013-02-16 00:00:00 +0100

This year has been my first time at FOSDEM. I liked the experience but I think I could have enjoyed it more with a community behind, I think this kind of event has more meaning when you are part of a FLOSS community, otherwise you are not enjoying all that offers.

In general the focus of the conferences has been mobile development(Firefox OS and others) and I missed more Hardware content, I am very interested in robotics and it would be good if talks about Open Hardware and 3d printers could have taken place, I understand that’s not anybody’s fault, but I wanted to point it out.

FOSDEM has increased my interest in contributing in a big project, concretely Mozilla, I think there are a lot of interesting stuff to do and learn there and it’s a great place to improve skills as a developer.

I’m very interested in C++, It’s a logical step for me, to start doing something with this language to be able to contribute in more different and meaningful projects.

Good experience, I think we will repeat next year, hopefully. :-)

If you want more, Danigm has written much more and detailed than me in his blog(ES).

Playing with Bootstrap tour, Anchors for navigation and onShown event

javaguirre — 2013-02-04 00:00:00 +0100

Today I have been finishing the integration of Bootstrap tour in our AngularJS application. I was having a problem with navigation with the path element in the steps because they does not support anchors for navigation, so I did a little pull request to fix that to my needs.

The second problem I had was the position of popovers, I wanted to change it after it was shown and I didn't found a good event to cover my needs in the documentation. Although checking the code I fond an onShown event I’m using to fix the position of some of the steps. The solution would be something like this.

var tour = new Tour({
    onShown: function (tour) {
        if(tour._current === 0 || tour._current === null) {
            //do something for the first step
        }
        else if(tour._current == 4) {
            //do something for the fourth step
        }
    }
});

Checking Boostrap Tour

javaguirre — 2013-01-31 00:00:00 +0100

Today we have been started using Bootstrap Tour, interesting stuff. It seems to be easy to create tours for your site with it, but I couldn't get it working perfectly yet.

It’s developed with Coffeescript and has some good events too.

It uses localStorage or cookies to store the current step of the tour and can navigate through your site when you go further in it.

I have some trouble with the integration with my Angular app, something normal, and I have fixed a little bug too, we had time for everything. :-)

There are some things to finish in our integration, I hope we could contribute more in the project.

Avoiding nodes overlapping in d3 trees

javaguirre — 2013-01-30 00:00:00 +0100

This is a simple example to avoid overlapping between siblings in a d3 tree.

I have been working a lot with d3 trees lately and dynamic node resizing, which is cool to have a complex representation for you data.

When using simple d3 trees with different node sizes, they sometimes overlap with each other. I knew there is a separation method, but I couldn’t get it working for my case, so using an example designed for d3 force element I could adapt to my current simple tree.

function collide(node, node_sibling) {
  var r = node.size,
      n1y1 = node.x - r,
      n1y2 = node.x + r;
  var r2 = node_sibling.size,
      n2y1 = node_sibling.x - r2,
      n2y2 = node_sibling.x + r2;
  result = (n1y1 < n2y2 && n1y1 > n2y1) || (n1y2 > n2y2 && n1y2 < n2y1);

  return result;
}

The size property doesn’t exist in nodes, so it will be whatever property you want to control the size of them.

I’m just checking in one dimension (x) because I want to control only siblings in my tree and they are aligned across the y axis. You could do the same with the y property in this function.

This kind of function could be approximately the same for other d3 elements.

To use it in a tree we could use it inside a forEach loop in nodes.

function detectCollisions(nodes) {
  nodes.forEach(function(d, index) {
    for (var i=0; i < siblings.length; i++)
    {
        if(d.id != siblings[i].id) {
            if(collide(d, sibligns[i])) {
                // Do something, like change the position
                // of the current sibling
            }
        }
    }
  });
}

This is it by now, I will get more deeply into it soon if I think there is something worth to comment.

Using SessionAuthentication With Tastypie tests for Django

javaguirre — 2013-01-29 00:00:00 +0100

Today I have been studying more deeply how to create good tests with Tastypie’s alpha version documentation.

It was easy to start if you knew about TestCase and django test Client, but still Tastypie documentation has a lot of blanks in this part.

I was using SessionAuthentication to authenticate my resources and it uses Django sessions in background, so it had to be easy to test it with the ResourceTestCase. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed and we needed to check the code to understand how to do it.

In a real Django app we could use login method from django.test.client.Client, and I thought tastypie.test.TestApiClient could be inheriting from it, but because you can have different kinds of authentication it wasn’t the right choice for the Tastypie api test client architecture.

If we read TestApiClient’s __init__ we can see it has a client attribute, instantiating from django.client.Client.

class TestApiClient(object):
    def __init__(self, serializer=None):
        """
        Sets up a fresh ``TestApiClient`` instance.

        If you are employing a custom serializer, you can pass the class to the
        ``serializer=`` kwarg.
        """
        self.client = Client()
        self.serializer = serializer

        if not self.serializer:
            self.serializer = Serializer()

With this in mind and following the same idea we could just do this in our tests.

from tastypie.test import ResourceTestCase, TestApiClient


class ExampleResourceTest(ResourceTestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.api_client = TestApiClient()
        self.get_credentials()
        self.example = {'title': 'My Data'}

    def get_credentials(self):
        result = self.api_client.client.login(username='myuser',
                                              password='secret')
        return result

    def test_post_project(self):
        self.assertHttpCreated(self.api_client.post('/api/v1/example/',
                                                    format='json',
                                                    data=self.example))

Now we can build authenticated requests for tests using SessionAuthentication in Tastypie.

Easy after all. :-)