- music 5
- Java 2
- Mobile Phones 2
- Software Development 2
- Home Automation 2
- Cloud 2
- Blog 1
- Android 1
- Software 1
- Networks 1
- CI/CD 1
- HowTo 1
music
A song a day - Day 5 - Elbow - The Stops
A couple of friends have nominated me on FaceBook to post a song every day for seven days, and nominate someone each day to do the same. This is Day 4.
A song a day - Day 4 - Squarepusher - Beep Street
A couple of friends have nominated me on FaceBook to post a song every day for seven days, and nominate someone each day to do the same. This is Day 4.
A song a day - Day 3 - Lewis Parker - Communications (Feat. Jehst)
A couple of friends have nominated me on FaceBook to post a song every day for seven days, and nominate someone each day to do the same. This is Day 3.
A song a day - Day 2 - Cat Stevens - Where do the children play
A couple of friends have nominated me on FaceBook to post a song every day for seven days, and nominate someone each day to do the same. This is Day 2.
A song a day - Day 1 - Nuyorican Soul - I am the black gold of the sun (4 Hero Remix)
Hello!
Java
London Java Community
Just a quick post to say that the London Java Community (LJC) now has its own website. Barry Cranford has set the site up to publicise the group, which is rapidly growing in size, and its activities and events. Barry has done a great job with the community so far and continues to provide great events for Java technologists.
How to fix the ‘Cannot start Ecmt Manager’ error when using Java 1.6
The ECMT manager which forms part of the S60 MIDP SDK doesn’t work out of the box with Java 1.6 (6.0). In this situation the error ‘Cannot start ECMT Manager’ is displayed when attempting to open the manager.
Mobile Phones
Android for Java Developers event
Last night I attended the ‘Android for Java Developers’ event which was put on by the London Java Community. Reto Meier, an Android advocate from Google took us through the basics of the platform and covered topics including IDE support, some of the libraries available, how applications are assembled and signed and also provided some information on the Dalvik virtual machine.
How to fix the ‘Cannot start Ecmt Manager’ error when using Java 1.6
The ECMT manager which forms part of the S60 MIDP SDK doesn’t work out of the box with Java 1.6 (6.0). In this situation the error ‘Cannot start ECMT Manager’ is displayed when attempting to open the manager.
Software Development
Automatically configuring Git based on remote repository URL
As an independent software engineer I often find myself working with clients who use different Git providers or who might require me to have a client-specific Git configuration. For a long time this resulted in me having a complex and difficult to maintain Git configuration, and some really hacky shell aliases which did some on the fly Git reconfiguration depending on which repository I was in… Not nice!
Interacting with a reCAPTCHA in Selenium
This one was a bit of a headscratcher for me so I thought I’d share it here in case it helps anyone else.
Home Automation
Getting hold of Bulb energy usage data (part 2).
About this time last year I posted an entry where I detailed my ideas for using the Samsung SmartThings ecosystem to get hold of my home’s Gas and Electrical usage data. Since then I have developed a simple SmartThings App which achieves this, so thought I’d share the details.
Getting hold of Bulb energy usage data (part 1).
Over the last year or so I have been slowly building up a collection of home energy metrics. Things like boiler runtime stats, heating zone temperature and demand etc, they have been incredibly useful in helping me understand the various characteristics (heat up time, temperature loss rate etc) of the different rooms in the house.
Cloud
AWS: Using a private ECR pull-through cache with ECS
I recently posted about Connecting to a private ECR repository using VPC Endpoints, which is a really useful approach when you want to keep your traffic to ECR within your VPC and not have it go out over the public internet.
AWS: Connecting to a private ECR repository using VPC Endpoints
Here’s the scenario: You’ve created a private ECR repository, you’ve uploaded an image to it and now you want to run that image as an ECS task. But… you don’t want ECS going out over the public internet to the ECR API. Instead you want to keep the traffic inside your VPC.
Blog
Moving domains…
It’s time for a tidy up - I have decided to stop using the mredd.co.uk domain, which was bought for me as a birthday present many years ago. Instead I’m going to move everything over to eddgrant.com, so this blog will be moving from http://blog.mredd.co.uk to http://www.eddgrant.com/blog.
Android
Android for Java Developers event
Last night I attended the ‘Android for Java Developers’ event which was put on by the London Java Community. Reto Meier, an Android advocate from Google took us through the basics of the platform and covered topics including IDE support, some of the libraries available, how applications are assembled and signed and also provided some information on the Dalvik virtual machine.
Software
Ignoring non-source files in Eclipse
Having recently started using Eclipse an initial gripe of mine was that there didn’t seem to be any way to tell the IDE how to identify different types of files, specifically there appeared to be no mechanism of identifying and excluding ‘non-source’ files such as derived or distributable files. This causes several annoyances one of which appears in the ‘Open Resource’ search function (CTRL + SHIFT + R); when executed this function searches the entire Workspace for files matching a given pattern, this causes any files which are duplicated during distribution to appear multiple times in search results, once in the source folder and once in the duplicated location.
Networks
How to allow ICMP ping on a Unifi Security Gateway WAN Interface
I recently signed up with thinkbroadband for free Broadband Quality Meter (BQM) service. Once configured they send ICMP ping requests to my WAN IP address and collect the data to provide me with a picture of my broadband availability/ latency etc. They do all this for free and surface the data in a useful graph, which can be used to interpret various behaviours of my broadband connection, including the reliability of my provider!
CI/CD
Automating Ubuntu 21.04 Server image builds with Packer and Virtualbox
I recently decided to write some tests for one of my Ansible roles that I’ve been making a lot of use of. The plan was to use Ansible Molecule to apply the role and drive the tests. Reading the Molecule docs this seems to be a fairly straight forward task for the majority of cases, essentially you spin up a Docker container, provision your role and run your tests. Unfortunately in this case the role I wanted to test was responsible for managing Docker containers, so there was no easy way to run the role itself within a Docker container without causing some sort of Docker-in-Docker inception!
HowTo
Migrating YouTube Music from GSuite to GMail
I’m a long time user of YouTube Music. I love that it’s able to reach in to the incredible library of electronic music that has been uploaded to YouTube over the past few decades. I also love that it allows users to upload their own music and have been starting to curate an uploaded library songs that aren’t available on streaming platforms. This feature has allowed me to slowly but surely upload old CDs which are precious to me (band demos, white labels etc). The beauty of it all is that I then have my entire library available to me wherever I am, even in the car via Android Auto. I love this!