I just wanted to do a little shout out to any developers, to say that the early bird ticket deadline is fast approaching for this years PHPNW conference.

Tickets have been on sale for a while now at £58 (ex VAT) but this will go up on the 12th August to £75 so if your thinking of going, now’s the time to get your ticket.

For more information or to book your ticket goto http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw10/.

Update [5/8/10]:
FYI The early bird ticket closing date has been extended to Saturday 4th September.

Please note: This Guide is for people with an Orange Branded Hero (the Graphite version, with the Orange sticker on the back) but should work for everyone else too (but don’t flash the orange rom!)

All Credit and thanks go to the wonderful developers at XDA and VillainRom.

Disclaimer

While this process worked perfectly fine for me, and  I have done if 4 times now, I take no responsibility if you turn your phone into a  paperweight while trying to do this. If your not comfortable with the risks, please ask a friend or wait for HTC and Orange to release *snigger* an official *lol* update instead.

Setting up your Hero

To get around the various software locks you need to be running the 2.73.61.5 version of the rom. If your using a higher version you wont be able to flash the recovery image.

I had a few problems downgrading my firmware as my Laptop was running Windows 7 so I kept getting Error [170]: USB CONNECTION ERROR and also when it did occasionally reboot into the Bootloader it just timed out trying to re-establish a connection.

After a lot of frustration, I managed to find and resolve the issue, here’s how. If you have an XP machine you can skip this part…

1) Download the Sync drivers from here

2) Open Device Manager on you pc and expand the Android device driver tab. Then run the Rom updater

When the phone reboots into the Bootloader, check the Device Manager to see if a Yellow ! appears over the Bootloader Driver
If it does you have the same problem I had, otherwise this may not work but is worth a try (you can always uninstall it it doesn’t).

3) While the phone is still in the bootloader, right-click on the device and choose update driver.
click on install from disk or known location, and browse to the drivers you downloaded.
You should then see a list of available driver, (I saw 3) one was called Bootloader but don’t pick that as it didn’t work for me, the other two had the same name but different version numbers, I picked the highest version.

(sorry for the vagueness of this step, am at work and cant quite remember, will update the post when I get home)

4) Click Next to install the driver and we’re done.

If you manage to do this within the Bootloader’s 60 second time-out, the updater will kick in and start flashing the rom. If you have hit the time-out just, restart your phone and re-run the updater.

You should now be successfully downgraded.

Flashing the recovery image

I’m not going to write the process for this step as there is a wonderful guide over at www.roothtchero.co.uk which is what I followed.
If the site ever comes down I will update this post, but by then I don’t think anyone will be using a HTC Hero. Just follow the guide, step by step until you can successfully load the recovery screen by holding the HOME and POWER buttons to turn your phone on.

Installing Android 2.2

I tried a few different 2.1 roms after I had installed recovery and none of them felt right, a couple were sluggish, the stock was ok but didnt have root so I settled for VillainROM12 which is based on the official 2.1 Hero update.

This is however a 2.1 based rom and when last week I saw this announcement on Twitter, I thought Yes please so I popped over to the VillainRom forum to download and install it. (the current version at time of writing is 1.1.1)

To install is easy, download the rom and rename update.zip.
copy the file to the root of your SD card and reboot your phone into recovery.

Perform a full wipe of both data and dalvik cache (ext is you are using it) and then flash the rom

All that’s left is to download your favourite apps and enjoy the FroYo goodness….

Note: I will update this post with some pictures when I get home tonight…

Posted from Manchester, England, United Kingdom.

Yesterday Mozilla announced the build has reached BETA and is ready for the more cautious developer to start playing with it. Firefox 4.0 comes with lots of new bells and whistles, you can find a full feature list here, most notable the new UI design and enhancements in <hmtl5> and CSS3. There are also lots of new developer api’s for us to play with including websockets and local indexeddb’s.

If your already surfing the beta channel wave, you should be able to just “upgrade now” although my work machine didn’t find it so had to install it manually. Those of you running a stable realease or want to install manually can do so via the usual beta release channel.

For more information on please read the Mozilla Announcement on their blog.

This new system basically allows them to push anything Googlebot finds into the main index in seconds rather than weeks.

Previously Googlebot would crawl the web, find a site, then submit its content to another system for processing. This other system would then sort and process the content and work out what its all about. It would then pass it to another system for inclusion in the index. This was a time consuming process and was also done in batches, which means your site would have to wait for all the other sites in the same batch to be processed before being submitted to the index.

The new system is different, rather than doing things in large batches, it will work on smaller portions, more portions at the same time and submit them all to the index straight away, allowing users of the search engine to see information much much quicker, and this is just the start!

Image copyright of Google

There are several rumours floating around about what lies in store next for Google users and their shot of caffeine.  But for now we will have to wait and just enjoy our new “real-time” search results.

You can real the full article on the Google Webmaster Blog

The main reason for this is because, Fx3.7 consisted primarily of “Out of Process Plugins” which as most of you know has been implemented in Fx3.6.4. This has pushed developers to bypass the 3.7 release and focus on pushing out Firefox 4.0, hopefully by November.

A couple of things that jump out to me are that there will be no more modal dialogs and software updates will switch to background tasks. This is to help improve the user experience as they are two of the main pause points in a using Firefox.

The background process updates I can understand, Chrome has shown that this is by far the best way to push out updates and bug fixes to users and ensure that everybody is running the same version across the board. The removal of modal dialog however Im not too sure about.

There are also the expected updates, the new chrome (browser layout, not Google browser) redesign, which has removed many of the less used parts of the interface as found during a Test Pilot back in March and from developer feedback.

Firefox 4.0 UI concept - May 2010

Something Im really excited about are the developer tools. In particular the console. Beltzner described it as a Quake style console, pulled from the top of the browser, as an advanced view source. With the ability to edit css/dom elements, and make other tweaks on the fly. They will continue to support Firebug and will also add a couple of other api’s to allow us to access rendering times and memory usage from within our apps with should help a lot with development and optimisation.

If you using Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch Mike Beltzner presentation.
It is almost an hour long but I do recommend watching or at least listening, to what Mozilla believe is the future of Firefox and the direction they are going.

For more on this story, head over to Mike Beltzner blog post, view the slides and watch the presentation.

First thing the post suggest is to check out Site Performance in Webmaster tools, so off I went. When this first appeared in the Labs section of webmaster tools it was updating pretty regularly and was quite useful and as the graph shows helped me tweak a few things and improve the load time of the server. But it hasn’t been updated in a while now so isn’t very relevant or useful to me.

Next thing it suggests is to install Page Speed for Firebug and test my site. So thats what I did and I got Page Speed Score: 93/100! which is pretty impressive. So I thought next, 7% to go, what can I do to get to 100/100. Nothing it seems… All the suggestions the tool gave me were unsolvable and prevent anyone from getting top marks.

The first suggestion is to Leverage browser caching,
the file it advises me need to do this too is “http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js” which I cant do anything about.

The next suggestion is to Defer loading of JavaScript, “66.4% of the JavaScript loaded by this page had not been invoked by the time the onload handler completed” is smugly informs me.
- http://gavtaylor.co.uk  24 functions uncalled of 25 total functions
- http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js 154 functions uncalled of 243 total functions.

On closer examination the functions it reports on my site are actually from Firebug, which must be open for the test to run? catch 22 there!
And the analytic code again is from Google and I cant do anything about that.

The final suggestion is to Use efficient CSS selectors,
http://gavtaylor.co.uk/core/styles/styles.css has 12 very inefficient rules, 27 inefficient rules, and 0 potentially inefficient uses of :hover out of 101 total rules.

This I can do something about and when I get a moment I will be re-coding my CSS file. But this wont improve my results more than 1 or 2 points.

So this unreachable target of 100/100 appears to be impossible. I could remove the Google code from my site which would resolve the Google plug-in issue but I cant run the test without having Firebug open so there will always be 24 out of 25 uncalled functions reported keeping me away from that 100/100 score.

So… will I be sitting in that tree, doing things I should not be?… No, not until they fix the issues with their testing tools anyway…

With this in mind, this last week or so I have been dipping my toes into the wonderful world of native Android development.I have gone for the setup advised in the SDK documentation, Eclipse with the ADT plugin. Quickly passing over the Hello World app, as a developer its a task  I must complete before doing anything else, I started on my first application. I decided that for my first attempt I would stick to something I know and rebuild a web based tool I help develop for a well known Manchester server hosting company.

Its been a long time since I last did anything in Java so was a little rusty, but after a few lunchtimes and couple of late nights I have managed to cobble together something that resembles and could just about pass for an Android Application.

So what is it you ask, this wonderful app you have been building up (wont shut up about if you follow me on twitter)? Well I can now tell you, its a speedtest. Not for how fast your mobile connects to the internet, I’ll leave that to the guys at speedtest.net, but to test the speed your website can deliver files to your visitors, now I cant provide you with a link to download and install it as its not really finished and as its not an officially sanctioned app, but I can show a couple of screen-shots from the current alpha version.

This is probably as far as this application goes, unless the boss asks me to continue with it, as although its quite basic and there isn’t all that much to it, it has served its purpose and helped me to figure out how an application should work, its activity life-cycle and how to correctly put one together.

The next step is to think of that award winning, must have,  how did we live without it  idea that will make me millionaire… any suggestions?

I couldn’t remember when I first noticed they were missing but when ever I checked a working folder on my laptop the tortoise svn icon overlays were missing. When I edited a file the red cross would appear as expected, but the green tick to say a file was up to date or the question mark for non-versioned files were missing, meaning I didn’t know if a file was up to date with the repo head or an ignored/non-versioned file.

This morning I came across a post on stack overflow that suggested modifying the registry to over-right the usual Microsoft default setting cock-up. In Windows, for memory reasons Im guessing, they have limited the number of allowed Shell Icon overlays  to 11. Now at first this seems like a logical way to stop memory abuse in Explorer. But for some stupid reason (most likely so their overlays come first), they are actioned in alphabetical order, so any overlays in position 12+ are ignored. With M being in the middle of the alphabet this results in the majority of these slots being allocated by Microsoft Products. In this case Tortoise SVN (obviously starting with a T) was being pushed out of the allowed slots.

I found this out by doing a search in the registry for ‘ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers’  (NOTE: only open regedit if your comfortable using it, we don’t need to change anything just taking a peek so you should be ok). This reviled that most of the Shell Icon slots were being taken up by something called Microsoft Groove. Not having a clue what this is I turned to a popular search engine to find out.

Microsoft Groove is the name for their multi-user document collaboration tool, which makes sense that it would need some icon overlays as it is essentially the same thing as Tortoise SVN. I don’t do any online document collaboration so re-searched for how to remove it. The Microsoft knowledge base article advised to remove the feature from Office via the add/remove programs control panel but when I looked I couldn’t find anything that mentioned Groove but after a further search or two I found that it has now been renamed to Microsoft SharePoint Workspace, which was listed in my version of Office. I disabled the feature and restarted my laptop and I now have my overlay icons back.

Every year, website developers across the world remove their style-sheets and show off their <body> to help promote web standards. Its a great opportunity to double check and show people that your website is written for and accessible to all.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Until now, you had to verify you owned every sub-domain on a domain before you could use webmaster tools for it, while for most sites this is fine, you verify the www. version, sometimes there are a couple more that need to be done.
for example on my site, I use the non-www domain, also there is a dev. and a api. that also need their own verification meta tag/html file. If I want to use webmaster tools on another sub-domain I have to verify again… this becomes a tiresome process.

Enter the new DNS verification. You now add a TXT record to your dns and it automatically covers any sub-domains you add.
That’s it… done! There is of course the usual dns propagation you have to worry about so it may not be a quick as adding a meta tag, but it defiantly saves time in the long run.

You can find out more by visiting the Google Web master tools or popping over to the Webmaster Central blog.