WebDevelopment, ColdFusion, Railo, JS, Database and Tech-related by the Co-Founder and CEO of tunesBag.com

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Subversion access without Apache: svn+ssh

I was always used to access subversion repositories through https, may it have been my own repositories or projects hosted on e.g. sourceforge.

By chance I realized that there is a much better, easier and more secure way to do that: svn+ssh

Just enter e.g. svn+ssh://username@subversionhost/repository as remote location and eclipse will automatically create a tunnel for you to this location and you don't have to run an apache on that host any more!

ANT is working fine with this type of location as well (although you might need to update some libraries) and I think ssh-compression is enabled because files will be transferred faster than with the default http(s) transport.

Sunday 13 February 2011

Root + Update HTC Desire to 2.2 the simple way

I've switched to a HTC Desire as my main phone some time ago and despite the fact that Froyo (Android 2.2) is around now for quite some time I have not received an update (Software update always told me that there is no new version available for my phone although I own an unbranded and unlocked model). The big deal with 2.2 is the WiFi hotspot mode for me, a feature I was using on a regular basis on my iPhone (Tethering) when I'm on the road.

There are several discussions (fire up Google) on this topic and the advice is to root the device and update the system with a custom ROM. While I'm a fan of playing around with devices and programs most of the time I'm not really happy with doing that with my phone. Why? I just want to use it for phone calls, check my emails, use some apps and browse the internet. No need to apply some specials hacks to my device.

Guess what - it's not that easy to find a firmware that's just doing that, finally I came accross this Pre-rooted Stock Froyo ROM, it's pretty much the default HTC firmware and updating to this version is really simple (You can download the original HTC firmware as well as it seems).

Just follow these three steps:
  • Root your phone using unrevoked3
    No mess with gold cards (at least for me), just download the app and run it (Further Instructions)!
  • Download the ROM from the source above and place it on the SD card
    Connect your phone using the USB cable and mount your SD card as drive
  • Get ROM Manager from the Google Market (it's free)
    Click on "Update ROM" in the program and select the ZIP file which you've just copied to the SD card - the program will reboot your phone several times and perform the update.
The update procedure took me 20 minutes, the research 2 hours I guess ;-)

Most important, now I'm able to enjoy Froyo and the mobile hotspot feature.

A message towards Google - Please offer pre-build default Android versions which can be applied to any phone without any hassles using a simple "update" button like in iTunes, I'm sure most of the people are interested in a genuine platform and not a provider/vendor branded one with "special features".