Rebar/Git Error and Solution

Just a quick one… for my benefit as well as perhaps yours.

I was trying to use rebar to pull in the dependencies on one of my Erlang projects but it kept failing with the following type of output;

fatal: could not read Username for 'https://github.com': No such device or address

I believe rebar doesn’t know how to ask for github credentials and I solved this by using the git credentials helper.

git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'

WordPress Upgrade Error – Incompatible Archive Solution

Just a quick post to highlight the solution to a recent WordPress issue I had when trying to upgrade WordPress release using the “Upgrade Automatically” option. The error I was seeing was:

Incompatible Archive.: PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature

Even for someone who may be technically minded this is a little unhelpful… but thankfully the solution (in my case at least) was to free up some space on my hosting account. So it seems that the cause of the issue (or at least one of the causes) is that there was not enough space available for the automatic WordPress upgrade to take place.

Android – Getting apps to appear on the market

When I first started working on Asssist for Gingerbread Design we all knew that we wanted the app to be available across as many devices as possible. We wanted to cover devices with smaller screens and lower densities such as the HTC Wildfire as well as more advanced devices. Little did I know that being able to do this would take so much searching and trial and error.

And even after trying the app out the on the Android emulator with it’s settings to match the Wildfire (which seemed to work OK) when we came to launch the device in the Google Market it seemed that the device wasn’t being displayed to all users.

We were told our app didn't appear on the market
We were told our app didn't appear on the market

Then, after weeks of searching I came across a little gem of info (sorry can’t remember where)… all you have to do is include the following in your project’s AndroidManifest.xml file.


This seemed to work for me and I hope it does for you too.

Android emulator not installing apps – a solution

During my revisit to app building for the Android platform I started to notice that the emulator (when using Eclipse) was a bit hit and miss when it came to loading the freshly compiled applications onto it. After much surfing on the web I had found that some folk had seen partial succes when killing the adb server. I played with this and I too had some partial success. Then after much trial and error I struck upon a solution that works everytime… it’s not pretty but it does do the job.

The Solution – Installing apps on the emulator

So what I do is this;

  1. Start eclipse
  2. Start the emulator… let it get to the point where it is fully loaded (i.e. at the home screen)
  3. From the command prompt kill the adb server with the command adb kill-server. This adb command is in my C:Program File/Android/app-inventor-extras folder on my windows setup (your may be different)
  4. The above command will cause eclipse to try 11 times to re-initialise the emuulator link. While this is happening (and after) I click the run button… I do this every second until the output in the console tells me that my app is being installed.
  5. Voila!

And that’s it… like I said it’s not pretty but it does mean that my apps install onto my emulator. Note this only needs to be done once, perhaps to set up the link between eclipse and the adb.