avp::ptr weblog

This article describes how to setup a new emulator which allows to install apps which use Google Play Services.

Recently, Android 4.3 (API level 18) has been published. As former releases it contains system images for ARM and Intel Atom (x86). When creating an emulator via the Android Virtual Device Manager one can choose to target either the “plain” API level or include Google APIs. The “plain” configuration can benefit from both hardware acceleration options (ARM and  Intel Atom). Running such a virtual device is quite comfortable as it behaves similar to a hardware device. The Google API targets however do not allow to use Intel Atom architecture.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sadly Eclipse ships with a broken color theme when it comes to autocompletion and tooltips. I cannot tell if the problem is limited to Ubuntu Precise, however, it is worth getting fixed immediately. The following screenshots illustrate the broken color settings in both situations. The tooltip window shows up with a black background color and blue links.

Eclipse – Tooltip with default colors settings

When autocompletion popup appears the first suggestions is not readable at all.

Eclipse – Autocompletion with default colors settings

So, here is what you need to do to fix the colors. Read the rest of this entry »

Some days ago, at July 8, TeX Live 2012 has been released. In the meantime, I also updated to Ubuntu 12.04. (Precise) but I did not find the time to install TeX Live. I am happy to report that there is nothing new to learn regarding the installation. You can straight follow the very same instructions I posted earlier for TeX Live 2011. Have fun.

Update: I noticed that TeX Live 2012 has been made available via apt-get. I recommend testing it out (I haven’t done so yet).

It took me a while to find out how to install the latest TeX Live 2011 package on my Ubuntu 10.10 system. So this is a short summary of my success story.

First of all, it is worth mentioning that the default PPA installs TeX Live 2009.

As of July 2011 the texlive package that ships with Ubuntu (TeX Live 2009) is lagging two years behind the current TeX Live release (TeX Live 2011). If you want the latest version of TeX Live, you can install it directly from the TeX Live website (this does not interfere with the packages in Ubuntu).

Though, it is not too difficult to manually install TeX Live 2011 from the sources following these instructions. In this process, I decided to download the TexLive package via rsync since it can be a rather big installation.

After successfully installing TeX Live itself, I set up the latest version of Kile (which is 2.1.0 as of today) following this description.

UPDATE!

Please mind that there is TexLive 2012 as described in a follow up article. There is also a PPA available to avoid the manual setup.

To mount an NTFS partition under Ubuntu you need to edit the configuration in /etc/fstab. Though, when successfully mounted there still is a good chance that the access rights to the partition are not as you want them to be. You cannot changed them with chmod command. Instead you need to set the umask for the mounted partition. In general umask 007 would be satisfying. But in case you run a service that reads from the partition as an anonymous user umask 006 is needed, e.g. an apache web server.

UUID=1973945397942 /media/data ntfs defaults,umask=006,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

You can find more information on umask here. This article was inspired by this post by Andrew Martin.

Today I finally took the time to ask Google how I can avoid that I hit the touchpad once in a while when I type something on the keyboard. As one would expect I am not the only person who is stressed by this. But there is an easy solution. Just install Touchpad-Indicator!