Just answer the F*#king question » Uncategorized

Serve JAD files OTA with PHP

Sime — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:14:41 +0000

Some handy code to dynamtically serve JAD files for OTA installation. The below script sets the appropriate headers types, also tidies up the JAD file removing stray characters which can cause issues and setting the correct file paths internally.

Place the PH script in a root directory as serveJAD.php. Place your JAR and JAD files in a subdirectory /J2ME

Call the script by serveJAD.php?format=J2ME&file={jad minus extension} or you can use the Apache rewrite below and call as /J2ME/file.jad

serveJAD.php?format=J2ME&file=game

or with Apache rewrite

/J2ME/game.jad


	$format   = $_GET["format"];
	$file     = $_GET["file"].".jad";
    header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate,no-transform" );
    header("Pragma: no-cache" );
	header("Content-type: text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor");
	header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$file.";");
	$jad = file_get_contents("./".$format."/".$file);
	$lines = explode("\n",$jad);
	$final = "";
	foreach($lines as $line){
		$line = trim($line);
		if(strlen($line)>0){
			$keypair = explode(": ",$line);
			if($keypair[0]=='MIDlet-Jar-URL' || stristr($keypair[0],"RIM-COD-URL")){
				$url = trim($keypair[1]);
				if(!stristr($url,"http:")){
					$keypair[1] = "http://".$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]."/$format/".$url;
				}
			}else if($keypair[0]=='MIDlet-Jar-Size'){
				$keypair[1] =  filesize("./".$format."/".$_GET["file"].".jar");
			}
 
			$line = join(": ",$keypair);
			$l = trim($line);
			if(!empty($final))$final.="\n";
			$final.=$l;
		}
	}
	print($final);
?>

RewriteEngine On RewriteRule /J2ME/(.*)\.jad /serveJAD.php?format=J2ME&file=$1

You can also use this to build automatic index pages, using this as dir.php?format=J2ME


	$format   = $_GET["format"];
	$scanthis = "./".$format;
 	$scanlisting = scandir($scanthis);
    $dirlisting = array();
    foreach($scanlisting as $key => $value){
		if(stristr($value,"jad")){
			$name = explode(".",$value);
			$dirlisting[$name[0]] = $name[0];
		}
	}
	ksort($dirlisting);
?>
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

"apps.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
"Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Application listing



 foreach($dirlisting as $name){
?>
"//.jad">print($name);?>


}
?>

Jerky video / flash on laptops.

Sime — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:01:41 +0000

Ok, this one took me ages to work out. Acer laptop had been running fine for ages, then suddenly any video playback would be jerky after about 2 or 3 minutes, along with Flash applications going slow. Youtube unwatchable, Quicktime very patchy and intermittent.

No spyware, no virus, no random processes. Drivers all up to date, firmware up to date.

After much hunting, reinstalls, spyware checking etc the simple answer turned out to be the laptop was overheating. So ( and this is specific to my Acer, but look for a similar software solution on other providers ), I turned down the speed of my ATI graphics processor from the Cataylst Control Center, and bam!, back up working fine ( look under Power Play, set the setting for ‘Plugged In’ as optimal battery ). For day to day use ( no large 3D applications ) works the same as maximum performance.

Also, give the fan a clean with a compressed air duster. The Acer only has a single fan hole under the chassis, and can get very dust filled. Clogged vent, no airflow, high temperature.

Some handy tools to check whats going on:

Speed Fan, gives you current temperatures of your various chips. With the Acer, if the core is getting above 70, you will possibly start having issues. You can also use the EpowerManagement to lower the core CPU speed ( and thus temperature ), however, be aware of display issues with multiple users.

Process Explorer, an advanced Windows Task Manager. Even better, it shows DPCs ( Deferred procedure calls ) - why? Well, too many of these and something is wrong somewhere between your software and hardware, and overheating CAN cause these issues. You will always have SOME, just run the video or flash, and if it really increases when the video start to go bad and you may have heat problems.

Anyway, this not may be THE solution, but not all performance issues are software, virus or spyware related.

Acer EPowerManagement Issues

Sime — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:49:09 +0000

So, you can’t get your Acer laptop to keep a nice bright display. You set it nice and bright, then a few seconds later it goes dim again. You change the profile in EPowerManagement, goes bright then dark again. Doesn’t seem to happen all the time. Hair pulling time.

Unfortunatley, your looking at an issue with the EPowerManagement software, and probably the issue is when another user is logged on to the laptop at the same time. The solution … err .. sorry, there is none. You just have to uninstall the EPowermanagement option from Add / Remove programs. In all honestly, not a major loss.

Converting a Midlet to a COD file for OTA installation

Sime — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:01:19 +0000

God, RIM sucks. Thought I’d mention that. I hate Blackberries with passion. Really.

Now, if you are converting a Midlet to a COD file, you will need to use the infamous rapc tool provided with the RIM JDE ( in the bin directory if you are looking for it ) . Now, along with issues with multiple versions, bugs and what have you, one big pain is if you want the RIM version of the JAD file created for OTA installation, rapc doesn’t give you all the parameters if you use the -midlet paramater. If you DON’T use it, you get a nice JAD but the COD will not work.

So, to get around this, I created a small app to extract the RIM specfic information from the COD file generated by rapc.

Generated the COD using

rapc import="%jde%\lib\net_rim_api.jar" codename=%jar% -midlet jad=%jar%.jad %jar%.jar

where %jde% is your JDE path, %jar% is the name of your module.

Extract JAD information from a COD file

To run:

java -jar cod2jad.jar {cod file} {module name}

This will dump the extra information to stdout, so you can just append it to your JAD file with >>, ie

java -jar cod2jad.jar path.cod myapp >> path.jad

Remember, once you have done this, open the COD file in winzip ( or whatever ) and extract the seperate elements to your webserver. Once note, if you COD is only made of one module, this will probably fail ( sorry ).

Oh, and if you are using Netbeans components, and/or getting verification errors, try turning down your obfusication level in your project - rapc hates the splash screen and wait screen when obfusicated for some reason. The other option is to try including the net_rim_api.jar in your project ( but don’t include in the package ).

And even nicer of me, here is the source code:

package com.magnetmobile.tools.rim;
 
/**
 *
 * @author Sime when drunk ... yay drunk code
 */
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.util.jar.*;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.security.MessageDigest;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import java.util.zip.ZipEntry;
import java.util.zip.ZipInputStream;
 
public class Cod2Jad {
 
    public static void main(String args[])throws NoSuchAlgorithmException {
 
        FileInputStream fis = null;
        try {
            int count = 0;
            if (args.length != 2) {
                System.out.println("usage: {path to COD} {Module name}");
                System.exit(-1);
            }
            Hashtable htSizes = new Hashtable();
            Hashtable htJarContents = new Hashtable();
            fis = new FileInputStream(args[0]);
 
 
            BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(fis);
            ZipInputStream zis = new ZipInputStream(bis);
            ZipEntry ze = null;
            while ((ze = zis.getNextEntry()) != null) {
                if (ze.isDirectory()) {
                    continue;
                }
 
                int size = (int) ze.getSize();
                // -1 means unknown size.
                if (size == -1) {
                    size = ((Integer) htSizes.get(ze.getName())).intValue();
                }
                byte[] b = new byte[(int) size];
                int rb = 0;
                int chunk = 0;
                while (((int) size - rb) > 0) {
                    chunk = zis.read(b, rb, (int) size - rb);
                    if (chunk == -1) {
                        break;
                    }
                    rb += chunk;
                }
                htJarContents.put(ze.getName(), b);
                process(ze, count, b);
                count++;
            }
 
            System.out.println("RIM-COD-Module-Name:" + args[1]);
            System.out.println("RIM-COD-Module-Dependencies: net_rim_cldc");
            System.out.println("RIM-COD-Creation-Time: 1202924527");
 
            zis.close();
            bis.close();
            fis.close();
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            System.out.println("Could not access file "+args[0]);
            System.exit(-1);
        } finally {
            try {
                fis.close();
            } catch (IOException ex) {
                Logger.getLogger(Cod2Jad.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
            }
        }
    }
 
    private static void process(Object obj, int count,byte[] data) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException,
UnsupportedEncodingException {
        ZipEntry entry = (ZipEntry) obj;
        String name = entry.getName();
        long size = entry.getSize();
        long compressedSize = entry.getCompressedSize();
 
        String output = "RIM-COD-URL" + (count > 0 ? ("-" + count) : "") + ": " + name;
        System.out.println(output);
 
        output = "RIM-COD-Size" + (count > 0 ? ("-" + count) : "") + ": " + compressedSize;
        System.out.println(output);
 
        output = "RIM-COD-SHA1" + (count > 0 ? ("-" + count) : "") + ": ";
        output +=  SHA1(data, true);
        System.out.println(output);
    }
 
    private static String convertToHex(byte[] data, boolean spaced) {
        StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer();
        for (int i = 0; i <
                data.length; i++) {
            int halfbyte = (data[i] >>> 4) & 0x0F;
            int two_halfs = 0;
            do {
                if ((0 <= halfbyte) && (halfbyte <= 9)) {
                    buf.append((char) ('0' + halfbyte));
                } else {
                    buf.append((char) ('a' + (halfbyte - 10)));
                }
 
                halfbyte = data[i] & 0x0F;
            } while (two_halfs++ < 1);
 
            if (spaced) {
                buf.append(' ');
            }
        }
 
        return buf.toString();
    }
 
    public static String SHA1(byte[] data, boolean spaced)
            throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, UnsupportedEncodingException {
        MessageDigest md;
        md =
                MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1");
        byte[] sha1hash = new byte[40];
        md.update(data, 0, data.length);
        sha1hash =
                md.digest();
        return convertToHex(sha1hash, spaced);
    }
}