Bill Farmer

Random thoughts on random subjects

Migrating this blog from Wordpress

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

I have got fed up with Wordpress. It required constant updates, which doesn’t work automatically on Sourceforge developer web, and it’s slow, especially in admin mode. I came across a reference to Hugo while following up on something unrelated, so I decided to investigate. I looked for migration tools, and found two: Exitwp, which reads a Wordpress export xml file and converts to Jeckyll WordPress to Hugo Exporter, which is a Wordpress plugin and exports to Hugo I found a blog post from Justin Dunham documenting migrating his blog.

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Resolving content uris in android

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

If you write an android app that handles images or any other sort of file your app may be required to deal with ‘content’ uris (content://). There is a very useful utility which resolves these into ‘file’ uris (file:///) FileUtils.java. This contains one external reference to LocalStorageProvider, which can be resolved by removing the function isLocalStorageDocument() and references to it. // import com.ianhanniballake.localstorage.LocalStorageProvider; // ... /** * @param uri The Uri to check.

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Handling run time changes in Android

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

Two articles, Handling Configuration Changes and Handling Configuration Changes with Fragments recommend the use of fragments to retain data and background tasks in Android during the life of an app. There are two problems with this: An android fragment is quite a complex heavyweight object to use just for retaining data and possibly a background task, and the fragment management is not simple. Fragments are not retained if the associated activity is discarded by calling finish().

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Using Emacs as an IDE

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

I had to learn Emacs on Unix many years ago as it was at that time the only development environment for Smallworld Magik. Having learnt it, I have stuck with it as it provides a consistent platform for editing source code and building applications in as many computer languages and platforms as I have used and many more I haven’t. It is the only source code editor I have used that always gets the indentation and syntax highlighting right.

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Upgrading a Moto G

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

I got myself a refurbished Moto G phone a while ago. It came with Android Kitkat 4.4.4, complete with Moto bloat. I had already put Cyanogenmod on my tablet, so I installed Cyanogenmod 11, android 4.4.4 on it, in accordance with the instructions on the wiki, no problem. That got rid of the bloat and allows fine control of app snooping via Privacy Guard in the settings. When I first installed Cyanogenmod, I had to use an unofficial build, as an official build for Kitkat 4.

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