Mark's Blog

YARS is meant to be the start of a plattform for automated RSS processing. I wanted to download a podcast automatically, some tv series and watch for specific words in a RSS feed. And so was YARS, after a rainy afternoon with hacking. You can find the latest version of YARS here, at Github.

Currently it requires Redis as database but soon I will extend it so it can use textfiles and the such. Remember: it is a start. You’re welcome to contribute code, use-cases and ideas for further development.

And this is what you can do with the first version: Read more »

Tags: python, tools, yars

When programming for Android you will soon notice, there is no suitable ORM “mapper” available. Of course, you could use Hibernate, JPA and the such – but the size is too big. Most unfortunately Google has not provided one.

GWT ORM does not look usable to me and some of its logic seems to be missing. Active Android gives a good first impression, but lacks properly licensing and is still too rudimentary. Something I can program on a weekend. That’s what I thought and ultimately did. Here is how it looks like currently: Read more »

Tags: Android, java, know-how

I know the Android SDK comes with a complete copy of the documentation. But I noticed that the one online has been recently updated and I want read it even when my ADSL disconnects. Therefore I configured Nginx to obtain a on-demand mirror of that page, which should work for other pages, too. Here it is: Read more »

Tags: Android, GNU/Linux, nginx

In my upcoming Android app I populate a ListView with rows from database. For this task SimpleCursorAdapter exists, which maps rows from a query to fields in a view. Unfortunately that mapping is limited to text-only, i.e. toString() calls. I on the other hand want to change pictures, adjust progress-bars’ fills and compute progress. Hence the need for a custom cursor adapter.

In older examples CursorAdapter.getView is overwritten, which is deprecated and no good, as it is called twice per run and you won’t be able to manage the cursor – which is a must as it won’t get updated and will always point to the same row. Instead, you (and me) should override SimpleCursorAdapter.bindView as follows: Read more »

Tags: Android, java, tutorial