Google Chrome and your local hosts file; Squid proxy for Mac

I was trying to alter my hosts file in order to block Faceb**k[1][2] and other annoying things that Ghostery told me were constantly loading on websites.  I looked up tips on how to do so and was surprised to see that what works on most browsers does not work on Google Chrome.  Here's an excerpt from How-To Geek:

When [we] tested it, Chrome did not use the hosts file in any operating system but we were able to block Facebook in Chrome by adding www.facebook.com.

Weird.  I did go to my Mac's System Preferences -> Network -> Proxies, selected Auto Proxy Discovery, and that seemed to make Google Chrome observe the /etc/hosts file.

There might have been more at work there, but I didn't want to mess with it further.  Instead, I decided it was time to install my own Squid proxy.  Of course, I wanted to see if someone had already made this less painful.  :-)  And voila:

http://squidman.net/squidman/

A Squid wrapper for Mac.  It installs and configures Squid, giving you a nice GUI to configure basic options.  It is designed to be a personal proxy, running on your local box, but you can configure it to accept connects from other computers, a subnet, etc.

Side note, it was unfortunate that the URL filtering on my router wasn't very smart or else I would have used that instead.

Update:

I set Squid up as a transparent proxy, meaning basically that it requires no configuration by the clients, and that all HTTP traffic will go through Squid by default.  The problem is with HTTPS.  Using HTTPS with a transparent proxy appears to work with Google Chrome, which seems to delegate all proxy settings to the system, but it does not work with Firefox.  With Firefox, HTTP did work, but HTTPS did not.  Only when manually setting Firefox to use Squid as an HTTPS proxy did HTTPS proxying work.

Update:

When trying to accomplish the same thing on my Ubuntu box, this is how I got Chrome to respect Squid:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/66554/why-is-google-chrome-ignoring-my-proxy-settings

References

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/10-reasons-to-delete-your-facebook-account-2010-5
2. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/

Problems running current version of Android SDK (22.6) on Mac OS 10.6.8

More evidence that my trusty 2006 Mac Pro, while still very capable, is becoming obsolete, seemingly thanks to Apple's rigid upgrade/obsolescence policies.

I was taking an online Android course through O'Reilly School of Technology, and have been doing all of my Android development there for the last several months.  My course ended, and I was anxious to use what I learned for other projects and to give Android Studio a try.  (O'Reilly's Android 1 course used Eclipse.)  Much to my dismay, it appears that Android SDK 22.6 doesn't play well with Mac OS 10.6.8.  I think the first problem I ran into was when I dusted off my local Eclipse and updated to the current version of the SDK.  That didn't work.  I had to manually upgrade it.  I finally got it installed, downloaded my O'Reilly projects and was going to ensure they ran locally.  The emulator never started up[1].  After many tweaks and restarts, installing the Android ADT bundle, etc., I gave up and tried Genymotion.  That didn't work either.  :-)  It seems ominous that a show-stopper such as this has existed as a reported bug[2] for three weeks.

I followed the instructions[3] from Stackoverflow to sneakily download an older version of the Android SDK tools (22.3), and then copy its /tools directory over the /tools directory in the ADT SDK bundle, i.e., ~/Downloads/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20140321/sdk/tools .

The good news for me is that I have a couple old Android devices I can use to run my apps on instead of using an emulator, but it's still frustrating to be unable to use the entire set of the current version of the development tools.

Reference

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22709471/bus-error-when-running-android-emulator - The question in Stackoverflow that describes the problem I was having with the Android emulator
2. https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=67036 - The relevant issue in Google Code for the Android Open Source Project
3. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9555337/how-to-downgrade-my-sdk-version#comment19794463_11514698 - The comment in Stackoverflow that allowed me to download an older version of the SDK tools.

Using Bundler to set up Ruby and Rubygems to work like Node.js and NPM

I was so excited by reading Development Seed's post about using Jekyll and prose.io to create sites without resorting to content management systems that I jumped into Ruby.  I was slowed when I dug my heels in and refused to "sudo gem install" anything, and tried to figure out how to use some keywords I'd heard -- "rvm", "Bundler" -- to do things the right way and install my project's gems locally, within the project itself.  After only a brief period of frustration, the clouds parted, and I found this:

http://ryan.mcgeary.org/2011/02/09/vendor-everything-still-applies/

So far, so good.  Thanks, Ryan!

- Also, a rbenv plug-in for making Bundler more convenient.

Keybindings in Openbox

When I log into XFCE on my work desktop remotely using NoMachine's NX client, the "p" button stopped working.  Instead of messing with my XFCE settings, I tried logging into LXDE.  The "p" button worked.

Then I needed to remap the keyboard shortcuts for switching/cycling through windows.  I'm using a Mac Pro at home, and left Command-Tab alone.  Instead, I wanted my keyboard's control + tab keys to cycle through windows.  In XFCE, I would have gone to the window manager settings in the main settings dialog.  However, it looks like I had to manually edit Openbox's keyboard mappings in an XML file.

I ran xev in the X session to find out which key was being pressed.  It said Control_L and Tab were being pressed.  When I edited the /.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml file from:

   1:  <!-- Keybindings for window switching -->

   2:  <keybind key="A-Tab">

   3:    <action name="NextWindow"/>

   4:  </keybind>

...to:

   1:  <!-- Keybindings for window switching -->

   2:  <keybind key="Control_L-Tab">

   3:    <action name="NextWindow"/>

   4:  </keybind>

...it didn't work.  I didn't care if it was the left or right Control key, so I just changed it to:

   1:  <!-- Keybindings for window switching -->

   2:  <keybind key="C-Tab">

   3:    <action name="NextWindow"/>

   4:  </keybind>

Then I typed openbox --reconfigure to reload the settings without restarting Openbox, and it worked as expected.

References:

- http://openbox.org/wiki/Help:Bindings
- http://superuser.com/questions/248517/show-keys-pressed-in-linux
- http://linux.die.net/man/1/xev

Android: Accessing shared preferences in Activity

I was getting this error when trying to access shared preferences in my main activity:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12201371/android-unable-to-start-activity-componentinfo

Moving getPreferences() to the onCreate() method solved the problem.  I'm guessing it's because I was trying to get the shared preferences before the activity was created.  (Hey, I'm new at this!)

Android ROMs

I'm flashing SuperJELLY on my HTC EVO 4G LTE right now.

I was running Paranoid Android for a few weeks, probably my fourth or fifth custom ROM on this device, and am switching back to a Sense-based ROM (or maybe stock-based ROM is more accurate) because there are some crucial features that just aren't supported at all or well on custom ROMs like Paranoid Android and Cyanogenmod.

GPS:
I've had significant GPS problems running anything other than a stock-based ROM.

4G/LTE and roaming:
I've never been able to get 4G data using a custom, non-stock ROM on this device using Sprint in Washington, DC.  Roaming seems to be much worse also.  Combine that with the fact that it doesn't automatically (as far as I can tell) update its preferred roaming list (PRL) makes it much worse than a Sense-based, stock-based ROM for data connectivity.

Camera:
The first couple non-stock ROMs I installed could barely use the camera at all.  The time between photos was seconds.

Contacts:
Two of the custom ROMs I installed could not load the contacts app without crashing.  The best explanation I found for this was that any significant number of contacts can be a problem for some ROMs.  Never had a problem with stock though.

These problems might entirely be HTC's fault for making it difficult for others to write code for their hardware.  However, that's just another reason to choose hardware whose philosophy fits yours.  Personally, I'd rather have a phone that is generic enough that it will run whatever I want to put on it, rather than having a camera chip that's so spiffy that anything but the stock ROM can barely use it effectively, much less take advantage of its spiffiness.

The take-away from this is that I'm going to hold my breath until my Sprint contract is up in February and then sign up for a no-contract plan with whomever is currently offering something like the MotoX or the next Nexus phone.

Anyone else have similarly frustrating experiences with custom ROMs on their new-ish HTC phone?

Proprietary NVIDIA drivers for Linux

One of my perennial occasions to POUND MY HEAD AGAINST A WALL is trying to wrestle with video issues on Linux.  This time around, I was trying to once and for all figure out why Kubuntu was doing such a poor job with giving me the available 3D & window compositing effects.  My mantra which was written on paper and hanging on my cube wall in front of my eyeballs for years at my old job was, "Never install proprietary video drivers!  Evar!!!1"  I wrote that after wasting probably a dozen hours trying to get my Ubuntu box to run as I thought it should.  This time, after trying XRender (which I don't understand), then switching back to OpenGL (which I don't understand), trying different NVIDIA drivers from the Ubuntu/Kubuntu repositories (I'm using 12.04), trying to tweak my xorg.conf, etc., I finally just went to NVIDIA's site and downloaded the latest driver, dated something like last week.  Of course, I installed it, rebooted it, now everything is great.