Why my Android sucks

I've been using HTC Legend with Android 2.1 for about two months. There are few major things that make the experience much worser than it could be:

• The device is unable to play popular video formats (divx, xvid, etc) out of the box. The only usable video format is H264 - you have to convert video to it.
• Android Market does not work for Russia - what a crap? There are alternatives, but anyways. Apple AppStore is already here, btw.
• I cannot send files via Bluetooth from device to PC and vice versa. At the same time SE z530i <-> Legend works fine, PC <-> SE z530i both work fine. Maybe Ubuntu at my PC lacks some BT profiles (Bluetooth FTP, I guess). But it is a problem of device, not Ubuntu, because HTC Legend is a consumer product, and it should support everything.
• I cannot create complex Wi-Fi connections with fixed IP and VPN. iPod can do it easily.
• It has annoying glitches in base preinstalled software, for example Weather Widget.

Advance Wars for Android

As always, my dream project was already implemented by someone else.

Advance Wars, my favourite game for Game Boy Advance was reinvented for Android.

Battle for Mars is a remake of original game, leaving most of tactics gameplay fun but with different storyline and graphics.

Actually there is zero storyline, comparing to original game. And wholly, it is actually worser than original game :) But I like it anyways.

Bitbucket

Last month I've been using Bitbucket for hosting my company's Mercurial repository.

I am admire of SaaS approach, but Bitbucket has succeeded proving me the opposite.
My repository is unavailable right now. And this happens much more offen than I expected from service dedicated for code hosting. pull/push operations take long time (up to 5-10 seconds). I have no idea how to make Mercurial so slow.

Maybe I'll give Assembla a try. But more probable, I'll rent a small VDS at Gandi and deploy my own Mercurial installation there.

flashpolicytwistd Ubuntu package

I've created an Ubuntu DEB package for flashpolicytwistd - a simple Flash Policy Server written in Python/Twisted. This simplifies installation process a lot.

Find the deb at project's download page.

CPU benchmark

I wrote a simple Python program, which builds R-Tree index for 100k nodes.

The program runs single thread and this means that only a single core of a CPU is working.

3m 31.322s Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz
3m 2.835s Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2372 HE @ 2.1Ghz
1m 31.393s Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 975 @ 3.33GHz

ssh hangup when working via router

I've discovered that my ssh connection occasionally hangs up when I am working through my WIFI router. And ssh works fine when the PC is connected directly to WAN.

This might happen because router drops the connection from its NAT table due to inactivity. To aid this, edit (or create) ~/.ssh/config and add there few lines:

Host *
  ServerAliveInterval 60

Flash policy server

Flash player uses policy server to check its permission to open sockets to certain ports of certain server.

Adobe provides sample Flash policy server. But it is unusable for production. It creates a thread per connection. Also it shows strange virtual memory usage.

That is why I wrote simple flashpolicytwistd using Python/Twisted.