Rooting & Unrooting Micromax Funbook Pro

Well, here is another rooting guide from me. This time it’s on Funbook Pro P500, a 10 inch tablet from the Indian manufacturer Micromax. I am not going to talk much about the tablet here, there are several reviews on it across the internet and a good Google search could land several results on this. All I can say about it is that I have been using it over the past 6-7 months and it has been an awesome tablet at its price point.

Before I started writing this blogpost I noticed that there are several articles on the internet emphasizing on rooting Funbook Pro, but most of them focus of either using an application or a tool to get this done. However in this post, I am going to use only the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) keeping you in control of the process.

In one of my previous posts (Rooting & Unrooting HCL Me X1), I have already mentioned the advantages and risks of Rooting, please do go through it before proceeding further. Let me reiterate one point from that post - Trying to root your device might brick the device. I am not responsible if you brick your device, so proceed at your own risk.

jQuery getScript, FireBug And Caching

Recently in one of my projects I had a requirement of loading JavaScript files dynamically. It was then I took a look at the jQuery getScript method. At first it looked perfect for my requirement, however as I started using it for my project I realized there were two drawbacks with its default implementation.

• There isn’t any caching for the scripts loaded by getScript
• Debugging these scripts in FireBug is quite difficult since FireBug cannot map the script code to the script filename

In this post, I am going emphasize on my experiences with getScript and how I got both it to work with both these requirements. To help me with this, I put up an example Visual Studio project available here. I used Visual Studio for comfort but any text editor will work since it is all about HTML and JavaScript.

Dynamic Expression Evaluation In .NET

Many applications need to evaluate expressions at run-time. This can be done using a dynamic expression evaluator. Examples of such applications are data analysis applications that perform calculations from user-defined expressions, spreadsheet software like Excel which allows users to define formulae, etc.

There are several ways of doing it in .NET, each one having its own pros and cons. This post covers the various approaches and at the end compares their performance along with code examples for each one of them. These approaches can be categorized as follows

Backup & Restore HCL Me X1

If you are planning to experiment with any Android phone/tablet, the first thing you would like to do is take a backup of it just in case things get messy. Typically in such situations you would like to take a backup of not only the user-data but also the operating system.

In this post I will be discussing on how to create a backup and restore the backup. You don’t need to root your device for this since adb already has root access in HCL Me X1. But you will need fastboot which can be obtained by compiling the Android source code.

Remember that the source code can be built only on a Linux distribution, so make sure you have one (I would recommend Ubuntu 11.10). fastboot will be available at <source_code_dir>/out/host/linux-x86/bin/fastboot after the compilation. If you don’t want to compile the source, you can try a compiled version of fastboot from the link specified at the end of the post; I built it on Ubuntu 11.10.

Rooting & Unrooting HCL Me X1

Android is primarily an operating system based on the Linux kernel. So similar to other Linux based operating systems Android has a special user account known as the root or super-user. Unlike other user accounts which have limited control over the operating system this account has complete access to the system.

However several (almost every) carriers and manufacturers don’t allow users to access this account mainly due to security concerns. Few carriers and manufacturers also do this because they don’t want users to access features for free when they can sell them :). Rooting is a process that allows users of phones/tablets to gain this privileged control (the root access). Here is an article with the Top 10 Reasons To Root Your Android Phone.

Though rooting your device is not illegal it might void the warranty of the device. So think twice (make that trice) before rooting your device and make sure you have a good reason to do so. Read these articles on The dangers of rooting your Android phone and What is Rooting on Android? The Advantages and Disadvantages

The process of rooting a device changes from device to device. It usually involves using an exploit to either gain temporary root access or to flash a custom recovery image to attain permanent root access. There are popular exploits like GingerBreak, psneuter, etc. and applications like GingerBreak.apk, SuperOneClick, etc. for rooting a device.

If you have read the articles and still want to go ahead let me remind you once again that trying to root your device might brick the device. I am not responsible if you brick your device, so proceed at your own risk.

A Primer To Android Development

As most of you know, Android is a mobile operating system initially developed by Android Inc. and presently being developed by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. Android consists of a modified Linux kernel and software built on the Apache Harmony framework (an open source Java implementation). The best thing I like about the Android platform is its versioning. The code names are released in alphabetic order of dessert items - Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean.

I am a newbie myself when it comes to Android, so the past few days I was trying to understand the various development models of Android. During my search I came across several good tutorials. This blog post is primarily to consolidate these tutorials for beginners like me.

Android, like most open source Operating Systems allows developers to look at development from two different perspectives - working on Android (Application development) and working with Android (Operating System development, not possible with proprietary Operating Systems). Google understands this and therefore has two different sites for Android developers - Android Developers (has the Android SDK to build applications) and Android Open Source Project (has the Android source code).

HCL Me X1 - A Customers Review

HCL Me X1 is HCL Technologies latest tablet and is one of the cheapest tablets available in India priced at Rs. 10,490. HCL released the X1 on October 14th. This is HCLs third tablet in the Me Series after the AE7-A1 and AM7-A1. I ordered the tablet on 19th through the HCL Store and received it this Tuesday. The entire week I have been toying with the tablet and here are my initial impressions on the Me X1.

This is my first Android tablet (my first Android device in fact) and one of the main reasons I bought the tab was to put up with the Android craze and have my share of fun with the Android platform. So expect to see several posts on the Android platform and the HCL Me X1 on this blog :).

Named Groups In Regular Expressions - Java 7

One of the new features added in Java 7 was the introduction of named groups in regular expressions through the java.util.regex package. This article covers the various features of named groups in regular expressions and their syntax in Java.

Parts of a Regular Expression can be grouped together by placing them inside round brackets. A major advantage of grouping is that various regex operators can be applied to these groups. Grouping is also useful for back-referencing a match. This allows developers to write regular expressions involving complex repetition patterns more easily.

Remote Debugging Java Applications

After my previous article about Remote Debugging .NET Applications using Visual Studio 2010, I was curious to see how Remote Debugging works for Java Applications. This blog post covers Remote Debugging Java Applications using NetBeans 7.0.

The basic concepts of Remote Debugging are the same for .NET and Java but the process of setting up the host and remote computers varies between Visual Studio and NetBeans. Similar to the .NET application used in the previous post, the screen shots correspond to a simple Java application which would popup a MessageDialog on a button click. Get the code here.

Remote Debugging .NET Applications

From the past few days I have been stuck in resolving a bug which cropped up in one of my applications after it went to Production. The worst part was that it was a machine-specific issue and we couldn’t reproduce it in any of our development systems. While trying to find a solution for this, I came across the concept of Remote Debugging.

Remote debugging is debugging a remotely running application through a development environment running on a system other than the one running the app. This is done by connecting the remote system to the system containing the development environment (in turn the debugger) through Sockets. Theoretically this is achieved in two steps -

• The remote computer would open a socket and listen to debug instructions through it. These instructions are feed to the application that is being debugged and the application responds appropriately
• The debugger would connect to the socket opened by the remote system and send instructions through it