I watched as the team shuffled into the meeting room, some holding their “Start, Stop, Continue” post-it notes in their hands.
“Okay folks! We’ve got an opportunity to pitch a new series that Netflix are going to air later in the year”
The team look at me, bemused.
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(4 minutes)
I’ve been used to GSAM’s excellent battery monitor tool on android for a year or so, but recently after upgrading to Nougat I’ve noticed that it’s stopped reporting accuratly for most applciations.
There is an Android Root companion that is supposed to fix the issue, but Nougat is unable to run it (thanks to better security built in to the mobile OS).
GSAM kidly request that you star an Issue on the open source issue tracker BUT DO NOT COMMENT ON IT. This can help Android offer users the choice to allow apps to access the Battery APIs built in to the OS.
Until this request is brought into the OS (I don’t think it will be any time soon) there IS actually a way to enable the functionality. It’s hidden in comment number #27 on the page…
> #27 rjkmadi...
> In the interim, you can give permissions through an adb shell.
> pm grant com.gsamlabs.bbm android.permission.BATTERY_STATS
> or pm grant com.gsamlabs.bbm.pro android.permission.BATTERY_STATS
>
> (Thanks for flindaman on Reddit.)
> Oct 3, 2016Excellent! But what does that even mean?
Well - let’s try it out. Before I begin a disclaimer.
adbFirst let’s see if we have adb…
adbFor me I didn’t. Rather than installing the android development studio, I just want ADB, so I decided to install the minimum bits I needed.
This means getting the “Safe way to install things” using brew. Let’s see if brew is on the machine…
brewIf not - follow the instructions here
If you do have it then make sure it’s working
brew doctorSince upgrading OSX I had to run an extra command to get Xcode tools working…
xcode-select --installNow I was ready to install the android-sdk.
brew install android-platform-toolsNow plug in your android and ensure it is connected using PKP connection (the picture communication connection from the menu on your device when you plug it into your mac).
Next let’s ensure we can see the device…
adb devicesIt should display your device in a list. Awesome!
Now let’s find the application name installed on the device..
adb shell pm list packagesSomewhere in the list you will see GSAM like com.gsamlabs.bbm or com.gsamlabs.bbm.pro
Take that text and run this next line to enable the hidden permission for this app to monitor battery information.
adb shell pm grant com.gsamlabs.bbm android.permission.BATTERY_STATSThen next time you restart your Android, GSAM Battery monitor will have what it needs to monitor all the apps running on your device.
(2 minutes)We’ve been working on our Master CSS files. These are files that repsent a section of the site.
Historically we would dump a load of CSS files in a MasterSiteAreaCSS.aspx and it would look somethign like the following….
<%@ Page language="VB" ContentType="text/css" Inherits="BaseCompressedText" %>
<!-- #Include virtual="~/Css/global.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/Css/tabs.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/Css/fancybox.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/SiteArea/Css/SearchResults.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/SiteArea/Css/Detail.css" -->This has served it’s purpose for years, but it’s getting very tired. Firstly it relies on a nasty ASP Includes hack. It also doesn’t allow us to do anything clever with the CSS files.
Our frontend dev is desperate to get on to playing with SCSS, so we decided to start playing with it to see what little changes we could make to our code to get a similar implementation using SCSS.
Here’s our first attempt:
@import '/Css/global';
@import '/Css/tabs';
@import '/Css/fancybox';
@import '/SiteArea/Css/SearchResults.css';
@import '/SiteArea/Css/Detail.css';This worked for files in the same directory, but we seemed to get errors when trying to get files off the route.
Eventually I worked out the correct syntax is to use ./ notation../
@import './Css/global';
@import './Css/tabs';
@import './Css/fancybox';
@import './SiteArea/Css/SearchResults.css';
@import './SiteArea/Css/Detail.css';Which now seemed to work from an IDE, but had issues when talking to a build server. What we needed to do was add metadata to describe the compilation process for a build command to pick up.
We opted for Gulp
{
"name": "mywebsite",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "My Website dependencies",
"devDependencies": {
"gulp": "^3.9.1",
"gulp-sass": "^2.3.1"
}
} var gulp = require('gulp');
var sass = require('gulp-sass');
gulp.task('sass', function () {
return gulp.src('./**/*.scss')
.pipe(sass().on('error', sass.logError))
.pipe(gulp.dest('./'));
});This got us the behaviour we wanted. Time to go further, could we minify the css as well?
{
"name": "mywebsite",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "My Website dependencies",
"devDependencies": {
"gulp": "^3.9.1",
"gulp-sass": "^2.3.1",
"gulp-clean-css": "^2.0.9",
"gulp-sourcemaps": "^1.6.0"
}
} var gulp = require('gulp');
var sass = require('gulp-sass');
var clean = require('gulp-clean-css');
var sourcemaps = require('gulp-sourcemaps');
gulp.task('sass', function () {
return gulp.src('./**/*.scss')
.pipe(sourcemaps.init())
.pipe(filter)
.pipe(sass({}).on('error', sass.logError))
.pipe(clean({ compatibility: 'ie8' }))
.pipe(sourcemaps.write('.'))
.pipe(gulp.dest('.'));
});Looking good, but then we realised it was doing some compilation in areas we didn’t want it to.
We decided to include gulp-filter to fix this.
{
"name": "mywebsite",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "My Website dependencies",
"devDependencies": {
"gulp": "^3.9.1",
"gulp-sass": "^2.3.1",
"gulp-clean-css": "^2.0.9",
"gulp-sourcemaps": "^1.6.0",
"gulp-filter": "^4.0.0"
}
} var gulp = require('gulp');
var sass = require('gulp-sass');
var clean = require('gulp-clean-css');
var sourcemaps = require('gulp-sourcemaps');
var filters = require('gulp-filter');
gulp.task('sass', function () {
var filter = filters(function (file) {
return file.path.indexOf("exclude-folder") === -1 && file.path.indexOf("node_modules") === -1;
});
return gulp.src('./**/*.scss')
.pipe(sourcemaps.init())
.pipe(filter)
.pipe(sass({}).on('error', sass.logError))
.pipe(clean({ compatibility: 'ie8' }))
.pipe(sourcemaps.write('.'))
.pipe(gulp.dest('.'));
});This seemed to work nicely. I wanted to get gulp-filter working without the function - there is a declaritive syntax, but I couldn’t get it working.
Remeber to add node_modules to your .gitignore file.
The other day I was trying to describe some branching and merging strategies over distributed repositories to a remote coworker. Sadly I’m fairly new to complex git branching behaviour, so I had a hard time describing what I was trying to say.
I realised the best thing to do was to try and share some diagrams. Now being clued up on javascript, and having a few minutes spare I researched to see if there is anything I could use to generate descriptive diagrams for me.
Luckily I stumbled across Git Graph JS. It’s a really simple library for showing git concepts. Without further ado - let’s see some code.
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(1 minute)
PCI Compliance is necessary on any site that takes credit card transactions. Trustkeeper is an example of a service you can use to scan your site and see if the site conforms to PCI (Payment Card Industry). To be PCI compliant you have to ensure with various security enhancements are present on your server.
On Feb. 13, the PCI Security Standards Council declared that TLSv1.0 is an unsafe protocol, and now Trustkeeper deems it as a failure if you have TLSv1.0 on your site.
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(2 minutes)