Monthly Archives: December 2010

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.6

Version 0.6.6 is a minor update that should fix Barnacle on Milestone and a couple other phones. It also cleans up the log a little bit.

The reason why 0.6.5 (37) was failing on Milestone is most bizarre: a process would exit with status 0 and yet the shell would treat that as "false", hence this was failing (only on Milestone!):

./wifi load || exit

Barnacle and iPad

Many users have issues connecting iPad to Barnacle's ad-hoc network. Here's some light as to why iPads are having difficulties when iPods and iPhones are doing fine.

The problem here is timing. Basically, the wireless driver on many Android phones only beacons an ad-hoc network for a while, and then if no other client associates, it stops. The next time it tries, it uses a different BSSID. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there's nothing we can do to stop it. If you try providing a BSSID in the settings, it might simply fail to beacon at all (it would only associate with an existing network matching that BSSID). read more »

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.5

Version 0.6.5 is hopefully the last of the December series of updates (starting at 0.6, 0.6.1, 0.6.2, 0.6.3 and 0.6.4 so far).

In 0.6.4, three distinct exceptions (also known as Force Close or FC) got squished. Also, added some handling of the nasty situation when another app enables wifi. If this happens, Barnacle tries to restart as gracefully as possible (which is not that gracefully unfortunately).

In 0.6.5, the setup scripts got a handful of fixes. There should be no more spurious "su not found" nor errors when connecting to NAT (for Access Control). Finally, switching between 3G and 4G should be as simple as restarting Barnacle (it will use whatever is available at the time of start). read more »

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.3

Version 0.6.3 is so major I was contemplating calling it 0.7.

Widget, encryption, bug fixes, ... a whole bunch of goodies for the holidays! read more »

Prospects of Ad-hoc Wifi in Android

Back to my "favorite" Android Issue 82. It seems Android engineers prefer Wi-Fi Direct over ad-hoc as illustrated by this thread.

Ad-hoc has slipped in priority in favor of other superior solutions keeping power constraints and security in mind. Soft Ap support exists and wi-fi direct support will come in the future.
read more »

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.2

Version 0.6.2 is an incremental update to 0.6.1 which improves the startup speed, but most importantly adds a couple new preferences: read more »

shsu recovery — auto-root after OTA

Despite all the excitement about custom ROMs, my Android phone is running the vanilla (Google experience) ROM that shipped from my network operator. However, I want to be both up-to-date and rooted, so I apply each OTA update but not without caution.

An OTA update typically removes the setuid bit from all executables on the system partition (the only one allowed to have the setuid bit set). To avoid losing root, I crafted my own recovery image which differs from the vanilla recovery image in one major aspect: before it reboots, it installs shsu: a shell-only su. Thus, even after unintended OTA update (happened before), I keep my root access.

read more »

unbootimg

When working on Android, I found it useful to be able to unpack a boot image, replace a few files and repack it. unbootimg is the perfect complement to the mkbootimg tool that is used to create Android boot images.

read more »

Dythr Hearsay

[English Translation] "The author of Barnacle Dythr now working on a project that seems to be. In this truly unique, WiFi ad hoc mode beacon using the SSID, the minimum one-way data communication between users of just one to many physical proximity, the notion that the spread of information that repeated . In close physical distance could be helpful to think of Twitter like. Acceptance of how people of the world aside, as the idea is really excellent." - Yasuro blogs

No more Barnacle Wifi Legacy

I have unpublished the legacy version from the Market: Barnacle Wifi Legacy. If you really want it you can get it from here, but I encourage you to use the current version as the legacy won't receive any bug fixes or updates.