This week on Twitter [Sep 05, 2010]

In an effort to make the Twitter news available on a daily basis, I have created Varunkumar Nagarajan daily based on my tweets and the tweets of people whom I follow. I will continue to post the “This week on Twitter” series here.

Science & Technology

• Smallest Full Moon of 2010. Link.
• TEDxAmazonia. In the middle of world’s largest rain forest. Link.
• Eclipse day at GooglePlex 2010. Link.
• After Apple & Google, Yahoo jumps into TV. Link.
• Firefox 4 Beta 4 out. Link.
• MIT testing self-assembling solar cells. Link.

Industry News

• Kevin Rose steps down as CEO of digg. Link.
• Google acquires Angstro to compete with Facebook. Link.
• Google buys SocialDeck. Link.
• Google backs out of JavaOne. Link.

Social Networks

• Facebook testing “Subscribe” – its version of follow. Link.
• Twitter in Real Time. Link.

Google

• Call phones from Gmail. Link.
• Gmail gets priority inbox. Link.
• Blogger turned 11 and Google organized BloggerFiesta worldwide.
• Useful Gmail shortcuts. Link.
• Google releases Chrome 6 on its second birthday. Link.
• Google mobile gets a cool new YouTube channel. Link.
• Google can read SVG documents now. Link.
• Google reader gets full screen mode. Link.

Gadgets

• One-click rooting for Nexus One. Link.
• Unicode fonts on Android. Link.
• Apple Music event 2010. New iPod Touch, Nano announced. Link.
• Official page of Samsung Galaxy Tab. Link.
• The great big spreadsheet of all known Android devices. Link.

India

• Landline telephone number may soon sport a 10-digit number. Link.
• Book KSRTC bus tickets from your mobile. Link.

Programming

• Lazy loading of JavaScript. Link.
• Binding Python and Mozilla DOM. Link.

-- Varun

Happy Teacher’s Day!!

Thanks for making me what I am today. Happy Teacher’s day to all my teachers. A special note of thanks to my Twitter friends and other e-buddies – I have been learning a lot from you guys.

-- Varun

[How to] Change DNS server on Android phones?

Domain Name System / Server is the one which takes care of translating the human readable domain names into machine understandable IP addresses. If you are not able to access a particular set of websites either from your laptop / phone, DNS server could be a reason for it. It happened to me recently that only few pages were getting loaded properly on my Nexus One. To fix the problem, one has to change the network configurations to use some of the popular DNS servers like Open DNS or Google’s public DNS. On Android phones, changing the DNS server is easy if you are using the static IP. You can do it from Settings > Wireless & network settings > Wi-Fi settings > Advanced (from menu) > check the ‘Use static IP’ option. After that, you will be able to change the DNS servers. However, when you are using dynamic IP (which will be the case most likely), the process is not straight forward. DNS server details will be taken from the DHCP server which assigns the IP. 

Here are the steps to be followed to change the DNS servers:

• Your device should be rooted. Check out these instructions to root your device with a single-click.
• Download and install the latest Android SDK from here. This comes up with all the tools needed for development and testing of your application. Make sure the driver ‘ADB interface’ is installed on your machine. In most of the cases, the driver will be installed directly once you plug-in the device.
• Connect your Android device to your PC on debug mode. Enable USB debugging on your phone. Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging.
• On your laptop, open a command prompt and enter “adb shell”.
• Use the commands “getprop dhcp.eth0.dns1” and “getprop dhcp.eth0.dns2” to know the DNS servers currently being used. There are applications like ‘ipconfig’ which will give you the same details.
• To change the DNS servers, use the command “setprop <property name>”. “setprop dhcp.eth0.dns1 208.67.222.222” “setprop dhcp.eth0.dns1 208.67.222.222”. This command has to be executed as root user.
• Remember, the above step will change the DNS servers only for the current session. You will have to repeat it when you are re-connecting to the network. Read through the next section to know about how to change the DNS server automatically when you re-connect to a network.

Changing the DNS servers automatically

• Android system chooses the DNS servers using the script located at “/system/etc/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-hooks/20-dns.conf”
• By default, /system partition is mounted as read-only. Need to re-mount the same in read-write mode. Follow the instructions here to do this.
• Take a backup of the script. Download the modified version of the script from here. The modified script has two additional lines which will override the DNS server changes. The modified script uses the Google’s public DNS.
• Changes will be applied after restarting the connection / device.

Update: To change the DNS server of 3G connection, check out this article.

-- Varun

What’s new on Apple Store?

Steve Jobs has announced lots of cool things yesterday at the Apple Music Event.

iPod Touch

• FaceTime
• Retina display
• HD video recording
• Game Center

iPod Nano

• Multi-touch
• Fm-radio
• Got smaller

iPod Shuffle

• Voice-Over
• Buttons
• Play-lists
• Got smaller

Apple TV

• Streaming HD movies
• Rent Hollywood movies and TV shows
• Internet with WiFi
• Apple remote

Other updates from the Apple event: iTunes 10, Ping, iOS 4.1

-- Varun

Google’s Style Guide and JavaScript Lint tool

Last year, Google has open-sourced the JavaScript tool Closure. Google has been contributing actively to the Closure project and the latest addition to the project is a JavaScript Lint tool (A code checker that checks for common mistakes in scripts). The tool has been named as ‘Closure Linter’ and it works on the basis of Google’s JavaScript style guide.

Google’s Style guide

Google has published style guide for different languages part of the Google’s open source projects. The Style Guide project also include few tools to enforce that these guides are followed. Here are the available style guides and tools:

• C++ Style Guide
• JavaScript Style Guide
• Objective-C Style Guide
• Python Style Guide
• CPPLint, a C++ Lint tool
• google-c-style.el, an Emacs settings file for Google Style

Closure Linter

Closure Linter is available as a command line utility and can be downloaded from here. After installing the tool, just execute the tool “gjslint path/to/myfile.js”. This will check your code for any common errors. Your script will be checked for the style guide compliance. To fix the style problems reported using gjslint, use “fixjsstyle path/to/file1.js path/to/file2.js”

-- Varun