Stock apps are the applications installed by default when you buy a branded phone. Most of them are useless, not optimized and have open source alternatives that can protect your privacy.

JUST REMOVE THEM.

Below, for instance, are listed ring files on my Xperia X10 Mini. Just look at which ones are the largest : Sony Ericsson and SFR (carrier)…

# busybox ls --color=never -lS /system/media/audio/ringtones busybox ls --color=never -lS /system/media/audio/ringtones total 2977 -rw-r--r-- 1 0...

Instructions are aimed at Windows mainly (on Linux it should be easier).

Need to migrate from Subversion to Mercurial ?

This is a quick guide to migrating an existing SVN repository to a new Hg one.

It takes 2 major steps :

1. make a local copy of the existing SVN repository
2. convert it to Hg

Make a local copy of the existing SVN repository

Oddly enough, this was the hardest part to figure out...

I*M Hell

I was just trying to implement client and server authentication over SSL on IBM Websphere 6 (JRE 1.4.2)…

Problems started to happen with a :

java.io.IOException: Error in loading the keystore: Private key decryption error: (java.lang.SecurityException: Unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters) at com.ibm.crypto.provider.PKCS12KeyStore.engineLoad(Unknown Source) at java.security.KeyStore.load(KeyStore.java:695) ... 30 more 

… easily solved by replacing the JRE’s policy files (local_policy.jar and US_export_policy.jar) with an unlimited version of them (ah,...

This has been annoying me since the beginning : small screen devices are not taken into account by the vast majority of apps editors.

Worse : despite Google’s pleading about size-caring (see developer.android.com/design), they recommend patterns that actually don’t fit the real small screens for which size-caring IS important. Example : the “action bar” and other icon bars : there is no place for such bars on small screens…

Of course the developer is able to adapt the...