Frank Groeneveld » google

HTC Hero without Sense

Frank Groeneveld — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:11:41 +0000

A few weeks ago I bought my first smartphone: The HTC Hero. It’s been a great purchase since the beginning, but I was wondering how Android would “feel” without all the HTC customizations such as the SenseUI. So, I installed an AOSP (Android Open Source Project) ROM for the Hero. It was a build of the Android 2.0.1 sources combined with the Google closed-source applications such as Gmail, Talk and Calendar. This was a really great experience, because all the features I use worked great. There was just one problem that is quite important for me: battery life. Somehow this ROM seems to drain the battery at night. When I first brought up this issue, nobody had noticed it, but quickly other people started to monitor their Hero’s and it appeared they were experiencing the same problem. I’ve switched back to the official ROM until this is solved, but you should really give this a try. The developers of the ROM did a great job!

Speeding up your website

Frank Groeneveld — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:17:50 +0000

A few days ago I stumbled upon the new Google “Let’s make the web faster”-page. I found some useful tips on there. Some of them are public knowledge, for example the fact that using echo in php is faster than print, single quotes are faster than double quotes and echo supports endless arguments, which is faster than string concatenating (so you write echo 'this', $is, 'faster than', $concatenating, 'the string' instead of echo 'this' . $is . 'slower').
However, there’s a nice article about ommitting html tags, which had some tips I did not know. For example, if you’re using HTML, instead of XHTML, you’re allowed to ommit more tags than most people know. For example, you don’t need to close a paragraph, you can just start a new one. For the complete list, have a look at the articles section of the site.

Google Analytics API launched!

Frank Groeneveld — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:15:02 +0000

Google just announced the public availability of the Google Analytics API. This is great news, because you can now write your own (web) applications that use the data from your analytics account. I might integrate this with the CMS we wrote for my company.
The announcement is available here.