Google Identity Toolkit for Android - weird compilation error

I’m hacking tiny Android app, one of the libraries I use is Google Identity Toolkit (it’s super easy to integrate). A documentation states that a Play Services should be added as dependency:

compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:8.3.0'

For any non trivial application it’s going to be a problem resulting in below error (or similar):

Error:Execution failed for task ':app:transformClassesWithDexForDebug'.
> com.android.build.api.transform.TransformException: com.android.ide.common.process.ProcessException: org.gradle.process.internal.ExecException: Process 'command '/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/bin/java'' finished with non-zero exit value 2

Search on Internet points to StackOverflow question: com.android.build.transform.api.TransformException. Apparently the bugs are related. The exit return code 2 is meaningless unless one has any clues. Anyway, the problem can be solved by replacing the dependency by:

compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-plus:8.3.0'
compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-auth:8.3.0'

I’ve opened an issue on Google Identity Toolkit - Android sample project asking for more documentation.
The error is related to a constraint of Android Dalvik runtime of to 65K Reference Limit. There are two solutions for the problem: decreasing the references (usually by chosing smaller dependencies, in our case subpackages instead of the full Play Services) and using so called multidex (some 3rd party blog).

Google Analytics doesn't work a.k.a. name collision in JavaScript

Today is another great day I’ve encounter a trivial bug hard to catch. It goes as follow. I went to Google Analytics to setup a new page. I’ve followed the instruction and I’ve copied into a source:

<script>
  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
  })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

  ga('create', 'UA-AAAAAAAA-X', 'auto');
  ga('send', 'pageview');

</script>

and it didn’t work ;-)

First I’ve thought is my mistake, i’ve put a code just before </html>, but after trying </head> it wasn’t any better.

I’ve tried to copy paste the code to developer console and tadah, it works! Here I should mention that I use both Google Closure Library and Google Closure Compiler on my site. After thinking and poking the code for a moment I’ve made an educated guess:

Closure compiler compiled code is colliding a name with Google Analytics!

Took me 1 minute to verify and yes, I’ve got it.

The solution was straight:

<script>
  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
  })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','dzialaj');

  dzialaj('create', 'UA-AAAAAAAA-X', 'auto');
  dzialaj('send', 'pageview');

</script>

Just for quick explanation, the string I’ve changed is a parameter to function which sets up a Google Analytics code on a website, it is a name that should be used as a Analytics main function and may be anything one wants.

Save yourself and pass the context by

One of extending packages of Go is golang.org/x/net/context package. The idea comes form task oriented programming. You get a task to execute but want to attach some data to it. It appears to be useful when programing a RPC or web server solutions. In such cases your listener creates a context object and pass it to handlers. The handlers keep it and use it when appropriate.

This idea guided most Google App Engine APIs for Go. Now they’ve introduced a Managed VM’s which are something between App Engine and Compute Engine. The refactored libraries can be found here: google.golang.org/appengine.

The standard way of logging in App Engine was to get a context and call methods:

func SomeHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
    ctx := appengine.NewContext(req)    
    ctx.Infof("got request!")
}

Whereas the new way:

func SomeHandler(ctx context.Context, w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
    log.Infof(ctx, "got request!")
}

The new way has one huge advantage, it allows you to pass any context which implements interface context.Context. It also requires to replace all appengine/log imports by a new package google.golang.org/appengine/log

The Go’ standard log library doesn’t have a concept of context at all.

Reasoning

I guess I should explain the advantage of using a context based log instead of standard one. In a case of task oriented application it allows the programmer to group all log messages related to given task. It’s a common practice to group messages by the place of the log function callback (the file and line where the log message is written). More sophisticated grouping includes process id and it may be a task id (or context in our case). Just imagine how much time it saves during debugging. It also allows much more sophisticated analysis of the server event flow without running in debugging mode.

I’ve created a tiny wrapper around both github.com/golang/glog library and google.golang.org/appengine/log: github.com/orian/utils/net/log. It should allow you to log both at App Engine and stand alone processes. Enjoy.

A real in depth explanation can be found in Go blog' article: Go Concurrency Patterns: Context

Upgrading an ASUS Z87 PLUS motherboard firmware

I needed to upgrade a firmware (in fact, it should have been done a long time ago). The steps goes as follow:

1. Find a firmware: (https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z87PLUS/HelpDesk_Download/)
   http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1150/Z87-PLUS/Z87-PLUS-ASUS-2103.zip
2. Unpack it and localize Z87-PLUS-ASUS-2103.CAP (or some other older version Z87-PLUS-ASUS-2004.CAP or Z87-PLUS-ASUS-1802.CAP)
3. Prepare a FAT flash device
4. Copy the firmware *.CAP file to flash root directory and rename to: Z87PL.CAP
5. Plug flash into the 'flashback' USB port at the back of PC (it's next to ethernet with a green border around)
6. Press flashback button on a motherboard, it's below a power plug, labeled as "BIOS_FLBK"

The FLBK_LED should start blinking (if it stops blinking means it cannot read firmware or the file is broken). It will take few minutes. DONE.


BTW. It sucks that Asus just doesn't say what should be the name of a firmware file. They could just use FIRMWARE.CAP and it would be fine. There are other ways of protecting people from themselves than encoding the model in a file name.

Slow compilation in Golang

Because I'm lazy and Go tends to not backport it's libraries, I've decided to migrate a project from go1.4 to go1.5. Everything would be great but the compilation process of the new version is noticeably slower than the old one.

Compile all your dependencies

What I've noticed some time ago is that if you change the version of Go the libs stay at old version. This causes them to be built on each go run you invoke. And if you use a library which automates rebuilding the binary on change like reflex () than you may wait long.

List all deps

To list all dependencies your application or library have you can invoke:

go list -f '{{.Deps}}' | tr "[" " " | tr "]" " " | xargs go list -f '{{if not .Standard}}{{.ImportPath}}{{end}}' > deps

(borrowed from from go-nuts)

Rebuild all packages

After that you can call:

go install -a $(tr -d '\n' < deps)

Update all packages

Alternative to the above, updates the code:

go install -u $(tr -d '\n' < deps)

Speedup

For my code it was from 15 seconds to below 1 second.

Apply to all subpackages in a project

As Craig Furman suggested in a comment (thanks):

go list -f '{{.Deps}}' ./... | tr "[" " " | tr "]" " " | \
  xargs go list -f '{{if not .Standard}}{{.ImportPath}}{{end}}' | \
  xargs go install -a