Wednesday, 10 January 2018

Gossip, Lies and WriteanArgumentativeEssay

Gossip, Lies and WriteanArgumentativeEssay Write an Argumentative Essay Developing a standard for the evaluation essay subject together with all the powerful conclusion contrary to the surface of mcdougal is the fundamental element a test essay. The process for producing the thesis is also a intimidating and also perplexing. You’ll find lots of sites at which it is possible to locate a legitimate summary sample but the very best reference you’re in a position to check would be your own professor. In case you’re doing beyond paper questions, then consider that the mark plot to find out what it’s likely you have missed. Work with a couple of the strategies that you used above to brainstorm for topic strategies to get [...] Continue Reading

The Hidden Facts About OnlineEssayWriter Revealed by an Expert

The Hidden Facts About OnlineEssayWriter Revealed by an Expert Ruthless Online Essay Writer Strategies Exploited Write Papers for Money Fundamentals Explained Evidently, in the event that you can’t afford most useful custom essay writers write this up to the essential benchmark, you should hunt competent. If you need assistance with philosophy essays. The sole amazing suggestion is to infuse essays using sensory particulars. Choosing on the web essay writers isn’t a nightmare ahead. Knowledgeable and fairly priced essay writers are what you may find on Darwinessays. First, the exact first stage in writing an article is to pick an interest (if a person has been assigned ). Online Essay Writer Secrets Be confident that the customized essay writers we delegate [...] Continue Reading

How-to Compose a LinkedIn Advice

Until you are an professional author or marketer, you may possibly unable to compete as well as one other work applicants with a professionally written resume. PapersNetwork.co.uk is among the leading article writing aid businesses but we understand that we have to show this to prospective clients and continue to prove it to the steadfast pupils that maintain coming back for more. Composition – Composing – Support – Aid is the best in relationship to online support for students as the business demands a higher level of professionalism along with dedication from every author they employ. Don’t miss your opportunity to receive a genuinely expert creating aid in your website! Whenever you are composing, stay away from utilizing the exact [...] Continue Reading

The Best Ways to Make Money With Your Car In the Gig Economy

Your car is an expensive investment but it doesn’t have to be a pure money suck.

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Why Do Lithium-Ion Batteries Explode?

While lithium-ion batteries are, on the whole, incredibly safe they do very very occasionally catch fire or explode. When it happens, like with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 fiasco or HP’s more recent laptop recall, it’s always big news. So what’s going on and why do batteries sometimes go out with a bang? Let’s find out.

How to Avoid Going Over Your Home Internet’s Data Cap

It’s not uncommon for internet service providers to cap the amount of data offered to home users as a way of getting them to pay more money for more bandwidth. If you find yourself within these artificial constraints set by your ISP, you have to carefully watch what you do online. Here are some tips to keep you under your cap and free from overage charges.

GPS Invisible Fencing Dog Collar Getting Guide & Guidelines

The creating part within the entire IELTS is again based on real-life scenarios. In the IELTS check, time administration is a fundamental element and hence section of your groundwork must focus how you are going to manage your time and effort within the assessment. The jobs have become different for both assessments. The decision of an argumentative composition are at least as crucial as the introduction. The decision of a comparison essay is quite as critical as the opening. The largest error essay writer you may make when creating an essay isn’t having an clear thesis declaration. Whomever says your documents may pick on your own awareness of self confidence when writing them, in addition to your essays will develop [...] Continue Reading

Team Indus searches for overseas partners as ISRO deal falls through

TeamIndus investors say that the company has not given up and will try to make the launch possible but it will not be possible before the 31 March deadline set by the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

Soon, gadgets that swing to your moods

Would it be possible for the gadgets around you to respond to how you are feeling? Maybe your laptop plays your favourite track when you are sad or maybe the lights in your home dim when you are tired and sleepy.

Geek Trivia: Pets Brought To Which Of These Companies Are Required To Sign A Non-Disclosure Agreement?

Think you know the answer? Click through to see if you're right!

Tuesday, 9 January 2018

How to Enable the Root User in macOS

Want to enable the root account on your Mac? You can, but the functionality is a little buried in System Preferences. Here’s how to find it.

What’s The Difference Between Bluetooth A2DP And aptX?

Bluetooth headphones are all the rage now, after spending the better part of a decade as a niche restricted to tech enthusiasts. Now you can find an incredible variety of Bluetooth headphones on electronic store shelves, and even more online. But as with almost all product categories, not every set of wireless headphones is created equal.

Charge Your iPhone Wirelessly with These Qi Chargers

Apple might have been late—OK, really late—to the wireless charging game, but now that the feature is here you should tota…

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How to Retrain Your Google Assistant Voice Model

There may come a time when you need to retrain your Google Assistant’s voice model—that is, the one that detects the “OK Google” command. For example, “Hey Google” recently started rolling out on phones, so you’ll need to retrain the voice model to accept this new phrase.

Effect of Engineering on Knowledge

What’s vital that you recognize is the experience you might be going to get from writing essays in this way are beyond the current scenario you might take. It’ll assist you in tracking the composing process. After looking in the case provided below, you ought to be able enough to obtain an idea of how you need to begin writing your own. You never comprehend what may eventually become a marvelous experience till you begin composing. To start with, you need to gain an awareness of why it is you’re writing this composition. An additional approach to do so will be to take an entirely diverse creative method of creating an article. Composing an outline can appear basic but it [...] Continue Reading

How to “Snooze” Someone for 30 Days on Facebook

Until now, there was no way to temporarily remove someone from your News Feed on Facebook. You could Block or Unfollow someone, but this was a permanent solution. If you wanted to see their posts again, you’d need to deliberately go back and unblock or refollow them.

How to Check if Your PC Is Protected Against Meltdown and Spectre

Warning: Even if you’ve installed patches from Windows Update, your PC may not completely protected from the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws. Here’s how to check if you’re fully protected, and what to do if you aren’t.

How to Get to the Old Uninstall Programs Panel on Windows 10

Windows 10 still includes the classic Uninstall Programs panel, also known as the “Programs and Features” window. But it’s buried by default, as Microsoft really wants you to use the Apps > Apps & features page in the new Settings interface instead.

Geek Trivia: The Two Grumpy Old Men From The Muppet Show Were Named After?

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Monday, 8 January 2018

Moving from buddybuild to Jenkins for Android Developers

Last week, buddybuild — a hosted continuous integration service focused on mobile apps — announced that it had been acquired by Apple, and consequently its complete Android offering, along with its free tier for iOS users, will be discontinued at the beginning of March.

This was a fairly undesirable way to start 2018 for buddybuild’s Android users and, with less than two months to find an alternative, many took to Twitter to simultaneously congratulate buddybuild on their acquisition, and commiserate with others who have to find a new way to build and test their app.

While Jenkins is usually deployed as a self-hosted solution (with over 150k installs), rather than a hosted service like buddybuild, we thought this would be a good time to highlight — thanks to the rich plugin ecosystem of Jenkins — some of the possibilities offered to Android developers by Jenkins.

Common workflows

Android projects are fundamentally no different from how other types of software development projects might make use of a Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery system (CI/CD) such as Jenkins: Android developers will collaborate using a source control management system (SCM) such as Git or Mercurial; they will create Pull Requests, which should be automatically verified; they expect to get feedback on test failures and code quality (e.g. via email or Slack); and they should be able to easily deploy new versions of their app to beta testers or end users.

To this end, Jenkins lets you define your build and deployment pipelines in a structured and auditable fashion (via Jenkinsfile), supports a multitude of SCMs, while the multibranch Pipeline feature automatically creates new Jenkins jobs for every new Pull Request in your repository, and cleans them up as branches get merged. The Blue Ocean user interface ties these features together in a clean, modern UI.

Blue Ocean build screenshot

Building Android Apps

To build an Android app, you need the Java development tools (JDK), which Jenkins can automatically install for you, plus the Android SDK, which you can also install on individual build agents using a tool installer, or you can use a Docker container with the Android SDK Tools preinstalled, for example.

Then, you can use your SCM plugin of choice to fetch your source code, and build the app using the Android Gradle Plugin via the Gradle Wrapper — in most cases this is as simple as running ./gradlew assembleDebug.

Once your app has been built and packaged into a .apk file, you can use the archiveArtifacts build step, storing the APK, enabling colleagues to download APKs directly from Jenkins, so that they can try out the latest build.

Testing Android Apps

The Android SDK supports two types of test: unit tests, which run on the JVM, and instrumentation tests, which have to run on an Android device or emulator. Both types of test can be executed using Jenkins and, since the Android Gradle Plugin writes the test results to disk in JUnit XML format, the JUnit Plugin for Jenkins can be used to parse the results, enabling you see a test report, and to be notified of test failures.

Compiling and executing the unit tests for your app is as simple as adding another build step which runs ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest.

Similarly, instrumentation tests can be compiled and executed via the connectedDebugAndroidTest task in Gradle. However, before you do this, you should ensure that an Android device is connected to your Jenkins build agent, or you can make use of the Android Emulator Plugin to automatically download, create, and start an emulator for you during a build. There are also plugins for cloud testing services such as AWS Device Farm.

Once you have finished executing the tests, you can use the junit step to analyse the results: junit '**/TEST-*.xml'.

Static Analysis

Similar to other Java or Kotlin projects, you can scan your codebase using static analysis tools like FindBugs or Checkstyle. Once again, Jenkins has analysis plugins which can parse the output of these tools, and present you with the results and trend graphs, or optionally flag the build as unstable or failed if too many problems have been detected.

The Android SDK provides a further useful static analysis tool called Lint. The output of this tool can be parsed by the Android Lint Plugin, which will analyse the issues found, and provide you with a detailed report within Jenkins. This functionality was demonstrated by the Android Tools Team at the Google I/O conference a few years back.

Securely signing and deploying Android apps

In order to distribute an Android app, it needs to be signed with a private key, which you should keep safe (losing it means you won’t be able to publish updates to your app!), and as secure as possible.

Instead of developers having to keep the signing keystore on their development machines, you can securely store the keystore and/or its passphrase on Jenkins using the Credentials Plugin. This avoids having to hardcode the passphrase into your build.gradle, or have it otherwise checked into your SCM.

The Credentials Plugin allows you to store secrets in Jenkins — which will be stored encrypted on disk when not in use — and those secrets can temporarily be made available during a build, either as a file in the build workspace, or exposed as an environment variable.

You can use such environment variables in a signingConfig block within your build.gradle, or you can make use of the Android Signing Plugin to sign your APK for you.

Once you have your production-ready APK built and signed, you can automatically upload it to Google Play using the Google Play Android Publisher plugin. The benefit of using this plugin is that it supports multiple APK upload, expansion files, uploading of ProGuard mapping files, promotion of builds from alpha, to beta, to production — and once again, your Google Play credentials are securely stored on Jenkins thanks to integration with the Credentials Plugin.

Sample Pipeline

Here’s a straightforward example of a Jenkinsfile defining a pipeline to build, test, and optionally deploy an Android app, from a multibranch Pipeline job. It requires the Pipeline, JUnit, Android Lint, Google Play Android Publisher, and Mailer plugins to be installed.

Jenkinsfile
pipeline {
  agent {
    // Run on a build agent where we have the Android SDK installed
    label 'android'
  }
  options {
    // Stop the build early in case of compile or test failures
    skipStagesAfterUnstable()
  }
  stages {
    stage('Compile') {
      steps {
        // Compile the app and its dependencies
        sh './gradlew compileDebugSources'
      }
    }
    stage('Unit test') {
      steps {
        // Compile and run the unit tests for the app and its dependencies
        sh './gradlew testDebugUnitTest testDebugUnitTest'

        // Analyse the test results and update the build result as appropriate
        junit '**/TEST-*.xml'
      }
    }
    stage('Build APK') {
      steps {
        // Finish building and packaging the APK
        sh './gradlew assembleDebug'

        // Archive the APKs so that they can be downloaded from Jenkins
        archiveArtifacts '**/*.apk'
      }
    }
    stage('Static analysis') {
      steps {
        // Run Lint and analyse the results
        sh './gradlew lintDebug'
        androidLint pattern: '**/lint-results-*.xml'
      }
    }
    stage('Deploy') {
      when {
        // Only execute this stage when building from the `beta` branch
        branch 'beta'
      }
      environment {
        // Assuming a file credential has been added to Jenkins, with the ID 'my-app-signing-keystore',
        // this will export an environment variable during the build, pointing to the absolute path of
        // the stored Android keystore file.  When the build ends, the temporarily file will be removed.
        SIGNING_KEYSTORE = credentials('my-app-signing-keystore')

        // Similarly, the value of this variable will be a password stored by the Credentials Plugin
        SIGNING_KEY_PASSWORD = credentials('my-app-signing-password')
      }
      steps {
        // Build the app in release mode, and sign the APK using the environment variables
        sh './gradlew assembleRelease'

        // Archive the APKs so that they can be downloaded from Jenkins
        archiveArtifacts '**/*.apk'

        // Upload the APK to Google Play
        androidApkUpload googleCredentialsId: 'Google Play', apkFilesPattern: '**/*-release.apk', trackName: 'beta'
      }
      post {
        success {
          // Notify if the upload succeeded
          mail to: 'beta-testers@example.com', subject: 'New build available!', body: 'Check it out!'
        }
      }
    }
  }
  post {
    failure {
      // Notify developer team of the failure
      mail to: 'android-devs@example.com', subject: 'Oops!', body: "Build ${env.BUILD_NUMBER} failed; ${env.BUILD_URL}"
    }
  }
}

Not just for Android

While buddybuild concentrated on Android and iOS apps, thanks to the distributed build agent architecture of Jenkins, you can automate any type of project.

For example, you can expand the capabilities of Jenkins by adding macOS (or Windows, Linux, BSD…) agents; you can dynamically spin up agents on AWS EC2 instances, Microsoft Azure VMs, or Azure Container Instances; you can create agents using VMware, and so on.

Conclusion

Thousands of Jenkins instances are already using the various Android-related plugins, and Pipeline along with the Blue Ocean User Interface make using Jenkins simpler than it’s ever been.

Give Jenkins a try for building your Android projects, check out the tutorials, and get in touch via the users' mailing list, or IRC.

Finally, as with Jenkins itself, all plugins distributed are open-source, so feel free to contribute!

How to Check if Your Linux System Is 32-bit or 64-bit

Most modern computers are capable of running a 64-bit operating system. But just because a computer supports it doesn’t mean that’s what’s running. Here’s how to tell whether you’re running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Linux.

Google Calendar Got Rid of Its Best Feature in the New Design

A few months ago, Google launched a new design for Google Calendar—and frankly, it was long overdue. Google Calendar has been using the same interface for ages, and the new one is nice and modern…except it’s missing Google Calendar’s best feature: adding events with natural language, like “Dinner with Mom at 6pm”.

The Best Switch Games to Play On the Go

The Switch is designed from the ground up with portability in mind. That doesn’t mean that all of its games are, though.

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Does Uploading Count Towards My Data Cap?

If you’re new to the whole “data cap” life—or are just trying to get a better idea of how to tame your data usage—then there’s something you should know: it isn’t just about downloading.

How to See Your Archived Stories on Instagram

Stories have been one of the biggest social network features of the last few years. Snapchat rolled them out first, but now every social network from WhatsApp to Instagram has stories. There’s also been a shift away from disappearing messages. People no longer seem to really want the photos they take to vanish into the ether. To that end, Instagram has recently added a Stories Archive. Now when you create an Instagram Story, it’s automatically saved to the Archive.

What's on center stage at the CES tech show? Your voice & smart devices

For the first time, CES has an area devoted to smart cities, with more than 40 companies set to exhibit their products

Nvidia partners with Uber, Volkswagen in self-driving technology

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the CES technology conference that Uber's self-driving car fleet was using their technology to help its autonomous cars perceive the world and make split-second decisions.

Microsoft Sucks at Naming Products

Microsoft is bad at naming things. Their recent renaming of the “Windows Store” to the “Microsoft Store” is just the latest in a long line of confusing and silly product names.

Japan investors bet big on Bitcoin

In April, Japan passed a law recognising bitcoin and other virtual currencies as legal tender while also stressing the need for transparency and financial stability.

Taxing bitcoins: On par with stamps, art

Bitcoins are on par with rare stamps or works of art, investment in which is purely speculative, at the risk of the investor and outside the reach of securities trading regulations.