Finally fixed it.......

Today after much head scratching , we managed to sort out why some software licences would not work.The issue has been going on for awhile and we were starting to run out of ideas.

It turns out that if your application is licensed using flex LM or flex enabled, it uses the first local hard disc to get a volume label ID. This is all well and good as long as the first drive that you have is C: drive, but everyone has c: drive first right?

Wrong, if you have tools like Microsoft Application Virtualisation (APP V) that can create virtual drives you can set these to use Drive B, In this case it was APP V causing the issue, once the APP v client was set to use another drive and a new licence file was create and authorised the software installs and works fine.

The error return by the FlexLm software is that the hardware has been changed or the licence file is corrupt. A good indicator is that if you compare the drive ID shown when creating the host file in LMtools (part of the FLEX LM tools) with that returned by typing vol c: in a command prompt, the two values should be the same ignoring a hyphen shown by the vol command.

worth remembering if you use both of these technologies

GPS 2 CAD & Android

I have recently picked up a project that I started awhile ago (I mention the idea in a previous post dated Jan 2010) when i started to learn android application development, after reading a friends blog on 7cache, a geocaching application he is working on for windows phone 7 it kind of got me wanting to try and finish an app idea i started and never went back to.

The idea behind the app was to use the GPS hardware in a phone to capture points and record them so that they could be used for CAD/mapping applications later on. When I started this I did not realise how in accurate the GPS could be, I knew that you were lucky to be accurate to within 5 metres of the point, but thought that the error would be reasonably constant once the GPS was stable. It would seem that this is not always the case.

The basic application started of life as the android notepad tutorial, the note editor was modified to record the GPS point data along with a title. To try and make the data useful afterwards I added an export to Dxf function (dxf is a drawing exchange format from Autodesk used by a large number of CAD applications). The dxf file contains points located by using x,y,z Cartesian co-ordinates which were converted from the GPS Latitude, Longitude and altitude recordings using some formulas to calculate bearing and range, along with a bit of basic trig (which i actually managed to remember the formulas for even though I have not used them for years).

An view capability was also added to allow the recorded points to be visualised while still on the phone. This was basic on the Open GL ES graphics demo from the android SDK with a zoom in and out function added.

This was where until last weekend I left it, the points plotting was in accurate even for the GPS and it was a bit lacking in other areas and I was not even sure if the app would be useful if I ever did do any more work on it.

I have now added a Map view so that recorded points can be shown on a map using the Google Maps API, this lets you see what you have stored and how accurate the GPs actually is. Adding this has actually made the whole thing feel like it has a purpose or some aim apart form me learning Java and more about android.

My current intent is to spend sometime trying to test if resultant data is at all accurate, the screens below are taken using the DDMS tool within eclipse to drive the GPS co-ordinates and take screen shots of the emulator and so are not really a good representation of accuracy of output.

Future plans are add an export latitude and longitude to file as well as look into a format that can be imported into a desktop application like Google Earth (KML or Kmz maybe).

some screen shots:

Dxf file viewed and lines added using DoubleCAD XT