Wednesday 18 February 2015

Open Mozilla Firefox 'Private Mode' permanently

I wanted to setup Mozilla Firefox to open in 'Private' mode always. It was a simple process to setup in Windows 8.0.
  1. Open the properties of Mozilla Firefox from the task bar
  2. In the 'Target' box, include an option -private

Sunday 1 February 2015

[Solved] An unexpected error occured in com.google.gapps - Android error pop-up

The pop-up appeared on my Android phone multiple times whenever I connect to internet. I did not have any clue why this happened. I finally tried the below to fix the issue, and it fixed the issue.

Note: This works only on a rooted Android device.
  1. Open Terminal Emulator app
  2. In the emulator type the following command
bugreport > /mnt/sdcard/bugreport.log

I open the file bugreport.log and looked for the exception message related to gapps. From the logs, I realized that while calendar sync starts, somehow the account name is set as blank, which was causing the issue. To double-check whether this is the issue, I opened the Calendar app in my mobile and navigated to Menu > More > Calendars. When I opened this menu item, the application force closed with unexpected error. This confirmed that the issue is with the Calendar app in my mobile. To fix this, I did the following:
  1. From the home screen, I opened Settings > Applications > Manage applications > All > Calendar.
  2. Clicked on 'Clear data'
  3. Also opened the Settings > Applications > Manage applications > All > Calendar Storage.
  4. Clicked on 'Clear data'

The issue is fixed!

In pursuit of fixing the issue, I found some useful information to troubleshoot issues in Android. I am listing them below:

Get Device information
The below commands can be used in a Terminal Emulator app.
dumpstate
dumpsys

Use Logcat
The below command can be used in a Terminal Emulator app:
logcat -b events

Get Kernel log information
The below command can be used in a Terminal Emulator app:
dmesg

Log file locations in the device
  • /data/anr
    anr stands for 'Application Not Respoding'. So we can expect to see such information in this location.
  • /data/dontpanic
    this location can contain crash logs.
  • /data/kernelpanics
  • /data/panic/panic_deamon.config
    this config file has the configuration to point to crash log output location.
  • /data/panicreports
  • /data/tombstones
    this location can have logs related to application crash.