Rooting my Phone-DEFCON 2

That’s right, I rooted my Moto Droid. Twice now. TWICE. There is something inherently wrong in that statement.

I’ll start at the beginning. I got my Droid sometime in June or July 2010, which was soon after I got my internship at CCP. My old phone was on my family’s plan, and I wanted something that could at least take PICTURES. I loved my little LG to death, he even got ran over by a car and lived, but it was time to move on to bigger, shinier, touchy things.

Fast forward a couple months, I was getting tired of Verizon not getting 2.1 to me fast enough (end even when it said I had a new version of Android available, it still never updated past 2.0.x). I was missing all the pretty little things, like the phone icon on the bottom tray, and extra home panels and all the other magic of Froyo. All this happened, and instead of going to a store to figure out why my phone hated my, I decided to root it. (This was also triggered by the fact I couldn’t wifi tether because Verizon is a bunch of jerks). I should have figured out there was an issue with my phone when it wouldn’t update LEGITIMATELY.

So, I got help from a coworker who had rooted his Droid, he directed me to Bugless Beast. After following all the tutorials on flashing SPRecovery to boot in recovery mode, wipe cache and data (backups didn’t even work), using RSD Lite and all that other nonsense to trying to do the Update from sdcard/update.zip. I have no idea how I finally got it working, but I finally got BB on my phone after a full 2 days of BS. It stayed like this for the better part of 5 months. I got the annoying popups constantly saying I needed to update, but I always ignored them, since the creator of BB said to NOT TO UPDATE THAT WAY. I missed the patch, or whatever fixed that problem, because I didn’t connect my phone to my computer ever.

Then, yesterday, I finally decide to update from BB v0.5 to BB v.06. Simple since it’s only .1 versions later, right? Wrong. After trying every different combination of this, wiping data and cache 5 times, trying to create backups using nandroid, to installing ‘Bugless’ Beast, everything failed, and every time I got the same error, with no help anywhere on what the error codes mean, because the rooting community cannot for the life of them decide on a central location of information. They prefer to disseminate information through forums with broken links.

After the hours of frustration, I decided to try another mod, Cyanogen.  Worked with the update.zip method the first time.  Wouldn’t boot into recovery (which is why I thought I had bricked my phone) but I could at least install something.

Well, after 4 hours trying to get a new BB or even the old one back on my device, nothing worked. Clockwork Mod wouldn’t flash any of the recoveries, SPRecovery wouldn’t boot up in CyanogenMod, Clockwork Mod in Cyanogen started up, but wouldn’t update to the new ROM.

I was ready to slam my phone into a wall last night. I am tempted to just get Verizon to flash EVERYTHING, so I can start from scratch again.

Here’s to hoping my phone isn’t just a terrible piece of machinery.

-TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

Starting Something

I haven’t been the best at doing side projects. It’s not that I don’t know what I want to do for them, it is the daunting decision of “What language do I start this in?”

I have been wanting to do my own farming sim game(not Farmville…) ever since I bought Harvest Moon. Its glaringly obvious glitches and bad localization was even apparent to me at such a young age. The well in the middle of your farm having no use other than *saying* you can refill your watering can there, was only slightly infuriating to me back then. I wanted to fix all the problems I saw with it, and make something out of it. This may have led to my (eventually realized) dream of becoming a game developer.

The problem with all this though, is that I have no idea where to start. Whether it be documentation of everything before I start, or going in head first, just doing what I feel like I need at the time. Of course, the latter isn’t incredibly efficient, but it will be an extended learning experience, that could be good for me in the long run.

Sitting down and just… DOING it will be the only way to get this done, so I hope to have updates on my own independent game sometime in the future :)

-PROSPECT, n. An outlook, usually forbidding. An expectation, usually forbidden.

New Design

Hey all, if you’ve ever been here before, you’ll notice that I have changed my theme to something…. larger.  The last theme was seemingly too small for even my eyes, and I was frankly getting sick of it.

Hope I haven’t destroyed your sense of self too much.

In leaving, here is a quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:

-RATIONAL, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.