Improving Remote Desktop speed on Vista/Win7

A fellow kept complaining that his Remote Desktop (mstsc) connection to the office is super slow. I told him that I had the same problem since I moved from Windows XP to Windows 7 & he found the following solution:

Run the following command line:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
to undo it:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

For full details check this post. It's not optimal, but it works & I didn't notice any problem since.

Memory debugging and Android application

Using DDMS

*. Compile & run the application on an enumlator in debug (e.g. Manifest.xml, android:debuggable="true").
*. open DDMS

Checking the heap status:
*. Select your application, click on 'Show heap updates' on the toolbar.
*. Play around with your application and check the results.

Checking the allocations:
*. Select the allocation tracker tab, click on 'Start Tracking'
*. Press 'Get Allocations' when you want to check the allocations.

Note: do not use both heap status & allocations - the heap monitoring will cause a lot of allocations.

Display ListPreference value in the preferences screen

One missing feature in the preferences activity in Android applications is to display the selected value of a ListPreference. By default, to view the selected value of a ListPreference you must click the preference and see what's selected in the combo box.

Here's an example how to create a preferences activity which displays the selected value of any number of ListPreferences in the activity.

public class MyPreferenceActivity extends PreferenceActivity 
  implements SharedPreferences.OnSharedPreferenceChangeListener {
    
    private ArrayList<ListPreference> mListPreferences;
    private String[] mListPreferencesKeys = new String[] {
     "prefKey1", // The 'android:key' value of the ListPreference
     "prefKey2"  // The 'android:key' value of the ListPreference
     ....
     ....
     ....
    };

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.preferences);
        
        mListPreferences = new ArrayList<ListPreference>();
        SharedPreferences sharedPrefs = getPreferenceManager().getSharedPreferences();
        sharedPrefs.registerOnSharedPreferenceChangeListener(this);
        for (String prefKey : mListPreferencesKeys) {
         ListPreference pref = (ListPreference)getPreferenceManager().findPreference(prefKey);
         mListPreferences.add(pref);
         onSharedPreferenceChanged(sharedPrefs, prefKey);
        }
    }

    @Override
 public void onSharedPreferenceChanged(SharedPreferences pref, String prefKey) {
     for (ListPreference listPref : mListPreferences) {
      if (listPref.getKey().equals(prefKey))
       listPref.setSummary(listPref.getEntry());
     }
 }
}

Notes:

• This code will update the values if the user selects a new value


• If you're defining preferences keys in the strings.xml file, make the mListPreferencesKeys list an integer list, and get the string at run time using 'getString'