Tag Archives: Java

What an impressive long blog title!
Quattro Wireless Ads has slightly better eCPM than AdMob, and it allows your to put a default image Ads (not clickable). However, its fillrate is unbearably low (50% ~ 90%, typically around 75%, according to my 2 week test). Here, I’m showing you a way to mix Ads from Quattro Wireless, AdMob, and your own Ads.
For information about how to setup Ads on android apps using Quattro Wirelss, click here.
Step 1: Prepare your own banner ads.
Setp 2: Add the following Ads banner in your layout xml:

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<FrameLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="50dp" android:gravity="top">
 
<ImageView android:id="@+id/ownads" android:src="@drawable/banner_ad"
android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" />
 
<com.admob.android.ads.AdView
android:id="@+id/adMob" android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_alignParentTop="true" android:layout_marginTop="10dp"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" />
 
<com.qwapi.adclient.android.view.QWAdView
android:id="@+id/QWAd" android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" qwad:siteId="xyz"
qwad:publisherId="xyz" qwad:mediaType="banner,text"
qwad:displayMode="autoRotate" qwad:placement="top"
qwad:animation="fade" />
</FrameLayout>

Step 3: Implement Quattro’s AdEventsListener …

If you are an AdMob publisher, you will know how fluctuating their fillrates are: mine varies from 40% to 100%. What’s even worse is that they don’t support default Ads. So I decide to mix in mine:
For information about how to setup Ads on android apps using AdMob, click here.
Step 1: Prepare your own banner ads (320×50 or 480×50. Note AdMob’s ads has a fixed height of 50 pixels).
Step 2: Replace your AdView with the following framelayout in your layout xml:

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<FrameLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:gravity="center_horizontal">
 
<ImageView android:id="@+id/ownads" android:src="@drawable/banner_ad"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content" />
 
<com.admob.android.ads.AdView android:id="@+id/ad"
android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="50dp"
android:layout_alignParentBottom="true"
app:backgroundColor="#000000" app:textColor="#FFFFFF" />
</FrameLayout>

Step 3: Change your activity to include this:

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private static final Uri SAME2D_URI =
Uri.parse("market://search?q=pname:com.clingmarks.same2dfree");
 
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) …

A few weeks ago we noticed that one of our applications had wrong timestamps in the log files by late for an hour.
At first I thought the timezone setting in the OS could be wrong but our ops people confirmed it is actually correct. Then I thought the JVM settings on that server must have something wrong. But I compared the JVM directories on the problematic server to a good server, they are exactly the same. This puzzles me. Then I wrote a simple Java app to print out all system properties and found that on the “bad” server, the default timezone is “GMT-08:00″ instead of “US/Pacific”.
After searching online, it turned out this is actually a bug in Java.
In short, in some cases JVM can get a wrong timezone from the machine, even if all the settings are right. What happened is when JVM starts, it looks for a matched …