[blog...]

Last weekend, I decided to get rid of Sony Ericsson default firmware on my Xperia Ray phone (from 2011). Biggest problem with the Sony firmware was the so called "bloatware" like WhatsApp, Facebook etc. you couldn't remove.

There are plenty of manuals on the web to do this, but it's rather confusion if you're not used to flash your android phone.

This is, what I used and how I got it working to swith to cyanogenMod 10 (nightly).

First the online resources:

1.  http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_urushi: The Manual on Cyanogenmod - specific for my phone
2. http://www.themobimag.com/how-to-get-cm10-jellybean-on-sony-ericsson-xperia-rayst18i/: good HowTo
3. http://www.themobimag.com/flash-85-baseband-on-sony-ericsson-xperia-rayst18i/: HowTo flash even the baseband firmware part

The steps:

1. Unlock the bootloader:
   • You have to download the Android SDK to have the tiny tool "fastboot".
   • Test if fastboot is working with your computer->usb->phone. To enter the fastboot mode you have to switch off the phone. When the phone is off you press down the volume key AND you plug in the USB-cabel. The LED flashes blue now and you are in fastboot mode.
   • You have to apply for an unlock code from Sony with your phonen IMEI. This code is sent by email to you.
   • With the unlock code you can flash the bootloader. All user settings are gone afterwards!
2. Get current CyanogenMod nightly and place the zip-archive to /sdcard. Boot your phone as usual to do this.
3. Put the Google Apps too: Gapps flashable zip
4. Get the file boot.img from the zip-archive and place it on your PC.
5. Put the phone in fastboot mode and flash the boot.img onto the device and reboot it afterwards:
   • fastboot -i 0xfce flash boot boot.img
   • fastboot -i 0xfce reboot
6. Wipe data/factory reset and install the zip-archive and afterwards the Google Apps.
7. Reboot and wait... 10 minutes for the first time

This way, I couldn't make any backup before from the Sony Firmware. With CyanogenMod you can use the new installed ClockworkMod Recovery to make backups and restore them (or parts like /data).

My phone is now faster, there is more memory space and I'm really satisfied with this step.

If you get lots of messages of this kind

??[lang]: User xyz has cleared the language cache

in your new TYPO3 4.6.x then there is a simple solution. Add the following setting to your typo3conf/localconf.php:

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['SYS']['lang']['cache']['clear_menu'] = 'TRUE';

This will add a menu "Clear Language Cache" to your "Clear Cache" menu. Now the user may manually clear the cache.

This also fix now the problem with cache-files and NFS. In our setup, the typo3temp is on a NFS-partition. And there seems to be some race conditions why you get errors like this:

Core: Error handler (FE): PHP Warning: 
file_get_contents(/var/www/typo3temp/Cache/Data/t3lib_l10n/a232e71bc72d2771b802cab5b3f429b4): 
failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/typo3_src-4.6.8/t3lib/cache/backend/class.t3lib_cache_backend_filebackend.php line 452

Usually the file exists - but maybe too late...

• http://wiki.typo3.org/TYPO3_4.6

If you develop extbase/fluid extension for TYPO3 you will get in contact with PHPdoc blocks before classes, functions, variables. This is no nice to have feature but required for extbase to e.g. recognize the right data type.

I really have to learn this because I am not used to write PHPdoc blocks. Usually, I only copy an existing block and adjust the description which I find very important.

PHP optimizer or accelerators cache the compiled PHP bytecode and/or do other optimizations. Unfortunately some remove the PHPdoc blocks from the source code first. This is the default behaviour of eAccelerator.

With eAccelerator and extbase you get this exception thrown:

#1242292003: could not determine type of argument "section" 
of the render-method in ViewHelper "Tx_Fluid_ViewHelpers_RenderViewHelper". 
Either the methods docComment is invalid or some PHP optimizer strips off comments. 

What to do?

1. compile eAccelerator with option "--with-eaccelerator-doc-comment-inclusion": "If you want eAccelerator to retain doc-comments in internal php structures" (eAccelerator help)
2. use another PHP optimizer. I use xCache on Debian Squeeze which seems to work fine.

Links:

• Exception #1242292003 on wiki.typo3.org
• eAccelerator
• xCache
• PHPdoc
• Developing TYPO3 Extensions with Extbase and Fluid