Windows comes with the tar utility now

Recently I needed to extract a tar.gz archive on Windows as part of an automated pipeline. I tried fiddling with 7-zip and WinRAR's command-line executable but hoped for something more straightforward. I had the Linux subsystem installed, and I knew about the tar utility, so I poked around and accidentally noticed that there's a tar provided by Windows even outside WSL. tar xzf works for extracting tar.gz files from the Windows command line just like on Linux.

Policy Plus - Several fixes

I had some fun today fixing a couple issues with Policy Plus. I previously thought that the undocumented multiTextBox presentation element had no attributes other than ID, but it turns out to sometimes have a label as the tag's inner text. Policy Plus will now display the multiline text box's label if specified.

While double-checking that multiTextBoxes work with Semantic Policy, I noticed that Semantic Policy import was broken for user policies; all policies were always imported to the machine policy source. That was an easy fix.

The changes are live on GitHub.

"Found cyclical include chain" can be caused by tools:layout

Today I helped a student who was getting a "found cyclical <include> chain" error from the Android Studio UI designer. Despite the error message, there was no <include> tag in the layout's XML. Rather, the self-inclusion was from a tools:layout attribute, set as the layout attribute in the Attributes pane of a fragment.

Android Studio incorrectly reformats Kotlin buildscripts

In the assignment they're currently working on, I saw some students create an activity in Android Studio and then receive script compilation errors in the project. The starter code we gave them contains a Kotlin DSL Gradle script which was altered by Android Studio when the activity was added. Strangely, the exclamation mark in !in was moved before the preceding space, making it invalid Kotlin. Reverting that change and doing a Gradle sync fixed the problem.

"Unknown fragments" errors in the Android UI designer are normal

A student was poking around Android Studio today and asked about an "unknown fragments" error in the UI designer. This seems to be normal when including a fragment which has no layout to use as a preview, like the Google Maps SDK map fragment. Such fragments will appear as a dark gray box in the UI designer, but can work perfectly fine at runtime.

Android Chrome may not redirect to custom URI schemes automatically

Single Sign-On authentication for the Moodle mobile app works by opening the SSO page in a browser window and trusting the browser to redirect after the login to a custom URI scheme handled by the app. Interestingly, this works when the user was already logged into Moodle in their browser, but not after completing the SSO flow. Apparently the Chrome browser sometimes won't honor an HTTP Location redirect to a custom URI scheme. In Moodle's case, the confirmed=true query parameter can be added to make the page display some nice UI with a link to proceed to the app.

Poking at the Markeen-assisted levels project

Many months ago, I started a Keen 5 level pack based on maps randomly generated by Markeen. It was coming along well but I left it alone for a long time because of other commitments. I had a couple moments of free time this week to look back at it. I had done my first pass of cleanup on the eighth map, but hadn't decided the flow of play through it. The constraints given to me by Markeen seem to require it to be an easier level than most others, but that's probably OK.