Journey of Indian Sky Map

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alokm.android.stardroid

Today I am happy to release Indian Sky Map, a fork of Google Sky Map. I have added an extra layer of Nakshatras. And changed the name of objects from western to Indian, but only those that I could find.

Also added the positions of Rahu and ketu. Had to search a bit to find it. Couldnt get a readymade solution though. I found a tutorial for calculating the Ecliptic longitude and latitude though. And that was enough, as I reused and tweaked the lunar computation to transform the nodal ecliptic coordinates to RA/Dec.
Nakshatra mapping was a laborious task. There seem to be no consensus on what are the exact nakshatras. To incorporate groups of star as nakshatras, I had to implement a circular region of variable size to accomodate different sizes. And then manually picked the RA/Dec center and radius for each one of them.
There is still a lot of scope for updating the names from western to Indian. But I am not sure how authentic the sources would be.
There is a huge bug though on the Sky Map app. If it is being launched by a search intent and the app has not already started, then the pointing arrow shows the wrong direction. I tried to implement the solution to this given by a guy on the forums. But still results were not satisfactory. Finally I had to implement a workaround to show the search box again if the app is being started through the search intent.

Hoping that this app does well.

70s dont get to Play (Google Play that is)

I was tinkering around with my Chinese android tablet Momo9c. I had loaded it up with the ICS firmware. It was terribly slow. I searched for a solution, it seemed overclocking might be the way to go.   Strangely enough, only installing the overclocking app (after rooting of course), and applying the default values fixed the cpu speed. That did gave me scare as the tablet crashed and I had to restart it.

Now I was happy that the tablet speed is usable, but to my horror Google play was showing the error "No Connection". The internet was working fine. I feared that this might have triggered the disable of the Google play, and I would have to reflash the tablet.

I was looking for solutions, when I thought of opening the play market from the browser. And I saw an security warning that this is not a valid site. I wondered whether there is a problem with Google Server. And that's when I realized that the Date/ Time of the tablet is not right. I checked and saw that it was reset to 1970.

So the secure connection could have only been made when the servers certificate start date comes into effect. (So much for having a secure communication through a time machine , atleast through current protocols :) ).  Then after just fixing the date/time I was good to go.