Are you a touch-typist?

Fancy yourself a touch-typist? want to show off your keyboarding skills…. head on over here

My cough record cough is 59wpm…kinda slow really….

Dang, should really improve on that…..

Wave and firmware update

If you are an owner of a Wave S8500 handset – do not be tempted to do down the route in flashing with unofficial firmware nor trick Kies into thinking your handset is in need of an update… Read more »

Online petition for Bada Developers

I have started an on-line petition for the benefit of the Samsung’s Bada community to lift the ban and restrictions for developers who develop apps on their own handsets… this was sparked by  my posting to Samsung’s official Bada forum about the nature of the restriction in place…to quote

We, application developers for Samsung’s bada OS, ask Samsung to grant us improved and easier access to our own developed applications on bada handsets.

In the current situation, Samsung restricts us developers to only one application at a time on our bada device for debugging or test purposes as well as for personal use.

Although the current limitations might be to decrease potential dangers of software piracy – but as developers, are we actually going to pirate our own applications that we developed? We, the developers, fork out a lot of money to get our hands on our devices and invest our time and patience in developing applications for our own and everyone else’s use. We should have the right to have free unrestricted access to our own self-created applications on our devices.

We should be allowed to hold more than a single self-developed application on our devices, to lift the severe limitations and inflexibility caused by the one-app-restriction, and to increase efficiency by allowing parallel debugging and testing of several applications at a time.

The logic in the current restriction appears almost ridiculous, as this would also mean that we developers have to buy and pay at the Appstore for our own application we created in order to actually use it ourselves.

Thus, Our proposal is the following:

Disband the restriction of one self-developed application per device for bada developers.

One possible solution, concerning both parties, we developers as well as Samsung, would be the following:

To register developer handsets and  IMEI numbers at Samsung, receiving a internal root certificate, which is tied to our own device, enabling us to develop, test, debug and use multiple applications on our devices at once and to be able to run those without any restrictions.

A worthy insight into undefined behaviour

While reading this article about how undefined behaviour in the aspect of C and C++, which can cause headaches and aimless hours lost, by banging your head of the wall, on the nuances of the syntax which can throw you off completely… this article is a worthy read and ensures that code do not fall into the trap of producing “weird errors” or “it works fine on my dev machine/environment, but but…. on the production, it behaves strangely”….

Heh… this article shows a completely undefined behaviour here…

<pre><strong>$ cc test.c -o test
$ ./test
Formatting root partition, chomp chomp</strong></pre>

Well, not really undefined but… you get the drift… the author explains how certain compiler emitted code can cause “odd behaviour” which is the essence of  ’undefined behaviour’

Credit is due to this author of the blog, John Regehr, cheers for that article… thought provoking and interesting to read…

McAfee + Intel

Interesting that the deal occurred with Intel and Mcafee, that took everyone by surprise (source: theregister)… so tell me… does it mean that Mcafee will be more optimized and lightweight and use clever Intel undocumented tricks to become more stealthier on the face of cyber-terrorism threats….?

Intel has bought information security specialist McAfee in a surprise deal valued at $7.68bn.

The chip maker has offered $48 a share in cash for the anti-virus firm, a 62 per cent premium of McAfee’s Wednesday closing price of $29.93 a share. Shares in McAfee leapt 58 per cent on the news while Intel’s stock dipped.

Intel stock dipped is not surprising considering the multi-billion dollar deal with McAfee… so…

Will end users be seeing variants of Mcafee packages highly optimized, of course, for different chipsets… such as Intel/McAfee Atom Internet Security, Intel/McAfee Dual Core 2 Internet Security…. it goes on…

Interesting times ahead….

Fonts for coders

Here’s a nice font – called Anonymous, a fixed width sans font for coders like you and me….

Thanks to Mark Simonson for releasing it.

Appallingly bad!

This has come to my attention, this site.. that has left me gob-smacked and flabbergasted when I read what seemingly looks like an innocent competition to find the best mobile and web application….of course any willing developer would think that there’s a prize or a reward for showcasing their talent…. sponsored by the ‘Irish Independant’…. Read more »

A lovely story…

I stumbled on this and thought it was a touching and endearing story about a couple, the blogger was talking about her husband and how she learnt a lot about Ruby…. Read it and enjoy it, it shows how much one can learn from their other half….that couple are truly geeky… lovely! w00t

Thunderbird & Hotmail

I have been having trouble in getting Thunderbird 3 to pull down emails from Hotmail, it wasn’t until after a bit of googling revealed a french site that showed the screenshots, so, as is my duty to share, here are the relevant screen-shots

• Tools > Account Settings, click on the hotmail account that you want to use, then click on ‘Server Settings’.
  • Server name – pop3.live.com
  • Port number – 995
  • Connection Security – SSL/TLS
  • Authentication Method – Normal Password

  • 

    Thunderbird Hotmail account setup (I)

• From the same window, click on Outgoing Server (SMTP), Click on ‘Add’, a ‘SMTP Server’ dialog box appears
  • Description – hotmail
  • Server Name – smtp.live.com
  • Port – 25
  • Connection Security – SSL/TLS
  • Authentication Method – Normal Password
  • User name – your hotmail user id

  • 

    Thunderbird Hotmail SMTP Setup

• Go back to the Webmail item on the left pane of the same window, to see the summary of the ‘Account Settings’
  • Outgoing SMTP server – hotmail – smtp.live.com

  • 

    Thunderbird Hotmail final setup

Then you’re done with. No need to get an extra add-on tool to do this for you. And you know what, it’s faster!!! W00t!

Email racket

I suspect very strongly that there is an email client racket going on…. I was approached by someone who uses Windows Live Mail (this person is running Windows 7), and every now and then, Windows Live Mail throws up a stinker when trying to connect to Google’s Mail server….by prompting for a password as “it does not recognize the account being valid“….

Like myself, I use Thunderbird, and Google’s Mail functionality works like a charm, but when attempting to pull down from Hotmail, it kicks up saying it cannot pull down the emails from hotmail…. After I explained that to this person, and got that person to see the conclusions….

This lead me to wonder, I have to get this off my chest…

Are Microsoft and the open source Mozilla are squaring up a subtle battle between each other? But who suffers in silence and at who’s cost? The end-users such as this unfortunate person who has to put up with the frustration of the relentless bickering…

My take… Live Mail is developed in such a way to throw up a temperamental tantrum with connecting to Google…

Of course credit is due to the developers of the Thunderbird plugin which enables to pull down the emails from Hotmail, every now and then this plugin has to be updated due to protocol changes (by Hotmail) where Thunderbird does not understand the Hotmail’s protocol for talking to each other….and hence have to be updated regularly…

Mozilla’s relationship with Google seems obviously cosy and hence works like a charm…. but when it comes to pulling emails down from Hotmail…

And likewise, Windows Live mail can pull down emails from other non-Google servers (I suspect it would work a charm with Hotmail in this case)

sigh… you just cannot win…

This is quite a possible and plausible theory that I’ve suspected for a very long time….Hmmmm….

Bitdefender Internet Security 2010

Hmmm…. where do I begin…. right…. I use Bitdefender Internet Security 2010 for my Windows PC. There has been a few occasions where I had to contact the support team over an issue that has been plaguing me for a while ever since, followed by copious amounts of uninstall/re-install a fresh build of Bitdefender I.S, and endless reboots….this is not an attack or a vendetta against them, I admire the job they are doing….so don’t get this in the wrong way, but I’d like to expose something about the Anitvirus vendors from a general perspective…. Read more »

Upgraded to WordPress 3

It’s this time that an upgrade of the back-end was needed, so backed up the site and database, the upgrade completed successfully and pain-less. Couldn’t say much about it as to what is new….or features as the time to investigate was limited due to work load at the moment…. but am happy now that I aint been bugged with a ‘WordPress 3 is available. Please update’!!!

Bada + Applications

Recently there’s being some discussions about Bada Wave Handsets which topped sales of 1Million units sold in four weeks, the forum was abuzz with a discussion about it, ended up biasing towards the features of the handsets with a Nokia 5800 (yuk! ). But nonetheless, at the end of the day, it is down to:

• Improving the SDK, easy to use API to do a lot more things
• Easy to put an application up to the Samsung’s App Store.

Read more »

PCRE ported to bada

Right, I have noticed there is a lack of regular expressions for the bada platform so without further ado, I ported PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) to both the bada’s simulator and the native handset – Wave GT-S8500 and it works! w00t!

• The thread I posted to forums.badadev.com in respect of PCRE Port and how to achieve it.
• This is the original thread on that forum about PCRE that kick-started off my goal to get the regexp working.
• This is the reply I wrote up about getting it to work in the simulator.

So there, it’s all there now… and its a debug version, not release as no optimisation to the code is done yet until it is verified to work.

Interesting times for Samsung

Recently, I was working on a new platform by Samsung called Bada, Korean for Ocean…and boy what a fun time I had in developing an application for the Bada platform, using C++. It was quite a simple and trivial to code under it and had immense pleasure playing with the SDK. Bada promises to be an open source platform for development efforts. Well… there’s Android/Java, there’s iPhone/Objective C, WinMobile/.NET, now there’s Bada/C++, quite understandably, they are trying to muscle in on the market in having their own application store, very much so that they recognize the potential and effort.

Read more »

Remove your account from popular websites

There has been a lot of debate recently about deleting your account from Facebook, in fact this blog explains such measures THAT prevents you from doing so, despite the furore over its privacy policy (was a former Facebook but decided to give Mark Zuckerberg the finger after the changes in the privacy back in January 2010, and get lost by deleting my former account and was pleased! – Hooray for no spam coming from Farmville – yuck!)

Now something has popped up that caught my attention, it’s not just confined to Facebook, but on other websites that indicates the difficulty rating in removing your account from sites such as Twitter, EBay, Amazon, to name but a few. Mosey on over to the ‘Smashing Magazine‘ to find out and remove your identity from sites. Hopefully the backups of the data would have been wiped cleanly (I wonder)

UML Graphics

For those of you into UML (Unified Modelling Language) graphics and implementing code based on ‘use cases‘, ‘actors‘, ‘implementation‘, ‘inheritance‘, look no further to this really cool UML drafting tool on-line, in which you can specify text-ually what the representation of the UML should look like, go to this site and form an orderly queue.

Even better, the graphics are nicely illustrated, clear and concise and can be retained in a PDF format for saving later on, or using a perma-link to the illustration.

I like the word play on the URL – yUML.me as you-em-el.me which has kind of a recursive naming, which is clever!

Neat! Enjoy UML’ers

Hacker Monthly

I spotted something that was mentioned on Codeproject.com about a new magazine which is out now, a very interesting read of a downloadable PDF called ‘Hacker Monthly‘. This is based on the ‘Hacker News‘, nonetheless, this proved to be an interesting read, specifically, on development news, not the hacking as a phenomenon that was describedduring the days before the web and the internet took the world by storm.

I give it 10 out of 10 for publishing their first ever issue and look forward to reading more of their issues.

Best of luck and God-speed to the publishers.

Win XP Drivers

Let me explain, ever get the situation where you are not 100% sure on what drivers within the Device Manager need updating, and even worse, they are de-facto installed as default, i.e. out of date, going back to when XP first came out. It can be a frustrating experience trying to find the right ones, worst case scenario is, installing the wrong drivers resulting in a non-functioning Windows XP… Read more »

Hilarious C Code question posted on Google’s newsgroups…

Thanks to AmberJ of #crunchbang@irc.freenode.net for sharing a link which I just had to share.

The poster on the Computer Programming Language Newsgroup on Google, was in desperation of some code to deal with a very simple problem using C, involving ‘for’ loops, until someone posted his reply which emits sarcasm, ingenuity and wit and possibly a contributor to the IOCCC…the original link to the question is here

When I broke out in laughter at the sheer depraved C code, it does actually compile and answers his question!!! I have printed the contents of the above link for reference and to keep as a namesake to look back fondly on and to admire!!!

LOL, enjoy!