Review WordPress app for iOS

I got the wordpress app for iOS long time ago, but never had the time or urge to try it.
Noticing that I rarely post on my blog, I thought it would be cool to try the app and write posts from my iPod touch.

So far the app isn’t that good nor too bad. I would expect much more from wordpress.

I think the app is missing many features to be called THE wordpress app. But aside from that if it’s only for writing posts on the go, then yes, it’s very good.
Think about it as a twitter client for wordpress kind of!!

Hacking FieldRunners Without Jailbreak

You know FieldRunners? You know that game that takes a gazillion hours of your time once you become addicted? Yea that one. There are many ways to hack FieldRunners when your iPhone/iPod/iPad are jailbroken. BUT, there isn’t much ways when it’s not!

I for one, don’t like to jailbreak my devices, but I still want to hack games!! So here is my procedure of hacking FieldRunners without jailbreaking the device.

Step One: get “Phone Disk“, they have a 15-day trial and you wont need it more than 10 minutes. Install the application and connect your device. (iPhone, iPod touch or iPad). By default Phone Disk will mount your Media folder.

Step Two: from Phone Disk icon in the toolbar.Select your device, “iPod touch” in my case, go to “Change Connection Root” and select FieldRunners.

Step Three: From the Finder, select FieldRunners from the left pane. Then right click the file FieldRunners.app and choose “Show Package Contents”.

Step Four: (finally) Find the files with the extensions “.enemy”, for example find the file “unit_light_solder.enemy” and open it with any text editor. Here is it the file opened with TextEdit.

Here you can edit any of the parameters. But be careful not to modify anything another than the numbers. I usually just modify the resources. For example lets change resources to “25″ instead of “1″. Save the file and Eject your device.

Open FieldRunners and enjoy each small soldier giving you 25 pieces of gold .

Here is how my game looks at Round 188, and my gold is more than 5000!!

REMEMBER NO JAILBREAK

Project Euler 59 – Java

If you don’t know what Project Euler is, then check projecteuler.net, this post is about Euler 59 and how to solve it in Java.

Here is the problem description:

Each character on a computer is assigned a unique code and the preferred standard is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). For example, uppercase A = 65, asterisk (*) = 42, and lowercase k = 107.

A modern encryption method is to take a text file, convert the bytes to ASCII, then XOR each byte with a given value, taken from a secret key. The advantage with the XOR function is that using the same encryption key on the cipher text, restores the plain text; for example, 65 XOR 42 = 107, then 107 XOR 42 = 65.

For unbreakable encryption, the key is the same length as the plain text message, and the key is made up of random bytes. The user would keep the encrypted message and the encryption key in different locations, and without both “halves”, it is impossible to decrypt the message.

Unfortunately, this method is impractical for most users, so the modified method is to use a password as a key. If the password is shorter than the message, which is likely, the key is repeated cyclically throughout the message. The balance for this method is using a sufficiently long password key for security, but short enough to be memorable.

Your task has been made easy, as the encryption key consists of three lower case characters. Using cipher1.txt (right click and ‘Save Link/Target As…’), a file containing the encrypted ASCII codes, and the knowledge that the plain text must contain common English words, decrypt the message and find the sum of the ASCII values in the original text.

First, how to think about this problem? Well, the description could be a little confusing, so here what it means in other words, the message, for example “I love internet” is encrypted with a cyclical encryption key. Lets say the encryption key is “abc” then the encrypted message will be:  (‘I’^a) (‘ ‘^b) (‘l’^c) (‘o’^a) (‘v’^b) … and so on.

The problem is that the encryption key is not known, so the user must brute force the key to find the message, a tip in the problem says the key is all lowercase letters. So it should be something from ‘aaa’ to ‘zzz’.

My solution was to make 3 nested loops in Java, each takes all the lowercase letters as it iterates. Each time a string answer is concatenated, in the last step, check if the string has the word ” the ” (with spaces). According to Letter Frequency, “the” is the most common word in English language, it was a matter of trial and error .

Euler 59 in Java

Getting Certified

I have noticed many students in IT fields in Palestine don’t have enough idea about getting certified, like why?, how?, when? how much will it cost? and where?

During college, i thought certification is for programming ninjas only. People who know all the do’s and taboos of the programming language. A seniors only area. I used to think about the certificate as a crown you put on after you become the king of the language. And I remember we used to point at some teachers like oh man he is good, he has like 3 Microsoft or Sun certificates.
Later, during my first working year, I found out i was wrong about most of it. Apparently certificates are for everyone, from first year students to company managers. Actually, most big IT companies have many certificates carefully designed for all kinds of levels.

The question now WHY? On the personal level, why should someone get certified when he knows a little about a language or when he think he knows enough? For beginners, the certificate will teach you lots of things about the language, including every single part of it, certificate training books are like a hose of information indeed. But what about people who already know enough. Well, you never know how much you know until you get the test. Most programmers program in one or two areas of the language. What about the other parts, the tens or hundreds of other APIs? Something cool about exams, is that they test you in all areas of the language and give you different scores for each part. So later you can know I’m very good in this part, but not good in that.
On business level, employers tend to like certificates, simply because it’s a good sign that you know enough about the language (you have a testimony from the mother company) and a sign that you care about your knowledge and how to keep up-to-date.

OK, i think its interesting, HOW? Most certificates -could say all of them- are delivered by one central examination institution, called Prometric. This institution has “Test Centers” all over the world. The process is really simple, you go to the company website you want to acquire a certificate from. Search for “company_name certificates”, like Microsoft Certificates, Oracle Certificates, IBM, Sun … etc. Check which certificate is most appropriate for you, better to start the ladder from the first step, look for the first certificate, which is usually easy and for new comers to the technology/language. Usually certificates are based on each other, and you should complete one to advance. But still there will be multiple entries, like entry certificate for new people, entry certificate for day-to-day users and entry certificate for advanced people. Make sure the company is associated with Prometric, on Prometrics site. When everything is good, buy the voucher online. And finally, call your local center to get an appointment.

Should I start today or WHEN? There is no exact answer, some people start as college students, others at advanced levels. It will take from one day to few months to get certified. All certificates have training materials. If you know enough, you will just skim it quickly, well, if you don’t then its a good chance to learn the real deal.

Is it worth it? How much will it COST? It depends on the owner company, could range from $100 US Dollars, up to $300 (average), some are even more. The price is international and should not change from one country to another. Make sure to check the owner company price before buying a voucher.

If you reached here, then you are probably saying “I like that” (Facebook Quote), now WHERE? As I said, Prometric have centers all over the globe. Except if you live in North Korea or Iran. Fortunately in Palestine we have centers in all cities, here:

List of Prometric associated Test Centers in Palestine (West Bank/Gaza)
- International Center of Bethlehem, Bethlehem, Phone 2770047
- Al Quds Open University, Gaza, Phone 2964571
- Vision Plus, Gaza, 2884888
- Hassib Sabbagh IT Center, Jenin, Phone 2510801
- Al Quds University (Said Khoury Center), Abu Dees, 2790852
- AMRA Information Technology, Nablus, Phone 2344304
- DOT ICT, Nablus, Mobile 0599-525225
- National Institute of IT, Ramallah, Phone 2407753
- Universal Technical Institute, Ramallah, Phone 2985757
- Axizo Computer Technology, Ramallah, Phone 2988128
- Galaxy Information Systems, Ramallah, Phone 2958444
- Palestine Polytechnic University (Kawash Center), Hebron, Phone 2235550

Note: if you know any centers, or have a comment about one of the previous, please reply to this thread to fix it.

I hope this guide helps you getting certified, or at least think about it seriously. For any other inquires, I would be glad to help.

Digging into iPhone development

Last Tuesday  17/March/2009 Apple announced the new iPhone OS 3.0, which honestly blew me away with the new features. Not the copy/paste (which has been anticipated since 2 years), but the overall progress the operating system and the SDK made.

The new OS not only made me think seriously of getting an iPhone, but also of developing apps for it. (Apple claims 100s of new APIs has been made, with many of them reading from the device sensors directly).

So, here i am, digging in a totally new area. I’m coming from a Java/Web development, and had faced many issues in getting used to XCode IDE and Objective-C syntax. Now after 2 weeks of not sleeping well and keeping wake-up until morning in the weekends. I can say im officially ready to start developing my iPhone applications.

Currently -after i kind of getting used to Obj-C – i want to start thinking about my own apps. I have many ideas of cool apps and games. But first i will need to dig more in Quartz 2D API.

Since I’m totally new to Obj-C and Mac development at all, i should read a lot, which i see does not conflict with my idea of learning by practice not reading. Simply because Obj-C is not just new syntax. For me as a Java developer, i see the ANSI-C, C++ and Obj-C a totally new world.

My first book (hopefully not the last) is Beginning iPhone Development – Exploring the iPhone SDK. Which i find good enough.

That’s it for iPhone development starting. Lets see where am I heading.

MAMP!!

I heard about WAMP a long time ago, and actually used it when i was on Windows PC.

WAMP is shortcut for: Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP package. Just get the package and all those techs will be running in a moment.

Now as a Mac user, i searched for something similar. Thanks to Google, the answer was found in a second, MAMP!! MAMP as you guessed states for Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP tools. In few minutes, my MySQL db was running, and my Apache server too!!

Very nice, now i just needed one more thing, Tomcat!! I work on Eclipse, and need Tomcat as my application server.

Thanks to this website, Tomcat was up and running in less than a minute.

Just need to mention, i got Navicat Lite “free version” for playing with MySQL. Navicat, even though i dont like commercial apps, and prefer open source always, but Navicat is a real exception. Its the best gui tool for MySQL. I know SQL, and can use other open source tools to work with MySQL, but with Navicat everything is gui’ed so its a real time saver, thanks to Premium Soft.