RavinZ Blog

iPhone 4S review from a Sri Lankan

2011-12-25T00:33:00.002+05:30

Hi all. In case you wandered here to know all the detailsabout the Apple's new iPhone 4S, this is not the place. This is not a completeproduct review, but a review on how the product fits into my needs. You can find lotof quality iPhone 4S reviews on the web. My intention is to articulate how the4S performs in conditions specific to Sri Lanka and the drawbacks Sri Lankanusers might face.

I got this phone from Singapore. iPhone 4S Factory Unlocked 16GB Black version running iOS 5.0.1. This was a huge upgrade for me as I wasusing a 2007 iPhone model for the past 3.5 years.

Support from Sri Lankan service providers

If you intend to bring an iPhone to Sri Lanka, you have to get a locked iPhone and unlock it, orget a "Factory Unlocked" phone to use with any local mobile serviceprovider. Locked iPhones are cheaper compared to factory unlocked ones. Butlocked iPhones are very hard to unlock.So if you bring a locked iPhone here, you might have to wait weeks, or even monthsuntil a software unlock becomes available. So I recommend you buy a FactoryUnlocked iPhone if you are planning to bring an iPhone 3GS/4/4S into Sri Lanka.

Micro SIM

iPhone 4/4S only support Micro SIMs which are smaller thanordinary SIMs. There's no technical difference between these two. Micro SIMsjust don't have extra plastic padding around the golden plate. You can eithercut it using a SIM cutter (or get help from a local phone shop to cut it) orbuy one from your service provider. Mobitel offers Micro SIMs for Rs 200/= forexisting users, Rs 400/= for new users.

If you cut your SIM yourself like me, remember to keep theextra plastic frame that remains after cutting. You'll need that to re-assembleyour SIM in case you need to use it with some other phone.

My old SIM (on left) after cutting it, shown with an ordinary SIM (on right)

User experience

Combined with Apple's thoughtful UI design, optimized OS andthe speedy processor, iPhone 4S provides a crystal clear UI navigation with nohiccups at all. It's absolutely flawless and blazingly fast. You don't feellike you are using a UI of a computing device because when you do stuff on thescreen, everything happens so fast and smooth without any response delays. It's flying in the breeze!

Siri

Even though it's still in beta, Siri is the most advertisedfeature of the iPhone 4S. For users in US and other western countries, Siriseems to work well. Personally, I don't have many of use-cases for Siri that are being advertised, but someSri Lankan buyers might be tempted to buy an IPhone 4S just because of Siri. Ifyou fall into the later category you might be disappointed.

Siri didn't recognize most of the things I said. I'm aSinhalese with the typical English accent of a Sri Lankan. Siri was completelyconfused and answered incorrectly or told that she didn't understand me formost of my questions. Some things worked, for example Siri understood myquestion "What is the population of

Sri Lanka

?". Occasionally, shealso succeeded in setting up some alarms and meetings for me. Voice dictationfor typing text got most of the words wrong, making it impractical to use Siri to type SMS and Notes.

Calling a contact via Siri also failed in numerous ways.Most of the time, she tried to call the incorrect person and every time shetried to make a call (correctly or incorrectly), she ended the call apologizing"Sorry, I cannot call person X".

Overall, Siri's voice recognition for me, was inconsistentand practically unusable. Technically, Siri's response time was acceptable overboth my ADSL connection (WiFi) and Mobitel 3G. (For those who don't know, Sirineeds an internet connection to function. Siri sends your voice to a server andit's the server which handles voice recognition.)

Voice Control

Fortunately, Siri can be turned OFF (Settings -> General-> Siri), at which point the old Voice Control feature that debuted withiPhone 3GS, will get activated. Voice control doesn't need internet but it'svery limited in its feature set. For me, the features provided by Voice Controlwas mostly enough so I used that instead of Siri. If I could call a person and playsongs while driving, that's fine for me. But I'll miss the SMS read/reply featurewhich only Siri is capable of.

I found out that Voice Control is far superior inrecognizing my commands than Siri. 90 - 95% of the time, Voice Control calledthe correct person I told it to and played the songs I wanted. All withoutinternet. This is somewhat understandable since Voice Control has a narroweddown search criteria (My Contacts and Song library) to match my Voice input with. Sofor the moment I'll stick with Voice Control, although I cannot read/reply toSMS while driving without Siri.

Both Siri and Voice Control can be brought up by a longpress of the middle button in the hands free kit so it's easily accessible even when you are driving. Here's a comparison between Siri and Voice Control from my experience

Sinhala/Tamil Typing and Fonts

iOS 5 includes Fonts required to display Sinhala and Tamilcontent on the web. (Tamil was available way earlier than iOS 5 as I remember). Butthere is no way to type in Sinhala or Tamil. You can copy Sinhala text from aweb page and paste it in text boxes (As shown in the image) but you cannot typethings on your own.

As a workaround, you can use Google Transliterate to typeyour Sinhala/Tamil content and copy it to the place you need. You can also useSanhinda free app (Sinhala only) from AppStore which I think would be better than the webbased Google Transliterate. I didn't use the Sanhinda app yet but I found thatthe UI in Google Transliterate is fighting with iPhone keyboard, and it is notoptimized for a mobile browser. So, being a native app, Sanhinda should do better.

The ideal solution would be a Sinhala keyboard which isaccessible from anywhere in the system. But this is one of those drawbacks iOShas over Android because Apple doesn't allow third-party custom keyboards oniOS.

Phone Number Formatting

As with every iPhone OS version from 1.0, iOS 5 suffersfrom the inability to properly recognize Sri Lankan phone numbers. It canrecognize incoming calls and match it up with your contacts but it can’t do thesame with SMS. Since incoming SMS phone numbers are like +94714123456 (with +94in front), it won’t match with the corresponding contact if you have stored the number as0714123456 (with 0 in front). To recognise SMS numbers, you have to add an extra entry with +94format for the same person. This problem occurs the other way round too. If youhave stored a number in +94 format, the phone won’t recognize incoming callsfrom that number.

Unfortunately there’s no fix for this until a Jailbreakcomes up. Still there’s no jailbreak for iPhone 4S with iOS 5.

Camera

iPhone 4S camera is insanely great for photo taking andvideo recording. Apple has done much more than upgrading the Camera sensor to 8Megapixels. You can take photos in a blink, there's no delay in taking thephoto and saving it like you see on other high-end phones. Tap the button andboom! the photo is saved.

I won't go into detail explaining the picture/video qualityand camera features (you can get that info elsewhere). I'll just say it'ssimply awesome!

The only thing to keep in mind is that if you have a 16GBiPhone 4S, you'd better watch your free space when you are recording video heavily. For aone-minute video, iPhone 4S will consume more than 170MB of disk space. This isbecause iPhone 4S records video in 1080p resolution, which has a very large video framesize. With iPhone 4, it was 720p and the files size was around 80MB perone-minute video. So with iPhone 4S, the file size is more than doubled. In thebuilt-in Camera app, there are no settings to reduce the video quality(third-party camera apps might allow that). So if you are a looking for aniPhone 4S mostly to do video recording, I recommend you get a 32GB or 64GBmodel.

Another notable fact is that you also need a somewhat-powerfulcomputer to play videos recorded by iPhone 4S. A computer which is few yearsold might not be able to play the recorded videos smoothly. In addition tothat, if you are a Windows user, you need to use Quick Time to play therecorded videos or have the correct software codecs to play them in Windows MediaPlayer or any other player. Keep in mind that the video frame size of a 1080p video(1920 X 1080) is actually bigger than the full resolution of most common17-inch monitors we use. So your computer really needs decent graphicsprocessing power to play 1080p videos.

Connectivity

The phone’s signal reception (Mobitel) was pretty good. Iused it in Kottawa and Meepe. In Meepe we usually get 1 or 2 Mobitel signals,but the phone still managed to provide fast 3G internet for me.

Here are the SpeedTest results for different connections Iused.

Battery Life

This is one of the most important concerns of any phoneuser. So how does the iPhone 4S perform in this regard? In a nutshell, I cansay the iPhone 4S battery is pretty strong and it lives up to consumer's expectations.

I didn’t carry out a technically-timed benchmark of thebattery. But here are my general experience concerning the battery.

My friend in Singaporewho bought my iPhone 4S had it with him for almost a month in its originalpackaging. He got it on 30^th November. When I opened the box on 23^rdDecember morning, the phone had around 75% of battery left. Yes, the phone was completely OFFwhile sitting in the package, but I think having 75% of battery, more than amonth after leaving the factory, is impressive.

Straight away after opening thebox, I proceeded to put to my SIM in and activated the phone via 3G, withoutcharging the phone. We played with it for a while and made a few phone calls (all from thatinitial 75%) and the remaining battery was only slightly reduced.

On the same day, I charged the phone to 100% by mid day. Andafter lot of playing and experimenting, it had 77% battery left when I wasgoing to sleep that night. In the next morning, it had 68% battery left (9% drop overnight). Starting with that 68%, after thefirst full day of very heavy use with occasional charging (when syncing via iTunes), the battery died around 7PM. The last 1% of thebattery, I used for 30 minutes of constant gaming and playing videos (without headphones) with the intention of draining the battery. I also observed that the wall charger charges the phone from 0 – 100% in around 2 hours.

Here are the list of things I did throughout the day.Remember, this is my first new iPhone after 3.5 years, so I had a lot to do withit on its first day.

Lot of camera activity(Experimenting with auto focus, Macro photography, lots of photos and videos)
Lot of experiments withSiri and Voice Control
Lot of internet activity(WiFi and 3G) throughout the day (Reading articles, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter)
Playing Games
Reading books (Lord of the Rings. I recommend you read itstarting with ‘The Hobbit’ if you haven’t already.)
Playing songs and videos (without headphones)
Occasionally making calls and SMS
Occasionally plugging into iTunes for syncing apps andvideos (This charges the phone battery)

Maybe the reason I had a very decent battery life out ofiPhone 4S even while in heavy use, might be because I was a conservativeresource user. Here are the list of phone features which were turned on/off.

3G was turned OFF when WiFi was available.
3G/WiFi was turned OFF when I’m not using the internet (eg.when playing games, Camera activity)
Location Services (GPS) was ON the whole time.
iCloud syncing was ON.
Push Notifications completely OFF.

I recommend you turn off 3G (Settings -> General ->Network -> Cellular Data) when not using internet in order to save your phone bill. I don’tcare about push notifications so I kept it off and that would have made animpact on the battery life if I hadn't done so.

So overall, it seems the iPhone 4S can get an ordinarysmartphone user easily through the day without being recharged. It might be the case that the battery is still new and the battery life might change over time.Other users might also experience different battery life depending on theusage. But I’m definitely impressed with the battery life I got.

Damage Resistance

iPhone 4 and 4S are like delicate flowers because of theirglass front and back. They make the phone a beauty but they can easily becracked if you drop the phone on a hard floor. So I recommend you use iPhone4/4S with a proper casing. The phone’s structure is very strong (you can feelit when you hold it). Nothing will happen to the phone internals if you drop it(I didn’t test it though), but the glass panels will crack making the phoneunusable until you replace them. My friend from

Singapore

said Apple doesn’t givewarranty for iPhones with cracked glasses.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very impressed with the iPhone 4S, speciallysince I have been using an old 2007 iPhone for a long time. But for iPhone 4owners it’s not a worthy upgrade. As with all Apple products, the delight ofthe iPhone is not in the specification sheets, but in actually using it in yourday-to-day life. The issues that exist, are there because of the region we livein, which is still not fully supported by Apple. (Built-in support for Sinhalafonts is a step in the right direction)

So I hope this article aided prospective iPhone buyers in

Sri Lanka

.Please leave a comment if you have a personal observation or a tip that mighthelp other users.

Fix for Windows Vista/7 blank "Windows Features" dialog box

2010-01-18T14:15:00.004+05:30

Recently when I accessed Windows 7 "Turn Windows Features on or off" (Control Panel -> Programs) option it just gave me a dialog box with a blank list. Normally you would get something like this:

But what I got was the same dialog box with a blank list. It displays "Please wait..." initially but the list doesn't appear afterwards. This is a problem known by Microsoft, but the solutions they have provided DON'T WORK!

I found this nice article mentioning the same problem and I fixed the problem according to the instructions given there. Visit FIX Blank or Empty List in Vista Turn Windows Features On or Off (OptionalFeatures.exe)

You have to download and run a tool from Microsoft and act according to the log it produces. Procedure is the same for Vista and Windows 7. Just make sure to download the correct version of that tool for your OS.

Things I hate about Mac user interface

2009-12-29T11:09:00.016+05:30

Apple MacOSX is known for it's aesthetic interface. During the time that I've used MacOSX I've realized that it is true indeed. Nevertheless Apple's minimalistic approach haven't included some of the most basic UI features into the operating system. I may be missing them probably because I've used them so much in Windows and a long time Mac user may have a different idea. Anyway these facts will be useful for any Windows or Linux user joining the Mac bandwagon.

No "Print Screen" key

In Windows you can press PrintScreen key in the keyboard to capture the whole screen ot Alt+PrintScreen to capture the current window. In Mac keyboard there's not such key and you have to do it using a built-in screenshot utility.

Cut-and-Paste missing in Finder

Windows Explorer equivalent in Mac is Finder. It does not have cut-and-paste functionality for file manipulation. Only thing you can do is copy-and-paste. So Cut is missing from right-click context menu and keyboard shortcuts. (Cut-and-paste IS available for clipboard operations)

"Paste" menu item will appear after you have copied a file.

No separate keys for Delete and Backspace

Mac keyboard has only one key for both delete and backspace functionality. You'll initially be confused by it's behaviour. The key is labeled "delete" and placed where the backspace key is on Windows keyboard. Although the key is labeled "delete", by default it has the backspace functionality. To get the the "Delete" functionality you have to use Fn+Delete.

Finder does not support the delete key for deleting files either. You have to right click and say "Move to Trash" or drag the file into Trash. No Shift+Delete is present either :-(

No option to show Hidden files

Finder doesn't provide any option to show/hide hidden system files. If you want to view hidden files you have to manually edit a configuration file using a command line utility and restart Finder process.

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

To stop showing hidden files again, use the same commands with the value FALSE instead of TRUE.

"Maximize" button behaviour

Maximize button in applications have different behaviour depending on the application. This is pretty confusing. The expected behaviour is fill the screen with the current window. But some applications doesn't follow this rule. Most of them just resize the window a little bit more instead of fully resizing. Safari, MS Word and Finder does this.

iTunes will go into the compact mode when you press the Maximize button, contradicting with the '+' sign representing the icon!

Window edges cannot be used to resize windows.

In Windows, you can use any of the four edges of a window to resize it. But in Mac, you always have to use the lower right corner of a window to resize it.

I think that should be enough for now. There maybe some more things to complain about, but I don't remember them now. Regardless of these shortcomings there are so many things to love about MacOSX! and what's my favourite operating system?? Windows 7! without a doubt!

Connecting a Mac to an Active Directory domain

2009-12-15T14:58:00.004+05:30

These are the steps you should follow in order to connect MacOSX to an existing active directory domain. I tried this using MacOSX Snow Leopard 10.6.2. The domain server is Windows Server 2003.

In the Mac, go to System Preferences -> Accounts
Click the lock icon to unlock it and enter the admin password to gain access to administrative settings.
Click "Login Options"
Under "Network Account Server", click "Join"
In the popup, click "Open Directory Utility" and make sure all the tick marks are checked.
In the "Server" field, enter the server name (without "\\" or anything) which is hosting the active directory service.
If it finds the server, it will ask you for the information shown below:
Make sure to use the client computer ID that your administrator has given.
Enter the correct details for the settings and click OK.

To login as a domain user, enter the user name in the usual domain\username format in the MacOSX login window.

Diving into the iPhone AppStore - Part 2

2009-11-15T18:35:00.006+05:30

This is the continuation from the post Diving into the iPhone AppStore - Part 1.

Application <-> Firmware Compatibility

Apple frequently releases firmware update for the iPhone. These new releases includes bug fixes, new features for users as well as developers. If your application depends on a certain feature that is only available in newer firmware versions, it will not work on devices with older firmware installed. For example, the MapKit library which provides native Google Map controls for third-party developers, was introduced in iPhone OS 3.0. So if your application needs to use native Google Map controls, it can only be run on devices with iPhone OS 3.0 or later. Similarly each new version of firmware (3.1, 3.1.2, …) introduces new features like this.

In XCode, you can set the target firmware version when developing your application. You can go as back to iPhone OS 2.0 as well. The best thing to do is setting the target to the minimum firmware version that your application requires so your application will be available to a larger audience. Although most iPhone users upgrade the iPhone firmware as Apple releases them, some don’t.

AppStore

AppStore is the first successful and the largest mobile application store on the planet and it has set a huge distance between it and its nearest competitor, Android Market. In a nutshell, it’s the one big store that iPhone users can shop for third party applications, currently featuring over 100,000 applications. If you are not an iPhone user, just install iTunes on your computer and visit the AppStore. You’re in for a treat!

If Apple is good at something, it’s maintaining the highest quality possible in their products. Their main strength is providing a very high amount of customer satisfaction by means of quality user experience. This is true for the AppStore shopping experience too. Users can easily install applications on their iPhones without any of the technical difficulties that were available on past mobile platforms. The end result is very high user recognition and discoverability for applications developed third party developers. When you put your application on the AppStore, it’s instantly available to all the 30 million something iPhone users around the world. And it’s guaranteed, that it’ll work on all the devices of the users who choose to install it. This is the fact that is attracting developers into the iPhone platform.

Application Approval Process

Apple loves maintaining quality and they want the third party developers to do that too. They don’t want third party developers to cripple Apple’s image in quality. When a user installs an Application, and if it gives crippled user experience, it’s the iPhone that get’s the blame from the user. Obviously Apple doesn’t like it and they want the user to have the best experience possible with their device. So they have a set of rules that every third party developer should follow in order to ensure that quality.

Making a release

When you finish building your application, and finish your internal testing and QA, you’d think you could make your application available to users straight away. This is not the case with iPhone. When your application is ready, you have to submit it to the Application Approval Process.

This is where things get interesting. It might take weeks (or months!) to get your app approved (or rejected!). You have no control whatsoever over this process and you have to wait until you get results from Apple. If your app is approved, it’ll appear on the AppStore and you’ll be notified. Since it’s humans that inspects your applications you can expect human errors and inconsistencies in different situations. According to Apple, they have a team of 40 full time employees, who have to review nearly 8500 application submissions per week. And every app is reviewed by 2 employees. Funny ha!

The point is, things can go wrong! and you won’t have any control over it. Suppose you submit your app and after few weeks it gets approved. As the users start using it, you notice a small bug that can be fixed quickly. But still, you have to resubmit the modified version of application and wait…all over again just to ship that small bug fix, while users keep using the buggy version. Because of this, you have to be very very careful in making a release into the AppStore. A small mistake can cost you so much.

Economics

Despite all the drawbacks, AppStore has a constant developer attraction. Mainly because of the unification that it provides in terms of distributing their software. After your app appears on the store, users around the world can buy it with a single click, using their computers or iPhones. (and it’s guaranteed to work on their devices) With every sale, the developer gets 70% of the price of the application and 30% goes to Apple. It’s that simple. No more infrastructure maintenance, financial handling and complex charging policies. You’ll get a monthly cheque from Apple. You don’t have to pay anything if your app is free.

As the developer, you get to choose the price of your app. From the start, developers have experimented with various pricing strategies which have yielded very interesting results. The sweet spot is considered $0.99. The net profit you get doesn’t come from the profit margin. It’s the sheer number of sales you could get if you do things right. There are lot of success stories about developers who have made fortunes with their simple, $0.99 apps. In the AppStore, sales figures can come in tens of thousands per day. So even if you make $0.50 profit per sale, it can mean $5000 profit per day! With the sheer number of iPhone users around the world (more than 30million) you have can have a huge target user base who can use your application. It doesn’t magically give successful results. You have to be creative and strategic with you application.

Conclusion

With all that being said, there’s a LOT I haven’t said. The web is pouring with iPhone and AppStore related articles in which many are interesting reads. I’ve been following on all the things related to iPhone even before it’s release. If you follow up on the subject, it may turn out to be fascinating to you too. As with everything in this universe, it has both good and bad things about it. Just know your beast and learn to get the most out of it. If you need to know more info, just search the web or put a comment.

Good Luck!

Interesting reads:

http://daringfireball.net/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple

Diving into the iPhone AppStore - Part 1

2009-10-29T09:25:00.009+05:30

The iPhone madness is resonating throughout the world and the shock wave has reached Sri Lanka as well. The madness is two-fold; iPhone User madness and iPhone Developer madness! I've been fortunate enough to be a part of the staggering iPhone user base for one and half years now. Thanks to my new employer I've been able get my hands on "the other side" as well, that is, the iPhone development arena!

I'm writing this since several people have asked me about iPhone development procedures, about the AppStore and such. This should help any would-be-iPhone-developer to know about prerequisites, special considerations and possible frustrations! that he or she is going to face.

Here are the steps that you should follow to get into iPhone development using iPhoneSDK.

1. Get a Mac!

Can't I use Windows (or Linux)? Of course not! All official iPhone development tools are developed by Apple and they are Mac-only!

Well, this is costly! but you have several choices here. If you have the money, you could go for an iMac. That's apple's desktop class computer and it's sooooo pretty! Next choice would be a MacBook Pro or a lower end white MacBook. If you have a spare monitor and keyboard/mouse, you can go for a MacMini (it's kind of cheap) and plug your own monitor and keyboard to it.

If you really need it, for the initial stage of experimenting, you can try out hacked versions of MaxOS X on your PC. But these have lot of glitches in them and it's hard to get them working. More info at http://www.osx86project.org/.

MacOS X version requirement

iPhoneSDK have a minimum requirement of a certain version of MacOS X to be installed. The latest SDK version (3.1.2) requires MacOS X 10.5.8 to work. The requirement tend to elevate with most updates to the iPhoneSDK. So make sure you have necessary software updates installed on the OS.

2. iPhoneSDK

iPhoneSDK has more or less the same development tools, libraries and programming paradigms that MacOS X uses. The reason for this is that, iPhoneOS is just MacOS X with a different UI running on different hardware. In fact, apple has built iPhoneOS with the same source files of MacOS X Leopard kernel and most of the system services and libraries. So it has the same power and the architecture of the desktop class MacOS X. If you are a Mac developer (which I'm not), you'll find iPhoneSDK surprisingly similar to the development tools you've been using up to now. The only major deviation that the iPhoneOS has from MacOS X, is the UI, which is a complete rethought from top to bottom.

XCode

XCode is the IDE you'll be using. Although you are not required to use XCode, it has really nice and elegant features making it the standard choice of Mac and iPhone developers (much like Microsoft Visual Studio). XCode and other supporting development tools are freely available on the iPhone developer connection website.

Objective-C

In iPhoneSDK, You'll have to write code primarily in Objective-C. It is essentially a super set of C, meaning you can code in pure C if you want. You can think of Objective-C as an extension library to C. All it does is providing an object-oriented like syntax to access underlying C entities. The syntax may appear weird at first since it's significantly different from the "dot" notation we are used to in C-style languages. But within 10 minutes or so, you can get the hang of it.

Since we are talking about native application development here, there are no fancy runtimes available for you. Actually, Objective-C itself has a runtime to do stuff like wrapping/unwrapping Objective-C classes from and to their equivalent C data structures. But it's not as powerful as .Net CLR or Java virtual machine. In my opinion, iPhoneSDK development stands between Win32 native development and .Net development. You don't have to go into so deep as native Windows programming, but you don't also have a large runtime feature set like .Net. For example, Objective-C runtime, doesn't have a garbage collector so you have to release resources manually when you finish using them. Somewhat similar to free() in C but not exactly the same. You'll understand these fine differenciations when you read the subject matter.

For more info on everything regarding iPhone SDK and AppStore, register on iPhone Developer Connection.

3. Testing the apps

iPhoneSDK comes with a nice iPhone simulator that you can use to test your applications. Obviously this doesn't have all the features of a real iPhone but you can emulate most of the functionality here. One thing to keep in mind is that DO NOT test application performance in the emulator. Since the emulator runs using your desktop CPU and hardware, applications run significantly faster on it. But it should be enough for most day-to-day business class applications.

If you do need to test your application on a real device however, you might want to consider buying an iPhone or an iPodTouch (iPodTouch lacks some hardware features the iPhone has). In addition to that, you need to register on the iPhone Developer Program ($99/year) in order to acquire a developer certificate. You need that certificate to test your applications on a real iPhone.

Continue to Diving into the iPhone AppStore - Part 2

Gaming Industry and "XP Effect"!

2009-09-15T14:10:00.004+05:30

Of course this is not about running games on windows XP. :-) I thought of writing this because 1) I haven't written a blog article from some time and 2) I see some dilemma that has been plaguing the technological progression of these two ecosystems. Hence the reason for the title of this article is the similarity that exists in the direction these two are headed.

If you are not a gaming fan you might consider skipping this article. (it's boring anyway!)

First let me extract what is known by many people. Even after two progressive Windows releases, Windows XP still dominates the market as the primary operating system of users arround the world. With advancements of computer hardware and software, you would expect people to move forward. In fact, that's what actually happened in the past. If we consider only the Windows community, users have steadilly migrated onto new operating system versions from Windows 3.0 era to XP era. With hardware advancements over time, the operating system designers were able to deliver new features and concepts and users willingly grasped them.

But since then, the Windows ecosystem seems to be stuck on Windows XP for a long time. (Argubaly, there maybe several reasons for it including Microsoft screwing up over Vista but that's not what this article tries to discuss) The point is, despite rapid growth of hardware and software capabilities, most end-users have decided to stay with what they are already familiar with. It seems that constant "change" that have existed with end-users, is "stabalized" for the past few years.

In my point of view, the gaming industry too have faced this kind of stabalization point in terms of exploiting hardware capabilities. In the case of Windows XP, it was the end-users who seems to have reached a stabalizatin point. But in the gaming industry, it's the game developers that have reached a certain stabalization. In the past, we saw games being released with higher and higher hardware requirements. When you buy a graphics card, it'll be obsolete within a month or two. But now, all the new gaming titles seems to aim a certain level of hardware requirements that would no way require high end graphics cards.

The Reasons

There's a lot. Talking about Windows, users were pretty satisfied with features offered by Windows XP. Most couldn't justify moving onto Vista with the overhead it had on the system and the user himself. The jump caused a considerable change of user interaction. Users simply chose to stick with what they already had, since it was familliar and enough for their requirements.

The same goes for the gaming industry. Only that it maybe little more complex. There is a level of harware specification that can be regarded as familliar and enough for most gamers and that's the level the game developers going to build their games on. This is mostly decided by the current versions of gaming consoles. Unlike PCs, gaming consoles (XBOX, Playstation, etc...) are the major market for games. We can see new PC graphics cards released every month but gaming consoles may take years to re-iterate. So a game which requires the highest hardware capabilities end up being available to a limited set of the consumers. Since developers like to expand their market they compromise on the game graphics to make it available to a larger gaming community.

The Effects

On Windows, what always happens will happen in this case as well. Developers will write software for XP because a large user base is available and users will continue to use XP because there are lot of software available. The downside is the old operating systems and software will not get to use new hardware features supported only by new software.

Talking about games, of course, graphics does not make a game. There's a lot more to it. Developers can make superb gaming titles by inventing controversial story lines, music and gameplay experience. But for "graphics-freaks" like me, gaming graphics will always matter! In fact, I'm using a somewhat old graphics card (see here). But it has more horsepower than all the recent games I've played need (except Crysis). I really wish those games exploited that extra power and improved more on graphics. Although we think the games will be more and more realistic, it will take a longer time to progress as the industry addresses the requirements of the global market.

If you read it this far, I know there are lot of points you may not agree. It's open for discussion...

Windows 7

2009-07-24T19:21:00.011+05:30

Though I was lazy to download Win7 RC due to exams and stuff, I got a copy thanks to the Microsoft .Net Forum Sri Lanka. I installed it on a separate partition since I didnt like to replace my 64bit Vista with this 32bit version. Here's a personalized review of Windows 7 mentioning the improvements in my interested areas.

(There are tons of in-depth Win7 reviews out there. This is just a personal preference of feature additions that I stumbled upon in my usage)

Overall, Windows 7 is snappier and cleaner to the highest level. Here are some additional things I noted:

Displays the really usable memory in system properties

See this post. 32bit OSes cannot use 4GB RAM. They are limited to 3.25GB. On my system, XP 32bit showed 3.25GB as full memory available. But in Win7 32bit it shows both the real memory and usable memory in system properties. This would avoid user confusion in situations like I faced as in the aforementioned post.

Performance Index Differences

Performance Index scale has been changed in Windows 7. Compare the rating I have in Vista and the new rating. In Win7, CPU and RAM performance index have been moved higher. I got a lower index for hard dist performance since I installed Win7 on an IDE hard disk. Otherwise my Base score in Win7 would have been 5.7, compared to 5.5 in Vista.

Rating in Vista SP1 (in SATA HDD)

Rating in Windows 7 (in IDE HDD)

Detects iPhone even without iTunes driver

Windows 7 detected my iPhone straight away and allowed me to use it as a camera. In XP and Vista, the iPhone won't even charge from the USB without the driver installed. This would make my life a lot easier if everybody had Windows 7. :-) It's worth to mention that Ubuntu had this driver built-in from some time ago.

Video format support

The video formats we love; xvid, divx, h264 and more, are natively supported in Windows 7. So you can watch your films even without installing a codec pack or another player. But for subtitles, you will need a player like KMPlayer or VLC.

Sinhala Typing isn't fixed yet!

That wiered Sinhala typing problem we had in Vista, still exist in Windows 7 as well. I had to install Vista Sinhala Quick Fix to fix that.

My 3 Column Blogger Template

2009-07-04T19:43:00.007+05:30

I felt 2 columns was not enough for my blog and decided to change it to 3 columns. I found this article showing how to take an existing blogger template and make it 3 column: http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2007/07/create-three-column-blogger-template.html

This article modifies the blogger Minima template, but I did this on blogger's Son of Moto template.

I was previously using Son of Moto template since I liked its fonts, link colors and all but I decided to change it's Greenish color theme to my own one. This was pretty easy, considering I had no experience in editing CSS before!

If somebody liked my template and wanted to modify, you can download it from the link below. Remember, this is just a modified version of Blogger Son of Moto template.

Download Link: http://www.mediafire.com/?ytdywrnq4zn

All images are tiled .gif ones. and they add up to just 1KB. I cannot guarantee the availability of images in its current server. So I suggest you host the images on your own server if you really need to use those.
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How to unlock iPhone with OS 3.0

2009-06-21T18:11:00.018+05:30

WARNING: The procedure in this post may not always give the same correct results. So use it at your own risk.

Apple released iPhone OS 3.0. So Dev-Team has released a jailbreak tool for OS 3.0. This lists down the steps for upgrading your iPhone to OS 3.0 and then jailbreaking it. FYI, Jailbreaking and Unlocking are two separate things. You have to Jailbreak before unlocking. Jailbreaking is cracking the OS. Unlocking is making any SIM work with your iPhone.

The procedure is slightly different for iPhone 2G and iPhone3G. So do whatever applies to you. The process is fairly easy and doesn't use any command line tools..

I personally did this procedure only on my iPhone 2G. I have no way of testing this for iPhone 3G.

Upgrading the iPhone

Open iTunes. (version 8.2 or later must be installed. Get it here)
Connect your iPhone to the computer. iTunes will show the iPhone sync screen.
Click the Update button in iTunes.
iTunes will begin downloading the firmware file (about 240MB).
The download progress will appear in the "Downloads" section of iTunes left panel.
You can disconnect your iPhone while the file is being downloaded. Connect it after the download and click Update button again.
iTunes will install the downloaded firmware file to your device. This may take like 20 minutes or so.

Upgrading is finished. If you are using an unofficial SIM the phone will be locked. Now for the jailbreak and unlock.

Preserve the downloaded firmware file

Now you have to locate the firmware file iTunes just downloaded and store it in an easy to access folder.
In My Computer, go to this address: %AppData%\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates
This folder is where iTunes stores downloaded iPhone firmware files. You have to copy the file corresponding to your iPhone to any folder you like for future use.

Here are the file names:

for iPhone3G : iPhone1,2_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw
for iPhone 2G : iPhone1,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw

Copy the file to any folder you like.

Jailbreaking Procedure

Download the latest version of redsn0w torrent from here: http://thepiratebay.org/user/iphonedev/
Extract the downloaded archive. There will be a program called redsn0w.exe in it.
Run the redsn0w.exe. This is the jailbreaking tool.
Carefully read instructions on the screen and do what it says.
In the first screen, click browse and give the firmware file you copied before.
In the next screen put a tick for Cydia and click next.
Follow instructions on redsn0w and if u follow it the phone will be jailbroken within like 15 minutes or so.

Unlocking Procedure

If you upgraded an iPhone 2G it should be already unlocked. iPhone 2G does not loose its unlock when upgrading. On the other hand, iPhone 3G looses its unlock when upgraded. So you have to install ultrasn0w to unlock iPhone3G.

This is for iPhone3G only.

Unlocking instructions are also available here.

Connect the iPhone3G to the internet (WiFi Only. Cannot use 3G since SIM is locked).
Open Cydia in iPhone.
In Cydia, go to Manage -> Sources
Tap Edit, then tap Add.
Type this in the text box: repo666.ultrasn0w.com (There's a Zero in the word ultrasn0w)
Tap Add Source. Wait until it refreshes. If you typed it wrong, it will give an error.
Go to Search and search for "ultrasn0w" and install it.
Reboot your iPhone3G.

Incoming phone number detection issue

iPhone does not support Sri Lankan phone number formats (as many other unsupported countries). So if your address book contact has 071123456 and if you receive an SMS from +9471123456 then the SMS will not detect the contact name for that number. You can fix that after jailbreaking by installing a patch from Cydia. You don't have to do this if you don't have the issue.

Connect your iPhone to internet (through WiFi or 3G).
Open Cydia. (Cydia is automatically installed when jailbreaking)
Wait until it refreshes its database.
Go to search tab from the bottom panel.
Search for "Caller ID Fix"
Some results will appear. As at the time of writing the latest version was "Caller ID Fix for 2.2". I installed this on iPhone OS 3.0 and it worked for me.
If it shows a fix for 3.0 then install that version. Otherwise fix for 2.2 will be OK.
Tap on the item and install it. It will do some rebooting stuff after installing and your contacts should be identified correctly now.

Through Cydia you can install lot more interesting stuff.

Cycoder - Video recording application

Winterboard - Apply themes for iPhone

Categories - Group icons into folders

SBSettings - easy access panel to popular settings

Put any questions you may have on comments. Good luck!

Update

redsn0w torrent download link changed to http://thepiratebay.org/user/iphonedev/

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NFS Undercover on iPhone

2009-06-08T12:47:00.002+05:30

I'm ill. So I found myself some time to install NFS Undercover on iPhone and have been playing it since then. I have played several racing games available on the AppStore. This is by far the most exciting and quality racing game I have played on iPhone. EA really knows how to keep its standards.

The game has nearly all the features as the PC version:

Same stupid story
Police and traffic
Nitros and Speedbreaker
Slow-motion and tilting cameras (gives a really thrilling experience)
Car customizations (performace and visuals)
Quality music tracks (EA always does this right)

Unfortunately free-roaming is not there. Maybe due to memory limitations of the iPhone. But you have all the race types including outruns, hot-car deliveries, cop takeouts, thug takeouts and bounty acquisition. Same cut-scenes from the original game will be there including that sweet girl friend of yours.

Here are some screenshots I took (click on the images for bigger versions).

The map. EA has designed great UI animations for the game menus.

In the garage. You can use typical iPhone finger guesters to zoom and rotate the car. Customizations are available for nearly every feature.

Race tracks are diverse and fairly detailed. You can get a really nice and intuitive driving experience with a fine-tuned accelerometer usage from EA.

Cops are quite good and helps increasing the quality of the game. I still didn't see any heavy SUVs which are my favourites in the PC version!

The game is available on AppStore for $9.99. I also downloaded Assassin's Creed but didn't install it yet. It needs firmware 2.2.1 (I have 2.2) but I'm lazy to upgrade with 3.0 just arround the corner.
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The Shut Down Comparison!

2009-06-03T12:20:00.012+05:30

Studying the ways of shutting down the computer has been kind of a research area among operating system GUI designers. Although we as users do not see it, designing a simple interface like shutting down the computer takes lots of user studies and research. Today with number of operating systems that we use, we can see different approaches they have taken on how to present the user with the least annoying Shut Down interface.

I'll compare the shut down mechanisms of the 3 major operating systems we use; Windows XP, Windows Vista and Ubuntu 9.04. Specifically, I'll consider the number of mouse clicks and mouse movement they require from the user. Although there are shortcut keys associated with them, I won't consider them since ordinary users won't know about them anyway.

Windows XP
In XP, users have to go through 2 dialog boxes to accomplish the task. First, the start menu and the second, the final shut down box.

Click Start button. (click 1)
Click "Turn Off Computer". (click 2)
Move the mouse to the center of the screen.
Click "Turn Off" button. (click 3)

It is clear that this involves 3 mouse clicks and a mouse movement across the screen. Although, as IT people the mouse is in our "genes", this is a fair amount of work load for a typical user. (You should've seen the time it takes for our grandma to do this)

Windows Vista
This is totally confusing for new users. There are number of ways you can shut down. With the default settings, you see a yellow "shut-down-like" button. People mistake this as the shut down button where it actually means "Sleep". To truly shut down the computer, you have to click the small arrow, and choose Shut Down from the not-so-simple menu that appears. This process needs a very high amount of concentration from the user.

This is the way you do it with default settings.

Click Start button. (click 1)
Click the small arrow to the right of Sleep and Lock buttons. (click 2)
Choose "Shut Down" from the the list. (click 3) (This list has 6 items. If you needed to Restart you have to find where restart is in the list. Shut Down is easier since it's the bottom-most item.)

This process requires 3 clicks (same as XP). But it also requires the user to thoroughly concentrate on what he/she is doing, which is too much to ask from an ordinary user.

You can change the behavior of the Sleep button to Shut Down via power settings. Read this for instructions on how to change it. Then the whole process changes.

Click start button. (click 1)
Click "Shut Down" button. (click 2)

Now it's only 2 clicks. So simple. The catch is that the red Shut Down button is very easily reachable. User don't get any confirmation dialog box after clicking this. So when you click it, wooosh! it's bye bye windows. So it's prone to unintended shut downs.

In Vista they have increased the number of ways to shut down and none of them are perfect. XP way is better in my opinion.

Ubuntu 9.04
Ubuntu 9.04 reportedly have a nice and clean interface. This is true for their Shut Down mechanism too. Although they have borrowed the idea from Apple MacOS X, they does a good job integrating it with their user interface.

Click the power button at the upper-right corner. (click 1)
Choose Shut Down from the menu. (click 2) (Menu has 6 items. Shut Down is at the bottom and Restart is the one before that)

That's it. If you are lazy you can leave your computer and it will shut down. But if you made an error in your decision you can always cancel it since it displays this time-out dialog box.

If you choose, you can continue the previous process further.

Move the mouse to the Shut Down dialog box.
Click the shut down button. (click 3)

See how thoughtful they have been. The computer will shut down without any user interaction within 60 seconds. If you are in a hurry, you make an extra mouse click on the Shut Down button on the time-out dialog.

It's "2 clicks" or "3 clicks with a mouse move" depending on the way you choose. But always the result is the same and you have the confirmation dialog so you can undo your decision. This is the nicest shut down process I've seen so far (including MacOS X).

Finally, see how much we can talk about a simple operation like this. (as if we don't have anything else to do!) These subtle changes effect the user's perception of an operating system. And most of the time, these are the "only" things that a user uses to judge an operating system.

Any thoughts?
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Between 2 worlds! Firefox and Chrome

2009-05-27T22:23:00.009+05:30

Why can't people get together and build a product that has only "good" features! But the world is not like that..is it? I switch back and forth between Firefox and Chrome due to this very reason. I like them and hate them at the same time.

Remarkably, my list of likes and dislikes is not so long. There are only one or two things that I dislike about these products but they have a very big impact in my (I think everyone else's too) browsing habits.

These are the specific things that gets on my nerves. While these may not effect other people, they directly collide with my web usage.

1. Firefox being bad!

Takes a long time to start.
Address bar does not support full google search (specially "define:" keyword)
Separate search box.
Separate download window. (There are some buggy add-ons to eliminate this)

2. Chrome being bad!

"Stop" button is at the right side. It should be moved to the left of the address bar.

Sometimes Tabs go "not responding" (more frequently than Firefox).
Some web pages are not rendered correctly.

3. Chrome being Good

Then I have the things which makes Chrome better than Firefox.

Really intelligent all-in-one address bar.
Simple and clean user interface.
Efficient use of screen real estate.
Download handling.
Starts up quickly.

Unfortunately, I don't have anything that makes Firefox stand out on Chrome. So right now there are 2 things that could make this world a better place:

Make a Firefox that doesn't have bad features listed in (1).
Make a Chrome that doesn't have bad features listed in (2).

I believe any of these things will produce a completely good browser. Personally I like the 2nd choice because I prefer Chrome due to its simpleness.

What's your choice? any thoughts?
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Download the same torrent from Windows and Ubuntu

2009-05-19T22:09:00.001+05:30

Thanks Kasun for pointing out this feature to me.

If you are a torrent downloader and a person who needs to switch between Windows and Ubuntu frequently, you need to continuously download your torrents from both operating systems. Most torrent clients facilitates this requirement. I'm going to demonstrate this feature using 2 bittorrent clients named, uTorrent (Windows) and Transmission (Ubuntu). But this can be applied on any modern torrent client.

What actually happens here is each client starts downloading from where the other client left off. Obviously for this, both clients must save the files to the same location on the hard disk.

I'm going to start with Windows assuming you are running uTorrent on it. I assume you don't need much explanation with uTorrent.

Starting the torrent

Download and save the .torrent file you need.
Start the download from uTorrent. But when you give the download location, save it to a path where it is accessible from Ubuntu as well. For this example I'll assume it is D:\Downloads.
Suppose in the middle of the download you decided to go to Ubuntu. Assume you were at 41% of the download.

Continuing the torrent from Ubuntu

If you haven't done so already, install Transmission from the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu. It's pretty easy and straightforward to configure if you are a torrent user.
You can access Transmission from Applications -> Internet menu.
Open the same .torrent file you used before. (or you can download it again) It will be opened from Transmission and You'll get the Torrent Options dialog box. (Note the 0% download progress of files)
For the Destination Folder, give the same location you used before. For example, on Ubuntu it may be something like /media/sda2/Downloads.
If you have done it correctly, download progress of all files should be automatically updated. If not, you can click the "Verify Local Data" button to update the download progress. (This will take some time for large torrents)
Click "Add" to start the download. Transmission will continue downloading from where you left off earlier.

Continuing from Windows

You can also continue the torrent from Windows if you decide to leave Ubuntu and go to Windows.
Open uTorrent. The old torrent entry must still be there. Stop the torrent if it is running.
Right click the torrent and click "Force Re-Check" from the menu. uTorrent will update the download progress of the files. (This will take some time for large torrents)
When it has finished updating you can start the torrent to continue downloading from that point.
This procedure is the same for Transmission. You can right click the torrent and choose "Verify Local Data".

The procedure should not be much different even if you use other torrent clients. There maybe some different terms they may be using but the basics are the same.

Enjoy!
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Solve Ubuntu Network Manager problems

2009-05-17T18:05:00.000+05:30

If you are a user of Ubuntu 8.10 or 9.04 you know how awful the built-in Network Manager is. It doesn't save your settings, and settings doesn't get applied so it's literary impossible to change your IP address using it.

One solution is to remove the Network Manager and edit the network configuration files manually. But there's an easier approach. You can install Wicd to do the configuration for you. This is an alternative to the default network manager which does it job right. It's really simple and straightforward to use.

Here are the simple steps required.

Install wicd through Synaptic Package Manager.
Network Manager will be removed from the tray panel when you install wicd.
Go to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications and disable the Network Manager.
If newly installed wicd network icon isn't there in the tray panel, launch it from Applications -> Internet -> Wicd Network Manager. It will start automatically from next startup.
In the Wicd Manager, expand Wired Network section and click Advanced Settings.
Enter your IP address details here. The settings will be applied as soon as you click the OK button.
You can open a terminal and type "ifconfig" to check whether the IP address settings have been correctly applied.

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iPhone device timeout error when syncing

2009-05-17T12:47:00.000+05:30

A person I know began getting a "Device Timeout Error" when syncing his iPhone with iTunes. All his contacts, photos were being synced but the problem occurred when syncing Music and video. Both iPhone and iTunes were on latest software versions. The problem was fixed after following these simple steps.

Note. For this to work, your iPhone/iPodTouch has to be jailbroken.

I found the original solution from here. The solution is to delete /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control folder from the iPhone and sync with iTunes. This should work for both iPhone and iPodTouch.

Here are the detailed steps to follow.

Download DiskAid or iPhoneBrowser. On Windows you need .Net Framework 2 for this. (I'm using DiskAid)
Connect the iPhone to the computer. (close iTunes if it is running)
Open DiskAid or iPhoneBrowser. It will show you the folder list of the iPhone.
Navigate to the folder /private/var/mobile/Media and delete the "iTunes_Control" folder in there. (be very careful NOT to delete any other things)
Close the application and Sync with iTunes.

I don't know the exact reason for this problem. But that person told he changed the USB port that he plugs the data cable. It may have something to do with changing USB ports or the machine you use to sync.
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NFS Undercover

2009-05-17T12:10:00.000+05:30

6.5 GB of Hard disk space required.

This is certainly not the crown jewel of the Need for Speed series. But it sure has some unique features (good and bad). The game features a story just like the last few versions. The game has a big open world, police, lot of cars and few unique event types. Time of day is set to the so called Magic hour where you experience a unique yellowish lighting condition.

Among few others, my favorite event was where thugs are chasing our girlfriend to smash her car. We are chasing those thugs to smash their cars and the city police are chasing all of us to take into custody. Cops seems somewhat easier to beat than in previous versions. Overall the game appears very artificial. Driving is not natural at all. Driving physics of NFS Undercover takes out the fun we had in previous versions.

Graphics
I played this game with highest graphics detail and highest resolution. Graphics appear bit artificial. Shadows had to be turned off because they totally sucked! My system specs are here.

Here are some screenshots:

The famous Smoke engine from Pro-Street made it to Undercover.

The biggest problem in the game graphics was crappy Shadows. They suck big time so I turned them off as most users have done. Even in highest quality shadow edges are ridiculous and unnatural.

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Burnout Paradise The Ultimate Box

2009-05-01T17:55:00.000+05:30

3.2 GB of Hard disk space required.

This is one of the best racing games I've ever played. The game has no story though so it gets boring after a few days of playing. The main reason I loved this game was its graphics and gameplay experience. Designers have built realistic collisions, car damage and Matrix style slow-motion camera movement into the game. Its basically like watching a simulation when vehicles collide.
The game takes place in a large city called "Paradise City". There is no police so you are free to roam around and do all the crazy stuff you can do with your car. Performing stunts plays a big role in the game. There are no menus to access races. Every junction in the city is a starting point for a race. One of the hardest parts is finding your way to the finishing line. There's no GPS or any guidance so you have to rely on the map which shows the dense road network of the city.
The cars that exist in the game do not exist in the real world. Game uses an imaginary set of car models with imaginary manufacturers. Nevertheless their car designs are truly superb.

Graphics
I played this game with highest graphics detail and highest resolution and graphics are very much realistic. My system specs are here.

The game world is heavily detailed and you get to drive through cities, mountains and so many other different terrines. Game features realistic lighting where you can see shadows change when the sun moves throughout the day.

Realistic collisions are shown with dramatic slowmotion camera angles.

Literally every part of the car is breakable. You can actually see tires break and fly away when you hit it hard.

This is what you get if you speed too much!

A moment captured in the middle of a jump.

Variety of vehicles are available. This includes 4x4 trucks, old classics, F1 cars and bikes.

Video uploaded by Thusitha :

The game gets bit repetitive since you get to play the same races again and again (with different cars) to get past levels. But you sure can enjoy freely roaming around the big city and performing stunts to your liking.
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Crysis:WARHEAD

2009-04-30T12:51:00.000+05:30

5.6 GB of Hard disk space required.

This has the most advanced graphics and effects among current fleet of gaming titles. World is full of natural beauties and interactivity. Intense combat takes place in tropical forests and various other landscapes. Game music and sound effects gives the true feeling of intense fighting. Crysis:WARHEAD is the sequel to the original game Crysis. The game storyline is pretty cheap though compared to Assasin's Creed. The character wears the Nano Suit which has a significant role in the story.

Graphics
I was restricted to 1024 X 768 resolution, 2X antialiasing and No Motion Blur with this game. All the other effects could be set to highest detail. Even then the graphics looks astonishing. My system sepcs are here.

Game Music
I loved the in-game music of Crysis:WARHEAD. If you like them, you can find them inside the game installation folder. Go to the "Game" directory inside the installation folder and open the file "Warhead_Music.pak" with WinRAR and extract it. All the audio files of the game are in the archive in ogg format. You can find the long music files by looking at the file size.

It's facinating to see volumetric light effects within the game.

World is full of beautiful sceneries like this.

Sea water is just like the real thing.

Lot of objects in the world are interactive. Trees literally break apart where you shoot them.

You also get to drive military vehicles.

Make your way through dense tropical forests.

Your enemies are these aliens and the Korean military.

Here's a video of the game by Thusitha:

The game may be little bit short compared to other games. But it keeps you going right until the end with the music and heavy fighting.

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Assasin's Creed

2009-04-29T17:20:00.000+05:30

6.7 GB of Hard disk space required.

Unique and superb story line. Character animation, details, excitement in the gameplay truly superb. They have literally put all the details they can put into those big cities. You can experience a stunning gameplay although the missions get kind of repetitive in the middle. The story alternates between year 2012 and ancient 1191 (read the Wikipedia article here).

Graphics
I was able to play this with highest graphics details and highest resolution possible. My system sepcs are here.

Detailed costume design plays a major role in the game. It adds to the liveliness and realism of the story.

Character movement and behaviour is truly outstanding.

You can literaly see the whole city from far away when you are reaching them.

Blending with scholars to get past the city gaurds.

Character perfectly mimics human movement when walking, running, climbing buildings and fighting.

Realistic day lighting makes the environment more realistic.

Looking around from the top of the tower.

Avery aspect of the city buildings are highly detailed. Smokes, high quality textures, realistic lighting and detailed city scapes gives you the true feeling of historic times.

The game stunningly ends with an opening to a sequel. Still no source on the release date of Assasin's Creed 2.
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Games I've been playing

2009-04-28T23:33:00.000+05:30

I thought of putting short posts about some games I've been playing in last few months. So I'll be posting an article per each game with some details and screenshots of it.

My system specs

Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 2.66 GHz CPU
Intel DG31PR Motherboard
4GB RAM (2GB 800MHz X 2)
NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT 512MB Graphics Card
Vista 64bit Service Pack 1
Vista Performance Index : 5.5

The list of games

The articles will be posted within the next few days.
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DialogTV vs SLT PeoTV

2009-04-21T17:27:00.002+05:30

This article does not wish to market any SLT or Dialog products by any means.

I have been a consumer of DialogTV and SLT PeoTV for some time now. We have PeoTV at home and DialogTV at my uncle's. Since some people have asked me about their qualities (specially about PeoTV) I thought of putting an article comparing the user experience you will get. I will not discuss about their monthly rentals or initial costs or whatever because there are official ways to get them.

Another thing to mention is that these details are gained from my experience. The details may vary for you or other customers.

Installation

DialogTV

As you may know, DialogTV uses a dish antenna and the receiver unit located near your television will get the signal from it. The receiver unit have several video-outs to be received by a television or any display device. Recently, guys from Dialog came and they replaced our receiver unit with a different model. This model basically sucks! It has old-style menus and the previous one was very user-friendly than the new one. I don't know why this happened but if you have a simillar story please do tell in the comments section.

PeoTV

PeoTV needs an ADSL connection to operate though the receiver unit is not directly connected to the telephone line. The receiver has an ethernet port where you can give an output from an ADSL router. Assuming you have another computer at home, both the computer and the receiver can be connected to the router. When we bought PeoTV they provided a 4-port router. But that router model has very limited capabilities compared to a usual D-Link or Prolink router we use. As I remember, its make is UTStarcom.

Startup Time

Both DialogTV and PeoTV has an initial delay to display the TV channel on screen. For DialogTV, this is only a single phase. You switch on the device, it scans the signal then it starts displaying video.

For PeoTV, there are two delays. Assuming you haven't connected to internet already, the router needs some time to connect to internet through ADSL. Then the receiver unit needs some time to connect to the PeoTV server and begin downloading channel menus and the video stream.

Intial delay for PeoTV appears significantly larger than the delay of DialogTV.

User Experience

This is the most important aspect of any commercial product, but there are significant shortcomings of PeoTV in this area.

Navigation in Channel Menus

Basically the PeoTV receiver unit is an internet video streaming device. It connects to the video server through internet and display video outputs on the TV screen. Channel menus are merely web pages (and poorly designed ones too) which takes ages to load. I know this because some times it displays "Web page unavailable offline" error message on the TV screen. Even when the menu is fully displayed it's very hard to navigate and select channels. The device is very slow to respond to key presses from the remote. For example, when you press the arrow key it takes like half-a-second to move the selection rectangle to the next item. It's like browsing the internet in a very slow computer!

Before you jump into any wrong conclusions, I have to say there's no problem with our ADSL connection. It operates really fast as expected when browsing the internet and we can watch YouTube videos straight away without waiting for buffering.

Jumping Between Channels

As most of us do, another way to change channels is by using the Channel Up-Down keys on the remote. This is faster than going to the channel menu since there's no need to load and display a web page. You just jump straightly to another channel. Although this is possible on PeoTV, the device literary gets stucked if you do it too much! By "too much" I mean the normal usage pattern of any user. We tend to change channels frequently and we don't have to think about the strain it puts on the device!

You don't have problems like this in DialogTV. When you need to change the channel you go to menu and just change it. That's it. It very much responsive than PeoTV.

Video Quality

There's not much to whine about video picture quality in PeoTV. In fact it is pretty good. There's an initial shuttering for few seconds just after you switch to a channel but that's excusable since the video stream needs some time to be buffered.

With DialogTV you have these occasional glitches of squares appearing and stucked video which is pretty annoying. This maybe due to effects of the ionosphere on the singal transmitted from the sattelite. Other than that, the experience is the same as PeoTV.

Time-Shift TV

This is a facility solely provided by PeoTV. Despite all other shortcomings, PeoTV can get ver useful with this facility. Time-Shift allows you to go back in time (up-to 48 hours) and watch any program that was telecasted within the last 48 hours. You get fast-forward and rewind capabilities when you are watching anything. Even if you are watching a live cricket match you can rewind the video and watch the places you missed. (Of course you CANNOT fast-forward into future!)

There's no alternative provided by DialogTV for this facility.

My Favorite Channels

This part is fairly personalized. Some of my favorite channels are missing from PeoTV. Although Discovery and National Geographic are available on both, I miss AXN, Pogo and ZeeCafe from PeoTV. PeoTV does not provide any other channels worth watching either.

Conclusions

Considering all these facts, it seems DialogTV provides a better user experience. On the other hand, PeoTV provides the time-shift facility which maybe loved by some users. In short, DialogTV is simple and responsive while PeoTV is complex and bloated. This is a good example showing that when we incorporate more and more featured high-tech devices into our lives, we have to face the overhead they puts on us. Nor DialogTV, nor PeoTV is as simple as classic television we get from the good-old RF antenna!

Please put your experience on the comments section.

Update

There's another very disturbing fact about PeoTV. If you have both PeoTV and ADSL, you HAVE to use the same crappy router they are providing to access internet as well. If you plug your own router, you will be able to access ADSL, but PeoTV won't work. PeoTV receiver unit requires the provided router in order to access PeoTV server.

This is inexcusible since their so called router has very limited functionality. It requires "dialing" (PPPoE) to connect to internet which has few drawbacks including single-user limitation and lack of support on Linux platforms! So if you are a heavy internet user with multiple computers you might be better off with DialogTV.

Tweet Tweet!

2009-04-12T11:24:00.000+05:30

Twitter! It's the latest explosion in social networking. (and probably the most simplest one as well!). It's becoming so large even its servers can't handle the load. The idea is to follow other people's status updates while others are following yours. But the beauty of this is you can transform it to any use you want. David Pogue puts it nicely, Twitter? It’s What You Make It (link from @akilakalum). I will try to explain the force behind Twitter using technical concepts that we learn in Computer Science, so I can better understand it myself!

In my opinion, the reason behind the abilty to transform twitter into anything you want, may be the "Policy and mechanism separation". (Those who know my 4th year project know what this means!) Unlike Facebook or other social media, Twitter doesn't implement so many policies (other than that 140-character limit!). It only provides a simple message multicasting mechanism to share your ideas. You can build your own policies on top of that mechanism.

As I see it, the only core rules that twitter enforces are,

You have a queue of messages. (Your twitter account)
Messages (you can call them status updates if you want), are limited to 140 characters each.
You publish messages to the queue. (by updating your status)
Others people can subscribe to your queue. (by Following your account)
You can subscribe to other people's queues. (by Following them)
When a message is added to a queue, subscribers also receive it. (Those who follow you, receive all your status updates)

That's it! Although it took me 6 points to write it, you can see it's just a publisher subscriber queue. Twitter is just the middleware hosting all the queues of users! There's a lot you can do with a publisher/subscriber middleware like this. You can use it as a news feed, notification service, advertising or even propose marraige!!

User-based Policies

In addition to the core policies enfoced by twitter, the community have developed some policies (or standards) over time to make it more user friendly. Speaking of terminology, Messages are reffered to as "Tweets".

In addition to publishing a public message, you can publish a message targeting a specific user. For that, the message is prefixed with @[username]. These directed messages are known as @replies (pronunced "at-replies"). But since @replies are just ordinary messages, other subscribers also receive it. (remember, only core policies apply! all others depend on how you interprit them) But everybody knows to whome this message was sent for, so they will ignore it if they are not interested.

You can pass a message you received from another, to your followers by prefexing the message with RT @[original-sender] (RT stands for "re-tweet"). This is like saying something you heard, to your friends while crediting the original person who said it. Again, remember, these are just ordinary messages. Users themselves have adopted these standards on their own.

Companies are using Twitter to advertise about their products. This includes technology giants and even Bakeries (link from @akilakalum). Some people have automated tweeting through the use of sensors and mobile phones so a new message is published every time an event occurs. Even really famous people are on twitter and anybody can follow them. Some I found are Mandy Moore (@TheMandyMoore), Demi Moore (@mrskutcher) and Senator John Mchain (@SenJohnMcCain) and Ravin Perera (@ravinsp) :-P

I have just begun using Twitter. So right now there's no use for me from it other than receiving good links and intersting info from other people I follow. Time to time I also put interesting things to be received by people who follow me. (I don't have so many followers actually!) So if you really don't have anything else to do, follow me on http://twitter.com/ravinsp.

Finally, a one comparison with facebook:

If Facebook is a global directory service, Twitter is a global notification service.

NS2 - Network Simulator

2009-04-02T11:46:00.000+05:30

We got an assignment which required us to write and run a script on NS2, the popular free and open source network simulator. This is what I followed to do it on Ubuntu 8.10.

Download and install NS 2.33 on Ubuntu according to instructions shown here: http://anggriawan.web.id/2008/05/install-ns2-on-ubuntu-804-hardy.html
When you run ns from the terminal you can enter an ns prompt. But I didn't use this prompt to run scripts. I simply ran ns with the script file as the command line argument. (for example ns myscript.tcl)
You write ns scripts using a language called Tcl. This tutorial: http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/tutorial/index.html is really great for learning Tcl scripting from the begining.

The tutorial walks you through creating network topologies, data flows and even drawing graphs with Tcl. See images below.

After runnnig a script, you get this visual simulation where you can analyze in detail what is hapening on the network

A graph drawn using output files and X Graph. Output files are also compatible with GNU Plot

Update

This image shows the same data file drawn using Excel. Two output files were created for two test cases.

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Ubuntu NVIDIA Control Panel

2009-04-02T11:26:00.000+05:30

Ubuntu 8.10 now has a control panel for NVIDIA graphics cards. My graphics card is NVIDIA Geforce 9600GT. This control panel has almost all the features you have in Windows NVIDIA Control Center. You can access it via System -> Administration -> NVIDIA X Server Settings

It includes settings for screens, color correction, OpenGL settings and even GPU statistics which shows processing power and the core temperature. See images below.

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Foxconn GeForce 9600GT

2008-11-26T17:40:00.000+05:30

At last!!! I can play games (at least a few!) in their highest graphics detail. This was a good deal from Barclays; Rs. 14,200/=. After so many queries to Gayan and Thusitha (thanks guys!) I decided to settle for 9600 instead of 9800 since it gave me a reasonable performance for a good price.

Spec:
NVIDIA 9600GT/512MB/GDDR3/256bit/Dual DVI/HDTV-out

Vista performance score: 5.9

(They have provided drivers for 32bit and 64bit systems of XP and Vista)

Note. The card works on Ubuntu as well. When I enabled the desktop effects it automatically downloaded and installed the driver. So no problem there.

Foxconn GeForce 9600GT (OC)
(Note the "OC" sign, which means Over Clocked. This is supposed to give a performance boost but I don't know its long term effects)

Size
This was a big one. It's about half the size of my motherboard! Just like Gayan, I had to remove my hard disks before plugging in the card to make room. They sure need to make these things less bulkier!

Power Input
I'm not used to graphics cards much. I had to separately supply power through the provided convector and it needed 2 power sockets. So a really power hungry device. If you have a server power unit like Thusitha the power unit has a separate socket for these kinds of graphics cards.

Display Outputs
The card only had 2 digital outs and one TV-out. They have provided 2 DVI-to-Analog converters. So I had to plug the monitor through that converter.

Game play
So far, I haven't been able to put my hands on latest games. But I tried NFS Carbon and Half Life 2-Episode One. Those could be run at full steam all settings maxed out very smoothly. A resolution of 1600X1200 and Anti Aliasing 4X seems nothing for the card on these games.

For the record, I thought of skipping NFS ProStreet and go for NFS Undercover. ProStreet seems a bit boring for me.

Here are 2 screenshots from Carbon and HL2-Ep01.

Update
Screenshots of GPU-Z. Core clock is 600MHz (can be over clocked up to 1200MHz). Memory Clock is 1000Mhz (can be over clocked up to 1200MHz). Foxconn has provided a small tool for over clocking but it cannot control GPU fan speed.

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Performance Monitoring in Windows Vista

2008-11-15T12:45:00.000+05:30

Most of us like to hate Vista! But with enough system resources and good device drivers, Vista can deliver a really smooth user experience. In addition to having a fancy UI, Vista includes some very powerful tools that system administrators can use to monitor system activity. These tools will help you to dig into system programs and startup lists and fine tune your system performance.

Windows Defender: Software Explorer

Windows Defender is a crappy tool which comes with windows to detect malicious programs. Due to its uselessness I have turned it off. But Defender has a tool called Software Explorer which is way better than using "msconfig" and "Task manager" to monitor running processes.

Go to Control Panel -> Programs -> Windows Defender -> Tools ->Software Explorer

Startup Programs

This gives a more clear and detailed view than "msconfig" tool. Since it has the ability to group Manufacturer wise, you can clearly focus on those no-name entries which could most probably be viruses.

Network Connected programs

This shows a complete list of progams has network connectivity. To view detailed information about network communciation, you can use the Reliability and Performance Monitor.

Performance Information and Tools

Go to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Performance Information and Tools -> Advanced Tools (on the left pane)

These include some tools which give detailed performance information reports.

Reliability and Performance Monitor

Click "Open Reliability and Performance Monitor" in Advanced performance tools.

Network monitor showing connections made by uTorrent

This is one-stop place to monitor detailed system wide activity. You can monitor Network activity, Memory activity, Disk usage activity and so on. One interesting feature is that you can see details about all the open files and their disk access at any given time.

Files opened by every process and their read/write activity

System Stability Chart

Windows collects system statistics over time and keeps a history of events in the event log. Vista includes a chart feature which draws a chart over time which varies due to system changes.

Go to "Reliability Monitor" in the left pane.

Bootup performance monitoring in Event log

Event log includes detailed statics for application and services startup times (including Windows boot time) so you can identify which applications delays windows startup. Windows automatically notifies you if a certain application has taken an unusuall amount of time to start.

Click "View performance details in the Event log" in Advanced performance tools.

Ok that's the lot. Using these tools you can administer your system to identify any unwanted activity. And with better hardware resources and drivers, I think Vista is a better OS than XP. User experience wise and system administration wise.
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4GB RAM issue with 32 bit Operating Systems

2008-11-09T19:56:00.001+05:30

I recently upgraded my old desktop and came across with this interesting issue. This would be useful for many of us since most of us are still using 32 bit operating systems. Just take this article as an early warning.

Upgrade configuration:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz, 1066FSB, 3MB L2, E7300 (arround Rs. 14,000/=)
2GB x 2 RAM (Dual Channel, 800MHz) (arround Rs. 3800/= x 2)
Intel DG31PR Motherboard (arround Rs. 7500/=)

This issue I had was having 4GB of memory. Well, I've reached the maximum addressable memory limit of 32 bit systems, right? So I should be able to use all 4GB as memory. But unfortunately, that was not the case. All I have is 3.2GB of memory on 32 bit Windows XP and 32 bit Ubuntu 8.10.

So where did my memory go?
Theoretically, the 32 bit systems are limited to 4GB of addressable memory. The problem is you can't allocate all those 4GB address space to RAM alone. Many other devices connected to the mother board (including the memory in video card) are mapped to the same 4GB address space. So there should be an address range dedicated to address those devices. So you are left with only 3.2GB of RAM address space.

According to what I've read from the internet, you have to use a 64 bit OS (I'm planning to put Vista 64 bit on my one) to utilize the full RAM address space. There's another facility called "Physical Address Extension (PAE)" provided by the motherboard to allow applications to address more than 4GB of memory on 32 bit systems. But I'm not clear about what it does and it seems to have it's own issues with device drivers.

Things to keep in mind
Maybe I have spent too much on RAM! Anyway having 3GB RAM this way is better than having 2GB and 1GB RAM sticks since dual channel gives you performance advantage. It won't be a problem at all if you are going to use a 64 bit OS (that's what I'm going to do). If that didn't work due to any reason I'll have to be stuck with a 32 bit OS and 3.2GB of RAM. Anyway that also should be enough for most current games.

more on this later...
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Update
As Gayan has pointed out, 64 bit OS alone cannot support more than 4GB. The motherboard should have a feature called "Memory Remapping" to map device memory addresses above 4GB (see first comment). It appears my motherboard doesn't support that feature. So 3.2GB is more of a hardware limitation for me.

Update 2
I tried adding /PAE switch to XP 32 bit. It still showed me 3.2GB of RAM. Maybe in the background it's using all 4GB or whatever. Anyway, Vista 64 bit SP1 seems to have fixed the problem. It showed me 4GB RAM after I installed it. I hope this would be the end of my problem.

Update 3
This is how it is shown in Windows 7 RC 32bit. Avoids user confusion and easilly understandable.

Ubuntu 8.10

2008-11-01T18:11:00.000+05:30

Well, well, well, after a series of posts on iPhone, here's one for Ubuntu 8.10. I just went through a quick trip to see what are the new features that is directly noticeable (other than those small small version number changes!)

Tip: You can make Ubuntu interface significantly nicer by making changes to system font sizes. In laptops "Subpixel smoothing" works great. These settings gave me a nice professional look for the overall interface.

Wallpaper is definitely better than Gutsy.
As usual, networking is faster than windows.
It took my laptop's ATI X200M video driver automatically. Desktop effects enabled. (I like that)
My sound card is also working fine. (Skype runs well)
Nice softer look in Human theme.
One click Shut Down menu. (I love it!)
A Shut Down dialog box is available via System -> Shut Down
Revamped Network Manager 0.7 (I wished they didn't)

This is a total disaster. Hey, I can see and edit my MAC address and MTU! Wonderful ha! I know so many home users who needs to see the MAC address of their NIC. Last time I checked, lot of users were having problems with packet fragmentation problems and MTU. I take it that changing the IP address is not so important! Because it's in the 3rd tab! After MAC and after 802.1x security. This will make things really easy for novice users!

And it has absolutely NO MEMORY at all. It doesn't save any of my network settings. Is this a joke? This screenshot shows my 'ifconfig' output and IPv4 settings. The IP address and subnet masks were all set here moments ago! When I reopen the network manager settings are all gone. It's better if they send a fix for this but this is certainly not the way to handle major releases.

It's significantly better if they kept the old Network Manager. But they just upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
USB Startup Disk
Now you can create a CD image of Ubuntu on the USB drive very easily and use that to install ubuntu.

Well that's what you see at the first glance. The only bad impression I had was the new Network Manager which is not good at all! It seems Shuttleworth is taking good features from "Apple" GUIs and integrating with Ubuntu, which is a good thing. The new shut down menu is like the one in MacOS X. And the new Disk usage bar in the installer look like the one in iTunes.

This is the iPhone disk usage bar in iTunes:

That's it. Share your experience!
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Having fun with iPhone OS 2.0

2008-10-27T13:25:00.000+05:30

It's been a while since I posted an article. During this time, I've upgraded my old 2G iPhone to 2.1 software update and filled it with so many commercial AppStore games and apps (for free of course!). In this article I'm going to show how to get any app you want from the AppStore for free, and install them in your iPhone. Here are some of the few:

"Note: Installing cracked apps on iPhone is illegal. But admitting it doesn't make it right. I know I'm doing a wrong thing. But can't be helped. These apps are just so cool! We should at least appreciate the developer effort they have put."

Cro Mag Rally : Uses your iPhone as a steering wheel. Very nice graphics and music.

Kroll : 3D fighting adventure with stunning graphics.

Nanosaur 2 : Takes iPhone's 3D graphics to the limit. Control a flying cyborg bird through stunning and beautiful worlds.

A word on iPhone 3G

I'm using an iPhone 2G. For Sri Lankans, iPhone 3G is still a bit far. It's not officially available in Sri Lanka. If you have someone in US, they have to buy it with AT&T connection. And even if you managed to get one, there's still no SIM unlock available (see iPhone-DevTeam blog for 3G unlocking updates). For differences between iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G buying procedures read the bottom part of my iPhone3G article.

Information on this article applies to both iPhone and iPhone3G.

I found lot of information from the web regarding this cracking and other procedures. So if you can't find anything from my blog, internet is very rich with so many resources regarding the iPhone.

Steps:

First, I assume you have jailbroken 2.1 software version running in your iPhone. If you don't know how to do it, search the internet. Or I may post an article regarding that if I have time. The process is really easy thanks to iPhone-Dev Team. They are the people who deals with iPhone cracking and unlocking.

You should also have some knowledge on SSH. If you don't know, get someone to assist you.

(Obviously, iTunes 8 must be installed)

Part 1 : Creating iTunes account

For this method to work, you should have downloaded at least one application (free or commercial) from the iTunes AppStore into your iPhone. This is what I did:

In your PC, go to iTunes and create an iTunes account.
It will ask your credit card information. You have to give them those details, but there is no initial charge unless you buy some product later on.
After creating the account, go to AppStore and download any Free application. (If you have Wi-Fi, you can also use your iPhone to go to AppStore and download it)
Sync that application with your iPhone.

Now we are ready to go ahead.

Part 2 : Copying the patch file to iPhone

Download and Install DiskAid for Windows. (Needs .Net Framework 2.0)
Download 2.1.MI.patched.zip. This Zip will contain a file called "MobileInstallation". Kepp that file.
Connect your iPhone to the PC.
Open DiskAid... It will detect your iPhone and display the files inside it.
As shown in the image, choose "root folder" from the drop down list.
Click OK for the warning message that will be displayed. (Do not mess with the files in the iPhone. Otherwise it'll corrupt the file system and you'll have to restore the software again)
Go to the folder: System --> Library --> PrivateFrameworks --> MobileInstallation.framework
Inside that folder there will be a file named "MobileInstallation". We are going to replace that file with the file you downloaded above.
Rename the MobileInstallation file in DiskAid into MI_backup or something..
Now drag and drop the MobileInstallation file in the Zip archive you downloaded into DiskAid window.
The file will be copied in to the folder you were in. It should be something like this:
Create a folder named "Documents" (with a capital 'D') in both these directories:
- root\Applications
- root\private\var\mobile
Now close DiskAid.

Part 3 : Changing file permissions with SSH

Connect the iPhone to the internet through your Wi-Fi network.
Go to Cydia application in the iPhone.
Tap "Reload" button on the top of the screen.
After reloading, search and install "OpenSSH".
To do the next few steps, your Wi-Fi network should allow your PC to connect to the iPhone through the network. If it doesn't, just connect it through a personal Wi-Fi connection with your laptop.
This is the tricky part:
You should install an SSH client to your PC and change the file permissions on the iPhone as shown below. There are multiple ways to do this, I'll tell how to do this on another post.
- /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileInstallation.framework/MobileInstallation
  Set permissions to : 775
- /Applications/Documents
  Set permission to : 777 (recursively)
- /private/var/mobile
  Set permission to : 777 (recursively)
That's about it. If you don't know how to use SSH, get some help from the internet.

Part 4 : Downloading games and applications

All iPhone/iPod applications from AppStore has the extension ".ipa". So many users have uploaded cracked applications in various file sharing site. So we can download those files directly without paying to the AppStore.

Go to AppStore and check for any games or apps you like. For example one of my favourites is "Cro Mag Rally" racing game from Pangia Software Inc.
Go to www.4shared.com. This file sharing site has so many .ipa files.
Search for something like "cro mag ipa" (put "ipa" at the end).
It will display various results. Download anyone of them. You'll get a .ipa file.
After downloading drag and drop that file into iTunes. It will appear in Applications area in iTunes.
When you sync your phone, you can chose what applications to be installed in Applications tab.

That's all. Here are some of the games that I've installed:

Here are some games and application that I really enjoy:

SpeakEasy : Voice Recorder
Photogene : A feature rich image editor
AquaForest : An interactive physics simulator. Emulates real world object behaviors.

Asphalt4 : Racing game
MotoChaser : Fun motor bike racing game
Spore : A game from EA. Control an evolution of a creature. (Cool graphics)
Scrabble : From EA

There are thousands of apps and games in the AppStore. Just search for what you want.

Enjoy!
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Getting GPRS/EDGE on the iPhone with Mobitel

2008-07-06T18:28:00.000+05:30

If you are using an iPhone (2G version) with a Mobitel connection, this is how to add GPRS/EDGE settings to the phone.

Go to Settings -> General -> Network -> Edge
For the APN, type mobitel3g (don't mind the '3g' part. This is the network name they are using)

That's all. No user name or password is needed. Now try going to safari and opening a web page.

GPRS/EDGE signal indicator
On the status bar, if you see a rectangle to the right of signal bars, that means you have GPRS. If there's an 'E' on it, that means you have EDGE signal.

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Installing 3rd party applications on the iPhone

2008-07-06T18:11:00.000+05:30

iPhone users in Sri Lanka are obviously using unlocked iPhones. Mostly they maybe using it only for phone-like purposes. This article is for people who are interested in customizing the phone and making full use of it by installing custom applications.

Note: Information on this article applies to only iPhone 1.1.4 software version. I haven't tested this on any other versions.

Cracking the iPhone
There are places who unlock the iPhone. I don't know which method they use but this is what I did to unlock my iPhone.

Download and install iTunes.
Download and install ZiPhoneGUI for windows (requires .Net Framework 2).
Connect the iPhone to the computer.
Use ZiPhone to crack the iPhone. Only one really easy step is needed. Just click the button!

ZiPhone GUI :

When talking about phones, people only refer to unlocking. It's the same with the iPhone too but "Unlocking" means making it possible to use other mobile service providers. With the iPhone, unlocking is only one part of cracking the iPhone. To make the full use of it, you have to "Jailbreak" it. ZiPhone does this automatically for you.

The term "jailbreak" is used for cracking the iPhone OS. The iPhone OS is shielded from outside world. Files in it cannot be edited or seen by the outsiders. Hackers use a procedure called Jailbreaking to get access to the entire operating system running on the iPhone. This means breaking the jail in which the OS is imprisoned. After that anything can be done to the OS like modifying and installing files. The iPhone can be accessed from a computer through the USB cable or Wi-Fi.

Open source community
Because of the ability to access the iPhoneOS and the architecture of the OS is so elegant, a community has been born who began writing open source software for the IPhone, even before Apple introduced the iPhone SDK. Other than that, official apps which are based on the Apple SDK will begin to arrive from the July 11th (but they won't be free).

There are thousands of applications written by various people for the iPhone. I have mentioned a few of them on a previous post. Here, I'm going to explain how to get access to them and install them.

Software sources
Open source community use concept called "software sources" in software installation. A software source is a place which contains a list of software applications. A company may introduce its own software source to list its own applications. So to install an application, you need the corresponding source for it.

Installing software
If you cracked the phone using ZiPhone you automatically get an application called "Installer". I don't know about other methods but just look whether you have that application installed. Then you only need to have internet on the iPhone. For that, you can use GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi or 3G(iPhone3G only). To get info about getting GPRS/EDGE on a Mobitel connection, see this post.

Installer is an application that manages 3rd party software installation on the iPhone. It can manage install/uninstall and update procedures very easily.

Install the software using the Install tab. Applications are categorized in groups like Games, Multimedia etc... Here, you have a group called "Sources". Install the sources inside it. After that, the installer will have access to those software sources as well. The Installer will display a message like "Refreshing sources". This means it's refreshing the list of available software from the sources. After refreshing, the list of software available to you will be much larger and updated. Go to other categories and install the software you like.

Sometimes after refreshing, you receive updates for applications which are already installed on your iPhone.

Installer needs sources to pull software. By default Installer comes with a set of sources specified. So it have access to software provided by those sources only. By manually adding sources to the Installer it checks for software from a broader range of providers. You can do that by going to the "Sources" tab.

Here you can see what are the sources that Installer have access. You can remove them if you don't need them. You can also add them manually. Usually if you visit a web site of iPhone software, they will specify a URL to be added as a source. You can type that URL here and add them to Installer.

For other tips of useful software and patches for the iPhone, see posts iPhone Tweaks and iPhone Games.

CAUTION: Installing buggy 3rd party application may reduce the stability of the iPhone. Install them at your own risk.

iPhone Games

2008-07-06T17:30:00.000+05:30

Here are some of the games I have installed on my iPhone. This is on 1.1.4 firmware and you need have Installer app installed on the iPhone. Jailbreaking and installation procedure is available on this post.

Raging Thunder
An accelerometer based car game. You have to use the phone itself as a steering gadget. Graphics are nice.

Cybersaurus
A 3D alien shooter. Unfortunately the demo has only 1 level. Other than that, it's really exciting.

CubicMan
A game which requires the use of your brain. Flip the box using your finger to accomplish the goal.

Solitaire
Really cool and gives you the natural feeling of moving cards using the finger.

Chess
This is somewhat hard for me to play. The computer is really intelligent.

GemLogic
Make continuous blocks of gems. Really cool. Flip the gems using your finger.

Labyrinth
The classic wooden table game. Use the iPhone as a tabletop. Tilt the phone carefully to move the ball to the target without falling into the holes.

SuperPong
Move the bat using to bump the ball back and hit the bricks.

Pool
A nice pool table.

Tris
Tetris with cool colors.

Here are some great OFFICIAL iPhone games which are to be released with the AppStore on July 11th. Unfortunately they will not be available to Sri Lankans and will be costly too.

Chopper

Super Monkey ball

Cardrineline

Spore

iPhone 3G

2008-06-27T18:16:00.001+05:30

Finally it's here. At WWDC 2008 Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 3G, which will begin shipping on June 11th to many countries. I'm not going to discuss about the iPhone coz there are lot of blogs about it and I too have published an article about the old iPhone on this blog. So I'll focus on the main differences between the original iPhone and iPhone3G and how will it effect us, Sri Lankan iPhone fans.

Please note that I still haven't used an iPhone3G and these facts are from what I read on the web. I recommend reading my previous post before reading this because that includes much information about the iPhone than this post. If you are in a hurry to buy one, I suggest reading Buying an iPhone3G section at the bottom this article.

Features in addition to the original one (Hardware wise):

3G
iPhone will support 3G + HSDPA. But it doesn't have a front camera, which means No Video Calls. Apple hasn't announced the maximum data rate. But it'll be significantly faster than GPRS.

GPS
GPS is included in addition to the cell tower triangulation.

Size and Color
It's a little thinner than the original one. 8GB has a polished black backside which means it'll be more sexier than the orignal one. 16GB also has a white color model.

Battery
According to what apple has mentioned, battery will have more power. The original iPhone featured a 5hrs talk time on 2G. The new one offers 10hrs of 2G talk time and 5hrs of 3G talk time. Audio and Video playback times are pretty much the same. 7hrs Video and 24hrs Audio.

Audio quality
Apple has said it has increased audio quality. Just play a 256kbps (or more) mp3 on the iPhone. It's an amazing experience.

Features on regular phones but are missing from the iPhone:
(These are also the features on which my iPhone gets criticized)

Bluetooth support
Most hoped apple would ship bluetooth support with their iPhone OS 2.0. But as it seems that's not the case. The phone will still only be able to connect to bluetooth headphones and car audio systems.

Copy and Paste
Adding a clipboard to the OS wouldn't hurt. Would it? But if Apple doesn't like it, users get nothing too. So far apple has mentioned nothing about this feature. It seems it's missing from this software version too.

SMS Acknowlegements/Reply Notifications
The GSM modem driver in the iPhone doesn't support SMS reply notifications. So if you are a heavy user of it, think twice. 3rd party SMS applications also won't have this feature because they depend on the SDK provided by the OS.

FM Radio
iPhone doesn't have an FM radio. You know what? I don't give a damn. I'm perfectly happy with my iTunes music library and 8 giga bytes to spare.

iPhone OS 2.0

The new OS will also be available to the original iPhone as well as a software update. These are some of the new features that c with the OS.

AppStore
AppStore provides a store of (official) 3rd party native iPhone applications. This means the iPhone will get various productive applications and games from worldwide developers (but for a price of course). Actually 3rd party apps weren't a new thing for hacked iPhones due to the huge community base around the iPhone. But the AppStore will certainly introduce some quality apps which will be accessible from any iPhone.

But Sri Lanka most probably won't have access to AppStore. Much like you can't buy music from iTunes store from Sri Lanka.

Exchange Server support
This is not so important for regular users. But corporate users can have access to the global address list and email through direct Exchange Server support. Companies can directly connect iPhones to their internal networks. it supports features such as push email, push contacts and remote wipe. Remote wipe is a security feature which allows system administrators to remotely erase down all data on the iPhone protecting company specific data.

Buying an iPhone 3G

Now for the really interesting part. Most ask me how can they buy the new phone. Up to now the news I've heard isn't good. I'll explain how I got my iPhone and the new buying procedure of iPhone 3G.

The Old way
Like the new iPhone, the original one was dedicated for one service provider (AT&T, US). The Phone had online ordering system. You can order it from the internet and it will come to your home (within US). The bundle included an AT&T sim (I still have it). Then you have to "Activate" the phone by buying a monthly plan from AT&T and acquire the phone number all through the internet and iTunes. What my friend at US did was buying the iPhone and sending it to me without "Activating". I received a locked iPhone (with an AT&T sim) which could be easily unlocked from ZiPhone (a nice piece of software). The cost of the phone was $399 + $26 (tax)

The New way
With the new iPhone, they don't offer online ordering. You have to go to an Apple store or an AT&T store and buy the phone there for $199. Yes, the price is significantly reduced. But you also have to buy a monthly plan from AT&T and "Activate" the phone within the store. So the person who'll be buying the phone will receive a monthly phone bill from AT&T.

The only releif with the new iPhone is that, it'll be available in many countries (but not in Sri Lanka). In India, they are offering it with Airtell. Price will be the same. Let's hope Mobitel (not Dialog!) will sign an agreement with Apple and provide iPhones to Sri Lanka.

Initially they will ship it to 24 countries on June 11th. Asia will begin to receive it on a later date.

Links

iPhone home page : www.apple.com/iphone
Tech specs : www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
.
.

Updated (02-Apr-2009)

A lot have changed since the original post. Now you can actually buy an iPhone 3G in Sri Lanka. Dialog officially brings it (price is bit high) and there are places which unofficially brings iPhone3G here. Since Dialog is officially in the business, EPSI iStore (Apple authorized dealer) is supplying iPhone accessories too. You can buy applications from the Sri Lankan AppStore in iTunes. Everything works well.

iPhone Tweaks

2008-05-05T13:59:00.000+05:30

To do these, iPhone has to be unlocked and Installer app should be installed. All the instructions are for Firmware version 1.1.4.

Refresh the sources in installer app.
Go to Sources section and then install Community Sources.
Refresh the sources again.

To fix the caller ID problem:
Go to iClarified section and then install AppSupport Patch (1.1.4).
Reboot the iPhone.

To fix the file system access issue with ZiPhone and iBrikr
Add the source iphone.unlock.no to installer app.
Refresh the sources.
Go to Unlocking Tools section and then install ZiPhone iBrikr Fix.
Reboot the iPhone.

To disable the keyboard's auto-correction feature
Go to Tweaks section and then install Kb.
Reboot the iPhone.
An enable/disable setting will be added to the General -> Keyboard section in iPhone settings.

To fix the root password incorrect (su) issue in MobileTerminal
Source iphone.lenlolabs.com should be added to installer app sources.
Go to Tweaks section and install the BSD Subsystem 2.x SU... patch.
Reboot the iPhone.

Usefull Software Sources
iSMS: http://iphone.nonsoft.com/repo/
(A new section called Shawn Chain's Apps will be added to the installer)

MobileTerminal: iphone.lenlolabs.com
will be in System section)

iPhysics: http://iphone.r4m0n.net/repos

Usefull Software
Listed as found in the Installer app.

Dictionaries
Merriam Webster

Games
Chess
ContraSence
GemLogic
iCave
iSolitare
Labyrinth
Pool
SuperPong
Tris
Yeti3D

iClarified
Pysl
Safari Download Plugin

Multimedia
Camera Pro
Voice Notes

Productivity
Mobile Finder
Sketches
weDict

System
Categories
SummerBoard
Terminal
XLaunch

Toys
RealArtist

Utilities
Accelerometer Log
Capture
Customize
SysInfo
weTool

From 4,000 to 40,000

2008-04-20T13:13:00.000+05:30

Goodbye my 4,000 rupee Sagem MyX1! Oh I liked that phone (and I still do). But I have no choice. I have to make room for my all new 40,000 rupee iPhone ($426 to be specific). It's a Wow! and the Wow started on 14th April 2008. Thank you Amma for the momentous financial support! and thank you Dilshan ayya and Sameera ayya for the USA contact. This is the best present I've ever had. The best phone and hopefully the best computer too!

Phone specs :

CPU Frequency: 412 MHz
(The processor is a 600MHz underclocked ARM processor)

Bus Frequency: 103 Mhz
RAM: 116 MB
Capacity: 7.3 GB
OS Version: 1.1.4

Unlocking iPhone

This must be the easiest thing in the world. Download ZiPhone for windows, connect the iPhone, and click the big button. 3 minutes of boot loader patching, installing, rebooting... all done automatically. You have a fully unlocked, hackable iPhone. This is where you get the amazing package manager (just like synaptic) in which you have access to numerous software repositories. At the lowest level, now you have BSD subsystem for Unix running underneath the MacOS.

Built-in Vs Third Party apps

Apple has made a wonderful device that's truly unique and amazing. And they have built truly unique and amazaing software for that device (including the OS). But some of them really SUCKS! That's where hackers step in. They have released various patches and countless software utilities to make the iPhone user's life easier.

At first few days I was pissed off by iPhone's numerous software glitches. Caller ID detection problem and SMS application limitations. Both was fixed using a patch and a third party SMS application (iSMS). Now I've tuned my iPhone to gain the max out of it and to suit my needs. These are some third-party apps I've installed on the iPhone.

iSMS : Really nice SMS application

AcceleroLog : Draws graphs using iPhone's accelerometer (The accelerometer is used to detect the phone's orientation in 3D space).

HP-16C scientific calculator : I make no use of this.

Terminal : You know.

Finder : This is the windows explorer equivalent of MacOS. You can browse through the filesystem.

SysInfo : System and Process info viewer.

Cydia : apt based package manager. It's really amazing. You can add sources to /etc/apt/sources.list.

Capture : Screenshot utility. The screenshots in this page were taken using this.

Another 2 screenshots of built-in Maps application and Safari, just to make it interesting:

Maps : Google maps based application.

Safari : Internet browser.

Bottom line : iPhone is Nothing without Third-party apps.

Music and Video

Superb! Audio quality and video playback quality is just superb! With apple ear phones and the gorgeous high resolution screen the iPhone gives you an unprecedented multimedia experience. I'm not going to say more than this because you just have to experience it.

Battery Life

Enough of technical blah blah! Now for matters that concerns any mobile phone user. Today most phones have a battery life of 4 to 6 days of normal usage. I've been using the iPhone for a week now. For iPhone, I'd give the iPhone a maximum 2 days of battery life. And surprisingly, I'm really satisfied with that. Being a highly interactive and feature rich phone, iPhone is subjected to a heavy usage throughout the day. Playing music, videos, internet surfing, and the highly responsive touch screen forces the user to play with the phone along the day. So the battery drain is faster than any other phone.
iPhone comes with a dock connecter which has a USB cable. iPhone can be placed on the dock and the USB cable can be connected to a computer for battery charging or data transferring purposes. Apple also provides a handy plug base which is USB-to-230V convertor. So you can use it instead of a computer to charge the iPhone.

Bottom line : Virtusa doesn't allow to plug USB devices to computers!

Extendibility

The iPhones extendibility is limited only by it's hardware mentioned below). With the power of Unix at the back and MacOS at the front, and outstanding hardware components such as the accelerometer and Multi-touch screen, you have a computer platform with unique capabilities to develop your applications. So if you're an iPhone user, you'll never see the end of customizing your phone.

Bottom line : Only XGL is missing. (Maybe it'll come too!)

Limitations

Ok, what's the catch ha? Here are the limitations of the iPhone which may effect many mobile phone users.

No 3G (only 2G+EDGE).
Camera has no zooming capability.
No flashlight.
No video recording software (yet).
Has no user serviceable components. The entire iPhone is sealed (including the battery).

Actually you won't mind these when you get to use it and see it's power. The most annoying limitation is:

Too attractive. You can't work on it in a public place without drawing other people's attention. It's really annoying.

Sri Lanka

Now pray I wouldn't loose this phone in the bus. Usage-wise it has a scratch-free screen and a PC-Magazine video shows that nothing happens if you toss it on a concrete floor. But who knows! So I'm going to get a casing for this. Probably with-in 2000 to 3000 rupees ;-)

Bottom line : iPhone casing costs nearly as much as my old phone!

Planing to buy?

It's really worth 400 dollars. But if you are going to buy from Sri Lanka, it'll take more than Rs. 65,000 which I think too much. So try to buy it directly from US. Believe me, it'll be a good deal.

Grand bottom line : I recommend an iPhone to anyone.
..

iPhone: from a developer's point of view

2008-03-23T21:32:00.000+05:30

First of all, I must say that, although the name suggests, the iPhone is not a phone. In short terms it’s an apple computer that fits on your palm which has GSM calling/SMS capabilities. (Maybe that’s why it lacks some of the features that Nokia high end phones provide!). It runs a light-weight version of Mac OS X and it has the same architecture of a Von Neumann computer up to a certain extent. So as a developer, one should keep in mind that developing native applications for the iPhone is much like developing GUI applications for Mac OS (or Microsoft Windows). When compared to other smart phones on the market, iPhone is inherently much much more powerful and flexible than them. Not only because it’s a computer, but because it’s a computer with a big multi-touch screen, a 3 axis accelerometer sensor and a Geo-Locator system which can report the Geographical location of the iPhone using signals from cell towers or Wi-Fi hotspots.

Although the iPhone is like a computer, it has significant differences compared to a desktop machine. It’s usage is entirely different. So developer’s should keep that in mind when developing applications.

The screen is compact compared to a desktop monitor, although it’s bigger compared to other phones. So only most relevant features for a mobile device must be included in the application.
Users use their fingers instead of the mouse and the keyboard to give inputs to the iPhone. So GUI elements must be big enough to be touched by the user.
iPhone users use the device when they are on the move. So they need to access important information as quickly as possible without going through so many screens or inputs.

Application Development

I’m a windows programmer. I had never used an apple machine nor did I knew about MacOS system architecture. But after going through iPhone SDK articles I found out that MacOS and iPhone GUI architecture closely resembles Win32 GUI programming. So I found it very easy to follow up on iPhone SDK with the knowledge of Windows GUI event driven architecture. The GUI framework in iPhone is known as UIKit which is a component of Cocoa Touch as opposed to Cocoa in MacOS.

iPhone SDK uses a language called Objective-C to write programs. At first the syntax was a little bulky for me. But you can catch up on the syntax in 10 minutes. It’s the same object oriented architecture in a different syntax.

iPhone SDK has a nice GUI class hierarchy which reminds me of Microsoft .Net Framework Windows Forms class hierarchy. These classes use delegation to receive and handle events in a way similar to Win32 callbacks and .Net framework delegates. For example, the developer can register an event handler for the “touch” event of a button.

(Portion of UIKit classes. Image extracted from an ADC article)

iPhone SDK encourages developers to use MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture in their application. This ensures that the GUI is separated from the application logic and the data model.

(MVC architecture)

Multi-Touch Events

Just like MacOS and Windows, Cocoa touch framework uses an event-driven architecture to raise and handle events. Unlike traditional keyboard and mouse events on a desktop, the iPhone has “touch” events. When user’s fingers touches the iPhone screen, the touch sensor sends information of each finger touch to the OS. This is how multi-touch technology works. When multiple fingers touch the screen, the event handlers for any GUI elements receive information about all the touches through multiple event objects.

The iPhone SDK API directly supports simple tough gestures such as swipes, double taps and pinches. To handle more complex gestures you can examine the event objects to generate your own custom events.

3 Axes Accelerometer

The iPhone has an accelerometer which can report acceleration data of the device in X,Y and Z axes (see image). Because of the gravity of the earth, the 3 accelerometers record different accelerations in 3 axes.

(Image extracted from an ADC article)

Why do a phone need an accelerometer? Well, using the iPhone, you can do amazing things with the help of the accelerometer. Using it, you can get the orientation of the device in 3D space at any given time. You can create orientation aware applications that responds to the physical orientation of the device. The application can change dynamically depending on how the user holds it. A basic use of this is demonstrated by the built-in Photo application where photos automatically switches to the landscape mode when user holds the iPhone horizontally.

More advanced and exciting use of it is gaming. (iPhone uses OpenGL ES to render 3D graphics). You can combine the accelerometer data into your game to use the whole phone as a joystick. When the user tilts the phone just like a joystick, the objects on the game can respond accordingly to create an exciting user experience. This video of iPhone SDK event shows OpenGL ES and accelerometer in action. It shows an application in which the user can “shake” the phone to perform undo operations and a 3D game where the gamer can fly the fighter jet by tilting the iPhone like a joystick.

Applications can register an event handler to receive acceleration events. A reporting frequency can be specified. The default is 100 times per second. This is good for games. But you should use a frequency to match your application’s needs in order to save the battery life.

Resource Management

Since iPhone is a mobile device which runs on battery, every effort must be made to make your applications efficient. Developer should take care of releasing resources which are not needed. Mac OS X natively has a garbage collector to free up resources (wow, isn’t it! Windows doesn’t have it!). But iPhone doesn’t have the luxury of a garbage collector since it’s restricted to a low power consumption environment. The SDK uses reference counting mechanism to keep track of the resources which are in use.

One Application At a Time

iPhone can run only one application at a time. Of course, the OS kernel and few low-level demon threads keep on running all the time, but only one user application can be run at a time. This ensures low processor usage and the applications get to have the full resources of the device at their expense. So if a user receives a phone call or presses the Home button while they are working on an application, that application really exits. This is a one major fact that iPhone application developers should take into account.

Although there are some benefits of this exclusive application execution, developers have to make their applications to adapt to this environment. Suppose a user receives a phone call while they are editing a photo in a photo editing application. Application exits and phone call application launches. The application should be able to restore it’s last working status when the user goes back to that application after the phone call. So the developer must save the status of the application when it quits and restore it back when it is launched again. All application receive notifications when the system is going to quit the application. As I understand it, it maybe something similar to the “Kill” signal in Linux.

This is an important design aspect in the iPhone. Almost every built-in applications have this restore feature giving the illusion that the application keeps running in the background when it is interrupted. What they actually does is, save the state when they are exited, and restore themselves back when they are launched the next time.

Development Tools

iPhone SDK comes with a rich set of tools which can aid developers in developing iPhone applications. XCode is the IDE for iPhone applications. XCode only runs on Mac OS X or later. It has instruments which can remotely monitor and debug your applications. Deploying applications is easy. Only a single button click; your application is compiled and loaded into the iPhone. You can build your application into a real iPhone connected to the computer or you can use the iPhone simulator that comes with the SDK. The aforementioned video shows the remote application performance monitor, monitoring the performance of the 3D game. I must say, it’s as good as Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (if not better). As a .Net framework developer, I find it easy to adapt to iPhone development.

Conclusion

This article only describes most exiting features of the iPhone SDK. There are many more features such as OpenGL, Media framework, Animations, Microsoft Exchange support etc… If you are interested I suggest you register on the Apple Developer Connection (free). You gain access to lots of documents, videos (through iTunes) and sample applications.

Finally, I must say, iPhone truly is an amazing device which opens the door for a new generation of mobile devices. Apple has developed a flexible framework and tools that developers would love to develop on. They launched the iPhone SDK on March 6 (watch videos). They will release iPhone 2.0 software update on June. As for me, I’m just waiting until my iPhone arrives on April. Let’s hope for the best!

Paint.Net : A free image editing software

2008-03-01T11:38:00.000+05:30

Paint.Net is a free, Photoshop like software created on .Net framework. It includes all the features that most of us need for everyday image editing tasks. It also includes most of the image filters which comes with Photoshop.

If you do simple image editing tasks and if Photoshop is too big, Paint.Net is just the right solution for you. Very user friendly and light weight. I use it myself instead of Photoshop.

Download link: http://www.dotpdn.com/files/Paint.NET.3.22.zip (1.6MB)
(.Net framework 2.0 has to be installed)

Home page:http://www.getpaint.net/

ZiPhoneGUI : GUI app to unlock iPhone (upto firmware version 1.1.3)

2008-02-20T15:46:00.000+05:30

ZiPhoneGUI is a nice easy to use GUI application for windows which can fully unlock your iPhone. It performs all Jailbreak, Activate and Unlock operations whithin a single button click. Also includes an advanced section which you can perform advanced operations on the iPhone. (But most users wont need it)

Open source project:
http://code.google.com/p/ziphonegui/

Download:
http://ziphonegui.googlecode.com/files/ZiPhoneGUI.exe

A screenshot of ZiPhoneGUI:

ZiPhone

ZiPhoneGUI is a wrapper for Zibris ZiPhone project which is a command line utility for all iPhone unlocking tasks. For both Windows and Mac.

visit:
http://www.ziphone.org/

Download ziPhone (no GUI):
http://downloadziphone.org/ZiPhone2.4b.zip

I personally didn't test it. But it defenitely seems good.

Use Skype through Pidgin

2008-02-04T15:18:00.000+05:30

Pidgin is an open source IM client that supports various IM protocols such as Google Talk, Yahoo and MSN. By default it doesn't have the skype support. But there is a plugin which can add the support so u can chat and call skype users from pidgin.

The plugin uses the Skype public API. So to use this plugin, Skype have to be installed. Check this link: http://myjobspace.co.nz/images/pidgin/

For windows

Download this file: http://myjobspace.co.nz/images/pidgin/libskype.dll
Copy it to the Plugins folder where you installed pidgin.

For Linux

Download this file: http://myjobspace.co.nz/images/pidgin/libskype.so
Copy it to /usr/lib/purple-2/ or ~/.purple/plugins.

Then

Restart Pidgin.
Now you can create a new Skype IM account in pidgin. (Skype has to be running to use this plugin)
Skype will display a confirmation message.

Then u can use pidgin to chat with and call to skype contacts.

Virtual Machines

2008-01-25T19:52:00.000+05:30

This is an article I wrote for a magazine some time ago. I thought of publishing it here. Good for new programmers and computer science students.

In this article I’m going to discuss about what are virtual machines, their uses and the help we can get from them for our software development work. Even if you haven’t heard about virtual machines before, you may find them quite interesting when you get to know about them.

The term “Virtual” means something that does not physically exist. It’s something that allows us to interact with it in an imaginary sense. Consider playing a game. The game world does not really exist but it’s just a simulation that allows us to play in it. In the same manner virtual machines are machines (computers) that exist only as a simulation.

How to create a virtual machine

When you install the necessary software, you can create your own virtual machine on your real computer (on Windows or Linux). This virtual machine can have a RAM, hard disks, a BIOS and other configurations as you specify. Here are some virtual machine software that are currently available:

Commercial. Mainly used on Windows

• VMWare Workstation
• Microsoft Virtual PC

Free and open source. Mainly used on Linux

• QEmu
• Virtual Box

Once you create the virtual machine you can install an operating system to it just as you would do in your real machine. Insert the operating system CD and boot the virtual machine. (The OS on the virtual machine is called the Guest OS. The OS on your real machine is called the Host OS.). You can see the screen of the virtual machine inside a window that appears in your virtual machine software. (See Figure 2)

The Uses

You may wonder what is the use of having a virtual machine on your computer. Well, the use is obvious. You could work on several operating systems at the same time without having to reboot your computer or moving to another real computer at a different physical location.

Suppose you are writing a software or a website on Windows and you want to test it on Linux. With a virtual machine, you can easily switch to the Linux machine (Just like in Figure 2) and test the software on that machine. Of course, modern virtual machine software support drag-n-drop facility so you can easily drag your files into the guest OS.

Networking

You can connect your virtual machine to a real network at your home or workplace. So the other machines on your network will see the virtual machine as a real machine. If you don’t have a network, you can create a small network between your real machine and the virtual machine. So you can test your software and do other network related stuff, just as you would on a real network (but no wires involved!).

You have nothing to loose…

Here is the best part about virtual machines. You don’t have to spend money to create them. So you can have any amount of memory or hard disk space you want on the virtual machine in a matter of few mouse clicks. (Of course, it is limited by the hardware configuration of your real machine). So you can experiment on the virtual machine without having to fear about breaking something or corrupting your operating system. If you break it, you can simply delete that machine and create a new one. It’s just simple as that.

So, begin digging. Test some virtual machine software and get a feel of it.

Madura English-Sinhala Dictionary

2008-01-25T17:07:00.002+05:30

Madura dictionary can find english/sinhala synonyms of any english/sinhala word. Visit [URL Removed; see Update 2]. Great product.

Update 1

URL updated; thanks to a visitor comment.

Update 2

There has been some discussions in the user comments for this post stating that Madura and several other dictionaries are copied from the Thibus dictionary database. So I'm removing the link to Madura dictionary until I get to know the truth of this. Although I don't have access to Thibus dictionary, some idea can be gained by comparing the definitions of the free dictionaries available.

Vista Sinhala Typing Fix

2008-01-23T19:14:00.002+05:30

Vista has built-in Sinhala support. But it has few problems when typing certain letters. This fix addresses those problems. Easy to install.

Link Updated:

http://www.siyabas.lk/files/VistaQuickFix.exe

Update:

This works on Windows 7 as well.
..

Vista Hibernate problem fix

2008-01-20T11:32:00.002+05:30

I think this is a bug in vista. Sometimes there is no way to hibernate the computer. Hibernate feature is gone. This can happen when you run disk cleanup. You can turn on Hibernate again by running this command in command prompt (Run as administrator).

powercfg /h on

Hibernate should appear in the shut down menu now.

if you don't want it, run:

powercfg /h off

Change Vista start menu power button action

2008-01-20T11:28:00.000+05:30

By default vista start menu power button is set to "Sleep" mode (Indicated by Orange). That means when you click it, the computer does not shut down. It goes into sleep. This is pathetic and is cursed by most users. You can set the button to power off mode so when you click it, the computer actually shuts down.

1. Go to Control Panel -> Power Options.

2. You will see 3 power plans. Balanced, Power Saver and High Pwerformance. One of them should be selected.

3. Click 'Change plan settings' under the selected choice.

4. Click 'Change advanced power settings'.

5. Expand the category 'Power buttons and lid' and expand 'Start menu power button' section.

6. Change action to 'Shut down'. If you are using a laptop, select 'Shut down' for both 'On battery' and 'Plugged in' states.

7. Click OK.

That's it. Now the start menu power button should appear in Red. When you click it, the computer will shut down.

Ubuntu Gutsy: Getting compiz-fusion working under ati fglrx driver

2008-01-19T20:01:00.000+05:30

First of all I have to say compiz-fusion is really cool! And with Gutsy we don't have to play with custom scripts for xserver anymore. Getting it working is so easy.

Follow these steps:

1. Refresh your package list using Synaptic.

2. If you haven't done so already, select and install package "xorg-driver-fglrx" and Restart the computer.

4. Select and install package "xserver-xgl".

5. Ubuntu will notify that the xserver setup has changed. Restart the xserver using Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

Compiz-fusion should be working now. To check, go to System -> Preferences -> Appearence -> Desktop Effects and select Normal or Extra effects.

Installing compiz settings manager

The standard appearance dialog box doesn't allow custom configuration to compiz visual effects. You have to use Compiz settings manager for advanced customizations and for some extra cool effects.

1. Using Synaptic, select and install package "compizconfig-settings-manager".

2. To access settings, Click the "Advanced" button in Desktop effects tab.

Enjoy!

C# 3.0 Extension Methods

2008-01-14T18:19:00.001+05:30

The new extension feature in C# 3 allows us to add New definitions to existing classes. In other words, we can introduce new methods to any class without inheriting our own type from it.

For an example, take the String class. This calss already has some methods for string manipulation like Split(), Trim(), .... Suppose we would like to add a new feature to the String class, like GetWordCount() so we could use it like this:

string str = "The new feature";
int words = str.GetWordCount();

Note that we have not created a new type. We are using the same old String class but with a new member method. We can achieve this by extension method.

static int GetWordCount(this string s)
{
 //
 //Word count logic goes here
 //
 return count;
}

This method can be inside any class. The only thing matters is in what namespace the method is. If the GetWordCount method is in a namespace called MyExtensions, you can load the extension by adding the using directive like:

using MyExtensions;

So the String class will appear to have an extra method called GetWordCount whenever you use this namespace.

Refer to MSDN for better in-depth article.

Visual Studio 2008

2008-01-14T18:06:00.001+05:30

Visual Studio 2008 is now available. These are the download link for free editions:

Visual Studio Express 2008 (900 MB ISO Image All-in-one DVD)
http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/
(go to the link at the bottom of the page)

MSDN 2008 (2GB), MSDN Express 2008 (300MB)
http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/msdn/Default.aspx

.Net Framework 3.5 redistributable package (197MB)
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/0/f/60fc5854-3cb8-4892-b6db-bd4f42510f28/dotnetfx35.exe

Ubuntu Gutsy

2007-10-28T16:56:00.000+05:30

Nah! Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy didn't went on with me as I thought. All the improvements fades away with the amount of bugs it has. The thing is that it comes up with different bugs on different machines. Still didn't downloaded the ati fglrx driver. So no experience on Compiz Fusion just yet.

Ubuntu Gutsy

2007-09-28T16:03:00.000+05:30

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon will be released next month. Seems like they've added some new (usefull) stuff to it. Including a graphical config tool for xserver (with dual display ability) and a new printing system.

Also among the new features are Compiz fusion which is enabled by default. We'll have an exiting experience ha!

More info on: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/tribe5

Windows Vista DVD Maker

2007-08-17T18:16:00.000+05:30

Just burnt a video DVD with Vista DVD Maker. I should say it's simply great. It has the best Menu templates I've ever seen with 3D rotations and dynamic video thumbnails. Also, if the codecs are installed you can convert any video file into the DVD.

Only catch is that there is no way of adding subtitles to the movie.

CDMA phones on Ubuntu

2007-08-12T12:06:00.000+05:30

Just finished another failed attempt to use my LankaBell CDMA phone on Ubuntu. It connects to internet but I cannot view any web pages. I got this far thanks to this article by Kalpa Pathum Welvitigoda.

If anybody is interested visit the above link or search in LKLUG mailing list archives.

Hi all!

2007-08-12T11:47:00.000+05:30

As for my first post, I say Hi to all!