Saturday, December 27, 2008

YouTube/FLV and Padissimo on P1i

The latest Core Player 1.30 has built in support for streaming youtube videos! And, you can even play FLV videos stored on your memory stick too! Yeah!!! Go get it from imserba forums. For streaming YouTube videos smoothly you need at least 3G or WLAN to be working really fast.

Another cool app has been released by CPS(CellPhoneSoft) for P1i and the like(M600). Ever missed the D-Pad on your P1i? Padissimo fills that void!!! Download and install it from here. Launch it, then just long press 0 to hide the screen d-pad. Now use 2, 4, 6, 8 and 5 keys as d-pad anywhere in menu or web browser. To disable d-pad(especially recommended when you are on opera mini), just long press backspace key.
Enjoy!

Automatic Wallpaper Changer in Ubuntu

Remember "Webshots Desktop" on windows??? 'Twas a cool program which thrived in Windows 98 age. It used to change wallpapers automatically at fixed time intervals. But it used to sit in the system tray and eat up lots of valuable resources. Now, its the Ubuntu Era!!! Ubuntu is catching up in the Desktop OSes race. So, a boring evening and I thought of finding the best automatic wallpaper changer for GNOME. After lots of googling I found many options. Most of them were python scripts, adaptation of someone else's starving labour!!! Scripts aren't good for newbies and like to whew them away. I tried some of them, some worked and others tried mixing up the grey matter inside my mind. At last I found a nice one with intuitive GUI. Its called "wallpaper-tray". To install it, search for it in "Synaptic Package Manager" and install it. After installation open a terminal and type "wallpaper-tray" and hit that damned "Return" button!!! You can select a folder(or multiple ones) from which images will be displayed. Set the time in minutes for shuffling. To add it in Startup, so that you don't need to launch it manually everytime you boot, just open the "System" menu, there click "Sessions" in the "Preferences" submenu. Add it there. And you're done! And , its not a resource hog like the nasty Webshots on Windows.
Enjoy ;)

Saturday, December 20, 2008

SE joins OHA, kicks away Symbian and Windows!!!

Sony Ericsson has joined hands with Open Handset Alliance to design phones based on the Android operating system. Isn't it surprising?? They had shown interest in the Symbian Foundation's open source venture. And after creating a breakthrough device(XPERIA) based on Windows they're saying bye to Windows??? Where is SE going. By the way, at non-java phones they were the best, are the beat and will be the best always!!!
Here is the news taken directly from their site.


December 9, 2008

Sony Ericsson joins Open Handset Alliance™

On December 9, 2008 Sony Ericsson announced the extension of its portfolio strategy to include support for the Open Handset Alliance™, committing to produce an Android™ based phone in due course.

"Sony Ericsson is excited to announce its membership of the Open Handset Alliance and confirm its intention to develop a handset based on the Android platform," said Rikko Sakaguchi, CVP and Head of Creation and Development at Sony Ericsson.

"We believe Sony Ericsson can bring a wealth of experience in making consumer focused multimedia handsets with new user experience to the Alliance drawing on the successes of the Walkman™ and Cyber-shot™ sub-brands. Sony Ericsson is a strong supporter of open operating systems and we believe the Open Handset Alliance offers an exciting opportunity for a new and unique user experience only Sony Ericsson can deliver."


Rikko Sakaguchi, CVP and Head of Creation and Development at Sony Ericsson.


Complements existing Open OS strategy
Membership of the Open Handset Alliance will complement our existing Open OS strategy which is based on the Symbian and Windows Mobile® platforms. Android is a complete, open mobile phone software stack that enables Sony Ericsson to provide the best user experience with all the latest technologies available on the Internet.
Visit the Open Handset Alliance website>>

Developer support
This announcement confirms that Sony Ericsson is joining the Open Handset Alliance and that we have begun development on this platform. It is still early in the process, and we cannot yet reveal any information about any future SDK from Sony Ericsson.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Wikipedia and DAA

Exams are near and study season is on. This semester, we've a paper called DAA, thats an acronym for Design & Analysis of Algorithms. For the students, this is the most nasty paper of this sem, just because there is no perfect book for it like we've Navathe and Elmasri for DBMS, Galvin for OS, Lipschutz for Data Structures and all of the rest not enumerated here. The book for DAA that everyone follows is called Fundamentals Of Computer Algorithms. The book is too thick and writer names are equally weird. One simple name is Sartaj Sahni. I hate the font and the dull colour of pages so I don't want to study from it at all. Also there is a lot of exaggerated stuff filled inside. It is too difficult to understand the concepts from it and the algorithms take whole of your brain's processing power and still can't run inside your mind!!! Most of the stuff belongs to Computational Complexity Theory so not as helluva as OS to understand. So, I was searching for some niftier alternative. I tore apart the DAA page from syllabus booklet and started searching for things on net. Search means google. For every topic that I was searching, the first result was a wikipedia article. The language, to the point articles, points, easy small and concise algorithms filled with elegance are easy to slurp and digest! I finished 75% of the syllabi in just two days(not 48 hours but less than 10 hours). I've never studied more than 6 hours a day in my life. The toughest paper of this sem now seems helluva to me! Long live wikipedia!!! Include all course material from our syllabi and we'll never have to deal with boring books.
Here is the list of some important stuff about which I got my fundamentals cleared on wikipedia in last 2 days:
Quicksort
Mergesort
TSP
15-puzzle
8-queens problem
Sum of subsets
Dynamic Programming
Branch and Bound
Backtracking
Greedy method
Divide and Conquer
Problem Classes i.e. P, NP, NP-hard and NP-complete
Cook's theorem
Graph colouring
...and lots more! That much seems enough to pass!! lol

Friday, December 5, 2008

Built-in IM client

Most new(old ones too) data capable phones have a built in IM client. In SE java phones, it is there in Messging menu with the name My Friends. Most of the people don't know how to use it. Although Java apps like Nimbuzz, Mxit, EQO, e-buddy and Mig33 are better performers at speed but for the occasional user, nothing beats My Friends. You just need to go to yamigo.com and register there. You'll get all setup instructions there itself. If you're stuck midway then do ask me here.
I'm busy now a days so blogging is getting little attention. Hope, I give much of myself to this blog after semester exams end. Bye bye:)

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Built-in phone mail client configuration

So, you purchased a shiny new cellphone and flaunting its camera and navigation and browser and music player and other features. Contented with that only?? Don't be!! There are lots more inside which probably you don't know how to use. This post delves into one such feature which is found on almost all phones that have data connectivity i.e. GPRS, EDGE, 3G, HSDPA viz. the built in e-mail client.
For configuration instructions, I'm referring here Sony Ericsson phones. Configuration on other brands is similar too.
Ok, so lets start. SE phones can be broadly classified into two categories based on the software. The popular and mass seller among the two is their Java phones. All the K, C, T, Z series phones fall in this category. Most W series phones too fall in this category. W950 and W960 are the exceptions. The other category of their phones are the Smart Phones running Symbian OS. P and G series phones fall in this category. The configuration is quite similar on both types of phones. For coherency, I'm taking the Java phones in consideration. And, I'm taking GMail as your mail provider. Before doing all that is below, login to your gmail from your computer and enable POP and e-mail forwarding in settings. Also enable IMAP.
Now, on your phone open Menu-Messaging-Email-Accounts-New Account.
Enter your name, email address in the text boxes. In the username box enter in this format username@gmail.com and in password box enter your password. Choose Connection Type as IMAP4. Enter the server address as imap.gmail.com and SMTP server as smtp.gmail.com. Enable SSL in IMAP settings. In SMTP settings enable SSL as well as SMTP authentication and enter your username and password. Set the Connect using field to your default data(gprs/3g) account. Save the settings. You're done!!! Now open Inbox and in More click Send & Receive. Wait till the phone connects to google's servers and downloads your mails. It may take some time depending upon your connection speed and no. of mails in your inbox. To compose a mail use the Write new option in email menu. If you're stuck somewhere then do ask me with the details here by posting a comment. For newbies this may occur as I've written all of this thinking that you're a bit experienced with your phone.
In P series phones, all of this is pretty similar. In Messging tap More-Email accounts. There create new. IMAP and SMTP configuration settings are to be done in Inbox and Outbox tabs.
That was all for today. I'll come up with configuring your phone's IM client in the next post.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Exams Time

My semester exams are scheduled to start from 19th of december. Not being serious towards studies and closed-eye answer sheet evaluation of my university, in previous two years I got quite a few unexpected setbacks with some bad results. Although, I've never been the brightest performer in my class but I had never performed so badly in the past as I performed here. I was always well above average and in the top 10% in my class which has now gone down to 20%. With a hope to pay attention towards studies this time, I decided to pack up my computer. I analysed the causes of academic deterioration and found that my computer was the prime source of distraction. I always used to be busy with the PC, googling for stuff, reading blogs, orkutting, managing my WAP site, playing games and watching movies and neglecting the book stuff and read them seriously only in the last 10 days before exams. Hope, this time I come up with a nicer result :) I've noticed an improvement in the last two days. I've started to love course books and getting flared towards reading them. Hope this goes on.
I packed up my PC, so how am I writing this blog post?? My phone is here with me and is a great alternative to my PC for net surfing, reading documents and pdfs, searching wikipedia for academic stuff and more, apart from blogging. I've three different ways to post. The first one is the built in browser Opera8 on the P1i. Opera9 and Ozone don't seem to work perfectly. Opera Mini 4.2 has a limit on number of characters. Mini Mod works fine but I don't use it much. The second one is Blogger Mobile application. It is nice too but is more oriented towards photo blogging. The third one which I prefer is Mail-to-Blogger. I just need to send a mail to an specified address. The title of the mail becomes the subject of the blog post, the text becomes the post. My phone's built in mail client has no limit on number of characters and typing on P1i's QWERTY keyboard is fast as Schumaker for me so this option fits best for me and I can type quickly and fastly and write on and on and on...
And since the phone is fully equipped at net so to avoid distraction from it I change the APN in internet accounts always after using so that un-necessarily I won't connect as it takes some time to tinker with the settings to fix it. A couple of hours in the evening and a few minutes in the morning after waking up is sufficient.
This much is enough for now. Stay tuned. The next post will be on e-mail client configuration on Sony Ericsson phones. Most SE users aren't aware that there is such a nice e-mail client on their phones. So for their awareness.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Ozone for UIQ3

And finally, what I was waiting for my P1i is out!!! Yes, the bestestestest mobile web browser for the UIQ3 platform is out!! It is called Ozone and can be downloaded from their site http://www.o3mobi.com/
Before Ozone, we the forgotten UIQ users had only 3 native options apart from the java based rocker Opera Mini viz. the built in Opera 8.65, @Web and Opera Mobile 9.5 beta. The 1st one is too crappy and renders pages weirdly. Especially I hate the automatic link highlighting and text highlighting with a contrasting colour on some themes in Opera 8.65. Then came @Web, based on Apple Webkit engine promising big things. But, it fell like a dead monkey. It is pretty medicore at UI, features, user friendliness and more. Then the biggest fuss maker for WM phones, landed to UIQ - Opera Mobile 9.50. But, it sucks at speed and stability. And it is pretty heavy on resources. I remember once while surfing through Opera Mobile I had opened heavy sites on four tabs and it had eaten up the whole 75MB free RAM of my phone. I got a call but could not receive it because of no RAM!!! I had to take out battery to reset. Damn you Opera!!!!
And finally today I read about Ozone on UIQblog.com. Downloaded and installed it right away. The peculiar thing is that it identifies itself as Apple iPhone's user agent. So, I directly opened Orkut on it to experience the iPhone version of Orkut on it. And guess what? It rocks!!! It rules!!! Although P1 has a resolution of 240*320 and iPhone has a hefty VGA screen, but Orkut looked pretty on P1. I had to scroll horizontally, but it was a nice experience. Google guys have designed Orkut for iPhone pretty intuitively and aesthetically appealing and later sprinkled decent user friendliness on it.
Earlier I was jealous of Nokia fanboys having better browser(Safari) on their Symbian 9 series phones. But now Ozone comes to the rescue and it beats Safari as well as Opera Mobile hands down!
My verdict on Ozone: The best mobile browser ever made for Symbian OS.
Plusses: very stable, fast, intuitive, user friendly, fast page rendering, low on resources, free
Cons: Its an alpha version!, seems to fail to load Orkut's desktop version

Current UIQ browser scores out of 100(My opinion)
1. Opera Mini 4.2 - 99
2. Opera Mini Mod 2.06 - 95
3. Opera Mini Official 3.2 - 94
4. Opera Mini Mod 3.x - 93
5. Ozone 0.9 - 87(Native UIQ app)
6. Opera Mobile 9.50 - 81(Native UIQ app)
7. @Web 2.0 - 65(Native UIQ app)
8. Opera Mobile 8.65 - 54(Built in)
9. Tea Shark - less than 40(failed)
10. UCWeb - less than 30(failed)

Please note: This is my opinion based on the browsing experience on my favourite sites on my P1i that I use regularly. It doesn't have any connection with any other individual, company, site, platform, phone. And the opinion can differ user wise. Please don't flame me with comments if your opinion differs. You stay happy with your opinion and me with mine :)

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Some free PHP-MySQL hosts

Want to have a small DB driven web/WAP site??? Here I write about a few selected ones.
FreeHostia
If you want almost hundred percent uptime then this one is surely for you. Although they're low at bandwidth(5GB/month) and space(250MB) but they've excellent uptime and very fast servers. A couple of demerits are that you can't use more than 1.3% of their CPU time per day and another is that file size limit is 500KB. The former implies that if your site uses heavy scripting, lots of modules and non-optimized code and you've lots of visitors then you'll cross the 1.3% limit with ease. Another demerit is that fsockopen, mail etc are disabled. Pros: no ads *grin
VNDV
Here you get 6gigs of space and 50 gigs/month bandwidth!!! File size limit is 8MB. Most serious con is that they remain down a lot and for very long periods. Recently they had some disk related problem so all sites went to read only mode and they had to run fsck(file system check). It used to happen twice every week and your site remained down for about 4 hours. But now they've solved that problem. Another problem that occured 4 days ago was that they went down for four days and came back today morning!!!!!! fsockopen and mail are not allowed here too. Pros: no ads, lots of space and bw.
Byethost
They've 300MB space and 20 gigs of bandwidth. Pretty decent enough. And recently they've also allowed fsockopen. And smtp through google's smtp server. Fastest host I've ever used. Almost 100% uptime. I've never experienced any downtime there yet!! The only and crappiest demerit that prevents you to host a mobile site there is that they filter out most of the mobile phone user agents as spam bots and don't allow access to your site. For a website they're extremely good. No ads here too.
Orgfree
They've 300MB space and unmetered bandwidth. They allow mail, fsockopen and all other bells and whistles of PHP. Butttttttttttttttttttt!! They display ads. Small text/banner ads are displayed on your site. I found a workaround to remove ads. Just set the MIME type of your pages as application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml instead of text/html. But then, IE, FF, Chrome etc won't open your site. Only Opera will. They're good for mobile sites but in their terms they've written that they'll delete mobile sites if detected. That happened to me!!!!
X10Hosting
Crap! Crap!! Loads of crap!!! Thats what I say after using them. They've tougher conditions and they suck at uptimes. I used to experience daily about 2-3 hours downtime in evening. Finally I left them and they deleted my site.

000webhost.com is a scam!!! Don't signup there. They only lure you to get a large user base for spreading their referral program. When you signup, they'll register you at another host which is a free one provided by byethost. Whenever you see a host with Vista Panel, 300MB space just take for granted that it's another free one provided by byethost. Byethost allow you to open a hosting company for free. And thats as crap as byet.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Sending multipart MIME mail with inline image

From today morning itself, I'm trying to send a MIME mail with PHP's mail() function that displays an image inline. But, I don't know where the <bleep> I'm making the mistake. The image goes but in GMail it shows up as an attachment instead of getting displayed inline. Here's my source code:
<?php
$to="prab97@indiatimes.com";
$from="help@indiatimes.com";
$subject="Verify";
$boundary="whatever";
$headers="MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers.="Content-type: multipart/mixed; 
      boundary=\"$boundary\"\r\n";
$headers.="From: ".$from."\r\n";
$headers.="Reply-To: ".$from."\r\n";
$message = "--$boundary\n";
$message.="Content-type: image/png\n";
$message.="Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n";
$message.="Content-disposition: inline\n\n";
$encoded = base64_encode(file_get_contents("image.png"));
$message.=$encoded."\n";
$message.="--$boundary\n";
$message.="Content-type: text/html; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\n";
$message.="Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n";
$message.="Content-disposition: inline\n\n";
$message.="This is a test. <a href="test.tst">Test</a>\n";
$message.="--$boundary--";
$send=mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
if($send){
echo "Mail was sent successfully!";
}
else {
echo "Failed!!!";
}
?>


I tried multipart/mixed, multipart/alternative, multipart/related but can't succeed in making it display inline. I want the image to be displayed first, followed by html text. There's no clue I'm getting about where I went wrong. If you've any idea then do tell me.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Scripting in an image with PHP

The title of this post may seem confusing to you. Let me make it clear. Here I am presenting a simple method for running a PHP script whenever a visitor of your sites retrieves a specific image file from your server.
In this example
Here, I am considering an image file hi.gif which when requested by a user runs PHP code to log the user's details. I assume, you're running Apache and PHP5. If you want a free host for this experiment then x10hosting is for you.

So, lets begin.
1. Open notepad and put the below code inside and save the file as "hi.gif"
<?
$LogFile="Log.txt";
$Date=date("F j, Y");
$Logging = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']." - ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']." - ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']." - ".$Date;
$Post = fopen("$LogFile","a");
fputs($Post,$Logging);
fclose($Post);
$icon = "../hi.gif";
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
$blah=fopen($icon, "rb");
while(!feof($blah)){
$data=fread($blah, 512);
echo $data;
}
?>


2. Now open notepad again and put this inside and save the file with name ".htaccess"
<FilesMatch "\.(bmp|gif)$">
SetHandler application/x-httpd-phpv2
</FilesMatch>


3. Now login to your server's FTP daemon and in images directory put the hi.gif and .htaccessthat you created above. Also create a "log.txt" in your pc and upload this zero length file to the same directory. CHMOD log.txt to 777 or 666

4. Now go to one directory level up and upload the original real hi.gif that you want to show to the user.

5. Done!!! Yes! You're done. The URL to ur image script will be http://yoursite.com/images/hi.gif


Explanation
The .htaccess file directs the server to parse all gif and bmp files in that folder as php scripts - the FilesMatch directive of Apache does that.
The hi.gif file accessed by the user is actually the PHP script that tracks user agent, referrer, ip and date of its accesser and then writes this info to log.txt and then returns to the user the contents of a real image hi.gif located one folder up. Thats it :)

There are many uses of this script including malicious ones. I leave it to yourself for thinking about its potential uses.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Best UIQ3 Apps(Part-2)

Well, so lets proceed with the second part of Best UIQ apps.

QFlashLight(must have)
This is a torch app. Works best on P1i, this app can turn on both the LEDs at once and the brightest torch app available.

Swiss Manager
This is the Swiss army knife for your UIQ device. It has a nice Task Manager, File manager, System Info page and lots more. Though cool, I don't use it much.

The Open Screen Capture
As the name suggests, it is an open sourcse screenshot program.

LCG X-Plore(must have)
One of the best apps available for any smart phone!! It has virtually everything built inside!!! It is a file manager, video player, music player, zip/rar extractor, doc viewer, hex editor and lots more!! A must have for all UIQ users.

Abakus
Its a cool and handy calculator app for your UIQ phone. Scientific and Engineering modes are there apart from the basic mode.

BestCrypto
This app can be used to protect your private pics, sounds and everything by encrypting and password protecting them.

DocumentsToGo Word/Slide/Sheet(must have)
These three programs are your replacement for any office suite! Apart from viewing any of your office documents, you can edit them as well. And the latest version even supports the latest docx(Office 2007 format). Its an another must have app.

Foxit Reader
Though new, but its a very good alternative for the built in PDF+. It lets you view PDF files just as they appear in your computer. But the app lacks fullscreen view and some more needed features. Well, they should be available soon, as the developers put more of them inside.

MobileFTPd
This app can turn your UIQ smart phone into an FTP server. So you can access your phone files remotely from any part of the earth.

StickIt
This app can stick your notes to the standby screen so you keep getting reminded of your notes whenever you have a look at your phone.

WorldMate
This one is for travel junkies, those who keep roaming around the world. It can help you plan your travel better.

Torch
Although it can't light the LEDs as bright as QFlashLight, but it is handy when you don't need lots of light. Get it from swmail's site.

With this I end this post. Enjoy your UIQ3 device :)

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Best UIQ3 Apps

As you might be knowing, I'm the owner of a Sony Ericsson P1i which runs on UIQ3 which in turn runs on top of Symbian OS 9.1; I am dedicating this blog post to the apps I use on my phone. I am not providing any link here to download the apps, you should give some pain to your fingers and google for the apps.

Oh wait..... Don't get disappointed. You can get all the apps full and cracked at imserba forums thats http://www.imserba.com/forum/. If you've ever used a Nokia S60 phone then you might be knowing about many of these apps. Some apps have been supplied with a direct download page link here. Others can be found from imserba. Ok, so lets start:


Agile Messenger
This is an IM app so you can hook your phone to ICQ, MSN. AOL, Yahoo! and GTalk messengers in one go and simultaneously. Works very good.

Blogger
This app, you can get from the SE's Fun & Download site. This is the same Blogger app's UIQ version which you might have seen on Cyber-shot phones that feature mobile blogging.

Core Player(must have)
This is a killer app for UIQ phones!!! Makes your phone a true multimedia device. It support lots of audio, video and pic formats but I mainly use it for playing videos with extension AVI, MPG, DAT, MPEG, MOV. It supports following filetypes: aac, asf, aif, avc, bmp, flac, amr, awb, h264, jpg, jpeg, m3u, mka, mkv, midi, mid, mp1, mp2, mp3, mpa, mpeg, mpg, mpv, m1v, m4v, mp4, mov, 3gp, m4a, m4b, k3g, mc, mpc, nsv, ogg, ogm, pls, png, spx, tif, tiff, ts, m2ts, avi, divx, gvi, xvid, wv, wma, asx, wmx, wvx, wax, wav, rmp

Fring
This too is an IM app, but supports VoIP calls so you can talk to your gtalk, yahoo friends directly if the phone is hooked to net through WiFi. Download it to your phone from m.fring.com

Google Maps
Google have released finally the native UIQ version of Google Maps with satellite view, traffic info and lots more. Get it from Google Maps site or the UIQ site.

Image Converter
As the name suggests, it can convert any image among various image formats.

LCG Jukebox
For the S60 fans who used it, its available here on UIQ too. But if you didn't know about it then don't use it. The Walkman player is better on P1.

Opera Mini 4.1 & Opera Mobile 9.5(must have)
Both of these are the bestestesttest browsers available for mobile phones. Everyone knows about them. Get the mini from mini.opera.com and the big one from opera.com/products/mobile

Slick
Yet another IM app, but with cool and slick looks. Try it if you're an experimenter.

Digia @Web
A very good browser. It boasts itself as the full finger touch browser and yes thats true!!! You don't need any keypresses for browsing, except for typing URLs and form data. Get it from their site

Yell Radio
A cool internet radio program. Though I don't use it because of my crappy gprs connection.

Tweak Peaks
This app turbocharges your phone to work fast by implementing some POSIX libraries. Also you can change your browser's homepage through it. But, it requires capsSwitch for the latter task. Get it from cellphonesoft.com

Airtel Live TV
Never worked for me after I purchased my P1. Thats because Airtel has shutdown all those channeld. Will run great after 3G starts.

Mobipocket Reader
It enables you to read e-books in PRC format.

CapsSwitch(must have)
This is the hack app for UIQ. It turns off system file protection and much more security restrictions and unlocks access to system folders. Get it from its developer's site http://101swmail010.googlepages.com/uiq3mods

GDesk
A very good app. It replaces that old boring desktop with new great looking designs with icon launchers and menus. Get it from http://gdesk.wetpaint.com/. Their site is weird! It'll take you lots of time to search for the download link. Go search it and know more about it there.

iPhoneLock
A keylock app that works just like the iPhone's keylock. Cool one. But it has some issues if you've turned on the Inactivity Lock in your security settings. Get it from http://iphonelock.kwull.com/download.html



Well, there are lots more apps remaining on my phone that haven't been listed here. I'm now tired of typing, so I'm splitting this venture into two parts. The next set of apps and their functions will be posted when I do the next update of my blog(that should be within 2-3 days).

Sunday, November 2, 2008

1337

1337 or lEET means "eleet" or rather "elite" and is mainly used for expert users/hackers on the Internet and is as old as the internet itself. 1337 actually is the language used by "eleet" people which substitutes alphabets from english language with similar looking numbers and ASCII symbols. There is also no need to follow the grammar when you are writing in leet.
In fact there is a firefox extension that allows you to write in leet. You can get it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/770 Apart from leet, it also allows a user to write in Hex, Binary, Morse and lots more languages.

Even Google has a leet version which can be reached at:
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/

For more information on leet, you can have a look at following sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
http://www.1337.net/
http://www.wikihow.com/Read-and-Write-in-1337

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Mobile SMS Life

Do you want to send free SMSes(India only)??? Mobile SMS Life is the best thing for this in my view. Earlier 160by2.com was the leader but now it allows only 10 SMSes per day on a single number. SMSLife comes to rescue. It allows 100 text messages and 10 voice messages per day on any number in India.
SMSLife is a java application so it can run on any phone that supports J2ME. You must've GPRS active, for sending messages. Download the app directly into your phone from their mobile site m.smslife.in. You need to register an account on their website before you start sending messages.
The voice message feature is cool. Whatever you type and send, will be read by a female voice in a call to the receiver. The call comes from a number from STD code 044.
Use and enjoy :)

Hard time for SE

It seems that SE is having a hard time in the market. The sales are decreasing day by day. No doubt SE designs the best phones in the range from Rs.4k onwards but it is now being ruled out of the roost. Nokia as always is dominating due to its craze and people being ignorant that an SE is always better and easier to use than a Nokia. Although Nokia phones are more durable than SE ones but I still prefer an SE because of the ease of use, size and shape. Well, the SE guys have done a great mistake by breaking the relation with UIQ. By the way, SE is loosing in India due to one more reason - the cheap chinese phones which play MP3's as loud as a music system are taking over the market in the range Rs.3k-Rs.10k. Well whatever goes, I'll always be loyal to SE.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Source Viewer

I was surfing on my phone and a page showed XML parsing failed. I wanted to check what's wrong with the BSE site. Just googled for an online source viewer, found a few which didn't appeal to me so I decided to write my own and under two minutes I built my own source viewer and uploaded on my PHP capable server. Here's the darn few line code:

<?php
header("Content-type: text/plain");
$page=$_GET["url"];
$fp = fopen($page, r);
while (!feof($fp)) {
echo fgets($fp, 128);
}
fclose($fp);
?>

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Old School Games

Its 2008! The PC games require gigs of RAM, a hefty graphics card and a processor that crunches numbers really fast. My 3+ year old PC can't withstand the sheer length of coding involved in latest games, so I keep sticking to old games.
One sunny day, when there was no college; I got nostalgic about an old game called SPEEDKAR which I had played in 1998 in school when I was studying in 6th grade. So, I decided to find the lost thing. After a lot of googling I finally found it!! Yes, and whole lots of old school games like DAVE, PRINCE, PRINCE1, MARIO, SPEEDKAR, ISLAND HOPPER on a site which has the full collection of old DOS games. Here is the damn link. Just go and search for your lost game and 97% chance is that you'll find it. But wait, on clicking a game name you may not be able to download it because they've messed with the a tag. Just right click any game then copy link address and paste in address bar of your browser and then correct the link by removing 8 to 11th characters from beginning.

Ok, so you've downloaded your favourite game but your PC isn't emulating the sound effects correctly. Just download VDMS and see the magic!!! VDMS sits between your game and Windows and translates game sound effects properly and routes to your sound card. Download VDMS here.
If you are on Vista and still having problems then just use DOSBox which is a pure DOS emulator. Get it here. If you're having problems using DOS Box then don't ask me, because I haven't used it. And I assume that you're not a newbie in computers so you can solve these kind of small problems yourself instead of bugging me.

TOR - The Onion Router

Sometimes when I get bored, I engage myself in some black activities on net like trying to crack into servers and much more which I am not going to detailize here. Well, to anonymize myself and save from wrath of some of the creepiest system administrators I use proxies(like everyone). But searching for a working proxy is a pain sometimes. Although there are some programs with predefined proxy lists but they are either trial or paid or crap!!!
While delving for a feasible solution I came to know about The Onion Router - the best solution to all anonymity woes!
TOR connects you to your requested site through a networked virtual tunnel of relays.
For more information visit their site.
TOR itself is not a HTTP proxy, it acts as a SOCKS proxy. The download from their site is called Vidalia bundle, and contains Privoxy which works as an HTTP proxy so you can use any browser. I am not going into detail of how to use TOR to anonymize yourself because they themselves have such a good and informative site. Just visit them and know everything about TOR.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Opera Mobile 9.50 beta released for UIQ!

Today on October 20th, 2008 Opera Software after a long wait, have released the first public beta version of its long awaited Web Browser for Symbian OS UIQ3.x platform. Earlier it was available only for Windows Mobile.
According to Opera, following bugs are there:
->The browser sets a new system-wide home-page, which cannot be opened by the embedded Internet browser (Opera 8.65).
->Cursor is not shown when HTML edit fields are partially out of screen.
->No support for landscape screen mode due to a number of system issues with the OpenGL graphical engine.
->Browser plug-ins are disabled by default due to non-existent or incomplete system support for Flash content. They can be enabled by the user for experimental purposes only, via More > Tools > Change settings > Advanced > Allow plug-ins.
->The continuous browser usage experience might be affected by the amount of available phone RAM memory.

As a lucky owner of Sony Ericsson P1i, I got to use their new lil kid. As soon as I came to know about the release I jumped to the Opera Mobile's official download. It was a monstrous 4.14MB!! Yes monstrous because I am using GPRS and it takes an era for downloading 4MB.

I got hold of the browser and was extremely happy to use it. The browser gave me the best experience ever on mobile. I could open the full facebook, and gmail standard view on my phone!!! But alas, due to crappy policies of Orkut its full view isn't available for mobiles. They detect the browser and redirect to the mobile version.

It also comes with the Opera widgets - handy little apps that run in the Opera browser.

So far I'm extremely satisfied with the new app. It changed my perception of web on my phone. The old Opera 8.65 was too crap to be usable. The worst thing that I hated most in it was the automatic link highlighting and mixing up site's CSS with the phone's theme. Digia @Web had come to my rescue but didn't appeal much. And finally Opera 9.5 put an end to my problems and I now can browse the web with ease.

There's an issue with mobile sites on 9.5 though. When you open any XHTML mobile site, it seems to hold the left part of the screen unless you zoom.

For the SE P1i/G700i/G900i/W960i, here is the download link

A new beginning

Today, I decided to jump into the blogging arena properly. I had a blog earlier on blogger, but I never used to update it. Hope, this one keeps getting my attention :P