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Monday, June 27, 2011

HowTo: Generate QR code for your site

Everyone know that one of the keys to have a great SEO for your website is making sure you keep your website updated, new and fresh. Whether you do this with a blog, or you change your homepage with new offers, coupons or new products, it serves to show Google that your site is “alive.” For many small businesses in particular, this is a real challenge.

So you already have great, fresh content on your site – what’s next? Do you know what is coming that may benefit your business?

What are QR codes?
QR codes (abbreviation for Quick Response code) are a popular type of two-dimensional barcode. They are also known as hardlinks or physical world hyperlinks. QR Codes store up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters of arbitrary text. This text can be anything, for example URL, contact information, a telephone number, even a poem! QR codes can be read by an optical device with the appropriate software. Such devices range from dedicated QR code readers to mobile phones.

QR code for your site?
There are various QR code generators available online but, generating QR code without using generators is also very easy. We will use Google Chart APIs to generate QR code for us.

Creating QR code
Google charts API allows us to generate QR code by passing various parameters to their API. Below is the short description of each parameter-

Name	Required?	Description
cht=qr	Yes	Specifies a QR code.
chs=<width>x<height>	Yes	Image size. (Remember it’s English alphabet ‘x’ and not cross ’X’ )
choe=<output_encoding>	No	How to encode the data in the chart. Here are the available values: UTF-8 [Default] Shift_JIS ISO-8859-1

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Mobile Security – Users Just Don’t Care

It’s not that users “don’t want to keep their data safe”. They do. Most corporate users don’t want their personal or corporate, private information, available to someone else. They don’t want their email stolen or their contacts pillaged. So why do people insist on ignoring the multitude of security recommendations on how to have a more secure mobile work environment? The answer to this question is that inside, users really just don’t care.

The average corporate user of a mobile device has a litany of reasons why they think they don’t need to listen to the advice of their security organization. Some of these reasons are more legitimate than others, but what they really boil down to is the fact that they all indicate a lack of economic incentive when compared against required effort. The end result is that the user just doesn’t care about the problem.

There are so many phones out there, it won’t happen to me. The chances are too slim.
I don’t understand the danger here? I mean it’s a smartphone, nobody attacks phones.
What do you mean I have to act in a secure manner? How do I do that?
But I downloaded this app from the official marketplace. What do you mean it’s not secure?!
You put firewalls and antivirus garbage on my laptop and it’s slow as heck, and I STILL get infected. Security doesn’t work.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Howto Send and Read SMSs using a GSM modem, AT+ commands and PHP

I need to send/read SMS with PHP. To do that, I need a GSM modem. There are few of them if we google a little bit. GSM modems are similar than normal modems. They’ve got a SIM card and we can do the same things we can do with a mobile phone, but using AT and AT+ commands programmatically. That’s means we can send (and read) SMSs and create scripts to perform those operations. Normally those kind of devices uses a serial interface. So we need to connect our PC/server with a serial cable to the device. That’s a problem.
Modern PCs sometimes dont’t have serial ports. Modern GSM modems have a USB port, and even we can use serial/USB converters. I don’t like to connect directly those devices to the PC/server. They must be close. Serial/USB cables cannot be very long (2 or 3 meters). I prefer to connect those devices using serial/ethernet converters. Because of that I will create a dual library. The idea is enable the operations when device is connected via serial cable and also when it’s connected thought a serial/ethernet converter.

The idea is the following one: We are going to create a main class called Sms. It takes in the constructor (via dependency injection) the HTTP wrapper or the serial one (both with the same interface). That means our Sms class will work exactly in the same way with one interface or another.

Let’s start. First we’re going to create a Dummy Mock object, sharing the same interface than the others. The purpose of that is to test the main class (Sms.php)

class Sms_Dummy implements Sms_Interface

{

public function deviceOpen()

{

}

public function deviceClose()

{

}

public function sendMessage($msg)

{

}

public function readPort()

{

return array("OK", array());

}

private $_validOutputs = array();

public function setValidOutputs($validOutputs)

{

$this->_validOutputs = $validOutputs;

}

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Service Listening to TCP, HTTP and Named Pipe at the same time

Introduction

The example below implements a simple service that is able to receive requests via TCP, HTTP and Named Pipe. Therefore, the service can be available for clients using different communication. E.g. Windows Phone 7 environment supports only HTTP.

The example is based on the Eneter Messaging Framework 2.0 that provides components for various communication scenarios.

(Full, not limited and for non-commercial usage free version of the framework can be downloaded from http://www.eneter.net. The online help for developers can be found at http://www.eneter.net/OnlineHelp/EneterMessagingFramework/Index.html.)

Multiple Listening

To implement the multiple listener, we will use the Dispatcher component from the Eneter Messaging Framework.

The Dispatcher receives messages from all attached input channels and forwards them to all attached output channels.

In our scenario, the dispatcher will have three input channels (TCP, HTTP and Named Pipe) and only one output channel (local channel to the message receiver).

So, if a message is received e.g. via the TCP input channel, the dispatcher will forward it through the output channel to the typed message receiver. The typed message receiver then notifies the user code implementing the service.

Multiple Listening Service Application

The service is implemented as a simple console application. The most important part is using of the dispatcher component for the multiple listening (TCP, HTTP and Named Pipe).

Since the service listens also to HTTP, you must execute it under sufficient user rights. (I recommend administrator for the debug purposes.)

The whole implementation is very simple.

using System;

using Eneter.Messaging.EndPoints.TypedMessages;

using Eneter.Messaging.MessagingSystems.HttpMessagingSystem;

using Eneter.Messaging.MessagingSystems.MessagingSystemBase;

using Eneter.Messaging.MessagingSystems.NamedPipeMessagingSystem;

using Eneter.Messaging.MessagingSystems.SynchronousMessagingSystem;

using Eneter.Messaging.MessagingSystems.TcpMessagingSystem;

using Eneter.Messaging.Nodes.Dispatcher;

namespace MultiReceivingService

{

public class RequestData

{

public int Number1 { get; set; }

public int Number2 { get; set; }

}

class Program

{

// Receiver receiving 'RequestData' and responding 'int'.

// Note: Duplex typed message receiver can receive messages of specified type

// and send response messages of specified type.

private static IDuplexTypedMessageReceiver<int, RequestData> myReceiver;

static void Main(string[] args)

{

// Create local messaging connecting the dispatcher with the receiver.

IMessagingSystemFactory aLocalMessaging =

new SynchronousMessagingSystemFactory();

IDuplexInputChannel aLocalInputChannel =

aLocalMessaging.CreateDuplexInputChannel("MyLocalAddress");

IDuplexTypedMessagesFactory aTypedMessagesFactory =

new DuplexTypedMessagesFactory();

myReceiver = aTypedMessagesFactory.CreateDuplexTypedMessageReceiver

<int, RequestData>();

myReceiver.MessageReceived += OnMessageReceived;

Async support for Silverlight and WP7

Async support in C# language brings the new life to the modern application development to bring forth the same technique of writing your code and bring asynchrony easily. The main focus of async ctp is to ornament the language in such a way so that the developer could seamlessly create applications that brings asynchrony yet not dealing with its complexity. Hence using the new technique, asynchrony could easily achieved in a program without refactoring the whole program with lots of callbacks and method calls. I have already talked about it in a separate article. If you don’t know, please visit “Async CTP 5.0”.

Async CTP is released again recently and announced in MIX 11. Just after it is released, the first thing that everyone looks for is what is new in the release. As a matter of fact, I did jumped back to see them but eventually found out that there is nothing new in this build in terms of new features is concerned but the release focuses on fixes of performance adding debugging capabilities etc. I will definitely look back to them later in another post, but in this post I am going to talk about another important thing that featured with this release. As opposed to the previous release, the current release now supports Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 environments. This seems to be interesting.

What is Asynchrony?

The word asynchrony means something that is running without blocking other operations running in parallel. If you have created a background Thread to process some data, you are actually doing asynchronous job in background as your foreground operation does not get hampered. In vNext C# introduces Asynchrony using TPL. The two new keywords “async” and “await” could be used to make one sequential method asynchronous. Hence the new way of developing asynchronous program replaces the traditional approach where we needed to refactor the code totally to gain asynchrony in our application. Basically, this is done using the StateMachine to store the entire method into a form of states, and each states are delegated into batch of statements. The Task.ContinueWith is used in the system to ensure that the method body gets executed sequentially. Yes, it’s a compiler trick. If you want to know more about it, please read through my entire article on “Async CTP”.

Now coming back to our discussion on Windows Phone 7, we know that C# async is now supported by both Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 out of box. To work with this, please follow the steps:

Download "Async CTP (Refreshed)" from this link.

After you install the CTP release, you will get few more dlls available in your installed directory as shown below:

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

How to Encode HD Video for Windows Phone 7

We know that Zune software has an automatic conversion tool but quality is not always what you’d expect or want. XDA member rvmax wrote an interesting guide on how to encode HD video in 720p or 1080p for your Windows Phone 7 devices. The guide includes a step by step installation with links to the required software, all of which are free and paid options for you to choose from. After finishing encoding, you can send the video to your mobile with Zune and it won’t convert it again.

If you liked it, please leave your comments.

Originally posted by rvmax

Encoding HD Video for Windows Phone 7

Zune offers by default an automatic conversion of videos for Windows Phone 7. However the quality is not always what you want, the encoding time is endless and often lacks many options such as subtitles.

This guide was produced for encoding high definition video 720p or 1080p to Windows Phone 7. You can use the same method to encode videos lower quality but the result won’t be conclusive.

Software & Encoding Setup

Many programs exist to encode each with their advantages and disadvantages. Some are paying others do not.

VidCoder offers all the advantages: free, easy to use while providing many functionalities.

The encoding is configured with the following parameters:

Container

mp4 File

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

SMS is doomed: Google working on Android iMessage, BBM competitor

Just after Apple announced iMessage app in iOS 5, it appears that Google has its own Android messaging client in the works, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The paper didn’t have any additional details on Google’s messaging app, but just like iMesssage, it’s reportedly being positioned as an answer to Research in Motion’s popular BlackBerry Messenger app.

Google’s new messaging app could fall under the Google Talk name, but it will need to do much more than that service, which is based on the Jabber IM protocol. IM is less convenient for mobile devices since it requires a steady data connection to remain logged in. To function as a texting replacement, Google needs to make sure its messaging app can accurately tell users when messages are sent, delivered and read.

For consumers, these new apps will offer faster and cheaper integrated ways to message friends. But the outlook is less rosy for carriers, who will likely see their lucrative text messaging revenue take a major dip. The messaging apps will move texting-like activity into cellular data networks and out of carrier’s aging SMS networks.

Consumers currently pay anywhere from 20 cents per text to $20 a month for unlimited texting on SMS networks. Most of that money is pure profit for the carriers: a dollar of SMS charges can produce around 80 cents of profit, while carriers only see around 35 cents of profit from a dollar of data or voice fees, analysts at UBS tell the WSJ.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

No glasses 3D now free in the App Store

You can create a 3D effect without needing special glasses. All you have to do is track where the user is looking and render the scene accordingly. You can now try it out the technique on an iPhone or iPad.

When you think about ways of creating a 3D display then you can't help but start to invent hardware to do the job - in particular special glasses that send different images to the left and right eye. In fact you can do much of the same job with just some clever software.

A team of researchers, the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) Research Group has built on earlier work that showed 3D images either using accelerometers (Holotoy) or a Wii remote to track the orientation.

The idea is that by working out the users view point the display can be modified to show what they should see from that position. Looking at the screen then becomes more like looking through a window into another world. Objects in the other world seem to be 3D because they move relative to each other as the viewer's position changes.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Nokia drops Ovi, migrates brand to “Nokia” starting July

Nokia has today announced that as part of the release of new devices in the near future, the company is to drop the Ovi range of services and rebrand them as “Nokia” services, a transition the Finnish giant expects to start in July and continue into 2012.

All of the services that currently under the Ovi brand will soon be know as Nokia, centralising the brand to ensure consumers are able to link the company to the range of tools and services it provides. Nokia says that as part of the reband, service roadmaps will not be impacted.

Although Nokia doesn’t specify which countries will see the rebranding first, it is expected that North American and European markets will see the new Nokia brand first, completing across all countries and services by the end of 2012. Those already owning Nokia phones will slowly see the name change propagate via device updates.

Sunday, May 08, 2011

PortableTPL for Silverlight / Windows Phone and XBox

Project Description

PortableTPL is a portable project inspired by the Task Parallel Library.

It can be used with .Net 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, XNA 4.0 for XBox 360 and Silverlight for Windows Phone.

PortableTPL supports following features:

Task

Task<T>

Task Continuation

Task Cancelleation with CancellationTokenSource

AggregationException

Parallel.For

Parallel.ForEach

Schedulers

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

WP7 - adding a ‘Fade to Black’ effect to a ListBox

I wanted to have a small and ‘nice’ application in which to experiment things related to networking and graphic effects in WP7, so I took out the ‘My WP7 Brand’ project from CodePlex and started to customize it, this is how ‘All About PrimordialCode’ is born.

Let’s start reminding you I’m not a designer, like many of you I’m a developer.

The first thing I want to show you is how I realized a ‘fade to black’ effect for a ListBox, requisites:

Items that are scrolling out of the ListBox visible area have to fade away gently, not with an abrupt cut.
The ListBox have to maintain its full and normal interactions as much as possible.
It has to work with dark and light themes.

The straightforward way to obtain those result is to use and ‘OpacityMask’ like in the following code:

<ListBox.OpacityMask>

</LinearGradientBrush>

</ListBox.OpacityMask>

<ListBox.ItemTemplate>

...your incredible item template goes here...

</DataTemplate>

</ListBox.ItemTemplate>

</ListBox>

Monday, May 02, 2011

Microsoft has magic iOS to WP7 conversion tool?

Microsoft has launched a free-to-download interoperability pack to help developers convert existing iOS applications to Windows Phone. But don't get too excited - the result is not as impressive as you might imagine.

If you think about it for even a few moments then it is obvious that one way that Microsoft can pick up some easy apps for its Windows Phone (WP) is to create a converter that reads in an iOS app and spits out a WP Silverlight/XNA app and this is exactly what they haven't done.

What they have done amounts more to encouragement than anything really helpful. The have put together a free to download package of things that might make it a bit easier to convert an iOS app to WP.

The items in the download include a 90-page guide to converting your iOS to WP and a series of "developer stories" - videos of developers talking about how they ported their iPhone apps to WP including why they did it.

The biggest and most useful item in the package is the API mapping tool. This simply takes iOS API calls and lists the nearest equivalents under WP - classes, events and methods are covered. This is undeniably useful but of course it doesn't provide a perfect or automatic solution simply because the structure of the frameworks involved is different. However there are plenty of simple, easy-to-devise, one-to-one mappings - and here is the problem. The mapping tool only does the easy bits and leaves the difficult reimplementation to the programmer. It's a welcome help but not a solution to anything and I doubt it is going to get iOS programmers to convert their programs any faster than they might already have done.

Widget Library for Windows Phone 7

Project Description

Create Windows Phone 7 apps using HTML, CSS and Javascript over the WebBroweser control inside the phone.

Widget Library for Windows Phone 7 allows you to build new applications for Windows Phone 7 in a easy way. You can migrate your widgets from iPhone or Android to Windows Phone 7 with this library. You have access to:

Play music on background

Show notifications

Navigate between pages

Play video

Download files

Save and load files from the IsolatedStorage

The communication between the WebBrowser Control and the Windows Phone 7 Apps is implemented using the script capabilities on the control.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Viewdle Releases SocialCamera For Android: Instant Photo Tagging, Sharing

Visual analysis company Viewdle this morning launched an Android app called SocialCamera that allows users to instantly tag photos, add captions and share them on Flickr or Facebook, by email or MMS. The demo video below explains how the app works in more detail.

The Android application, which is still in beta and not to be confused with Justin.TV’s Socialcam app, is free of charge and should be available through Android Market today.

Viewdle was founded back in 2007 and last October raised $10 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Best Buy, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Qualcomm.

On a sidenote: I organized my first Plugg conference back in March 2008, and the fledgling company took home the top prize at the startup competition that year (it later went on to win the one at Le Web, too).

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Google offers $2.05 mn for Modu’s patents

Google is offering US$2.05 million for the patents of failed mobile phone developer Modu.

Google submitted the offer to the Tel Aviv District Court, which is handling Modu’s liquidation.

Google topped the previous offer of US$1.46 million made by Kensington Technology in late March. In December 2010, the court appointed a receiver for Modu, founded by Dov Moran, and the company’s employees petitioned for its liquidation.

The company registered over 100 patents in its three years of operations, and they constitute its main asset.

Steve Jobs on iOS Location Issue: 'We Don't Track Anyone'

There has obviously been a lot of discussion about last week's disclosure that iOS devices are maintaining an easily-accessible database tracking the movements of users dating back to the introduction of iOS 4 a year ago. The issue has garnered the attention of U.S. elected officials and has played fairly heavily in the mainstream press.

One MacRumors reader emailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking for clarification on the issue while hinting about a switch to Android if adequate explanations are not forthcoming. Jobs reportedly responded, turning the tables by claiming both that Apple does not track users and that Android does while referring to the information about iOS shared in the media as "false".

Q: Steve,

Could you please explain the necessity of the passive location-tracking tool embedded in my iPhone? It's kind of unnerving knowing that my exact location is being recorded at all times. Maybe you could shed some light on this for me before I switch to a Droid. They don't track me.

A: Oh yes they do. We don't track anyone. The info circulating around is false.

Sent from my iPhone

As is Jobs' usual style, his brief comments provide little detail or information to support his claims, and his vagueness leaves things rather open to interpretation.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

iDroid Project

Welcome to the iDroid Project Wiki

The iDroid Project's goal is to fully port the Linux kernel and the Google Android OS to Apple's iDevices. With the utilisation of our 'OpeniBoot' bootloader, we have gained the ability to boot the Linux Kernel therefore enabling us to boot Google Android & any other Linux based operating system easily.

iDroid itself is distributed either as a binary download package or using the projects official iOS application Bootlace which enables you to install iDroid & OpeniBoot without the need for a computer.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the forums. You can also talk to developers directly in #iphonelinux or #idroid-dev on irc.freenode.net

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Windows Phone 7, Android and iOS with Mono

Nick Randolph has published five more parts of his series discussing some of the pain/success/difficulties experienced in building the same application across three platforms:

Mono III: Shared Libraries

Mono IV: Webservices

Mono V: Content and Resource Files

Mono VI: File Access

Mono VII: Database

Over the past couple of months I’ve been thinking more about how to share resources between applications written for WP7, Android and iOS. Increasingly companies that I consult with are asking how they can build an application once and have it run across multiple platforms. My belief is that this isn’t easily achievable and even if it is would lead to a poor user experience on one or more platforms.

Friday, April 08, 2011

Microsoft Announces Mobile Management Tool for iPhone, Android & More

Believe it or not Microsoft held a conference last week that was devoted completely to device management. Dubbed the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), Microsoft looked at many ways to manage the variety of devices in your organization.

They described it as follows on the event web page:

“At MMS 2011, you’ll drill deep into IT management technologies and learn about the latest solutions for Desktop, Datacenter, Device and Cloud management from Microsoft.”

Now, you might expect since it’s Microsoft that this was exclusively devoted to managing Windows devices — whether PCs, tablets or mobile phones — but you would be wrong. In fact, Microsoft announced the Beta of a new monitoring tool that they claim enables you to track iOS devices (both iPhones and iPads). Symbian (that’s Nokia’s OS for now until they switch over Windows Phone 7 next year) and Android.

It also lets you watch your servers and clients (although presumably these are Windows only).

The tool, The System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (SCCM 2012), will supposedly enable IT pros to manage this variety of devices from a central console. According to a post by Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft reporter extrordinaire, on ZDNet, the new tool has been designed specifically to handle the so-called consumerization of IT, which has lead to the proliferation of a variety of mobile devices across the enterprise.

Microsoft released its second SCCM beta last week. From a monitoring stand-point, this is a big departure for Microsoft which typically confines its monitoring to Windows devices. While Foley suggests this undercuts Microsoft’s claim that Windows tablets are superior to iPads and Android tablets, I think it shows surprising foresight to acknowledge the breadth of the existing market and to provide a way to monitor all of the mobile devices in the organization.

Posted via email from Jasper-Net

WP7: Right alignment bug for item templates with grids

If you have done a few templates with some of the content aligned right and other content aligned left in a grid. You have probably bumped into this. It took quite some time to solve. The problem does not exist in WPF or later versions of Silverlight, but since Windows Phone 7 is based on version 3 it’s a bug that can cause some headache. First, a quick view of how it looks. In the picture below, the accent colored label should be aligned right: