noob2geek

Android extends App size to 4GB, APK size remains at 50MB.

Santhosh — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:08:57 +0000

Google has showed some interest to give its Android app developers more room to include great details to their apps and games. Previously, Android apps were limited to 50 MB which, which is now extended to 4GB while still keeping the max size of APK at 50MB to make sure phones with lesser internal memory can still use such apps. Google solved this issue by inducing “Expansion packs”. Expansion pack can add the further required files for the apps up to 4 GB. The expansion packs can span up to 2GB each. Google will host these files on market to cut file serving costs to developers.

The apps are downloaded normally and installed on the phone. On newer devices, the expansion files are downloaded automatically while on older devices they will be downloaded after running the app for the first time. Hopefully these expansion files are downloaded to the microSD card in case of lesser internal storage capacity. The downloading can be done via Wifi or network carrier which will be prompted. Google has thoughtfully enabled the resume feature if there is any failure while downloading those large expansion packs over network carrier. The resume feature won’t be available while downloading via Wifi, the process will be done in background, so that it is obvious that users shouldn’t disconnect from wifi or move out of range before the download is finished.

The process of downloading expansion packs is well illustrated by Google in the flowchart above. In the end, this new increase in limit will enable us to see better and visually appealing games and apps in near future. Imagine a fully fledged photoshop-like app on your phone or tablet, game with amazing graphic details? This will soon be possible in matter of time. We just have to await for the developers to start coding.

AutoCAD now available for Android.

Santhosh — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:29:52 +0000

AutoCAD, one of the popular 2D and 3D modelling software widely used for multiple purposes in numerous fields is now available on Android. The AutoCAD WS for Android was launched recently by Autodesk, Inc. It allows you to do the basic functionality of viewing, editing and sharing your DWG files with your friends and colleagues.

The App also allows you to make drawings directly from your Android smartphone or even on tablet on the move and much more. However the app doesn’t resemble to the desktop version of the software in terms of features and performance. The app can be downloaded directly at the Market over here or scan can QR code.

Hello World examples of 50 commonly used Programming Languages

Santhosh — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:35:27 +0000

Getting started in programming language includes learning how to display basic messages. There are variety of programming languages and each come with it’s very own way of coding methodology and keywords. Hello, World! is the most simple program used to display the text “Hello, World!” on the screen. And it will the first program many will learn in any language. Here is a list of simple “Hello, World!” examples of over 50 commonly used programming languages.

1. C

#include 

 int main()
 {
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
 }

2. C++

#include 

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    cout << "Hello, World!" << endl;
    return 0;
}

3. Java

public class HelloWorld
{
     public static void main(String[] args)
     {
          System.out.println("Hello, world!");
     }
}

4. C#

 public class HelloWorld
 {
     static void Main()
     {
         System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("Hello, world!");
     }
 }

5. Phython

'Hello, world!'

6. PHP

7. ASP

<%= "Hello, world!" %>

8. ASP.NET

9. JSP

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=WINDOWS-1252"%>

   
        <% out.println(" Hello, world!"); %>

10. SQL

CREATE TABLE message (text CHAR(15));
 INSERT INTO message (text) VALUES ('Hello, world!');
 SELECT text FROM message;
 DROP TABLE message;

11 PL/SQL

SET serveroutput ON size 1000000;  -- this is a SQL*Plus command to enable the output buffer
BEGIN
    DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line('Hello, world!');
END;

12. Perl

print "Hello, world!\n";

13. Perl 6

"Hello, world!".say

14. ActionScript

trace("Hello, world!");

15. ActionScript 3

package
{
    public class HelloWorld
    {
        public function HelloWorld()
        {
            trace("Hello, world!");
        }
    }
}

16. ActionScript (Adobe Flash)

this.createTextField("hello_txt",0,10,10,100,20);
this.hello_txt.text="Hello, world!";

17. Javascript

document.writeln('Hello, World!');

18. OpenScript

-- in a popup window
request "Hello world"

19. XMLMosaic


  XMLmosaic Class
  
    Main
    void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine('Hello World!');
}
    
  
  
    1

20. AppleScript

display dialog "Hello, world!" buttons {"OK"} default button 1

21. HTML (is a markup language)


  
    Hello, world!

22. XHTML

Hello, world!

23. HTML 5



  
    
    Hello, World!
    
  
  
    Hello, world!

24. Ruby

 puts 'Hello, world!'

25. BASIC

10 PRINT "Hello, world!"
20 END

26. Visual Basic

Private Sub Form_Load()
  MsgBox "Hello, world"
End Sub

27. Visual Basic .NET

Module HelloWorldApp
  Sub Main()
     System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")
  End Sub
End Module

28. Visual Basic Script

WScript.Echo "Hello, world!"

29. Mathematica

Print["Hello, world!"]

30. MATLAB

disp('Hello, world!')

31. VHDL

use std.textio.all;

entity Hello is
end Hello;

architecture Hello_Arch of Hello is
begin
       p : process
       variable l:line;
       begin
               write(l, String'("Hello, world!"));
               writeline(output, l);
               wait;
       end process;
end Hello_Arch;

32. Verilog

module main();
       initial begin
              #0 $display("Hello, world!!");
              #1 $finish;
       end
endmodule

33. COBOL

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID.  HELLO-WORLD.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    DISPLAY "Hello, world!"
    STOP RUN.

34. Fortron 90 / 95

program hello
    write(*,*) 'Hello, World!'
end program hello

35. ASCII (hexadecimal notation)

48 65 6C 6C 6F 2C 20 77 6F 72 6C 64 21 0D 0A

36. MS-DOS

@echo Hello World!

37. Bash / sh

echo 'Hello, world!'

38. Lisp

(format t "Hello, world!~%")

39. Go

package main

 import "fmt"

 func main() {
   fmt.Printf("Hello, world!")
 }

40. Curl

{curl 3.0, 4.0 applet}
{curl-file-attributes character-encoding = "utf-8"}

Hello, world!

41. Delhpi

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
begin
  Writeln('Hello, world!');
end.

42. Gtk#

using Gtk;
using GtkSharp;
using System;

class Hello {

    static void Main()
    {
        Application.Init ();

        Window window = new Window("");
        window.DeleteEvent += cls_evn;
        Button close  = new Button ("Hello, world!");
        close.Clicked += new EventHandler(cls_evn);

        window.Add(close);
        window.ShowAll();

        Application.Run ();

    }

    static void cls_evn(object obj, EventArgs args)
    {
        Application.Quit();
    }

}

43. Qt toolkit (in C++)

 #include 
 #include 

 int main(int argc, char * argv[])
 {
     QApplication app(argc, argv);
     QMessageBox::information(0, "Qt4", "Hello World!");
 }

44. PostScript

% Displays on console.
(Hello, world!) =

45. JavaFX

Frame {
   title: "Hello World JavaFX"
   width: 200
   content: Label {
      text: "Hello World"
   }
   visible: true
}

46. Logo

print [Hello, world!]

47. Objective C

#import 

int main (int argc, const char *argv[])
{
    printf ("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}

48. Adobe Flex MXML

49. VBA

Sub Main()
    MsgBox "Hello, world!"
End Sub

50. StarOffice/OpenOffice Basic

 SUB main
     PRINT "Hello, world!"
 END SUB

Reference: wikibooks.org

Force yourself off the sleep with Alarm Clock Xtreme app for Android

Santhosh — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:26:15 +0000

Getting off the bed every morning is something that everyone finds it hard to do. No matter what we try to do, we often fail to get over sleep. Even alarms sometimes fail to wake us up. If you are one such and looking for possible ways to get off deep early morning sleep, there is a perfect app that suits your need.

The Alarm Clock Xtreme for Android is of the geeky alarm app ever developed for android devices. The application is perfect to wake us up from any deep sleep. The app comes with option to solve math problems to turn off the alarm. Unless you solve the problem, the alarm doesn’t turn off. So this will prevent you from turning off accidentally. This way you can get your mind freshened and put into work. So unless you are not falling asleep even after turning off the alarm by solving the math problem, this app will do it’s job perfectly. All you need to do is get off the bed and start of with your daily rituals.

Here are couple of screenshots from the app:

The screenshots above show the options to select the alarm dismiss methods and setting up options. While on the bottom, you can see the mathematical problem solving method to disable the alarm. Also you get to select the math difficulty level, tougher you choose, better time you get to wake up!

Download the app from here or directly scan the QR code on your phone.

Apart from the math-solving feature, the app also sports several other features like shake to snooze, music alarms, timer, countdown and several other options. This app can be downloaded from the Android Market and weighs 670 KB.

How to monitor site uptime

Santhosh — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:51:11 +0000

It is a dream of most techies to own a website or a blog of their own. There are several criteria included in building an awesome site. In the beginning, many just doesn’t seem to feel the necessity of monitoring the site up time, but as your website starts to get popular and bigger in terms of content, it is really necessary to keep an eye on uptime. Uptime not just decides your site reputation but also about your revenue generation. If your site keeps going down every now and then, your visitors will have a negative thoughts and may not come back often and as a result you will lose income.

So it is really necessary to monitor your site’s uptime and compare it with the promised uptime by your host. This is a must if you own a unmanaged VPS. Monitoring a site’s uptime is no big deal. You don’t need to sit in front your computer, there are several services out there just to do the job. And one of the best I would suggest others to use is the Pingdom.

Using pingdom service is very simple. All you need to do is create free account and it lets you monitor 1 website. If you want to monitor more sites, you can consider upgrading to pro-account or use multiple free accounts. I would suggest to use the IP address to monitor the uptime of a site instead of URL since DNS downtimes can also give false alarms.

Once added, you can set the interval between checks in “Check Interval” to 5 minutes which is I would recommend. Once everything in place, it starts to monitor your site’s uptime and you can also using options to get notification methods whenever the site goes down. And also the advantage of using Pingdom over other services is that it can also let you monitor uptime from their Android app. All you need to do is enable Android notifications.

In the above screenshot you see pingdom’s uptime report for a month of one of my VPS. The host guarantees 99% uptime and they live up to their promise with just 3 downtimes spanning around 15 minutes.

Top 5 Must Have Firefox Extensions

Aditya — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:45:14 +0000

The thing that makes Firefox such a brilliant piece of software (and even a memory hog at times) is the abundance of extensions available to users. You can literally extend it to perform a bunch of tasks that are not expected from a browser. They also help improve usability, increase productivity and also provide security. Here’s a look at what we think are the must have extensions for Firefox from an average user perspective (that means you won’t see Firebug on this list even though we think it’s amongst the top 5 extensions for Firefox). On with the list then,

1. Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is an extremely popular extension. Most of you know about Internet advertising and the abundance of ads on some websites (see – even we have some ). A lot of these advertisements are mostly harmless, however, it’s a good idea to block the ads for many reasons. First is obviously for security. No matter how many times you tell people not to click ads that look suspicious (winning lottery, hot girls waiting for you, you are the millionth customer, etc), they still do it. Almost all such ads contain some security threat – phishing, malware, spyware, viruses. They are not safe. Another reason is if you have kids – even the supposedly safe sites these days can pop-up with X rated advertisements. Having a protection against them is very important.

This is where Adblock Plus comes in. Simply put it will remove all advertising content from web pages and will deliver only pure content to you. It’s the best no-nonsense extension out there. Because the pages no longer load ads, the browsing speed improves quite a lot – especially if you use slow connections. We strongly recommend this add-on to all users of Firefox. The extension can be downloaded and installed from here.

2. Video Download Helper

We are often faced with situations where we want to download embedded content from websites. You tube videos for instance. Many people don’t know how to download such content. There are some dedicated websites that convert the URL into direct download links but where most of those services work on one or two sites, video download helper works on many. It sits near the address bar in Firefox and whenever it detects embedded media – audio, video and images, it gets activated and you can see 3 spinning balls. Clicking on that icon will list all the embedded media available on the page, which you can now download without having to go look for any other website that converts the links. You can find the download link and more details here.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a great tool if you have dried up on ideas. It’s a website where you can browse websites matching your interest. There are 500 topics to chose from and users like you tag the websites and pages with the topic. All you do is create an account, the toolbar (this add-on) has menus that you can use to chose a topic or a tag – click the stumble button and you’ll be browsing through the topics you chose. You can also browse through similar topics on the same website as well. It also gets better as you tag more websites and browse more. With over 25 million registered users and more than a billion stumbles per month, this is one of the best add-on for writers and researchers. It’s database it ever growing and is getting better every day. You can get it here.

4. Greasemonkey

Getting annoyed by the Facebook ticker that was added recently? Use Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to use scripts that allow on-the-fly changes to web pages. There are plenty of scripts available that you can use to make changes, there is no need to worry if you don’t know how to write the scripts. The best thing is, Greasemonkey remembers these changes and will execute them every time you load the page. It’s as if the website has changed – just for you. There are, as I said, a lot of user scripts available on userscripts.org. You can also roll out your own scripts, look at the wiki for information on how to do this and finally you can get the add-on here.

5. Feedly

Feedly is the overall best start-page add-on I have ever seen. Remember iGoogle? It tried to organize all your content on one page which you can put as your default start page for your browser. Feedly is similar to that but much better. Feedly is magazine-like start page based on the best content of your favorite websites. Powered by Google Reader and Twitter. When installed Feedly will present you with a starting page that has news from a variety of topics such as Android, Photography and World News. You can customize all of this, add sites you want to follow and also read your Google reader feeds right here. You can also log-in to your twitter and Facebook feeds to check them from Feedly. It also comes with a link to this article telling you 9 ways to personalize your Feedly page. You can download the add-on here.

File Permissions in Ubuntu

Aditya — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 05:48:47 +0000

Ability to set file permissions for individual users or user-groups is one of the most sought after features of Linux. If you are system admin for a school, college or a company you work for then proper file permission setting is among the most vital tasks.

The command used to modify file permissions is chmod, short for change mode of a file. You can also use Nautilus file browser to change the file permissions. I will cover the details after a little background on the file permissions. To find the permission settings for a file, issue the following command int he terminal from the directory where your file is.

ls -l
cmd output

As you can see, the first column in the output has some strange looking character sets. This set is the file permissions for that file (directory). The third column is the owner of the file (directory) and the fourth column is the default group of the file (directory). We can ignore all the other columns at this point.

In the first column, each set would be 10 character wide. The very first character is a d for a directory or just a - (hyphen) for files. After that, the next three characters are the permissions for the owners account. The order is read-write-execute. If the superuser can read the file it would display r otherwise just a -. Similarly for write and execute w and x would be displayed. The next three characters are permissions for all the other users belonging to the file group (from the fourth column in the output above). Final three characters are the permissions for everyone not part of the group. Superusers (root accounts) can always override all the settings mentioned here and none of the permissions apply to them.

Changing Permissions – The Easy Way

The easiest way, as I said, is to just change the file permissions using Nautilus but it’s time consuming if you want to change the permissions of a lot of files. Command line way may seem tedious to begin with but it’s the faster way once you know your way around. To change the permissions in Nautilus, right click on any file (directory). Go to properties and then to permissions. Change the permissions and click ok. That’s it.

Changing Permissions – The Faster Way

To change file permissions via the terminal, you can use the chmod command. To change permissions of a file, enter the following command in the terminal.

chmod ABC path/to/file

Here, ABC is a 3 digit number which is the decimal representation of the file permissions. For example, r-x means 101 in binary which translates to 5 in decimal. So, if you want everyone to have just read and execute access to files and only the owner has the write access to files then the permissions are rwx,r-x,r-x which is 111,101,101. That translates to 7,5,5 (comma is only given for clarity here). So, the command would now be,

chmod 755 path/to/file

Don’t worry if you don’t know how binary works, you will get used to it. Easiest way is add 4 for read, 2 for write and 1 for execute. So, considering the examples above, rwx = 4 + 2 + 1 = 7 and r-x = 4 + 0 + 1 = 5. You’ll get used to this. There is another way to to this, the text method (which I don’t prefer).

chmod who=permissions filename

Where Who is any from a range of letters, and each signifies who you are going to give the permission to. They are as follows:

u - The user that own the file.
g - The group the file belongs to.
o - The other users i.e. everyone else.
a - all of the above - use this instead of having to type ugo.

And then you can directly write rwx in front of the equal sign. For example,

chmod g=rx

Next post will cover setting default permissions to files you create using umasks.

How to learn math online from Bill Gate’s favorite teacher.

Santhosh — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:44:55 +0000

Not everyone likes math, especially students curse it during exams. Math has to be the most hated subject all over the world. But learning math is necessary for any science student. Without math, it is quite impossible to imagine what would’ve happened to this world. I myself hate math but not anymore. I began to show some interest in it and was in constant search of learning it in a new way.

Traditional way of learning math might be helpful for most, but for me it is a big no-no. I started discovering new ways to understand and learn math. I purchased many math reference books, started browsing through the web for best tutorials, made use of wolfram|alpha etc. But this just didn’t help me out to my expectations.

I wanted something that is a blend of both tradition as well as modern way of learning math and I was lucky enough to hit the sweet spot and found “Khan Academy“ through one of my friend on Google+

Khan Academy is free, non-profit, one man initiative with over 2400 educational videos teaching math, science, finance, history and test exercises. It is founded by Salman Khan who holds multiple bachelor’s degree from MIT and is very generous to help reach the knowledge to the mass. His teaching method is brilliant and uses good examples when needed just like in normal classes. The best advantage of this sort of learning is that you can pause, rewind and or forward the lecture if boring. This way you can learn at your own pace. Even Salman quotes this in most of his speeches. Also the ability to download the videos with click of a button is added bonus to share with people having no access to internet. To encourage visitors watch more videos, the academy also has included a pointing system where you get more points for watching videos and analyze the stats.

His collection of videos and his teaching is so good that it has attracted eyes many biggies like Bill Gates and co-founders of Google. Bill Gates himself has made a statement that Salman Khan is his favorite teacher and uses those videos to train his children. Recently Google funded Khan Academy with $2 Million to encourage making new tutorials.

Google now sends wordpress update notification to webmaster tools users.

Santhosh — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:59:39 +0000

Google, as we know is very good at introducing new features very often to keep the web safer to use. Webmaster tools is a great product for any website owner to get access to tweak their site’s performance on google search results and also to help improve the site performance in terms of speed and security. Recently, Google has come up with yet another new feature for webmaster tools users using wordpress. If your wordpress is out-of-date and or insecure, you will get an notification via mail to update it for security reasons.

Here’s what I got recently stating to update one of my site:

Wordpress update notification from Google.

It is always good to keep updated since insecure versions of wordpress are vulnerable to attacks. Newer versions come with possible solutions to patch those vulnerability until new loopholes are found.

The moment I received this notification, I was bit in doubt since I had never heard of Google sending such mails to its webmaster users suggesting to update the wordpress and the formatting of mail was not good! I even thought this might be fake, but after looking at the details of the mail, the sender ID was google’s official webmaster tools address. Later I did a search on internet and was confirmed that it is official after reading Matt Cutts’s update on twitter.

You don’t need to enable any option to get such notification in webmaster tools. It’s great to see google sending such update notification to wordpress users. Hope this will make people who often tend to be lazy updating their installation. All it takes is just a click to update the wordpress to latest version.

10 Free and Must Install Android Apps

Santhosh — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:18:09 +0000

Every new android user always rush to install new apps after exploring their phone’s features and capabilities. Even I did the same and began tweeting which apps to install and was overwhelmed to see so many suggestions from my friends. It’s been almost a month (at the time of writing this post) since am using android and tried many apps. So I decided to come up with a list of my own must install Android apps which are also free.

1. Google Sky Maps

If you are an astro buff and love to gaze at beautiful night sky, this is the must install app. It is so cool that it syncs to the direction using the inbuilt compass & accelerometer and displays all the celestial objects on it as you tilt the phone. And when you see above, you see the exact object and constellations. Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a window on the night sky.

2. Widgetsoid

If you are not satisfied with the widgets that came with your phone or don’t like its look and feel, you must install widgetsoid to create custom widgets. Widgetsoid lets you create your own widgets like toggle buttons, indicators like wifi, battery etc, shortcuts and even system related functions like rebooting and unmounting SD etc. Widgetsoid is the only app which has custom color for icons and indicator!

3. Pulse News

Meet Pulse. A beautiful application that makes browsing news from websites and social networks fun and engaging. Pulse takes your favorite websites (including Facebook) and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Tap on an article, and you will see a clean and elegant view of the story. Sharing a story via Facebook, Twitter or email is as easy as two taps.

4. Google Goggles

This app enables you to search the real world by taking a picture. Goggles uses image recognition technology to recognize objects and return relevant search results. Identifies products by scanning barcode, famous landmarks, storefronts, artwork, and popular images found online. Goggles can translate words in English, French, Italian, German & Spanish. Goggles can extract contact information from business cards. Oh well, it can even solve your Sudoku. Watch this video to get a clear picture.

5. Titanium Backup

There are times when you will need to backup all your installed apps like when you want to move them to your new phone or if your apps are installed on SD card, you may need to move to new SD card. This app needs your phone to be rooted, if done it lets you backup and restore all your Apps, Market Links. It can also remove unwanted bloatwares from your phone.

6. Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. After you install Dropbox on your computer, any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, your Android device, and even the Dropbox website! With the Dropbox app, you can take everything that matters to you on the go.

7. ASTRO File Manager

You might have wondered where is the file manager / browser in your android phone. It is because majority of android phones come without file manager. To any user, a file manager is a must have utility. This is where the ASTRO File Manager app comes to the rescue. This app lets you browse, backup, rename, delete, move, search, compress files etc. It also comes with a inbuilt image viewer and many other features.

8. Swype

Tired of typing on your default keyboard on your screen? Especially if your android phone comes with smaller display, you will feel the heat while typing longer messages or mails. Swype will replace your default keyboard with it’s very own which can be used to input text by just swiping across the screen. It traces out your fingers motion and inputs the word.

9. Twitter

The official Twitter app is a must install app to every twitter user. This app lets you do almost everything that you do on the twitter web interface. It includes features like: Browse interests, Find & follow friends, Tweet, Retweet, Favorite, Direct Message privately with your followers, share photos, videos and web pages, real-time search, view maps, trends, and follow.

10. Angry Birds

Now that you have many essential apps installed, you will need something that is really addictive to kill time when you bored. The survival of the Angry Birds is at stake. Dish out revenge on the greedy pigs who stole their eggs. Use the unique powers of each bird to destroy the pigs’ fortresses. Angry Birds features challenging physics-based gameplay and hours of replay value. Each of the 240 levels requires logic, skill, and force to solve.