dzolee's pocketblog

Download links

2009-06-21T09:41:00.003-01:00

A couple of people were complaining about poor speed and connection when they tried to download PeekPocket 1.6. I've uploaded the sources and the compiled binary to Mediafire. Hope this will help the situation.

>> To download PeekPocket 1.6, click here <<

Apart from that, I've really no time to update this blog on a regular basis. Recently I've been far too busy with a lot of things, absolutely not related to Pocket PCs. I think the best idea is to close this blog. It was fun but it's time to move on.

Chillout

2009-03-07T09:54:00.002-01:00

Long time no see!
Been busy as usual... so far it seems I've played enough with handheld devices. It's been a lot of fun, but honestly I ran out of ideas. I coded a game, various graphics things, even a cross-platform skinnable dialog framework... been a lot of fun.
My attention has turned towards other things, among them, the possibilites of speculating financial markets. Nowadays everything in the news is about recession, credit crunch and stock prices. Speculation is a profession, one can learn it but it takes years. Coding is a profession too, and anyone with some experience knows it takes years to become a good coder. So is it with speculation.

Alright, I think when I find something interesting related to coding, I will post it here. For example there is a funny bug related to floating point runtime - I found a workaround in UPX sources.

I hear there are download problems with files shared on this blog. Should you have any problems, drop me a note, tell me which file you want, and I will send it in email.

Happy new year

2009-01-02T14:47:00.001-01:00

I wish everyone a happy new year, lots of fun, good health and big fat wealth. :-)
I wanted to write up a small how-to on the subject Wifi scanning in C#, because I get questions from time to time on that.
Laters.

How IT gets done

2008-12-09T08:23:00.002-01:00

I've been active on RentACoder.com some time ago, was both a coder and a buyer couple of times. I had good impressions generally, but my problem was that sellers (coders) from developing countries like India and China were so bloody cheap so that it really did not pay for me to turn my PC on. No, I don't think I have overestimated my hourly rate, those guys ARE really too cheap. (They are really good, too, by the way).
I posted a project to RAC - I need some graphics job done. I received a dozen bids within the hour, and picked a seller from Pakistan. Has very good ratings, and I hope the job will be done quickly and perfectly. Honestly he bid 1/5th of the price that it would cost me if I wanted the job done here. Not to mention, every pro seems to be very busy at the moment, I had the feeling they are doing me a favor by accepting a PAID job. Funny, really. So what I can say is if you have anything IT related and want a quick solution, go for RAC.

Been a while

2008-11-14T20:37:00.002-01:00

Been a while since I had no time to drop in here to update the blog. Sorry to say, this aint likely to change in the near future. It seems my PDA carreer will be parked for a while. I enjoyed these little devices really, but to be honest, WinCE could benefit a lot from improvements. To put it short, it is sometimes a very big pain in the bottom to achieve something that would be a 2 minutes task on a desktop PC. An example could be doing fullscreen, graphics stuff, accessing Wifi, or doing some UI tricks like transparency. I enjoyed my stay in WinCE land really, but somehow the magic is over. I wrote couple of articles to CodeProject, hope helped some people a little. By the way, I see my article about Gfx programming, written 2 years ago, has the best score (4.63) in the CE / Embedded - Graphics and Multimedia section. Well, that's nice. Thankx for all the votes, folks.

St. Petersburg

2008-10-17T19:10:00.002-01:00

I've been to St. Petersburg this week. Had to visit a site and sort a couple of things out. The first part was no problem, but the second, well, still there are some crashes under heavy load. I will be occupied with logfiles and optimization in the next couple of days. Will post some pics later, a very nice city by the way.

The #1 salesperson

2008-09-28T20:54:00.002-01:00

I read an interesting article on CNN Money. It was about a guy called Joe Girard. He was a car salesperson - in fact the best car salesperson. He sold an average of 5 cars a day while the others sold one weekly. How he did it? It's all about the attitude. Read the interview here.

Getting enough sleep?

2008-09-14T08:16:00.002-01:00

Well I wasn't recently. This summer turned out to be hell of a busy one. But I want to get back on the old track. Not working till late, not worrying about what needs to be done. As the old Guns n Roses song goes ... I get up around seven, get out of bed around nine ... and I don't worry about nothing no, because worrying is a waste of my ... time.
Alright, I had no time to watch any movies (just barely had chance to have a gander at Prison Break 4x1-3, it's cool), I had no time to collect any funnies for Friday, just here is a bunch of articles about Sleep from CNN Money.

End of summer

2008-09-01T12:17:00.002-01:00

Well, september is here. In the eyes of many, the summer is now over. I don't think today differs that much from yesterday. The weather is alike, my mood is alike, and so on.
But from another point of view, seventy-five percent of the year is gone. Maybe it's time to ponder for a while. What have I planned for this year and where am I? What do I want or have to complete this year?
I'm sort of happy with this. The year was a very busy one so far. Ever since spring kicked in, I had tons of things to do. Now that it's slowly changing for the worse (oh yes, it surely is), I hope I will have more time for fun. Go back to the gym, go fishing, watch Eastenders, and so on.
How's your year? Have you achieved many of your plans? It's still not too late to pull up your socks for a final rush. Success is for those who are willing to work for it.

More movies

2008-08-21T15:09:00.003-01:00

Hot summer days, when I'm not in the pool then I'm watching movies after work. Some more I've watched recently:

21 grams is a drama/thriller. As the imdb plot outline says:
How much does life weigh?
They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death... everyone. The weight of a stack of nickels. The weight of a chocolate bar. The weight of a hummingbird...

The forbidden kingdom is a fantasy action adventure movie with Jackie Chan. No, not that bad. :-) It's about a kung-fu obsessed teen guy who adventures to medieval China. Can be watched once.

Movies... movies...

2008-08-11T11:55:00.002-01:00

I've had the pleasure of watching the following movies recently:

Race is a Bollywood movie. Bollywood?! Yes, that's the indian Hollywood. I saw some indian actress somewhere and thought I'd watch some Bollywood movies. Not bad, not bad.

Welcome is another Bollywood movie, not as good as Race but you can watch it once. If you haven't seen any indian movies, I recommend watching one. It's a different world! Very few people dead, very few bullets fired, a whole lot of fun, music and dancing.

21 is a Hollywood movie with Kevin Spacey, about a small group of very smart students who start playing a system in Las Vegas to get rich at the card tables. A good movie.

Falling down is an older movie with Michael Douglas. It's about an average guy who just can't take the frustrations of our civilized world anymore. One day he simply goes mad...

Street Kings with Keanu Reeves is about a burnt-out cop who finds corruption inside the police...but it turns out that those who seemed clear, were dirty and they that seemed dirty, were absolutely clear... Many bullets fired, many men down, but still a good one!

Why does Skype run a webserver on my computer?

2008-08-03T19:54:00.005-01:00

I noted some time ago that most recent software comes bundled with a lot of other stuff. A custom Google toolbar, an automatic update downloader, etc, etc. All occupies hard disk space, and all eats some memory. Now Skype has given a surprise. I already noticed that it installs some plugin manager called SkypePM.exe. Do you have it running and eating some 20 megs of your memory? :-)
And what for? Do you have ANY Skype plugins?? Me neither.
I simple deleted the file after I terminated it with Task Manager. A bit drastic yes, but Skype restarts it all the time. But the great surprise came only after that. I was debugging some network code and was absolutely clueless. I tried some dummy connections from the other machine like telnet to port 80, the standard web server port. As I watched traffic with WireShark, I noticed connection succeeded to that port. What the... I said, and opened a browser and typed my IP from another computer. I checked the sniffer log and, guess what. Bleeding Skype does have a webserver in it. It listens on port 80 and also handled the standard HTTP GET message and responded properly. Of course it did not display any web page, it returned a page not found error. But let's not be fooled by ths, there is a huge difference between a webpage that does not exist, because there is no server on that address, and between a webserver that runs but returns there is no page to display.
Here is a screenshot, see the open port for yourself.

(you can disable your local Skype webserver in the Tools menu Options / Advanced / Connection dialog. I did it.)

Kasuei Hitchhiker back soon?

2008-07-24T09:50:00.000-01:00

Some time ago I wrote that the Kasuei website was down and nobody had a clue what's going on with Hitchhiker. Now there are some news, after a while, their website was updated. It seems they will release Hitchhiker 2 soon, which will be compatible with WM5 and WM6 devices! Meanwhile, the old version, Hitchhiker 0.4 can still be downloaded here.

Three little squids

2008-07-18T08:34:00.004-01:00

Do you remember the fun song Three little pigs from Green Jelly? Well last weekend I had some squid again. This time I made it outside, after all, the weather's fine, it's summer.

Looks fine, heh? The recipe is still the same: clean'em, stuff'em, fry'em. I stuff them with chopped onions, garlic and tomatoes. For seasoning I use black pepper and a bit of lemon juice. Once stuffed, close the ends with a toothpick, then fry in a pan on just a little oil.

Now experience shows that the smaller, younger squids are better since they're just thinner and more delicate. The squids I fried this time were quite big and prolly old too, not all of the onions and tomatoes became soft and yummy inside.

Figo drinks what?

2008-07-07T11:05:00.002-01:00

There's a mineral water ad with Figo. I bought a sixpack and took a picture of Luis smiling.

Exceptions

2008-06-26T02:03:00.000-01:00

Did you ever think about what happens when you use the new operator to allocate memory for a structure but allocation fails? Well, the new operator throws an exception. Except, if you specify (std::nothrow) like this:

BYTE *p = NULL;
p = new (std::nothrow) BYTE[128];

it's a good idea to initialize the pointer to NULL and you can check whether allocation succeeded with a NULL check afterwards.

Another thing: how can a constructor report any error back to the caller? Yes, the only way is to throw an exception. So in general, it's a good idea to use try-catch blocks where there are constructor calls (eg. objects instantiated with new)

How to delete items from maps

2008-06-20T08:57:00.000-01:00

Suppose you have a map of your custom structs, suppose your struct has only two fields: ID1 and ID2. You use ID1 as the map key for quick lookups. You can delete items using the key from a CAtlMap with the RemoveKey() method, or with the erase() of a std::map container. That's fine. But what if you want to delete some items from the map, based on the other field, ID2? You have to iterate through the map and delete items one by one. Be careful here. It's not as simple as it seems because iterating thru the map uses a POSITION (for a CAtlMap) or an iterator (for a std::map). The POSITION (or iterator) is something like a pointer to the current map item. But it becomes invalid once you delete an item!
So how to do it properly: for a CAtlMap, where ID1 is a DWORD, do the following:
-define an array of IDs, eg. CAtlArray<DWORD> IDsArray;
-iterate thru the map using something like this, and store IDs of items to be deleted to the ID-array:

POSITION pos;
DWORD key;
MyStruct *val;
CAtlArray<DWORD> IDsArray;
long i, count;

pos = MyMap.GetStartPosition();
while(pos != NULL)
{
MyMap.GetNextAssoc(pos, key, val);

if(val->ID2 == SelectedID)
{
//store item ID
IDsArray.Add(val->ID1);
}
}

-then in a separate loop, delete selected items with RemoveKey:

count = (long)IDsArray.GetCount();
for(i=0; i<count; i++)
{
MyMap.RemoveKey(IDsArray[i]);
}

Now if you have a std::map, the approach is different.
-use a for loop to iterate the map
-note the iterator is not incremented by the for statement
-check the current item and delete if required
-make sure iterator is properly updated.
Code example:

std::map<MyStruct> MyMap;
std::map&ltMyStruct>::iterator it;

for(it = MyMap.begin(); it != MyMap.end(); )
{
if(it->second.ID2 == SelectedID)
{
it = MyMap.erase(it);
}
else
{
it++;
}
}

That's it!

Zidane vs. Materazzi again

2008-06-18T06:50:00.001-01:00

The Euro 2008 is rolling, football is everywhere. I received an email from mobiano.com - they added my fun game Pocket Zidane vs. Materazzi to their downloads. I wrote this game as an experimental project - I wanted to use the same display routines on QVGA and VGA using auto-scaling. Well the whole thing was later cancelled because I had some problems with it, but I don't remember what it was. Anyways the game works, and has a cool display on VGA and QVGA devices too.

My favorite hairdresser

2008-06-06T14:08:00.008-01:00

Oh yes, I went for a haircut again. This time the I took pictures of her and her dog. First comes the dog - she'd agree.
God's sake. It's sleeping. It always does. In the shop, you see. I bet this is the only hairdresser's with a sleeping dog in it. Oh, there might be another one somewhere in Kathmandu. Truth is, the dog's older than 10 years, it does not do much apart from sleeping. Sometimes it gets up, walks round the shop, maybe even farts but then goes back to sleep soon. I give him dog biscuits. He likes them. He likes any kind of food. I remember one time she left my hair half cut and ran for a walk with the dog because it started to cry. It turned out that the dog had the runs because the day before she gave him some chicken meat. Unbelievable, isn't it. You sit in the barber's chair, then she goes away for 15 minutes because the dog needs to go out.
Yes, that's her, personally. The hairdresser with the farting dog. Looks a bit like Kate Moss, don't she. I took the photos with my phone so don't expect extra quality.
I took some pics in the garden too, that's where I spend a lot of time since spring came in:

Another view from the back.

And now I'm off to pick some berries.

Cut it short

2008-06-03T08:03:00.003-01:00

I've been to the hairdresser again. Of course there's a lovely story again and this time I've taken some pics with my phone, too. One of the famous farting dog and another one of the famous hairdresser. I'm too busy to write a post about it today, but I'll do it in the next couple of days.

Native code is not dead

2008-05-25T07:05:00.001-01:00

What a small world we live in. I've slapped together some time ago this graffiti-like java stuff for my blog header saying "Native code is not dead". And now I came across someone who seems to use the same slogan - now it's quite funny that two people came up with the same idea, isn't it? Click here
By the way, I've got the idea of this java code that moves around GIFs from Lucian Wischik's site.

PeekPocket 1.6 is out

2008-05-15T18:39:00.002-01:00

After a couple of months break, there is a new version: 1.6.
There are no ground-breaking innovations in it, there were some important bugfixes, testing with WM6, and there are now different sound effects for open & secure APs.
There are always good development ideas coming in from users of the program, and I myself have some ideas too, but I have been thinking about what my original goal with this program really was. Well I wanted sort of a replacement for the crappy built-in WiFi scanner. A simple, hassle-free program without installation, need for the .NET CF etc. At the end it turned out to be a cute little app with custom GUI elements, the ability to detect WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption types, while still being a relatively small (around 300k) program. Oh, and it's multilingual too, it supports more than a dozen languages. (Thanks to all contributors).
So, I think this program is rather finished. Yupp, there are always new ideas, but I've accomplished my original goal. And I have tons of other things to do, both professional and private. To mention some I'm headed for a NATO base in Germany next week because the company I work for has a contractor there and we have to do some consulting there. I'm also trying to learn the wonderfully complicated art (or profession) of stock markets trading, I undertook to translate a book on the subject to my primary language - Hungarian - (so far those who read the translated parts said it's cool). We've moved last October and there is always something to do around the house, too...
Things change, and everything that has a beginning, has an end too. (Except for the set [0, 1), which has a beginning but has no end, if you know some maths, ha-ha).
Thanks for all the support, feedback, tips, ideas and help offered. PeekPocket development is finished, I'm sure I'll find myself another part-time occupation soon. :-)

Latest Linksys firmware

2008-05-13T09:22:00.001-01:00

My never-ending adventure in Linksysland goes on.
Some time ago it was a bit cumbersome to find the WRT54G version 7 firmware on the Linksys site because v7 was not included in the combo box. (How did I find it then? Honestly I don't remember :)
Much to my happiness I saw the combo on the site now has a v7 option - and the v7.0.4 firmware can be found on the site without problems! Click here. By the way there is also a v7.0.7 beta firmware out there, which I use without serious problems since a couple of weeks, click here to download.

update: the firmware is still far from being perfect. Are you Linksys guys doing anyting apart from downloading porn and playing minesweeper? Is it that hard to write a 1 meg-program after years of development, without bugs? Still some things don't work on wireless, they work perfectly on the lan. For example I can't upload to a friend's FTP server using wifi. I get a disconnect after a couple of megs. Only on wifi.
Linksys - a division of Cisco.
-or-
Linksys - a shitty product from Cisco. :-)

I vote for the latter.

PeekPocket 1.6 coming soon

2008-05-07T07:57:00.003-01:00

There was no new version of PeekPocket since November. It's not that I don't have plenty ideas enough for three next versions, I just had no time for development. There were plenty things to fix around the house, and there are still some. If you live in an apartment, things are a bit simpler since you don't have to mown the lawn, fix the roof, repaint the flower bowls and so on. But there is also a lot of fun around the house, I tell you that. For example I noticed a Blackbird's nest on the garage!
(click to enlarge)
Back to the subject! I was thinking about further development and figured that I already done what I originally wanted with PeekPocket: that is to have a simple, easy-to-use WiFi scanner for Windows Mobile! On the way I added some custom GUI elements, and made all sources freely available. I've not earned a single cent on this project, but that's all right. (Yeah, there is a donate icon on the right, but noone ever donated a single cent, at least I have not received any notification emails from PayPal. :-) ) I believe I learnt a thing or two about Windows Mobile programming and this is enough.
There were also some clones based on PeekPocket, to name but two AiroMap and PFScan. If PeekPocket wasn't a cool idea, people wouldn't clone it right? :-)

So, I've added some important bugfixes and minor improvements since the last release and now it is being tested by volunteers (thanks!). Version 1.6 is coming soon!

Breaking news: Linksys WRT54 firmware upgrade succeeded!!!

2008-05-01T13:14:00.001-01:00

Oh, I can't believe it!!
I did it!!! I've upgraded my WRT54 v7 firmware!!
The trick was - restore factory defaults before the upgrade! The default IP address, 192.168.1.1 and username/password pair admin / admin should be used!! How was I to know this? Anyway here is the 7.00.7 beta firmware I've used. So far it works fine, there are still a couple of web sites that work only when connected to LAN. When using wireless, I get some DNS error.
Remember to write down every important setting before upgrading! After the upgrade you cannot restore saved config backups!