Nikhil Mathew's Blog

2016-09-12T13:31:00.006-07:00

सत्यम् ब्रूयात् प्रियम् ब्रूयात् न ब्रूयात् सत्यमप्रियम् |
प्रियम् नानृतं ब्रूयात् एष धर्मः सनातनः ||

satyam bruyat priyam bruyat na bruyat satyam apriyam
priyam cha nanrutam bruyat esha dharmah sanatanah

Speak truth in such a way that it should be pleasing to others. Never speak truth, which is unpleasant to others. Never speak untruth, which might be pleasant. This is the path of eternal morality, sanatana dharma.

To speak truth is an eternal value irrespective of time and place. But the expression of truth should be accompanied by two conditions. Firstly, it should be presented in a loving manner and secondly it should be spoken for the betterment of others. How you speak is as important as what is said. Priyam means speech that does not hurt others. Hitam is something that is said for the good or betterment of others. One should be careful of speaking truth but not hurting others.

We should be careful in speaking the truth. The purpose should be good and the words used and the manners in which they are spoken are important. So the value of truthfulness is relative to a situation. According to the Indian scriptures while living in the world of relativity truth can be interpreted in many ways.

The King And The Astrologer

A king produced his horoscope before an astrologer and asked him about his future. The astrologer pondered the positions of the planets and consulted the Shastras and finally gave his verdict: .Maharaja, all your relatives will die before you, you will perform their obsequies with
your own hands.. The king became furious. He was very much attached to his relatives and could not tolerate such a verdict. The king at once ordered that the poor astrologer should be given imprisonment for life.

Then the king sent for another astrologer. This man was more tactful than the first. He found that the previous astrologer’s readings were absolutely correct. So, he tactfully put the same truth the other way round. He said: .Maharaja, you have a very long life. You will live longer than all your relatives.. This also meant that all his relatives would die while the king was alive. The same fact had been very tactfully told to please the king. The king was highly pleased with the astrologer and gave him rich and costly presents.

Therefore it is said that even while telling the truth, one should tell it in a pleasant manner. Even a truth should not be told in a way that will hurt the feelings of others. If it is told so, it is tantamount to untruth only.

Your speech should be truthful, pleasant and beneficial.

How to use Mobile phones in Hostel without getting caught ! AKA best 3G USB Modem that doubles as Pendrive!

2011-09-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

I had been looking for a device for making phone calls from laptop (without internet) that disguises as a pen drive to even a person who is technically sound like any of us.

This is for a friend who is a student in a college where usage of mobile phone is banned in hostel, but allowed in college campus (Strange!).

Laptop is allowed, but no internet devices is allowed as hostel provides wifi internet with screening which does not allow voip and even if it does, the speed sucks so voip is impossible. They conduct inspections and raids every now and then and hiding a mobile phone is too risky since INR20K fine if caught once and a second time its INR60K and a month suspension!

Finally I was contacted for expert advice and I have been looking for hardware that could plug into USB or PCMCIA of laptop that allows to insert a regular sim card and make voice calls just like a phone.
I started of with GSM Modem which are bulky and external devices with external chargers that connects to serial port ! Those will be obviously busted.

After investing a serious amount of time(half a day), i have finalized with a black color "megafon" branded Huawei E173 7.2 Mbps 3G USB modem.

The device looks reasonably similar to a USB pendrive, especially with the black color and the unreadable 'megafon' logo on it .
I am assuming that no one around here would be familiar with the Russian mobile service provider's logo.

It comes with a solid body and no slots or openings for antennas, an almost-undetectable forward sliding mechanism to open its casing to insert a regular sized SIM card and a microSD card.

Once connected to a Laptop, it installs a USB modem, a Virtual CD Rom drive with the driver and software for the modem and a USB mass storage drive.

The auto-mount CD drive can be disabled with AT command.

AT ^ U2DIAG = 0 (device-only modem)
AT ^ U2DIAG = 1 (the device as a modem + CD-ROM)
AT ^ U2DIAG = 255 (the device as a modem + CD-ROM + Card Reader)
AT ^ U2DIAG = 256 (the device as a modem + Card Reader).

Once installed and configured, the device is ready to make or receive voice/video calls, sms , mms and whatever you ask for !
Oh yea, and did i forgot to mention you can use internet using HSDPA/3G/EDGE/GPRS which ever available.

The software that was bundled with the device is Huawei Mobile Partner software which is easy to use and decently does its job.

Voice Call Window Screenshot :

You can use a headset/mic and i found the setup more comfortable than a regular mobile phone when using a laptop or a PC for two reasons.

1. No heating up your head with radiation when making long duration calls.
2. Ease of Keyboard/Mouse for dialing, texting and operating.

Ebay India Link:
http://cgi.ebay.in/Huawei-7-2Mbps-3G-USB-Modem-E173-3G-Datacard-Brand-New-/380368400279?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_203&hash=item588fb92f97

Youtube Video :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=74qtoVdd5Gw

Hope this info will be useful for people who are planning to buy a Internet on the go device from any service providers. You can opt for an unlocked device like this, and have the power of switching the operator as and when required.

College guys, if you find this useful, make sure that you keep it a secret or soon the bad guys will be checking all your USB devices too !

Cheers
Nikhil Mathew

How to test the App Store Distribution build of an iPhone application before submission for review ?

2010-12-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

I have been developing applications for iPhone ever since Apple released its first iPhone back in mid 2007, initially for browsers and later on with Apple iPhone SDK as soon as its first Beta was released. It's after making my first distribution build of the application that I realized the fact that there is no way to test the distribution build at all. That kept me worrying until the app made it through Apple's review process.

So many questions that kept me waking up from sleep:
Was the build compiled properly ?
Is the provisioning profile alright ?
Will the app show up the "A signed resource has been added, modified, or deleted." error ?
Are all the resources that I added and replaced just before the final version, updated properly ?
Was any of the APIs I used from the sample code I grabbed from Internet , "Private" ?

The fear that something may go wrong is so intense when apple takes almost ten days to get the app reviewed and get back to us with a mail that says, thanks but no thanks, we are afraid that we cant let it through this time because...............
/*
(Every time I read these first two lines, I go blind and deaf for a few minutes and was never able to figure out what exactly was the reason for rejection for the first few minutes. After the initial panics and moaning, I will figure out the error to be something like a school boy being asked to return home and come back after a complete redressing session because one of his shirt button is open.)
*/

And that means another 10 minutes of fixing and 10 days of waiting.

It may get so worse that a 'predict the FIFA 2010 winners' app may actually make it to the itunes only while Shakira and South Africa’s Band Freshlyground are leaving home after their live performance at the finals.

When apple introduced In App Purchase and Push Notifications, the things got even worse.

The way the debug build and the distribution build work with In app purchase and apple push notifications are very different that there is a lot of scope for a distribution build of an app to go wrong even if the debug or adhoc builds worked just perfect.

So how to test a distribution build ?

I tried several ways to install a distribution build on to a device, but XCode or iTunes will complaint about the application being signed with invalid entitlements.

But yesterday when my last submission was rejected by apple due to the push notifications not working as expected, I was really challenged. The app was a kind of reminder and push was the main functionality. We tested the push without even a single miss for around 15 days before submission to itunes connect. From the details and screenshots, it was evident that didfailtoregisterforremotenotificationswitherror was getting called whenever app tries to register the push using
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] registerForRemoteNotificationTypes

This happens usually on the simulator alone. I have all versions of iPhone devices for testing and not one of them , not even the iPhone 1.0 returned this error.

So I had to conclude that something went wrong with the distribution build.

Though I had tried several times before, this time I went ahead and tried it with an iPhone 4.1 device. As expected, it failed with "invalid entitlements" reason. But I was not ready to give up and jailbroke the device. Now the apples restrictions all went away and the .app file was successfully installed through the XCode Organizer.

I found my push issue was because I have signed the distribution build with an app store distribution provisioning profile that was created before enabling the production push for the appID.

So lesson learned : make a new distribution provisioning profile every time you change something about the app in the portal.

I created a new provisioning profile , and the error was cleared.

Thanks to jailbroken iphones that allows to install Distribution build before apple submission. Without those, I would have kept guessing for days !