@property (readwrite, assign) BOOL isShowingLandscapeView;
@property (readwrite, assign) BOOL previousOrientation;

Define the following 2 methods.

#pragma Notification
- (void) registerAllNotification{
    self.isShowingLandscapeView = UIDeviceOrientationIsLandscape([UIApplication sharedApplication].statusBarOrientation);
    self.previousOrientation    = NO;

    [[UIDevice currentDevice] beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];
    [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
                                             selector:@selector(orientationChanged:)
                                                 name:UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification
                                               object:nil];
}

#pragma mark -
#pragma mark Orientation Method
- (void)orientationChanged:(NSNotification *)notification
{
    UIDeviceOrientation deviceOrientation = [UIDevice currentDevice].orientation;
    if (UIDeviceOrientationIsLandscape(deviceOrientation) &&
        !self.isShowingLandscapeView)
    {
        self.isShowingLandscapeView = YES;
    }
    else if (UIDeviceOrientationIsPortrait(deviceOrientation) &&
             self.isShowingLandscapeView)
    {
        self.isShowingLandscapeView = NO;
    }

    if (self.previousOrientation != self.isShowingLandscapeView){
        if (self.isShowingLandscapeView){
            NSLog(@"Orientation Change Occur: Landscape Mode");
        }
        else {
            NSLog(@"Orientation Change Occur: Portrait Mode");
        }

        [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@"OrientationChange" object:nil];
        [self updateUI];
    }

    self.previousOrientation = self.isShowingLandscapeView;
}

You must have to call [registerAllNotification] method in your viewDidLoad or ViewDidAppear method to register the event. And you have to define updateUI method where you can write the code to update UI based on orientation. So to know the current orientation just apply the logic

if (self.isShowingLandscapeView){
   //do the landscape tasks
}
else {
  //do the portrait tasks
}

I defined this code in my mainviewcontroller that has a reference in my delegate. So from other view controller I can easily access to know the current orientation. Also a notification send triggered when orientation change occurred, so from other view controller I can know this by registering an observer of the event. Here updateUI is a method defined in the other view controller.

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(updateUI) name:@"OrientationChange" object:nil];

Practically you can use different languages to write the program that will automatically search and collect the information. But if you’re PHP experts and want to use PHP for this kind of stuff here I am referring a book with PHP library. Practically I found this book is very helpful to learn the topic and their library is easy to use.

Checkout the following book

 Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL

Checkout the library:

Here I am describing a simple example of web scraping idea. Suppose you want to develop a web application where you want to show classified information about current news from different newspaper. So that people who are interested on a particular news can get all the newspaper link in your classified category.

Web scraping for news classification

In the following diagram it is describing that, the application will retrieve all the news from different websites, then classify and categorised information based on interest, like politics, sports, entertainment etc. The above book and the library will help you to make this kind of application.

You can also extend the thing to develop a iPhone or Android news application. On that case your scraping script should be installed in a server where it automatically will collect and classify information and in the smart phone application you just retrieved the data from your server.

Abstract of our paper is:

“Ubiquitous personal health records, which can accompany a person everywhere, are a necessary requirement for ubiquitous healthcare. Contextual information related to health events is important for the diagnosis and treatment of disease and for the maintenance of good health, yet it is seldom recorded in a health record. We describe a dual cellphone-and-Web-based personal health record system which can include ‘external’ contextual information. Much contextual information is available on the Internet and we can use ontologies to help identify relevant sites and information. But a search engine is required to retrieve information from the Web and developing a customized search engine is beyond our scope, so we can use Google Custom Search API Web service to get contextual data. In this paper we describe a framework which combines a health-and-environment ‘knowledge base’ or ontology with the Google Custom Search API to retrieve relevant contextual information related to entries in a ubiquitous personal health record.”

The paper is already listed in Google Scholar, PubMed.gov, BioInfoBank Library, IOS Press and some other sites.

You can download or see the full paper via IOS Press by clicking Full Text PDF.

The weather was going too bad, rain comes so imagine our situation, the two guys however helped us cleaned the broken glass as much as possible, then heavy rain started. They drive our car we were seated back and they took us under a bridge so that we can wait to stop the rain. After 1 hour the Plus Team (Express way service) car come, the Indian people told us don’t talk with them. Then we suspected more to these people, then we told the total situation to the Plus team.

But the plus team people told us why you deal with this guy? Wow, I think the Plus people should charge them how they know from opposite site that we got an accident? But Plus people didn’t do that, rather they charge us. Ok, I told them the total situation and also told them what they can help us, is there any nearest workshop or not? They answered no, so we can go back to Melaka as that is nearer. But the indian people argue with the Plus people, I told them I’ll give you the fees but I don’t want to follow. Whatever they charged higher price 250RM = 82 USD only for just clean the windscreen. But whatever I paid them, and return back to my home safely though I had to drive within rain with no windscreen.

After I came back I talked with some local and foreign friends here and some of them told me, it’s a common situation in expressway. A group of criminal people try to make such incident to either rob or take more money as a charge. I’m sure that its also a planned incident, because the opposite side’s people could never know how other side’s car got an accident without get informed.

I hope Malaysian authority should take some action/prevention for this type of crime and also they should train the Plus People to deal this type of situation. I wrote this blog post, because I want to warn my friends that be aware when you drive on highway and don’t talk or avoid if any local dress people try to help you.

The simplest thing I tried and that solved my problem by the following way:

if I one to search 1 space:

SELECT * FROM tbl_name where str_field LIKE '% %'

if I one to search 2 space:

SELECT * FROM tbl_name where str_field LIKE '% %% %'

if I one to search 3 space:

SELECT * FROM tbl_name where str_field LIKE '% %% %% %'

Officially I’ve started my M.Sc in 26th April, 2012 in Multimedia University (MMU) Melaka Campus. I got a research fund in the faculty of information science & technology to pursue my study. My research and study mainly focused on health information technology. Where my major is data mining specially web data mining.

Actually academic things are quite different from professional things. I think academic people think differently than what we think in professional life. My supervisor is actually American by citizenship American + Australian. He is highly experienced, PhD holder, very kind and friendly. He guides me to think academic way. Before my masters study I never know how to write thesis paper, because in my bachelor study my friend and me developed a project in our last year and wrote a paper about that. But to write academic thesis paper there are some rules that I learned in these days. The interesting thing is that, to write something and reference something in thesis paper I’ve to read books, journal, conference papers and sometimes websites information. So reading and understanding is one major part in post-graduate research.

In these days I’ve read many books and journal papers related to health information technology. Now a days I’m studying data mining. In my career, I wrote some PHP scripts/crawlers to grab data from website. So in my research project I’ve also do something similar, but in different way, where I’ve to explore best way to gather information for our project needs.

I read blogs mainly in my iPad. I also read many books in my iPad, but honestly said still paper book is much easier to read, understand and comfortable. So to study more about data mining, yesterday I ordered 3 books from amazon.com. I’ve a PDF version of one of these books, but really I hardly need the paper version. May be if you are interested in data mining research, these books might be helpful for you.

If you know better resource, books or journal links you can share with me as comments. To find papers scholar.google.com is very helpful. Also IEEE Xplore Digital Library helped me lots to find quality journal and conference papers. But you must have to pay them for registering and accessing. But the good thing is, if you’re student of any reputed university you can get auto access from your campus. Because university pay them.

So far, sometimes I become confuse after meeting with my professor, but later I understand better than previous. Now I think teachers think more differently than we think, and that actually helps us to think more differently.

If you are really interested to research, you should join in post-graduate study where you will get the opportunity to do more research. And if you’re from professional career like me (I completed my Bachelor in 2008 and worked for different companies, freelance, self-employed until 2012)  then this will bring some different tastes in life. But if you do Masters you should select Masters by Research, not Masters by Course, because in research you’ve the opportunity to explore more.

In 24th March, I reached Kuala Lumpur. The airport terminal is very beautiful. Then I hired a taxi and came in Melaka. Here my uncle (father’s cousin) is living. So he helped me to settle many things. My supervisor also helped me to manage a guest room in a guest house. Melaka is also very beautiful. Very natural. Lots of trees here and there but rain often comes. Life is simple and great. People are so far very friendly and helpful. There are many Indian restaurants. So its good to take food from there, as Indian and Bangladeshi food tastes are quite similar.

On 24th, my supervisor gave me a key of the research room, where me and some other students will research. The most important thing I get is the high speed internet. In Dhaka, we used to suffer for high speed and stable internet connection.
Here is a pic of my research room.

So unofficially I started my research, because my university is applied for the student pass, and after I got it I can register for the M.Sc. Hopefully within some weeks it will be ok, and my wife will come here to live with me. Yesterday I rented an apartment to live in Melaka. The apartment is fully furnished with all the essential things including fridge, TV, Air Conditions, washing machine, sofa, dinning table, bed, mattress etc. Also there is a nice swimming pool and a gym within the apartment area.

Today I swam for half hour and its great feelings and exercise. I’m enjoying my life in Melaka but it would be more beautiful when my wife will arrive and join me.

So in 2008, I completed my B.Sc then started job, worked on different US based companies, and then did freelance web development, and later started my iOS apps development business. Now I’ll fully concentrate on my research but I know I’ll get enough times to do part time work in my business and freelance.

There are several reasons to choose Twilio. One of the most important reason is, its very easy to integrate Twilio’s REST API. The price is also cheap compare to other services. In this post I’ll not write details about Twilio. You can easily learn more about it by there web site. I’ll mention some features that we integrated in our application.

Our project is developed based on CodeIgniter framework. So we just downloaded the REST library provided by Twilio and dropped in our libraries folder.

Then I wrote a class to use the Twilio API to serve our application purpose. Our application’s task was:

1. Send SMS
2. User can search and select custom phone number
3. User can buy a local phone number

Here is my class that I’ve written. You’ll see this class named is Smsapi and its located in the libraries folder follow the above image.

<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

/**
 * This is a wrapper class for sending sms. Twilio Api Custom Library suitable for our CI Project
 * @author: Mahmud
 * @category Library
 */

// Include the PHP TwilioRest library
require "twilio/twilio.php";

class Smsapi {
    private $client;
    private $AccountSid;
    private $AuthToken;
    private $CallerID;
    private $ApiVersion;
    private $CI;
    private $SMS_Callback;
    private $VOICE_Callback;
    private $VOICE_fallback;
    private $VOICE_status;

    function __construct(){
        // Twilio REST API version
        $this->ApiVersion   =   "2010-04-01";

        $this->CI           =   &get_instance();

        // Set our AccountSid and AuthToken
        $this->AccountSid       =   $this->CI->config->item('twilio_sid'  );
        $this->AuthToken        =   $this->CI->config->item('twilio_token');
        $this->SMS_Callback     =   $this->CI->config->item('twilio_sms_callback');
        $this->VOICE_Callback   =   $this->CI->config->item('twilio_voice_callback');
        $this->VOICE_fallback   =   $this->CI->config->item('twilio_voice_fallback');
        $this->VOICE_status     =   $this->CI->config->item('twilio_voice_status');

        // Outgoing Caller ID you have previously validated with Twilio
        $this->CallerID     =   $this->CI->config->item('twilio_phone');

        // Instantiate a new Twilio Rest Client
        $this->client       =   new TwilioRestClient($this->AccountSid, $this->AuthToken);
    }

    /**
     * This function is a wrapper to send SMS to a phone number. You should use this method for all type
     * of SMS message sending.
     * @param string $number phone number to whom sms will send
     * @param string $message message that will send to the phone number
     */
    public function send_sms($number, $message){
        $response = $this->client->request("/{$this->ApiVersion}/Accounts/{$this->AccountSid}/SMS/Messages",
                "POST", array(
                "To" => $number,
                "From" => $this->CallerID,
                "Body" => $message
        ));
        if($response->IsError){
            $error  =   "Error: {$response->ErrorMessage} " . " File: Smsapi.php 42 no line. Number: $number";
           // echo $error;
           log_message('error', $error);
           return FALSE;
        }
        else{
            //echo "Sent message to $number";
            return TRUE;
        }
    }

    /**
     * This function search for available mobile numbers based on ZIP code
     * @access public
     * @param string $zip ZIP code of US or Canada
     * @param string $country US or CA
     * @return BOOLEAN TRUE for get result and FALSE for error or no result
     */
    public function search_mobile_numbers($zip='', $postal='', $country='US', $failsearch=FALSE){
        $SearchParams['InPostalCode']   = !empty($zip)    ? $zip    : '';
        $SearchParams['NearNumber']     = '';
        $SearchParams['Contains']       = '';
        $SearchParams['AreaCode']       = !empty($postal) ? $postal : '';

        /* Initiate US Local PhoneNumber search with $SearchParams list */
        $response = $this->client->request("/{$this->ApiVersion}/Accounts/{$this->AccountSid}/AvailablePhoneNumbers/$country/Local",
                         "GET",
                          $SearchParams);

        if($response->IsError) {
            return $response->IsError;
        }

        $AvailablePhoneNumbers = $response->ResponseXml->AvailablePhoneNumbers->AvailablePhoneNumber;

        if (empty($AvailablePhoneNumbers)){
            $AvailablePhoneNumbers  =   "No available numbers in your zip code";
            if ($failsearch){
                //now check only available number not need to zip code specific
                $SearchParams['InPostalCode']   = '';
                $response = $this->client->request("/{$this->ApiVersion}/Accounts/{$this->AccountSid}/AvailablePhoneNumbers/$country/Local",
                             "GET",
                              $SearchParams);

                if($response->IsError) {
                    return $response->IsError;
                }

                $AvailablePhoneNumbers = $response->ResponseXml->AvailablePhoneNumbers->AvailablePhoneNumber;
            }
        }

        return $AvailablePhoneNumbers;
    }

    /**
     * Buy mobile phone number
     * @param STRING $number the phone number user wants to buy
     * @return mixed TRUE for success and string for error message
     */
    public function buy_mobile_number($number){
        /* Purchase the selected PhoneNumber */
        $response = $this->client->request("/{$this->ApiVersion}/Accounts/{$this->AccountSid}/IncomingPhoneNumbers",
                                     "POST",
                                     array(
                                         'PhoneNumber'          => $number,
                                         'SmsUrl'               => $this->SMS_Callback,
                                         'SmsMethod'            => 'POST',
                                         'VoiceCallerIdLookup'  => TRUE,
                                         'VoiceUrl'             => $this->VOICE_Callback,
                                         'VoiceMethod'          => 'POST',
                                         'VoiceFallbackUrl'     => $this->VOICE_fallback,
                                         'VoiceFallbackMethod'  => 'POST',
                                         'StatusCallback'       => $this->VOICE_status,
                                         'StatusCallbackMethod' => 'POST',
                                     ));

        if($response->IsError) {
            $err = urlencode("Error purchasing number: $response->ErrorMessage");
            return $err;
        }

        return TRUE;
    }
}

?>

I also provided the constant variables in config.php. You’ve to provide your own API Key, token, Twilio Phone Number in this variables.

//Third Party Library Configuratio
$config['twilio_sid']           =   'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';
$config['twilio_token']         =   'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';
$config['twilio_phone']         =   'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';
$config['twilio_phone_display'] =   'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';
$config['twilio_sms_callback']  =   $config['base_url'] . '/sms'; //it should be our application's dedicated sms url
$config['twilio_voice_callback']=   $config['base_url'] . '/voice'; //it should be our application's dedicated voice url
$config['twilio_voice_fallback']=   $config['base_url'] . '/voice/fallback';
$config['twilio_voice_status']  =   $config['base_url'] . '/voice/status';

In my class you’ll see 3 functions

1. public function send_sms($number, $message);
2. public function search_mobile_numbers($zip=”, $postal=”, $country=’US’, $failsearch=FALSE);
3. public function buy_mobile_number($number);

Using send_sms() function you just have to provide the phone number and message to send as text. Using search_mobile_numbers() function you can search and get the available phone numbers based on ZIP, POSTAL and Country code. And the final function buy_mobile_number() you can purchase the number from Twilio and from then that number will be not available for other users.

We also integrated some other features like some voice, automatic SMS answer when user send text to a number. But for simplicity I’ve not described them in this post.Hope this article will help you to work on Twilio.

Whatever I’m writing this post to inform my friends and blog readers about my activity in 2011

1. I had been doing web application development job (part time) via oDesk for a US client. I worked almost 1 year for him. I used CodeIgniter framework, MySQL workbench, SpringLoops, and Twilio Communication Service API to integrate voice and sms in his project. We worked in a team and my role was managing the project and team, implementing API, make the web app structure, design database and deploy on server.
2. I joined in a Berkely based US company as a Sr. Software Engineer where my role was to manage and develop iOS application. But I left the job after 3 months. Its really tough to do job late at night, because there is a 12 hours difference between Bangladesh and US. So their morning is night in here.
3. In 2011, I was fully concentrated on Objective C, XCode and iOS applications development. That year was very successful for me. I learned many things of iOS game and application development. I learned Tile based game development, box2d physics engine based game development and all about cocos2d framework based 2D game development. My wife all time supported me by designing graphics for my games and apps and providing continuous support. I published some major updates of some of my apps. The success is all of my free iOS apps downloaded more than 1 Million times via all iTunes Store. And people updated my free apps more than 1.5 Million times. And the average feedback of my apps is 4.0 out of 5.0.The success was not come in a day. Sometimes I worked more than 16 hours in a day. And sometime I didn’t work any time
4. I also fully moved to github for all of my public code hosting.
5. I updated my bike from Bajaj Discover to Yamaha Fazer during the middle of the year 2011.
6. I was thinking to join for higher study, and thinking to move Malaysia for my MSc. I attended IELTS Academic Module exam and achieved Band 6.5 score(listning 6.5, Reading 6.5, Speaking 6.5 and Writing 5.5). I was little surprised for my writing score and I realized that my academic writing is not good, so I’ve to improve it more :S
7. Near the end of the year I updated my camera from Nikon D5000 to Canon 5D Mark II.
8. And I’m consulting with a professor in Malayisa and looking for opportunity to join any university to study MSc by Research.

I believe to spend time happily. And I all time try do that. And I’m very thankful to Allah (God) that he helped me by giving success.

In 2012, I still want to move Malaysia to complete my MSc by Research. Please pray for me. Additionally I’ll try to write more technical post in my blog. I’ve also some plan to develop some new iOS applications and games beside my part time Web application development job. I wish all of you a:

Happy New Year

2012

What’s the problem if a person like to share pre-populated text as his status message. I don’t know why they took the decision!!

So if you need to update user’s status using facebook iOS SDK you can do the following way:

Instead of using the below code

[facebook dialog:@"feed"
	 andParams:params 
	 andDelegate:self]; 

Use the following solution

 [facebook requestWithGraphPath:@"me/feed"
        andParams:params
        andHttpMethod:@"POST"
        andDelegate:self];