Alternative way of updating your ios device

As you all might be knowing , iOS 5 was released last week, and Apple's servers were creaking under the pressure of user's trying to upgrade.

I too tried updating the OS on my iPod touch several time,  but was unsuccessful, which considering the size of update (~ 700 MB ) and the limited bandwidth is a costly task to repeat.

So, I started looking for alternatives.

I found out that you can download the update from several other site offering the updated ipsw files. Although i tried downloading ( just downloading not updating ) from Apples server and succeed.

If you also have downloaded the updated firmware and want to use that to update ( not re-downloading ), just press the options key on your mac keyboard and click update key, you will be presented with a prompt to select the ipsw file from your filesystem.

For those like me, using a windows keyboard, Alt key works as options.

So , go ahead and try the new shiny iOS.

Regards,
Ishan Malviya 

installing Arch linux

I have a Samsung N150plus netbook on which ubuntu 11.04 with unity interface was installed, but i was getting bored with the ease of ubuntu. If I want easy , I will boot up my Mac with Mac os X Lion or my windows XP machine.

So i decided to go with Arch Linux, the bleeding edge distro. As netbooks lack the optical drive i went with usb install option.

I have been using "unetbootin" for installing ubuntu etc from usb media, but somehow i was unable to install Arch using this, The error i was getting was "Boot device didn't show up after 30 seconds".
after few hours of trying to find a solution i decided to go with the old and trusted dd command.

and it worked!

The command i used was
dd if=Arch---.iso of=/dev/sdb

for Arch---.iso you need to use the Arch iso file you downloaded and for of you need to find out the id of your usb device.

Booted and installed , am now trying to get a GUI working on it, yes it boots into plain old command prompt and no GUI is installed :)

Not for the faint hearted....

Regards,
Ishan

path to the embedded xml's in ios projects

Xml parsing is an integral part of any mobile project you will come across, 4 out of 5 projects are about parsing the xml and then using the data in one way or another.

xml's are also a great way of passing data between different platforms.

NSXMLParser is provided by the Foundation framework and is an event based parser (SAX ), though there are several free third party parsers available which perform better than NSXMLParser.

To get the xml file opened and read into the NSData variable we need to create the path to the xml file stored in the application.

It can be done as :

NSString *appDirectory = [NSHomeDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"project_name.app/file_name.xml"];

Will post more when i'll experiment with a DOM parser in ios.

Regards,
Ishan

complementing c++

C++ as a language is very complex, that's where lies its beauty but everything is not built into the C++ standard library.

Multi threading and network programming are amongst the most missed components.

Some even suggest replacing C++ standard STL components with external libraries, most notable among those are "Boost C++ library".

This is a library designed by programmer, most of them are on the C++ standards committee, so there are great chances of the Boost components getting merged in C++0X standard.

Using Boost also gives the advantage of being platform independent so rather than worrying about porting your multi threaded code, you can now concentrate on better code architecture.

Regards,
Ishan Malviya

Learning c++

I have been a big fan of C/C++ since the time I started programming. In fact C++ was the first programming language I learnt.

Learning C++ is not an easy task and believe me when I say there is no replacement for writing code, but reading good books and reading code written by others is a very helpful practise.

There are a series of books that i would recommend and reading them in the order presented here will elevate your rank in the C++ guild.

1. Thinking in c++ vol 1/2
2. Effective c++
3. More effective c++
4. Modern c++ design
5. Design and principle of C++

I am assuming that you are at least comfortable as beginner, these books can take you from the beginner's level to near master.

As I have already said , nothing matches writing code.

Regards,
Ishan Malviya

billion dollar messes

HP declared today that they are going to exit the consumer hardware arena, just about 1 year after buying Palm Inc. for 1.8 billion usd and leaving it to rot.

HP has also bought compaq systems for over 24 billion usd.

Great going HP.

Regards,
Ishan

switching to the dark side

I have always admired the Apple hardware, though i don't agree with the premium consumer has to pay for getting that half eaten apple on their gadgets.

Mac OS X , in my opinion is a bit better than windows, nobody can beat Steve jobs in the eye candy department, but all the talks about mac being more secure as compared to windows is just marketing bull.

Having just finished reading "Masters of doom" for the third time, i was really intrigued by the praises heaped on objective-c development environment by John Carmack.

So i went ahead and bought an iPod 4G, which is almost same as iPhone 4G without the gsm and gps chip.

Am experimenting with the ipod , having already jail broken it, but that deserves a separate post.

BTW, N900 still beats the craps out of anything any day :)