Tag Archives: programming

Android: The Story of A Fragmented Platform (src) So even though I wasn’t planning on it, I just published yet another minor update to Beats 1.x as Beats 1.7.5b. Changelog? Added Amazon Fire TV support (Beats-style only), add more speed multipliers, removed AdMob, and fixed a few crashes. Interesting, not-so-obvious question: What do all these changes have in common? Answer: They are all related to the problem of Android fragmentation. Actually, so was most/all of the changes in Beats 1.7.4b and 1.7.3b. So here’s a rant about why. How fragmentation lead to Beats 1.7.5b Lets look at the root causes …

This post was originally written for Guild Wars 2 (specifically in explaining why ArenaNet hasn’t stopped fly hackers stealing orbs in WvW yet), but applies to pretty much any and every online game with damage/fly/wall/aim-bot hacks. In this post, there are two sections: “How does game hacking work?” and “What kinds of hacks are there?” I’m reposting it here after hearing about the recent Final Fantasy XIV hack as it is a “how-in-the-world-was-this-even-allowed-to-happen” example of a network connection hack described in the last section, although technically no game client is even needed in FFXIV’s case and no decryption is necessary …

When I was a teaching assistant for CIS 191 ”Linux and Unix” (University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2012), I was asked to give a guest lecture, given my involvement and contributions to the iPodLinux project. And so I decided to give a special topic lecture titled, “Linux Everywhere: A look at Linux outsidethe world of desktops”. Here it is: Presentation: PDF (PPTX)

For my Dancing Monkeys Accelerated project, we were required to use Git for version control and host code on GitHub. As a person who has always preferred SVN (for its linear/incremental nature), and have only had experience with Google Code and SourceForge, setting up a new GitHub repo was a new experience. And so, for future reference, I document the process here. In this tutorial, we install msysgit and TortoiseGit and host code on GitHub.

Warning! Long, random, technical rant ahead! Read at your own risk! I may also misuse a few words incorrectly here and there – I apologize in advance for any incoherence within my rant

For PennApps Mobile 2011, I was invite to present a tech talk on how to get started with Android development. The talk gave a general overview of what Android was, how the app layers worked, what you needed to get started, a live/follow-along setup+Hello World demo, a small stopwatch app demo, the basics of debugging, and then finally next steps for app publishing. Finally, the talk ended with a quick blurb of Beats as an example of what your project could become. Here are the links and slides. Announcement: Android, iPhone, WP7 Tech Talks! Facebook event: Intro to Android & …

This is a repost from the PennApps Mobile 2011 website prior to the start of the hackathon. Background: Due to my success success with Beats during the very first PennApps 2010, I was interviewed and asked to give advice to new hackers/participants in the upcoming PennApps Mobile 2011 hackathon. ====== Interview by Justin Meltzer from the Interactive Media Group. I took some time to interview Philip Peng, a junior studying Computer Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. As the lead developer of a mobile game called Beats developed on the Android platform, he and his team transformed a concept hastily …

A user on the iPodLinux forums posted that they had started working on a Flash player port to the iPod. I was skeptical, and here’s why: Keripo wrote: Here’s my two cents. Keep in mind that this is just my speculation/rambling/etc. so don’t take it to heart/seriously. I’ve looked into getting Flash playback on the iPod before in the past and the only suitable project I found was Gnash. Gnash is an open source, GPL’d replacement for Adobe’s web browser flash player. Its written in C++, uses GTK+, and can be cross-compiled. I’ve ported simple GTK-to-hotdog before so that’s not …

When the iPod nano 2G was was released late 2006, the first thing we found out was that the firmware was encrypted. Past generations of iPod had unencrypted firmwares/bootloaders that we were able to more or less dump and reverse engineer and eventually understand enough to port iPodLinux to, but this time around, Apple wasn’t so nice. And so went on a long period where no one had made any progress on the platform. In the meanwhile, a few (misguided) users decided that the best way to hack the encrypted iPod nano 2G would be to try to brute force …

I’m currently creating a modified podzilla 2 build with a few custom functions. The first is loading modules from different locations specified by the passed argments (ie “Podzilla2-Mod /usr/lib/Media /usr/lib/Misc” loads modules from both the “/usr/lib/Media” and “/usr/lib/Misc” folders, and any other ones I may add on). I’ve already got that implemented and fully working. The second one is menu path sorting based on the module’s current folder location. While I have things working nicely at the moment, due to my lack of string manipulation knowledge in C, I’m pretty sure my code at the moment is quite ineffective (memory-wise …