We did it again, another app for our beloved Android. It runs on android versions from 1.5 to 2.2.

Android Market link: Montastic Widget

App lets you see the status of all your web servers monitored with montastic service.  You need a Montastic account to use this widget, montastic is “The website monitoring service that doesn’t suck” please visit montastic site for more info.

Montastic Widget will remain green as long as all your servers are well, showing time of last update. When one or more have problems, it will turn red and show you how many servers are not responding.

Widget also supports notification alert, which is active by default. Alert will play your default notification sound and will activate green blinking led light. That’s all folks, if you have suggestions or feature requests please hit reply button.

We have released new free application for Android, desktop widget called Analog Clock Collection.
You can download it from following market location Clock Collection

Application comes with 24 different analog clock styles from which you can choose your favorite one, all clock widgets are 2×2 size.
To Insert a widget, long-press in an empty area on the home screen select ‘Widgets’, then ‘Analog Clock Collection’.

If you have suggestions, feature request, new clock style that you want to see in next app. version hit the replay button.

Google, in order to give initial push for android 2.1 application development, is giving free Nexus one and Droid phones. Developers with apps having 3.5 star or higher rating and more than 5,000 unique downloads qualify for free android phone.

You will receive either a Verizon Droid by Motorola or a Nexus One. Developers with mailing addresses in the US will receive either a Droid or Nexus one, based on random distribution. Developers from Canada, EU, and the EEA states (Norway, Lichtenstein), Switzerland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore will receive a Nexus One. Developers with mailing addresses in countries not listed above will not receive a phone since these phones are not certified to be used in other countries.

It’s a shame that lot of great android developers are left out and will not receive free phone because their countries are not listed in Google’s official email. Also developers from “not listed countries” are not able to sell their applications on android market and they are offering them for free, making android market a great place with 46% of free apps. This is how they get rewarded

HTC Magic comes to Serbia, taa daa !!! (drum roll)

Vip mobile Serbian mobile operator has launched HTC Magic.
VIP Mobile has signed a strategic partnership, during 2008, with Vodafone who has exclusivity on HTC Magic in moust Europen countries. This is first Android device available on Serbian market. Cost without contract will be 450 €, and subsidized on two year contract 100 € with 40 € monthly fee.
In a meantime Teleonor second largest Serbian mobile operator has started taking pre orders for Samsung Galaxy Android smart phone.
It is going to be hot summer for Android fans in Serbia, I can tell you that
I’m still in doubt which one to choose, I will publish review as soon as I get my hands on one of those two.

Recently I was writing about my problems with Firefox. Annoying but I could live with it.
But after upgrading to version 3.5.1. my Firefox has died on me. Permanently. I tried everything reasonable to fix it, tried to start firefox in safe mod, rebooted computer. Did little of googling. It didn’t help… This error keeps popping up again and again:

The procedure entry point JS_GetOperationLimit could not be located in the dynamic link library js3250.dll.
So long Firefox it was good while it lasted.

I didn’t believe that this day would came, my Firefox 3.0.10 keeps crashing all day with no apparent reason, while all other apps work OK. I did not install no new plugins neither new version, strange indeed.

While at the same time I am being offered to update to new version 3.0.11, which has been released literally few hours ago. This version has been working with no problems for a long time. I’m wondering are crashing and release of new version related Let see, What’s New in Firefox 3.0.11:

Firefox 3.0.11 fixes several issues found in Firefox 3.0.10:
* Fixed several security issues.
* Fixed several stability issues.

Maybe it is paranoia but I think that bad news travel with speed of lite and that this info about Firefox security issues has been somehow exploited.
Update: After installation of new version everything is back to normal, now I am puzzled.

From many different choices for wordpress backup, I picked this one. I have made some minor changes, original script was reporting some silly warnings regarding tar params. You can download altered script here: dbBackUp.txt.
I like this particular php script because it sends me email with compressed wordpress database in attachment whenever it is executed. It can be called manually from web browser, if you place it in public directory on your website server. Or, as I’m using it, you can use cron daemon to activate script. I have created little bash script and placed it under folder: /etc/cron.daily/ Bash script is trivial:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/php /srv/mysitefolder/dbBackUp.php
exit 0

Every morning I get fresh email with compressed database backup file. To make my life easier, I have created separate gmail account whose sole purpose is to receive “backup emails”.
Only draw back that I see is that you must have at least one writable folder, in case you are calling script via web browser on shared hosting, or ssh access to server to schedule cron job for auto backup.
Oh, and one more thing, it requires that you have installed PEAR - PHP Extension on your server.
One thing that can be improved is compressing and emailing images and wordpress content directory along with database dump.
So remember, backup early and backup often, don’t learn it the hard way!

I am using GDI and GDI+ for 2D graphic for ages. GDI+ for a moment looked like mana from heaven, but it has some serious drawbacks. The most painfully one is speed, or lack of it to be more precise. Everything in GDI+ is done without any hardware acceleration. I’ve been searching for faster alternatives, for windows platform, with no luck. It took me by surprise, few days ago when I stumbled upon D2D Tom’s blog.
The Good news is that boys and girls at Redmond are having some constructive ideas and lots of time on their side. The Bad news is that they are wasting that time making crapware.
To cut to the chase DIRECT2D is hardware accelerated 2D API (with software fallback) that will be shipped with Windows 7 and also available for Windows Vista via upgrade. It is built on top of Direct3D and requires DirectX 10. If you want to try it out download March(2009) DirectX SDK which includes build of Direct2D that runs both on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
So everything seems great so far, right?
I was actually impressed, until I looked at the code samples. What a bloated mess.
They did it again, instead of make things simple, they have managed to somehow make it even more complicated. Code that is intended to be used by general application developer, not a game developer, is just to complicated. Even a Direct3D API is simpler to use than D2D, you can find proof of concept on this page with c++ source code.
So where’s this leave me now? I don’t know. I, for one, would rather make use of D3D, but that’s just me.

One of habits that I acquired during my work as software (web) developer is to constantly use several browsers for work, testing or just simple browsing. My main browser of choice is however Firefox.

I am using Google Chrome browser for testing only, I tried to use it as my primary browser but problems that I experienced where definite show stopper for me.

First problem started with constant disk activity while browser was active. This problem was solved later on (by disabling most of advanced options - phishing & malware protection).

Another problem that is really annoying, still unresolved, is random behavior of text copy past. Chrome wont let me copy and paste into text fields. I have no idea how often it happens in what scenarios, but that functionality just is not working as expected.

Third, that for me as developer is unacceptable, is lack of plugin support.

So yesterday, while testing one of my new sites in IE, I noticed this anomaly on google home page:

I did quick test in Firefox and Safari, but default Google home page was clean - no shameless self promotion
Google occasionally promotes products on its home page, but I was unaware that it separates users in two different categories, IE users and others.

So beware users of IE, download it at your own risk,  but if you want to take my advice follow this download link for Firefox.

Some times I am amused how problems, that looked like huge pain, can be solved in few lines of code using basic math algorithms learned at elementary school. We were adding IBAN number verification which requires mod 97 calculation on number with 18 digits or more. First instinct was to just execute it directly as n%97Then it became clear that integer variable can’t be used. Than I start thinking about some other type or class, that can be magically used instead, but that just didn’t seemed as right way to go. OK, I had to think it over. Solution that I come up is using a “traditional long division algorithm”:

94 / 7 = 13 R 3
7
--------
24
21
--------
3


So here it is simple and efficient, c# code, but can easily be adapted for any programming language:

string str_digits = "12345678901234567890";
long mod_value = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < str_digits.Length; i++)
{
    long digit = str_digits[i] - '0';
    mod_value = ((mod_value * 10) + digit) % 97;
}