Grand Central

Moved!

aschepis — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:09:56 GMT

this blog has moved to my new domain: http://adamschepis.com/blog

CountItOut - an open-source example iPhone app

aschepis — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:16:18 GMT

http://code.google.com/p/countitout/

Count It Out is a sample iPhone app (SDK version 3.0) that is intended to be a demonstration of Core Data as well as some UI controls that Apple doesn't give you out of the box (yet.)

The purpose of the app is to be a generic counting app that is useful for tracking the score of your baseball game (balls, strikes, outs, inning), the # of promo codes you have sent out for your latest and greatest iPhone app, or anything else you do in the day that requires keeping track of a running count or a countdown.

It will be up on the appstore soon as a free utility. In the meantime if you are interested in creating iPhone apps, learning CoreData, or finding some examples of settings UI tables with more complicated controls than those that come out of the box then check out this app (and if you want to contribute, shoot me a comment or message)

Thanks!

My Google Robot - WaveDigest

aschepis — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:30:29 GMT

While google wave may be the future of communication, it's certainly not there yet. This wave robot allows you to register to get emails whenever a wave changes (or to get hourly, daily, or weekly digests). Now you can know when an important wave changes.

in the future it will also provide RSS feeds for changes on a waves as well as providing webhooks to allow developers to perform their own operations when a wave changes.

Add it to your wave: wavedigest@appspot.com

check out the code and let me know what you think. if you have wave access and have developed some robots and want to contibute shoot me a message.

http://code.google.com/p/wavedigest/

Hudzu - A new (and different) iPhone RSS app

aschepis — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:34:13 GMT

My good friends Andy and Bryan collaborated with me to build this new iPhone app which is now available on the app store. The concept of the app is to act as a Heads Up Display for your life (based on your RSS feeds and email) so that you can know the important things that are happening at a glance and can then drill down to really figure it all out. Check it out! let me know what you think.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hudzu/id337397655?mt=8

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Hudzu is an extremely useful, highly customizable feed engine designed to streamline your daily feeds by keyword occurrence. Acting as a HUD for your life, more popular keywords "bubble up" to the top of the trending list, making it easy for you to keep up with the latest buzz in just seconds.

Looking to get started quickly? With Hudzu you can quickly add your favorite blogs, or chose from a list of common feeds and be running in seconds. Looking for more even more customizability? With Hudzu you can even import from Twitter(tm) and/or Google(tm) accounts.

"Highly addictive [...] A huge time saver!"

"Wasting time trolling through unread articles is a thing of the past"

"As an avid gamer, Hudzu is a must have for new product announcements"

Praise for iCountCalories

aschepis — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:17:43 GMT

"I've just bought your app and have an iphone 3G. It's exactly what I've been looking for - you put the food in that you've eaten and it tells you how many calories you've eaten and how many of your daily allowance is left - thank you!" - Kirsty (UK)

get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=335404904&mt=8

iCountCalories: My first iPhone App

aschepis — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:17:57 GMT

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=335404904&mt=8

I'm very proud to have had my first iPhone app posted to the Apple Store today. iCountCalories is a calorie tracking tool that I wrote for myself while in the process of losing 55lbs. I'm not expecting it to sail to #1 but hopefully some people find the application as useful as I did while developing it. Additionally I hope i can get some good feedback so that I can improve it and make it even more useful!

Current features:
- tracking calories
- database lookup of common foods
- history charts

How is your identity being stolen?

aschepis — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:47:22 GMT

Let me count the ways:

18.4% - Theft by employees
18% - Hackers
14% - Lost or stolen media
11.6% - Personal data inadvertently exposed

Kind of drives home the importance or proper access control, doesn't it?

Source:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/06/malicious_attacks_blamed_for_m.html?wprss=securityfix

Perils of using Symbol Servers

aschepis — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:41:42 GMT

I was helping a colleague debug an issue this morning in a piece of our code that filters network traffic. He couldn't get WinDbg to load symbols from our internal symbol server or from the MS symbol server and had no clue why.

Finally it occurred to me that in the act of attaching to the process he was blocking the code that would have accepted the connection from our network driver and processed it.

So the windbg was sending out a request to the symbol server, our network driver was intercepting it and sending it back up to the user-mode process for filtering but that couldn't respond because windbg was attaching to the process and trying to load the symbols. doh! :)

Solution: disable filtering on the symbol server port (80), attach again to build up the symbol cache, re-enabled filtering and try again so that symbols are loaded from the cache.

Dan Reed's Blog

aschepis — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:48:16 GMT

Just found Dan Reed's blog recently via the Communications of the ACM Blog. Dan's posts are generally geared towards HPC but make for really great reading. Check it out

President Obama is on the right track

aschepis — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:21:55 GMT

Lots to be please with in President Obama's latest communication on cybersecurity. He still hasn't named his cybersecurity chief but he continues to show his administration's commitment to securing both our federal cyber infrastructure as well as extending a helping hand to securing the networks of key private industries such as our power grid, banks, and water providers. America's cybersecurity posture is something that I am keenly interested in (and honestly worried about) so it's good to see that there is at least an open dialogue and some action taking place.

Brian Krebs at the Washington Post (Security Fix) wrote a very positive blog post about this news, and Bruce Schneier published a blog post that points out both his optimism as well as a few potential pitfalls that the administration should be wary of as they move forward in the process.