ChaiPuter

I am working on a project of recreating an old game of Sierra called King's Quest IV - The Perils of Rosella in 3d , I am not working alone, we are a whole team working together. We are using a gaming engine called AGS, which helps in creating games - especially quest games, anyway, this engine enables us to also play video files, but it supports natively only the compressed Theora format, which is an open source video codec which is the equivalent of DIVX just open source (Later on, Google bought the rights for this codec, and have [graded it and are actively using it, but they have left the previous version for the joy of the public). So our graphic designer has created several video files which then she wanted to convert to the Theora format, but apparently it is hard to find a decent codec converter which doesn't need a license in computer science in order to just use it, why? because it is an open source project so anybody who wants to use it needs to be an IT ge...

Let's say I have a Database with data. Now, lets assume I want to have a site around this database, which users and admins can access and have access to the data using nice GUI'd tables with the specific data I want each group to be exposed to. When I think of designing such a site, I think of the following requirements: The site must be lightweight , there is no need for any heavy "Engine" here. The site should be built using good coding practices, so I want it to have an MVC engine. I want not to worry about the sql queries, I want not to worry about sql injection, I want DB schema changes to be minor (coding wise) in short - I want an ORM . I want some CRUD functionality I want a nice GUI which means using a lightweight Templating system like Smarty which will preferably use great JS libraries , Twitter Bootstrap, font Awesome etc . One would think I am asking for too much - well, nothing is too much, it just will take a lot of time to develop th...

In a previous post I wrote about "How to read Android apk contents" , since then I have tested those apps and have drawn conclusions. There is no need for all of those apps, all one needs is two main apps which can do everything one might want with his apks! The clear winners are: APKInspector APK Multi Tool These two application complement each other and let you view any aspect of an APK (apkInspector) and change it as you wish (apk multi tool). I have explained a bit about APK Multi Tool in the previous post about reading android apk contents and so I want to clarify a bit about APK Inspector. APKInspector is a python application which runs only on linux and needs several packages to be installed for it to run. The above requirements can frighten many people so a virtual box (Oracle virtual box) was created using the  Ubuntu OS and all packages (as well as the main app) already are installed on it. In order to download this virtual machine ...

In many cases, when programming, i want to measure the time some block of code has taken. This functionality is needed in many projects I work on, and on each project it is sometimes needed many times. The first few times i have done it manually, use getTimeInMillis() and deducted the end time from the starting time. When it occurred several more times I have built a Stopwatch class, which is the path many have gone on before. After tweaking that class several times, as my requirements became clearer to me, I have understood that I can do a decent job in the stopwatch class, but I can use a robust and maintained framework which has done a nicer job than mine, that was the stage where i went googling it out. And i have found many classes implementing the stopwatch functionality, after narrowing them down, 3 frameworks remained: 1. Apache commons 2. Spring 3. Google's Guava Which one did I pick? What are the differences between them? Basically th...

You have created this great android app. Then you discover that the world is actually flat and your app will be downloaded by dudes all over the planet, and they want your app in their own language. How can you localize your app? Be sure that all of the text in the app is using strings.xml, please note that the actual java files as well as the layout xml files should refer to the strings.xml file. Create a directory for each language you want your app to be localized to, so if you want your app to be localized to 11 languages you will need to create 11 additional directories; These directories should be located in the "res" directory and should be named values-XX where XX is a 2 letter country code, which you can find here:  http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php Copy your strings.xml file into each one of those directories Translate each one of those strings.xml files to their relevant languages (I managed to have those files translated i...

Are you called from time to time to fix friends' / neighbors' / family's computers? Do you then pull your good old collection of cds each one containing a different utility you might need? Well, those days are gone! Today you need only carry a nice 8gb flash drive on your key chain. What will it contain? Download the latest hiren's boot cd (currently 15.1 but it gets updated every now and then) from your favorite torrent site. Follow these orders (in the link) in order to format and make your flash drive bootable.   Copy the contents of the hiren's boot cd into the flash drive (as mentioned in the link above). You have just created a bootable hiren flash disk (and for those who don't know, hiren's boot disk is the best rescue disk you'll ever need). Download the portable apps app , install it on your computer and download every app you find handy. This stage could take some time and could get to 5gb of downloaded no installer free...

Lets say you want to read the contents of an android apk file. Why? Maybe it's yours and you want to be sure of the version, maybe you want to see if the code in that apk contains the latest feature you inserted. Or maybe it isn't your code but you want to check something with someone else's code (without breaking any license etc). In a nutshell - What are the steps one should take in order to explore an apk file? 1. Only read the manifest contents of an apk : Use the following command (make sure you have aapt.exe and the apk file on your path): aapt dump badging XXYY.apk [Later Edit] 1.5 You want to change some resources of the apk using a nice GUI Try APK Edit  - It will enable you to do the following: Change icons of your android application. Change the applications name. Edit the localized text (Strings.xml) used in applications. 2. You want to read all of the apk's contents : Method A. Use the following tool: apktool  (apktool ...