Lantean

I've gotta say this. I'm a big fan of J.J.Abrams director. He managed to develop a fresh sci-fy style, which looks really attractive. If you compare science fictions movies from the past 10 years, with the latest Star Trek: Into Darkness movie... you'd be impressed.

What i like the most of the new movies is the way they’ve recreated the whole Trek technology. I’m not into hi tech visual effects… but the technology that’s shown into the movie could deceit even guys with PhD’s… the transporter looks super real!.

Luckily, although the movie is a couple months away, we got to check out the trailer… right now!!.  It will be released on May 17th, and even the website is already up!.

By the way… J.J.Abrams is the father of Fringe. A sci-fi series that has been around for the past couple of years. If you have enough spare time i suggest you give it a shot.

And last but not least… if you’re into SciFy technology, i recommend you read Physics of the Impossible, written by Professor Michio Kaku.

In such book, he got to analyze every single Trek technology, and he gives an educated estimate of when the technology could potentially become a reality. For instance… the Warp Drive is estimated to show up in the next 100 years.

I don’t expect to live 100 years… but maybe, in my next incarnation, i’ll be able to jump into the Enterprise… why not???.

It's been a while since the last iPhone jailbreak was made public. But all evil comes to an end, sooner rather than later. A couple days ago, a hacking group named evad3rs, published a brand new Jailbreak tool for iOS 6.x.

It’s claimed to be able to jailbreak any iOS device: iPod / iPad / iPhone / iPad Mini. I’ve tested it myself on two devices: iPhone 4s and iPhone 5. The results were impressive. They managed to combine at least 3 different exploits to make things work.

The process is quite seamless. You simply download the app, run it, and follow the instructions onscreen. The binary is available for OSX, Windows and even Linux.

You can download it here. What to do once the device is jailbroken?. You can perform an incredible amount of customizations, that are not available in the pristine version of iOS.

If, on the contrary, you're still running an old version of iOS, we suggest you check out this site. They've got a nice repository of information with the previous jailbreaks that were made available... who doesn't remember BlackRa1n, LimeRa1n... JailbreakMe or GreenPoison?.

Those were golden times, but Apple has spent a lot on hardening iOS security (no wonder why they're now providing devices to the US Government, while RIM is directed right ahead to chapter eleven).

By the way.. we do not encourage the usage of hacked / cracked software. If you like an app, please, support the devs!.

So… you’ve got a crashlog, and you don’t know if a given DSYM actually matches with the original executable?. Well, there is a super easy way to verify this. Simply type the following, in your console:

dwarfdump -u Project.app.dSYM/Contents/Resources/DWARF/Project

Ideally, mdfind should help you locate the matching DWARF. But sometimes… symbolication requires extra debugging.

So... you thought that OSX was the most stable OS ever developed... right?. Guess what... you can crash it super easily. Just try the following...

• Open any OSX app. For instance, Safari.
• Type in the location bar the following string:  File:///
• See the crash onscreen?

It’s been reported in OpenRadar, and astonishingly, it’s only affecting the latest incarnation of OSX, Mountain Lion. You can crash Chrome, Safari… and probably, any app you’ve got installed.

What’s all the fuzz about?. Crashes can be used to get ownership of the IP pointer.. which is, in layman terms, the guy that says what-to-execute next. Long short story, this could potentially be used to develop an exploit, to scale permissions in the system.

Let’s wait for a patch… 10.8.3 is taking quite a long time to ship.

I really like codeIgniter, since it’s super lightweight, and its learning curve is super small. You can get to build a whole website within just a couple days, even with database support.

I’ve written myself a e-commerce website in just two weeks, without having previous knowledge on the technology. Now, let’s get to business.

What happens when you’re writing a view (php based), and you need to display a variable?. Well, you’ve got, essentially, two options. To begin with, you can simply invoke the php ’echo’ routine, by doing something like this:

<?php echo $variable; >

Now, if you wanna keep your code really clean, you can rely on CodeIgniter built in parser. How do you implement it?… super simple…:

1. Initialize the Parser Library:

$this->load->library('parser');

2. Replace the '<?php echo $blog_title; ?>' routines with the following syntax:

{blog_title}

So far so good. Now… here’s something interesting. What happens if you wanna print an object’s property? or an object’s method?. Well, CodeIgniter doesn’t support that scenario. It will only work with strings, and with arrays (of strings). So… i’ve extended a bit the library, in order to support ‘printing object’s properties’.

You can download right here my extended version of the parser. We won’t be analyzing the code i’ve written. It’s not complex, and you’re invited to run a diff between the original, and my patch.

Now… how do we use it?. Simple…

1. Install the sf_parser library

You should copy the ‘sf_parser.php’ file to ‘/application/libraries/sf_parser.php’. That’s it. No more no less. Simplicity is one of the things i love the most about CI framework.

2. Initialize the sf_parser library

Instead of initializing the CI’s default parser, we’re gonna need to load our custom library. We can achieve that by doing the following:

$this->load->library('sf_parser');

3. Use the new syntax!

The goal of this library is to enable you (the user!) to print any object’s properties, or getter’s results. Which means that… instead of using the following syntax, in your view.php file:

<?php echo $blog->get_title();>

You can now do something far more elegant… which looks something like this:

{blog:get_title}

If you found it useful… if you found a bug… or if you’ve extended it further, i’d love to hear from you!