Beli’s blog

With rising problem of SWF reverse engineering, I was looking for a simple tool that does SWF protection. There are variety of tools out there, but one got the hold of my eye, so I decided to do a little testing. Not that I have something to hide, as I usually write GPL code, but when I do it for clients, then it is reasonable to mess up some sensitive code parts.
That tool is SWF Protector 3.0 which has nice interface and it is very simple to use.

According to author, it provides unbreakable protection for reverse engineering. I do not believe that, as everyting is breakable sooner or later, but for now it does the job good. It has two levels of protection, for Actionscript 2, for which I do not care about as I don’t use AS2, and two for AS3: Obfuscate and Protect.
Obfuscate does not protect SWF from decompressing and reverse engineering, but it really messes up code beyond readable. Protect protects from reverse engineering completely. Good thing is that default setting is to do both at once. However, since they increase size of the file, if size of SWF is really important, Read more…

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What irritates me the most in Flex Builder 3 (windows) or Flex3 for Eclipse (linux), is when you upgrade SDK, you loose autocomplete or some packages cannot be found by autocomplete.
For example, most common error is when you write import flash. and want to get events, all you can see is flash.errors but not flash.events or any other.

Problem: (this is just pure speculation)
Since FB3 comes with FlashPlayer 9.x, and most probably that you have 10.x by now, adding SDK looses itself between versions. No matter if you set in SDK’s ini file that target player is 10.

How to fix it:
Go to your project properties -> Flex Builder Path, choose Library tab, and expand your SDK.
DELETE playerglobal.swc then add playerglobal.swc manually from SDK.
(same-same but its somehow very different).

Now, clean your project and WOA! Now you have autocompletion and can see all packages.

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Depending on architecture of your Flex application (or application you work on), you might have to use callback functions, or it is mandatory to use them. Of course, you shouldn’t be mixing things inside so service functions should remain in service class, where you call your remote objects. Callback function populates your model and that is it. We shall not get into merit should you use MVC, callback functions etc. but presume that you have to do it this way.
So, this is a typical remote service call: Read more…

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The problem: I need the easiest way possible to resize a bunch of images from a digital camera, or from one directory, and place them into another.

There are a lots of great tools for the job. As linux user, I had a choice of a variety of excellent applications to use, from large scale applications like GIMP or Krita, to small tools like BIRT. Lately, because I have KDE4, I used Gwenview because it supports batch resizing.

However, all of them ask you to select the files which you wish to resize. Well, I want all of them; I may have already prepared them in some directory by selecting them from various sources. So, file selection was just slowing me down.

Solution: Since I could not find a tool which would solve my problem, I made one.

Baires is an application that will resize all of your pictures that reside in a selected folder, and resize them to the same folder or another folder. Since it keeps ‘last used’ settings, next time resizing is just one click away.

Baires is an open source GUI application, made in Qt. It works on all platforms, but if you are not using openSUSE or Fedora linux, you’ll have to compile it from source. I have pre-compiled RPM packages for openSUSE 11.0 to 11.2, SLED/SLES 10 and 11, and Fedora 9-12, available for download.

You can download it from Baires download page

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The first question you may ask is why to compile kernel in the first place? Well, since all companies/groups that makes Linux distributions wants their product to work on as many machines possible, kernel is compiled in the most generic way possible. That means that it is compiled for low-end processor and it includes all possible modules that kernel has to offer. It is obvious that it is made to work with everything and not to work fast. For example, you will see in many Linux packages, kernel included, filenames have some suffix like i386, i486, i586, i686… It means for which processor they are compiled. i386 and i486 will work on i386 and i486 old processors respectively, and higher, while i586 will work on Pentium 1, and i686 on Pentium pro. So, if you have, for example, Intel Core2, and you use i586 generic file, this means that all of the new and fast instructions that your processor have will be unused. So, if we compile kernel for our processor, it will run much faster.
Read more…

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Gmail is not allowing you to make nice HTML signature by default, ones like you can make in your Thunderbird, Outlook or any other mail application. However, every problem has it’s solution. One way or the other. Let me mention, this tutorial works only for Firefox or Firefox-based browsers, like Flock.
So, let’s start… Read more…

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Dear AMD/ATI,

you said on your site that you needed to withdraw resources from development of older drivers. You said that it was necessary for you to focus all efforts on your new hardware. You said that it is for our own good, so we can have better experience.

Dear AMD/ATI, did you forget that video cards, that you called old, are 6 months old?
Did you forget that there are more than 10 million laptops in shops with yours, now unsupported hardware?
Do you know that all of that video cards does not work with Linux anymore?
Did you forget that number of Linux users is on the rise?

Dear AMD/ATI, why don’t you fully open your video drivers? There are people out there, who knows how to make it work. There are people who have time to make it work.

Dear AMD/ATI, I am very disappointed in your decision to forget me and the money I gave to have your product.

Dear AMD/ATI, I will never again buy laptop with your video card. NVidia didn’t open their driver either, but at least, their cards work and keeps working better with Linux.

Dear AMD/ATI, I am sorry, but you forced me to say ‘farewell’.

Once faithfully,
Emil Beli

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I have seen that many of the junior Flex programmers have problems in understanding how events in Adobe Flex works and how should be used. So, I find a good thing to explain events a bit more. I have already wrote about custom events in this article. It’s time to go a bit deeper. Read more…

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Few days ago, Mrs. Carla Schroder, managing editor of the Linux today magazine wrote a nice article on how software giants are considering users very stupid and turining its systems slowly into few button toys. She called it “Fisher-Price computer”, as Fisher-Price enterprise is the world’s biggest manufacturer of baby equipment and toys. And how, just maybe, Linux is for grown ups. You may read original article here.

I agree with her to a certain point, however, I will go deeper in why software giants considering users stupid. That’s because most of Read more…

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I’d like to share some funny lines I found in BBC’s article : MS Windows 7 goes on  a public test

Let’s start with funny quotes.

Windows 7 has been designed to be compatible with Vista so users do not have to invest in new hardware.

That is a good news, because you already bought new top-notch hardware to run Vista.

Windows 7 will also have “comparable system requirements” to Vista, which should mean that if your PC is capable of running Vista it will also run the new version.

If you still haven’t bought new top-notch machine, you should get it now!

“Vista is the fastest selling operating system of all time and, in percentage terms, enterprise moved to Vista faster than it did to XP [an earlier version of Windows],” he said.

Typography error: not ‘selling’ but ‘failing’.

“The timeline stated all along is that we are targeting Windows 7 within three years of of the launch of Vista and that would be the end of January 2010.
“We feel quite confident we are on trajectory that will deliver on that promise. But the exact timing will be based on quality.”

3 years for a fix? Confident? Not sure, though. May be 4 or 5?

“We were able to shave 400 milliseconds off the shutdown time by slightly trimming the WAV file shutdown music.

OMG, 400 milliseconds speed improvements! System will now shut down 0.4 seconds faster than Vista. Clearly worth to mention.

A version of Windows 7 will also be available for netbooks, but with some caveats.

The Windows 7 Starter Edition will have limitations on how many applications can be used concurrently on a machine in order to preserve performance.

Why don’t say publicly: 3. Windows explorer, Antivirus, and one of your choice. Otherwise can’t run on netbook (see quote above, where equalizes it’s requirements with Vista).

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