Android ListView

Watch this on YouTube

1:  package com.listviewdemo;  
2:  import android.os.Bundle;  
3:  import android.app.Activity;  
4:  import android.app.ListActivity;  
5:  import android.view.Menu;  
6:  import android.view.View;  
7:  import android.widget.ArrayAdapter;  
8:  import android.widget.ListView;  
9:  import android.widget.Toast;  
10:  public class MainActivity extends ListActivity {  
11:       String[] names = {"PRABEESH", "RUPESH", "RESHMI", "VINEETH","NISHA","ABHI","AJU"};   
12:       @Override  
13:       protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {  
14:            super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);  
15:            //setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);  
16:            ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1,names);  
17:            setListAdapter(adapter);  
18:       }  
19:       public void onListItemClick(ListView l,View v, int position, long id)  
20:       {  
21:       Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "You click "+names[position], Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();       
22:       }  
23:       @Override  
24:       public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {  
25:            // Inflate the menu; this adds items to the action bar if it is present.  
26:            getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.main, menu);  
27:            return true;  
28:       }  
29:  }  

Scams, scams everywhere

It's the scam season. Well, actually scams are always going around. Facebook is pretty popular to spread those scams, for example the Gina Lisa Facebook scam and the scam to have Facebook in a different color.

There's one recently that caught my attention:

"This is incredible"

Basically what happened here is that someone on Facebook clicked on the wrong link, and the event got automatically created. Consequently, all of his/her friends were invited to the event as well.

Of the 4 pages that showed up in the search results (there are many more), ~500 people clicked on the bit.ly links. Which is not very much, considering how many people got the invite. Most of the comments on the events were "What is this?", so this means most people realised it's fake.

The CNN logo is being (mis)used, probably to make it look more legit. When you click on the link, you get redirected through affiliates but eventually you land on the following page:

"Dr. Oz Miracle Diet"

Websites:
hxxp://consumerhealthnews9.org  - URLvoid Report
hxxp://consumerhealthnews6.com   - URLvoid Report

When clicking on any of the links on those sites, you get redirect to:
hxxp://ww90.thorizo.net  - URLvoid Report

More affiliates, more links to click on. The title for this blog post could also have been "affiliates, affiliates everywhere". 



Removal

If it seems that you have created the event, simply go to the event page, click the "wheel" icon and choose "Cancel Event":

Cancel the event

Be sure to also check your Apps, it's possible you allowed a malicious app to post & create things on your behalf:

Check your Apps

If you were invited to the event, simply ignore the message. You can also report the event as scam or spam by clicking on the Report button on the left of the event:

Report the event

Conclusion

To keep it short and simple:

don't fall for these types of spam/scam, most of the times it's pretty obvious it's fake.

If in doubt, send your friend on Facebook (or if someone sent you the link) via PM if he or she knows what this is about.

You can also use a linkscanner to verify the integrity of a link on either http://www.urlvoid.com or https://www.virustotal.com/

To get some information on a bit.ly (or other URL shortener services) link, you can use any of the following websites:
- http://www.getlinkinfo.com/
- http://longurl.org/
- http://www.longurlplease.com/ (includes Firefox extension)

To report a malicious bit.ly link use:
http://bitly.com/a/report_spam

Webmaster tools Structured Data Testing Tool - helping bloggers who care about SEO

This quick-tip introduces the Google Webmaster Tools structured data testing tool, which gives you a view of how your site looks to the search-engines.

Today I discovered that Google Webmaster Tools offers tools for testing the structured data on your website.

I haven't seen any announcements about it, just noticed it there when I was looking for something else - so I'm not sure if it's really new, just new-to-me, or I've been lucky enough to get a it before most people do.

You can find it here (or at least that's where I'm finding it):    http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Once you're at that page, you can paste in either an URL (your own, or someone else) or some HTML, press preview - and the system will show you how the meta-tags, open-graph tags and other Google-supported structured data on your site looks to Google.   This isn't important for many bloggers - but is very useful information if SEO matters for your blog.

And you can also "Select the HTML tab to view the retrieved HTML and experiment with adjusting it." - and so test out the effect of making changes to your template etc.

The results show you:

• A preview of how the URL looks in a Google search-engine-results-page.
• Authorship testing results - whether have a Google+ page or profile associated with the site
• Authorship email verifications results
• Publisher markup verification status
• An extract of the structured data

I don't even begin to understand what all the results mean.    And I'm not sure if we can do something about all results that are shown - eg   checking Blogger-hints-and-tips currently tells me that there are values for properties that I've never set (eg blogid and postid)  and also properties that aren't part of the schema, eg:

• Error: Page contains property "image_url" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "blogid" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "postid" which is not part of the schema.

But, much like the syntax-checker provided by Facebook for checking how successful you were at  installing Open Graph tags I'm sure that this will be a useful SEO diagnostic tool.

Lips of Suna 0.7.0 released

After a long hibernation a new version of the 3D RPG Lips of Suna was released today!

Take that you, ermm brown something?

More screenshots here, and there are quite a few great new features:

• New terrain system.
• More responsive controls.
• Real single player mode.
• New spell and enchantment systems.
• Many graphical improvements.
• Added limited scope game modes.
• Improved script performance.
• Extended character modeling support.
• User interface improvements.
• Improved mod loading.
• Major code cleanup.
• Several less interesting changes.

Looks like the developers are back at it full-force, so give them some encuraging feedback over here!

GSoC 2013 pushes SuperTuxKart forward!

If you follow our planet, this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code.

Not showing most of the new features yet is this nice video featuring the mascot of OpenGameArt.org as a new player character:



But their blog has many interesting technical details (and other screenshots + videos) to show off the new features.

So if you like to also contribute, or just want to praise the great work, have a look at their FreeGamer hosted forums :)