It was an enjoyable and extremely educational experience, and I am grateful to the entire publishing team that relentlessly tugged me along and kept me on schedule for more than a year.

More information and of course to get your hot little hands on a copy:

http://www.packtpub.com/iphone-applications-tune-up/book

Traveling at the moment, but when I get some additional time and can sit down for more than a few minutes, I’ll put together a few details on the overall experience; even point out some efficiencies I discovered and traps I blindly walked into.

Who this book is for

To sum it up, it’s an action-thriller set in the medieval age of war-torn eastern Europe filled with empirical struggles between feudalism and aristocratic ideals. It’s not well known that Objective-C played a pivotal role in the dismantling of the populous western caste system responsible for the stagnant performance of current day mobile platform development.

I don’t want to give away too much, but there is a romantic interposition towards the end of the book that will leave readers highly suspicious and apprehensive of Android’s luring siren calls.

… but more seriously, details are below.

iPhone Applications Tune-Up
High performance tuning guide for real-world iOS projects

Details and pre-order @ Packt Publishing: http://loyal.ms/gwGfAa

Book description
The best iPhone applications are the ones that demonstrate smooth, fast, efficient and optimal performance. An application should be designed to run at 200 mph, but operate just as smoothly as it would at 5 mph. Developing an application that supports such a wide range of performance needs is no small task and requires an understanding of the basic elements of performance as well as a strong strategy.

This book covers every aspect of tuning, optimizing, and squeezing every last bit of performance out of an iOS project. From application architecture and design to development and deployment, readers will be guided through the entire process of tuning an iOS application for high performance.

Every line of code presents an opportunity to improve upon the effective performance of an application. This book begins with the fundamentals of performance, demonstrating the impact poor performance can have on the success of an application. Apple’s App Store is riddled with applications that fall just short of success and it isn’t too much of a stretch to attribute many of these failures to a lack of optimization. Readers will be lead through each chapter, learning every aspect of performance tuning from simple syntax tips and tricks to advanced process management, and network and memory optimizations.

In addition to theories, syntax, and detailed code examples, readers will learn to take advantage of Apple’s powerful performance measurement and benchmarking utilities to identify the specific components of an iOS project that might need attention.

Learn the fundamentals of performance driven development to remedy existing performance related issues or design high performance iOS applications from start to finish

Who this book is written for
This book is for iOS application developers who are interested in resolving application performance bottlenecks in both new and existing Xcode projects. Readers should be familiar with the basic concepts and principles of iOS development, Objective-C syntax, and use of Apple’s Xcode development environment.

About
This is the first (to be published) book of its kind and is very much focused on Objective-C tuning practices for all iOS platforms, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and iPad 2. Performance tuning is a recipe that includes some common sense, a little bit of obvious and of course generous helpings of technical know-how and all around development experience. No matter the size or depth of an iOS project, performance can play a key role in an applications success or failure on the market. iPhone Applications Tune-Up is designed to aid developers in squeezing every last bit of performance from every aspect of an application. A lot of experience and research has gone in to producing a book that highlights the areas in which performance gains are most critical and even commonly overlooked.

—

I have an absolute passion for technology and Objective-C represents this deep focus most simply because it encompasses the highest levels of programming technology and advancements in development languages. iPhone Applications Tune-Up will be the result of more than 1000 hours of my personal time; authoring, researching and generally staring at the screen. At this point I have only a couple of chapters remaining before the re-write and finalization work begins. It’s been a long and enjoyable road up to this point and I look forward to its final release.

Now, go pre-order it! http://loyal.ms/gwGfAa

Enjoy.

~Moses

I recently printed the entire book up to this point and was very surprised at the stack of paper that sat on my desk, and almost couldn’t remember writing all of it. Will be interesting to hold the final book in my hands and realize the whole thing came from these little fingers.

With 8 chapters under my author belt, here are a few lessons I have learned along with a selection of important observations.

• I can put an entire chapter together in 48 hours.
• I can’t really put an entire chapter together in 48 hours.
• Procrastination is still one of my personal characteristics.
• I absolutely loath Microsoft Word.
• Writing is just as much learning as it is teaching.
• its, it’s, effect and affect still haunt me.
• More screenshots equal less typing.
• Writing code at this point is still more enjoyable.
• My best writing is done early in the day before my mind gets tired.
• Most of my writing is done late at night after a long day of coding.
• Printing and reading each chapter helps find mistakes.
• Microsoft Word’s spell checker doesn’t recognize iPhone.
• Micro outlining is by far the best way to prepare a chapter.
• Don’t print chapters with an ink-jet, buy a laser and save your wallet.
• Auto-editing between brain and fingers gets easier to control.

… this is my short list.

With chapter 8 submitted and chapter 9 not due for a couple of weeks, it’s time to relax a bit and let the mind prepare for a much more technical chapter 9.

Enjoy.

~moses

As we’ve been commenting on over the past several months, Aanval v6 is a major interation and one we are sure greatly improves information security efficiency and security event management.

Although now would seem an appropriate time to catch up on sleep, we have a lengthy list of enhancements and features planned for v6 and will continue to aggressively roll out new builds following our release early, release often methodology.

The interface for Aanval v6 was completely re-written in Flex 4, scrapping the entire previous Flex 3 interface. The backend remains MySQL / PHP, however dozens of updates and optimizations were made to improve performance and stability.

Aanval is quite a large project, comprised of several hundred thousand lines of code. A major portion of time for this release was spent working on the interface (Flex 4). If you follow me on Twitter, you’d have witnessed a bit of my frustrations with the latest releases of Flash Builder (the unstable, Eclipse based pile of junk). But I’ll save all of that joy and excitement for another post.

A couple of more notable features of Aanval v6, besides the new multi-tasking interface are the GeoLocation displays and the re-introduced event correlation system.

• GeoLocation with integrated Google Maps is now available in both real-time and search displays to provide a global, visual reference of event attack sources.
• The event correlation system has been re-introduced with an updated interface to group and rank events that may be related to one another.

For more information on Aanval v6, including upgrade details, new license purchasing, etc – see  aanval.com

A short list of a few of Aanval v6′s new features and enhancements:

• All new live GeoLocation (Google Maps)
• All new event displays
• All new event correlation
• All new event browser
• All new live even monitor
• All new frequent X displays
• All new report management
• All new action management
• All new signature management
• All new datastore management
• All new policy management
• All new snort management
• All new syslog filter management
• All new installation and update system
• All new multi-tasking interface
• All new inter-display interaction
• All new look and feel
• And much… much, more
• Dozens of bug fixes are included, too numerous to list

A selection of screenshots, a few of these may be early release or even beta.

Aanval Snort & Syslog Intrusion Detection and Correlation Console

Aanval is the industry’s leading web-based gui for snort and syslog intrusion detection and correlation. Government security and defense organizations from more than a half dozen countries, educational institutions from around the world, global financial organizations as well as space exploration and military weapons manufacturers rely upon Aanval as a part of their security infrastructure.

http://www.aanval.com/

Enjoy.

~moses

I’m very much excited about the opportunity and look forward to the next several months of ‘book author boot camp’. Some close colleagues of mine were kind enough to expose me to a few of their authoring experiences… they weren’t convincing enough, I still signed a contract.

Performance, efficiency, tuning and literally squeezing the most out of an application (on any platform) is something I enjoy quite a bit. Not only am I looking forward to putting this on paper, the research and learning will be one of the most enjoyable aspects of the entire authoring process.

Of course, the excitement wears a bit thin when I think of the potential work load involved with writing a good sized technical book in as little as a few months. This, along with operating Remote Assessment, running Tactical FLEX and driving Aanval will make for some interesting scheduling. Add development projects for a 1/2 dozen languages, speaking engagements, travel, continuing education and of course family and personal life. “This is a lot of work.” — very much sums it up.

The positive is, I’ve always had an interest in becoming an author and educating myself on the publishing process. This is great opportunity to find out just how deep my interests go.

It isn’t too often that you are approached to author a book, well… In my case, it was nil until now. Regardless, it wasn’t an automatic yes. A lot of pondering, prayer and planning went into the decision. Of course, I am not the only one affected by signing such a time consuming contract.

Our little family already exists within a sphere that is unlike any we know. Dynamic may be the best word to describe how we operate and it appears, there won’t be a change for quite some time. It’s tough to balance a schedule like ours and remain productive as well as healthy, but I think we do alright and we’re only getting better.

Without a doubt, I’ll be posting more about the book and the authoring process over the next several months.

And until I know different, some serious thanks and appreciation to Packt and their staff for the opportunity. Here we go.

Enjoy.

~moses

It just makes me so happy!

~moses

We are extremely excited to have published the very first App of this kind, as well as firmly step once again, ahead of Aanval competitors by providing our customers and users with native iPhone and iPad access to live Snort and Syslog intrusion detection events.

Aanval iPhone is available in the iTunes App Store and is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

iTunes > Aanval iPhone direct link

Aanval iPhone functions for both the free limited version of Aanval as well as commercially licensed versions. It does require the latest release of Aanval 5.5 to function properly, so ensure you are up to date.

We have an extremely long list of features and enhancements planned for Aanval iPhone and customers should expect rapid updates over the next several weeks.

If you are a current Aanval user or customer, grab this little App and enjoy live event data on the go.

If you are not yet using Aanval… then go download and install it. It is available as a free single sensor version, or a fully licensed and supported commercial version.

Additionally, we sincerely appreciate all beta testers who took the time and effort to participate in testing Aanval iPhone prior to release.

Thanks again and enjoy.

~moses

After the excitement of this morning / afternoon (FedEx delivering the iPhone 4, 2 days early) and the craziness of snapping a dozen pictures and videos for all to see, I jumped into Xcode and pushed out some test App’s to the new iPhone 4.

Increased memory and processor along with the new screen makes for a fun new playground!

And as you would expect, debugging and deploying to the new device went as smooth as it could have. Just a few clicks to kick the 3GS out of the system and we were deploying.

Now to get back to being productive and wrap up a beta of this Aanval iPhone App.

~moses

This was the result of a little playing with XMLSocket along with PHP to create a multi-client socket server for Flex to interact with.

Initially I only wanted to test the simplicity of Flex’s ability to make simple socket connections and pass data, however one can easily see how much fun you could have here. *scratches brain*

Left side is simply telnet’ing to the socket server on the remote host.

Right side is the Flex application which connects to the same remote socket server.

Then demonstrating basic Reflection using getDefinitionByName with ClassFactory to dynamically instantiate display objects and move them about the stage.

~moses

@umAndy (Andy Powell) dropped a tweet a few weeks ago with my name selected as the winner for a free ticket to Flash Camp Atlanta 2009.

Flash Camp Atlanta is a one day event focusing on the Flash platform, Flex and Actionscript. The camp provides tracks for both beginners and experienced developers.

Flash Camp Atlanta 2009 – Speakers and Sessions

Flash Camp Atlanta 2009 – Tickets

These surprises are always nice, and I do very much appreciate it. I hadn’t planned on attending, due only to my schedule being so full for the end of the month, however I’ll give moving things around a shot and see if I can’t get away for the day.

For those who might not know who Andy is (you should), drop by his blog and get familiar.

http://www.infoaccelerator.net/blog/

Thanks again for the ticket!

~moses