Adam Horvath's blog

At generally unmotivated companies, why can you find more motivation and talent in the lowest ranks than in management? Not a number game It obvious that at large, unmotivated organisations there are a lot of hidden gems: talented people at the lowest ranks who somehow just don’t belong there. One of the countless examples would be Nokia where, even when the company went into free-fall and was losing market share by the day, some of the best engineers in the world were still working there – mostly on the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder. However, as we start to look up that ladder, we find fewer and fewer of these world-class talents; some might argue that this is just a numbers game. If there are 100 people on one rung of the ladder, then the next rung only has around 10 people, so it’s 10 times less likely to find someone exceptional there. That argument is incorrect. In an ideal setup, the selection criteria for attaining that next level should be 10 times more stringen...

I’ve recently purchased a Lenovo K3 Note from Gearbest and it came with preinstalled malware and bloatware. Here are the things I had to do to bring the phone into a usable state. Root it Lot of the malware was preinstalled system apps which cannot be removed without root mode. I’ve rooted using the CWM (ClockworkMod) method , installing the CWM recovery image then installing SuperSU. The KingRoot method should be easier but didn’t work for me. Remove apps - Bloatware I’ve used Titanium Backup because I wasn’t sure which app would break the phone if removed. I removed the following preinstalled apps (that I remember): BSPTelephonyDevTool 1.0 DU Batter Saver 3.9.9 DU Speed Booster 1.4.0 Mcube Mobile Assistant 3.0.4.0835 Power Manager 1.1.287.150113.c3631eb SYNCit 4.0.54 Theme Center 2.70… UPDATE: needed for ringtone selection User Experience 4.4.1 Remove apps – Malware that was display popup ads The malware that was hijacking my browser was hidden in a modi...

The browser hijack style malware is getting pretty widespread on Android devices, especially the cheaper ones that can be purchased directly from overseas and come with pre-installed malware. Let’s see how to find the adware app that is causing the issue. The symptom is usually the same: when the web browser is opened it is redirected to an unknown webpage advertising something totally useless. In some cases a virus infected APK Android package gets downloaded in the hope that it will get installed. The app that is causing this issue is waiting in the background for the browser process (either Chrome or Android Browser) to start. When it does it asks it right away to display a webpage. The intent Android natively supports communication between apps, which in itself is very useful, for instance a webpage can be opened from the email client. The code is pretty straightforward too: Uri webpage = Uri.parse(url);     Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, web...

Apple recognised that Objective-C is not only not modern but very much not appealing to developers who are used to modern languages. As this can be a barrier to entry it was the right choice to introduce a new language called Swift. While the language is similar to most modern languages, it has its own quirks. On the one hand it's somewhat debatable why did Apple invent a brand new language instead of using another existing one, like Google did with Java for Android, on the other hand Swift is actually a well thought and fun to use language. Unlike with Google's own Go, I did not miss anything from the language as I was building my app with it. However, it's worth to note that unlike Google's Go, it's not just a language with a compiler, it's a fully supported platform: every OSX and iOS API can be called using Swift, XCode fully supports Swift (eg.: code completion), and most of online Apple Developer documentation is translated to show both Objective-C an...