iPhone applications : Grid 5

BGP 0.4.3 released

grid5 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:39:00 +0000

In this release, I added support for 4-byte ASN in asdot notation.

Currently I’m traveling Seattle and San Francisco for business so I don’t have much time to spend on iPhone application development but I see some room for improvement for 4-byte ASN support in the app (automatic translation between asdot and asplain notation among others). So you can expect 4-byte ASN support in the app would get better.

As always, let me know if you have any issues, comments or questions.

Thank you,

Let’s see where your users are from

grid5 — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:11:25 +0000

Fellow iPhone developers,

If you have been downloading “sales report” from iTunes connect but your
Excel fu is somewhat weak like mine (we’re *iPhone* *developers* after all), you might want to continue reading.

I just wrote a quick n’ dirty Python script to parse reports and generate a pie chart utilizing Google Chart API, which tells you X % of your iPhone app Y download took place in country Z.

It might (or might not) tell you something about your application and give
you some idea on how to improve it.

The script is available at http://github.com/dxy/iphone-scripts/tree/master

I’m well aware that it’s ugly but it just does what I want.

Hope this helps you guys dominate the world.

Cheers,

Ahead 0.0.6 released

grid5 — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:36:25 +0000

Ahead is now available on the App Store.
It serves a sole purpose of reminding you how much time you have
ahead of you. I wrote this application so that I can rethink about a bigger picture (rather than just tasks at hand) from time to time because it’s so easy to forget that I have limited amount of time in my life.

Here’s the quote from Application Description in the App Store.

Do you want to know how many weekends you can spend with your daughter before her wedding next year? Are you anxious to know how many months you have to finish your art piece for that exhibition? Have you ever wondered how many cups of the first coffee in the morning you will have before you turn to 60?

Ahead is a really simple application which tells you how far you’ve come and how much you have yet to come. You set a “date of origin” and a “date of target”, then Ahead shows you how much time (in days, weeks, months and years) you have ahead of you.

This application, by the way, is inspired by Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address on YouTube

Text of Steve Jobs’ Commencement address (2005)

BGP 0.4.2 released

grid5 — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:26:53 +0000

This update fixes a bug which causes a crash in some cases where response from a route server contains routing entries with trailing “(aggregated by w.x.y.z)” in them.

If you find a bug, please leave a comment with what you entered (i.e. AS Number if ASNumber lookup or IP Address and Route Server if ASPath lookup). It makes a bug easily reproducible and that usually helps me fix a bug.

Thanks,

BGP now available to iPod touch

grid5 — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:11:02 +0000

iPod touch users,

I’m glad to announce that BGP is now available on iPod touch.

I just verified that BGP works on iPod touch as well as iPhone so I flipped a switch on the App Store and now it supports iPhone and iPod touch.

Please give it a try.

BGP 0.4.1 released

grid5 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:58:09 +0000

With this update, AS Number lookup feature falls back to one of RIR servers (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC or AfriNIC) when the ASN you typed in was not found on RADB whois server.

Generally speaking, data on RADB server is supposed to be up-to-date but there’s no guarantee that one organization is registered in RADB. On the contrary, it’s likely that any given AS Number (or the organization which possesses the ASN) should be registered in one of the RIR whois servers but its data could be somewhat out-of-date since there’s no immediate motivation for network administrators to update it unlike RADB data which also servers the purpose of keeping routing stable and secure.

Hence I chose the strategy of trying RADB first and then falling back to RIR.

BGP 0.4.0 released

grid5 — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:17:08 +0000

BGP (an application, not the protocol) is now available on the App Store.

It enables you to do the following tasks on your iPhone:

look up basic Autonomous System (AS) information, such as the name of organization, for a given AS number
run ‘show ip bgp ’ command on one of route view servers and display routing entries returned

AS Number lookup

BGP (again, the application, you know) currently sends its query to whois.radb.net so BGP 0.4.0 cannot handle AS Numbers which are not registered in RADB.
BGP 0.4.1, which is pending review by Apple, will try whois.radb.net first and if it fails, it falls back to a whois server of an appropriate RIR (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC, or AfriNIC) by consulting a local copy of IANA AS Number allocation table.

AS Path lookup

BGP connects to one of the route view servers and runs ‘show ip bgp ’ on it and displays the BGP routing table entries the route server returns.

That’s pretty much it for now. I hope you like it.

Update: Feb 6

I found out that there’s a review on the App Store in US reporting a crash during AS Path lookup. I (apparently) didn’t catch that issue while I was testing before uploading the app to Apple for review but, after trying various IP addresses as input, I found out a case in which a route server returned the result in a format that the app didn’t expect. I’ve fixed the code in my svn repository
a) not to crash due to data in an unexpected format (I should’ve done that in the first place.)
b) to appropriately parse route view result in that newly found format as well.

I will send the rebuilt app to Apple as soon as the version currently in review (0.4.1) is approved (or rejected for that matter). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Feb 11

I uploaded 0.4.2, which fixes a bug described above. It’s pending Apple’s review.