4D Results for iPhone

Just visit gidapp.com/4 with your iPhone and you will see all the latest 4D results from Magnum, Da Ma Cai and Sports Toto displayed optimally for your smartphone - it's as simple as that!

gidapp.com/4 is a web application designed specially to detect iPhones, Androids and other such smartphones; and to display a mobile version of the web page for these extraordinary devices.

Even though it is simply a web site, on your iPhone, the web page will look and feel like an app.

Here is a screenshot that will help convince you to take a quick look.

photo by Harsha Krishnan

Visit 4D Results by GIDApp with your iPhone now, or scan the QR code below:

In case you don't already know this, we boast the fastest 4D results on the Net. Yes, our draw results are published regularly at around 7:39 p.m. most draw days and sometimes even as early as 7:32 p.m.!

Latest 4D Results for your Mobile Phone

Starting today, if you visit gidapp.com/4 with your mobile phone, the web site will detect that you are using a smartphone and redirect your request to a mobile-friendly version of the web site.

I didn't want to spend a lot of time tinkering with the design just yet. For now, it looks just good enough to be useful, and that is the priority right now. No need to zoom in or out, and just a thumb click to flip through the 3 pages.

Works great on iPhone; works just OK on Android™. And I'm sure I'll hear from Blackberry and Windows Mobile phone users if something is terribly wrong for them.

If you'd like to bookmark the site on your smartphone, you can bookmark gidapp.com/4/ but I'd really recommend using the complete URL (below) so you can skip all the detection and redirection steps in the request even if the detection and redirection usually happens quickly and without (a discernible) delay.

Get the Latest 4D Results by gidapp.com, optimized for smartphones, from here: gidapp.com/4/?m=1, or scan the QR code below to get the link:

Latest 4D Results by gidapp.com

Now you can get the latest 4D Results (for Malaysia) easily here from gidapp.com.

This was supposed to be my second Android™ application but I decided to finish developing a simple web site for it first. A web site will always have the widest reach and the largest audience -- that is the plain and simple fact about that.

So this is the new plan: Get a simple but fast web site up and running; a web site to quickly display the fresh, daily draw results from Da Ma Cai, Magnum and Sports Toto and have them all up in one place, on one page. For now, I will only focus on these 3 companies. This web site will live here: gidapp.com/4. Bookmark it! :)

For now, there is only one version of the daily draw results page, so if you visit this web site with your smartphone today, all you will see is a regular web page. Some time next week, if everything goes as planned, when you visit gidapp.com/4 with your smartphone, any smartphone, you will (hopefully) see a web page optimized for your typical tiny phone screen.

Actually, the mobile version of the web site is ready and done but I still need to run some tests before I enable it for the rest of the world. The ultimate goal of this little project of mine is still an Android application, of course. If I am lucky, there may even be a version for the iPhone!

Right, Harsha? :)

I hope you will take a look at my web site, and if you like what you see, please share the site with your family and friends who love nothing more than to check 4D digit number results daily.

Visit gidapp.com/4 every 4D draw day from 19:30hrs. onwards.

GIDApp No. 2

For my second Android™ project/application, which will remain unnamed for the moment, I will first need to gather some historical data from more than a couple of local (Malaysian) web sites. Some of this publicly available data go back as far as as 1985! It is insane to even contemplate fetching all this data by hand and so I had to come up with some kind of software to help me do that easily and quickly.

Previously, I would simply use PHP's fsockopen to quickly grab a web document or 2, or to masquerade as a browser, but this time fsockopen was simply not going to cut it. I needed something a lot easier to set up and one that could survive whatever robot traps there are on these kinds of sites usually.

Curl and Wget

When amateurs like me want to develop software that will masquerade as web robots or crawlers, the obvious choices are of course Wget and Curl. I have had limited experience with Wget, especially when setting up cron jobs on my web servers, but I have never had any with Curl. After quickly doing some research on both, I concluded the one more suited for my needs today is Curl.

It took me nearly 3 weeks, but today I have completed my "web robot" that successfully crawls all the necessary web sites, grabs any document I want, extracts just the information I need and puts it all, very nicely, into a MySQL database!

My custom web crawler, powered by PHP and Curl, is able to connect to a web site, manage cookies, send referrer data, request compressed web pages, navigate itself around a web site to get to the best parts, fetch the document containing the data I want, parse it, just extract the data I need, verify that it is correct, and save it all to the database! And it does this all at the rate of 1.5 minutes for one month's worth of data from one web site.

Considering that I have over 20 years of data to fetch, and that too from more than one web site, it is not bad at all, if you ask me! :)

At this rate, GIDApp No. 2 should be ready in 3 months. :)

Buying Cotton Swabs with GIDCompare

A couple of days ago, I was at the local pharmacy and decided I also needed to get myself some cotton buds. Cotton buds are so cheap that I am sure many of us don't even know the price we usually pay for one. I know I didn't. Like regular people, I'd usually just walk into a store, grab the first one that catches my eye or whatever is available on the shelf, pay, leave and not think about it until I run out again.

Since I have GIDCompare installed on my Android™ phone now though, nothing, not even cheap cotton swabs, is going to escape my scrutiny. :)

I must reveal right away that the results below are somewhat shocking and that I am quite disturbed by the price variances I found.

As you will see, if you buy a certain brand of cotton buds at a certain store in Malaysia and if you just happen to choose the wrong packaging, you can pay up to 196% more for the same product!

This particular brand of cotton swab comes in 3 different sizes/packaging. Let us compare the first 2 first:

i. 5x20 sticks @ RM2.90

ii. 2x120 sticks @ RM5.88

GIDCompare i vs. ii

GIDCompare Report i vs. ii

Using the 'move' button in GIDCompare, we'll move Package ii up into Item A and fill in the details of our 3rd package in as Item B.  Here is the third product packaged and priced in yet another way:

iii. 5x100 sticks @ RM4.90

GIDCompare ii vs. iii

GIDCompare Report ii vs. iii

All 3 packaging compared above contain the exact same product, but can costs a whopping 196% more if you pick/buy the wrong one!

From now on, I am going to use GIDCompare to compare unit cost prices for everything, and I mean EVERYTHING! :)

72 Hours Later...

We crossed a milestone in just under 72 hours.  Now the app, GIDCompare, is in the "10 - 50 users" category.

Thank God for kind and loving family and friends! :P

I am going to add advertisement banners to the other web sites like GIDForums and see how that will work out for the app.  I am sure there is a lot of potential there to convince the random reader to install the app on her Android device.

If you have a web site or a blog and would like to advertise the app on your web site, you can find some banners here.  The click URL is:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gidapp.android.gidcompare

Introducing GIDCompare

GIDCompare is my first Android application published to Google Play.

GIDCompare is a simple unit cost price calculator. An ideal tool for shopping, especially grocery shopping. Compare packaging sizes and compare prices to find the most value for your money. A shopping price comparison application to help you find the best buys.

The input fields of the application also accept valid math expressions (formulas,) e.g. "500+375" or "2*4.275" or "23*(1-0.25)".

Download GIDCompare from Google Play.

If you are reading this and you own an Android device, I urge you to install my little Android application and try it out. Please rate it if you like it. If you don't like it, or if you have ideas for me to improve the application, please leave a message here or contact me via email.

I owe a debt of gratitude to all the senior members of GIDForums, past and present, for inspiring me and teaching me everything I know about programming today. Without these great and generous human-beings, I would not even imagine developing an Android application all by myself.

Special thanks to Mr. Dave Evans - an intelligent man, a generous man, a worthy man. Just reading his forum posts everyday for the last few years turned me, a guy who has never had a day of formal computer training his entire life, into a guy who loves programming and getting good at it! :)

Visit the GIDApp Site. Image archive can be found here.