The folks over xda are doing a great job with all the new Windows Phone 7 hacks, but it seems that the HTC devices are the ones getting all the fun there.

For instance, the member xboxmod have found a way to install provxml on WP7, and hence total access to the registry, which allowed them to change the WP7 themes with custom colors, disable relocking the phone once unlocked with ChevronWP7 and a lot of other stuff.

On the other hand, a lot of the member have been asking if there is a way to do so on Samsung devices (Omnia 7 and the Focus). While we have access for read/write on the registry for Samsung devices, it is so limited compares to the provxml method on HTC devices.

I developed a simple app showing how to write the registry using the Samsung native DLLs, so hopefully some guys will pick this up till we come up with a full functioning method to manage the registry on Samsung Devices.

This is the link to the application (the XAP file with the source code), you find in the same thread a homebrew registry viewer too which allows the traversal of registry keys.

Happy hacking!

I worked lately on a simple application in OCaml that compresses files using the Huffman compression algorithms. The application is a showcase of how to use the Huffman’s Static compression, decompression algorithms compared to the dynamic (adaptive) algorithms (Vitter algorithm is used in the application).

The source code is available on github here https://github.com/martani/Huffman-compression--OCaml-. Although the code is not as elegant as it should be, we have used excessively the imperative features of OCaml for optimization reasons, especially for the adaptive algorithm where the tree changes with every introduction of a new symbol to code. So it is not really the best place for OCaml beginners who should be baptized with the functional beauty of the language before they see its evil imperative side :).

Although, It might be a great place too to see how the imperative and functional programming could be done on the same land, I don’t promise anything though, since we did the project in the hurry with just few days in our hands to prepare for exams and … you know the rest of the story.

So the project uses only the primitive OCaml modules, there is no libraries to install or anything, there is also an associated Makefile to compile and test the executable.

The Makefile has a make test directive to test the executable on a file named ”input” in the working directory (that you should include yourself obviously), basically it stars a static compression followed by a decompression then compares the original and the decompressed files to ensure the program works correctly. It does the same with the dynamic method too.

On a side note, we were surprised that while compiling the code with ocamlopt, we get sometimes programs that run 15x times faster than the same program compiled with ocamlc.

For a file about 5.8 MB we got some executing time around

   1: ***@****-Studio-1558:~/workspace/huffman$ make test

   2:  

   3: Testing... static huffman

   4: Compress:

   5: 1.18 user 

   6: 0.00 system

   7: 0:01.19 elapsed 

   8: 99% CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 5504maxresident)

   9:  

  10: Uncompress

  11: 2.26 user 

  12: 0.00 system 

  13: 0:02.27 elapsed 

  14: 99% CPU 

  15: <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Compressed = Uncompress ??>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

  16:  

  17: Testing... dynamic huffman

  18: Compress

  19: 8.11 user 

  20: 0.01 system 

  21: 0:08.13 elapsed 

  22: 99%CPU 

  23:  

  24: Uncompress

  25: 4.04 user 

  26: 0.00 system 

  27: 0:04.05 elapsed 

  28: 99%CPU 

  29: <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Compressed = Uncompress ??>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

As you can notice, the static version of the program is faster than the dynamic one, this is due to the fact that we optimized the the static version to use actual bits on compression / decompression, but we used lists to represent the bits (0’s and 1’s as actual 32 bit integers!!), so that was expected.

Link for the source code : https://github.com/martani/Huffman-compression--OCaml-