Advantage of Research and Development

This blog is coming out of the recent conversation with my brother. He is a research scholar and holds Ph. D. in Environment Science. He usually write Research Papers which are published in renowned Environment Science Journals worldwide. He came up to me and said.

Brother : Hey, today my 10th research paper published in Environment Science Journal

Me : Oh good, I am also an author of technical book. (I authored a book for Packt Publishing) (You know, the jealous factor is very common between siblings)

Me: How many pages in research paper?

Brother: It's of two pages.

Me: Is that it? My book is of 70 pages and it's sold at $10 USD per copy.

Brother: My research paper is published in a Journal which is sold at $2000 USD per copy and it's subscribed by global universities and organizations. 

Me: Ohh Pooh... (Speechless)

Well yes it was a money factor which I was considering but later on I realized that yes my small book is nothing compared with two pages of research paper. It's all about content that matters. A content of two pages of research paper is far more valuable than content of 70 pages of a technical book. Because that content is coming out of hard work, that includes months of research and experiments and lots of other things.

R&D is key factor of innovation in all fields. Without R&D we would not have great things which we are using right now in all the fields. Research and Development plays a critical role in the innovation process. It’s essentially an investment in technology and future capabilities which is transformed into new products, processes, and services.

Research and Development departments are common in many larger companies, especially those working with newer products or technologies. While research and development work can be instrumental in creating new products or adding features to old products, the work that the department does is more complex than simple innovation.

Moral of the story is : Do not under estimate Research and Development and do not show off your work to Research Scholar.

.htaccess Doesn't Work in Amazon AWS EC2 Instance with Ubuntu

Recently I was configuring Laravel application in Amazon AWS EC2 instance which was having Ubuntu and Apache installed. The problem was htacess file was not working so Laravel routes were not working. Instead of parsing laravel routes it always shows error URL not found.

The problem is by default in apache installed on ubuntu doesn't have .htaccess enabled so first you have to manually enable it in config file and restart apache.

Here are the steps.

1) Login to your EC2 instance with SSH.

ssh -i "Yourkey.pem" ubuntu@yourpublicip

2) Enable Mode Rewrite, this is just incase if it's not enabled.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

3) Go to following directory.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

If you use LS command here you will see following file.

000-default.conf

That's the file with default apache configuration which are applied to your sites in /var/www/html folder.

4) Open this file for editing.

sudo nano 000-default.conf

5) Add following lines after DocumentRoot /var/www/html line.

<Directory />
     Options FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/html>
     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
     AllowOverride All
     Order allow,deny
     allow from all
</Directory>

6) Save the file and restart the apache.

sudo service apache2 restart

that's it and now your .htaccess file will work and your laravel application will start working.

Cordova FacebookConnect Plugin Not Working in iOS 9 and iOS 10

Recently in one of my Cordova project we have Connect with Facebook functionality where I have faced certain issues to make it working in iOS 9 and iOS 10 so in this blog I am going to explain those issues and how to resolve it.

1) Which Plugin to Use

There are two plugins if you search for Cordova Facebook Plugin. Following are two links.

GitHub - Wizcorp/phonegap-facebook-plugin

GitHub - jeduan/cordova-plugin-facebook4

The first plugin is older one and it works good till iOS 7 and iOS 8 and cordova 4.0 iOS but it does not work for iOS 10 and Cordova 6.0. If you use that plugin you will usually get issues like you will not be redirected to Facebook in mobile safari or after authentication, it come back to your app and nothing happen.

So my recommendation is to go for second Plugin, which works fine with latest cordova and iOS 9 and iOS 10.

2) After authentication, it come back to your app and nothing happen.

This issue is observed in iOS 9 and iOS 10 for both the plugins. That's because of LSApplicationQueriesSchemes introduced in iOS 9 on words.

There are two URL-related methods available to apps on iOS that are effected: canOpenURL and openURL. These are not new methods and the methods themselves are not changing. As you might expect from the names, “canOpenURL” returns a yes or no answer after checking if there is any apps installed on the device that know how to handle a given URL. “openURL” is used to actually launch the URL, which will typically leave the app and open the URL in another app.

Up until iOS 9, apps have been able to call these methods on any arbitrary URLs. Starting on iOS 9, apps will have to declare what URL schemes they would like to be able to check for and open in the configuration files of the app as it is submitted to Apple. This is essentially a whitelist that can only be changed or added to by submitting an update to Apple.

So you have to WhiteList all the Facebook App Schemes in your info.plist file. Following are schemes you have to add.

<key>LSApplicationQueriesSchemes</key>
<array>
    <string>fbapi</string>
    <string>fbapi20130214</string>
    <string>fbapi20130410</string>
    <string>fbapi20130702</string>
    <string>fbapi20131010</string>
    <string>fbapi20131219</string>  
    <string>fbapi20140410</string>
    <string>fbapi20140116</string>
    <string>fbapi20150313</string>
    <string>fbapi20150629</string>
    <string>fbapi20160328</string>
    <string>fbauth</string>
    <string>fbauth2</string>
    <string>fb-messenger-api20140430</string>
</array>

3) There was an error making the graph call

I spent almost an hour to solve this issue. Everything was configured but when I try to make graph API call to get basic profile, it fails every time and the reason behind this was in graph api call IO have space after each field.

facebookConnectPlugin.api("me/?fields=id, first_name, last_name, email",["public_profile"],
function (result) {
},
function (error) {
});

As you can see above there was a space after each field. So to make it working. Remove that space. It does not affect in Android but it does not work in iOS.

facebookConnectPlugin.api("me/?fields=id,first_name,last_name,email",["public_profile"],
function (result) {
},
function (error) {
});