The New Freedom

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I have a lot of projects on my plate right now. So, my natural response is to start more projects. Thus, I present you with Port Scandroid, a port scanner for Android!

I didn’t have any proper internet for a while so I had to use my fancy new Android phone to do all my tubing. Android is a very developer and open-source friendly platform, and I didn’t have anything else to do without real internet, so I figured I’d try my hand at writing an app.

For those that don’t know what a port scanner is, it probably isn’t of any use to you. Do you remember in the Matrix 2 when Trinity had to do some hacking to get into a building? She uses a port scanner to get started.

Port Scandroid is based on JMap by Tom Salmon.

I learned some interesting stuff about programming for mobile devices and about 3G networks doing this project.

Lessons learned (in no particular order):

Check the quality of the code you are porting before you begin porting it.

If I had to do this again, I wouldn’t have ported JMap. It just isn’t very high quality code. I should have analyzed the way the code solves the problem and rewritten it. That way, I could ensure that the code was high quality, and I could also have avoided all of the hackery involved with moving from pure Java to the android application space.

3G data networks aren’t quite what they seem

I thought I had some major bug (I suppose it still might) where all results were returning false positives. I found that this wasn’t happening when I was connected over wifi. I asked around on the forums and the developers mailing list and apparently my mobile service provider is running some kind of proxy which accepts all connections and then does something to them before passing them along. There were some other threads about similar things happening where the actual traffic was modified by the proxy.

Artists release

This program isn’t that great. It’s pretty slow, there are some hacks with the orientation. But it works! And I guess that’s what counts in this case. I normally wouldn’t have released this to the public, but I read this blog post ontaming perfectionism the other day and decided I’d release it anyway.

Pixel art is fun.

I think about half of the time of this project went into making the icon. Apparently, I love doing pixel art. I’m still not totally happy with the icon but at this point I can’t afford to spend any more time on it. I wanted to use all Free software for this project, but unfortunately I’m still not satisfied (or, more likely, competent) with GIMP, so parts of it were made with GIMP and other parts were done using photoshop. (Right now, one of the comments on the market says “Icon looks too XTREME for what this app acctually [sic] does.” I think I’m proud of that.)

If you don’t get the reference, you need to watch more David Cronenberg movies.

The application is available for download here (.APK) and is available on the market.

The source code is available here (.tar.gz) and is released under the GNU General Public License.

There! It’s over with! Now I can get on with my life! I’m not going to be working on this anymore, but I’d love to look at any interesting bugs or fixes or patches or anything else you do with the program. Let me know!

Rich

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