My iPhone 4 Death Grip
July 14th, 2010
Has Apple gone too far making the iPhone simple?
Just installed iPhone OS 4.0 beta that was released to developers yesterday. It seems to be a great release and delivers on a lot of feature requests. One of the biggest new features was multi-tasking support. Multi-tasking is the ability to switch from one application to another without closing the current application. Basically when you switch apps they are kept running in the background or frozen until you return to them where you can pick up where you left off.
To activate this new multitasking feature in iPhone OS 4, one has to double click the physical Home button (the round button with a icon of a square) to bring up the new app switcher. Now up until now double clicking the home button brought up the iPod controls when music was playing. In this new release the popup iPod controls are nowhere to be found. Here are some other Home button combos:
- Click Home once (from lock screen) – Wake iPod
- Double click Home (from lock screen) – Bring up iPod controls
- Click Home once (from dashboard) – Go to first icon page / search
- Double click Home (from dashboard) – Display the new multi-tasking app switcher
- Hold Home – Voice Control
- Hold Home and press Lock – Take screenshot
- Hold Home and Hold Lock – Restart phone
Goodness knows where the accessibility options have gone which used to be triple click Home.
Now is it me or is by having just two hardware soft buttons (i.e. function determined by software) a bit to much on the sparse side? The fact that there are this many key combinations is slightly worrying. Can anyone remember all of these? It also does not help that Apple changes this combinations in each iPhone OS release.
Maybe it’s time that the next iPhone device has a few extra buttons?
Gadgets, Operating Systems, Software, iPhone
mount: unknown filesystem type ‘iso9660′
March 17th, 2010
If you are running Ubuntu jeOS and selected the minimal VMWare installation option you may find that you receive the following error when you attempt to mount a CDROM using the sudo mount /cdrom command from the command line:
mount: unknown filesystem type 'iso9660'
This is because the kernel does not have iso9660 (cdrom filesystem) support built-in. To fix the problem you just need to upgrade your kernel by running the following commands as root from the command line:
aptitude update aptitude upgrade
then restart your machine by running the following command:
shutdown -r now
Once you’ve restarted you should now find that you can mount CDROM’s by using mount /cdrom command.
Great guide to using Apache’s mod_rewrite
February 25th, 2010
Stumbled on these great guides for using Apache’s mod_rewrite:
http://www.easymodrewrite.com/guide-syntax
http://www.easymodrewrite.com/guide-advanced
One particular area of interest was the following rules:
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?page=$1 [QSA,L]
The above rules will pass all URI requests through index.php for handling unless the requested file or directory exists.
How to mirror your websites using rsync on Linux.
I’ve been given the task at work to mirror all of our websites on-to our local development server. I knew instantly that I needed to use something like rsync but was unsure how to use it. Also rsync runs over SSH and requires human intervention to enter the login password for the remote server over SSH. As I want the mirror to update daily I would need to setup a cron job but that could not work as the rsync command rqquires someone to type in a password.
After Googling I found this fantastic article at How to Forge: Mirror Your Web Site With rsync. It gives an extensive step-by-step guide on how to setup mirroring using rsync, configuring the servers so that rsync does not require a password when connecting to remote server, and how to setup the cron jobs.
How to copy files & folders from server to server in Linux
Found a fantastic guide at crucialp.com on how to copy files in Linux from one server to another using various techniques including SCP, rsync and tar (over SSH).
Check it out: How to Copy Files Across a Network/Internet in UNIX/LINUX (Redhat, Debian, FreeBSD, etc) – scp tar rsync
Netgear WNR2000 router not assigning IP address. How to fix DHCP so that it works.
January 13th, 2010
If you have a Netgear WNR2000 router like I do you might find that some computers and devices won’t connect to the internet. You maybe receive messages like the following:
Windows: Limited or no Connectivity
or
OS X: Alert: No internet connection
I had this problem for weeks, I tried updating the firmware to the latest version but this had no effect. The only way I could fix the problem was by restarting the router. The router would then assign an IP addresses but then a few hours later the computers would drop off the wireless and then when they try to reconnect the router would not assign them an IP.
After reading countless posts on the internet I found the solution to my problem in a post on the Netgear forums.
So what’s the solution?
Well it turns out that one of the settings for the DHCP service on the router defaults to the wrong value. Under the LAN Setup section of the routers web administration interface The RIP Version setting was set to Disabled for me and according to the documentation the default should be RIP-2, see below snippet from the routers own documentation:
RIP Version. This controls the format and the broadcasting method of the RIP packets that the router sends. (It recognizes both formats when receiving.) By default, this is set to RIP-2.
RIP-1 is universally supported. RIP-2 carries more information
Changing the value of the RIP Version from Disabled to RIP_2B under the LAN Setup section fixed the issue for me. Hope this helps.
First person to translate this wins blog kudos
August 6th, 2009
If you can read my latest blog post please post a comment with the translation for everyone else to see.
The hard disk you’ve been waiting for…
August 6th, 2009
Found this going through my photo library today. Quite amazing how technology has advanced.
Click to view larger version
A bargain at $3398!
You know when software is crap when…
July 29th, 2009
Today I was amazed. I was using Microsoft Office 2007 on my PC at work to document one of our products. I tried to perform a routine edit operation on some text when Office crashed. Kindly it re-launched and recovered my work. So I attempted to perform the same edit operation again. Guess what?… It crashed again. But this time not only did it restore my work but it also displayed this dialog:
Is it just me that thinks any program that needs it’s own version of Norton Diagnostics built-in and powerful document recovery is probably just a badly written piece of software? Why should end-users have to put up with this nonsense. No program should require a built-in diagnostic suite. I wonder what my Mum would make of this screen if it popped up when she was working on her essay?