Thought Patterns

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?

Cameron Gadgets, Operating Systems, Software, iPhone Apple, iPhone, iPhone OS 4

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.

Cameron Operating Systems iso9660, jeOS, Linux, Ubuntu

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.

Cameron Networking, Operating Systems backup, cron, Linux, mirror, rsync, SSH

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

Cameron Networking, Operating Systems Copying Files, Linux, SSH

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.

Cameron Networking, Operating Systems DHCP, Netgear, WNR2000

Everyday I use my iMac and I am more and more convinced that Mac’s are indeed better than Windows based PC’s. Having spent most of my life being a PC nerd I feel I can say this without bias.

As a Web Developer I have to make sure all my websites work on all web browsers. I have to make sure that the site I have designed looks great in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE6, IE7 and IE8! Obviously IE is not available on the Mac so last year I decided to purchase Windows XP Professional and VMware Fusion. Taken from the VMware site about the product:

Seamlessly run your favorite Windows applications and devices, on any Intel-based Mac. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion is the easiest way to switch to Mac—letting you bring all of your Windows applications with you, making the most of your Windows software investment, while providing the perfect safety blanket for the switch.

What is great about VMware Fusion is that it is not entirely an emulator. The CPU is not emulated but instead uses virtualization. This means that Windows running under VMware is getting full power from the CPU. What is even better is as my iMac is dual core, VMware Fusion gives one core to OS X and the other to Windows. This results in almost now slowdown on the host or client operating systems.

VMware Fusion is built on the industry’s most mature, and powerful virtualization engine, under development for more than a decade. This powerful technology delivers the speed and stability you expect, with low impact on your Mac, letting you enjoy the full power of your hardware.

Using VMware Fusion allowed me to installed two copies of Windows XP one for IE6 and one for IE7/8. I then ran both versions of Windows XP at the same time each occupying one of OS X 10.5’s spaces (virtual desktops). That’s three OS’s at the same time! I was amazed at how smooth they all ran and how little impact running two XP’s had on OS X. I could switch between OS X, Windows XP (running IE8) and Windows XP (running IE6) seamlessly. I was even editing a large file in Adobe Fireworks in OS X and playing music in iTunes.

I challenge any off-the-shelf PC to do better. This is just one more thing that makes me realise why I could never go back to owning a PC.

My iMac’s specs:

• OS X 10.5.7
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• 320GB HDD

Cameron Operating Systems, Uncategorized, Web Development iMac, OS X, Virutalization, VMWare Fusion, Windows XP

Google have just announced that they are entering the Operating System market.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

This is sure to ruffle some feathers at Microsoft and Apple. It seems that it will first be targeted at Netbooks and then at full desktop PC’s.

Article: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

Cameron Operating Systems Google, OS

Cameron Operating Systems Apple, Mac

I know that my blog posts so far have been very Mac orientated, so not to break with tradition here’s another Mac related post. A colleague at work who’s a web/graphic designer gave me a link today to very neat program. This program shows a floating preview of incoming mail so that you can determine whether the message requires your immediate attention.

Mail.appetizer is a plug-in for Apple’s Mail and the current version is a beta, but so far a very stable one. There is also a panther version available.

Cameron Operating Systems, Software Mail.app, OS X