The /\/ TechDiary

Read the blog post, the shits finally hits the fan, and James Goslings own comment later – clear talk.

We have been hit by an old time viral like biological chain letter for parents. Rabbits. My wife took these photos when trying to “send 10 rabbits for 5 familie s ” not to break the chain.

I think she got away with it. I do not know whether it was petty of gourmet-rabbit desire.

windows sucks, copyright fidget 2001 (cannot find license, so please ask me to remove if not appropriately used)

I just got a new lenovo W510 with windows 7. I was kind of looking forward to trying it out, windows 7 was supposed to be a good experience. After 1.5 hours I finally got it to work decently talking to the network. During that first 1.5 hours I had to power windows 7 down 4 times because it had become irresponsive. I repeat, 4 times. All I had done was clicking on the network or wireless buttons in the task bar, and clicked a little around, trying to get it to find my wireless lan.

It turned out that my wireless LAN had been turned off, so it somehow got stuck looking for something, to say the least I am not impressed. An OS/GUI must not become irresponsive from just clicking around in network configuration menus.

The behaviour I saw what a window open, not reacting to input. When I clicked the taskbar, somewhere, it said the windows was irresponsive and offerend me to cancel or shut it down. No matter what I chose, nothing happened. I could not open the “start” menu, and I could now start the task manager (ctrl+shift+esc).

Now, with network on (both a cable and my WLAN turned on), it starts to work again. If turning obnoxious on me again, expect an update.

He’re a video of the behaviour, it is mean to show that no matter what I click, all I get is the non-effective popup. And when I try to bring up the task bar at then end, I still just get the popup. windows7 dead end

Today I experienced more or less the same problem as reported hereon iBricking when upgrading using iTunes under VirtualBox. I found a way through, though. The problem is that the iPhone “disconnects” from USB during the process, and reconnects again later. Some times with a different “id”. VirtualBox does not automatically attach the iPhone again, and one has to manually watch the sync process and discover that the iPhone has disconnected. If one is quick enough (not that difficult, iTunes seems to be retrying to connect to the iPhone quite patientely), to reconnect the USB device to the virtual machine, then the upgrade can work.

iPhone

It can help to have a command like the following running in a console window # watch -n 1 lsusb

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04b3:4485 IBM Corp. Serial Converter
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 046d:c505 Logitech, Inc. Cordless Mouse+Keyboard Receiver
Bus 001 Device 019: ID 05ac:1281 Apple, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2110 Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth Controller
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0483:2016 SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

The usb id’s changed something like

Recovery Mode:
xxx 1293 (I believe to remember).

Restoring
  Bus 001 Device 021: ID 05ac:1294 Apple, Inc.
Reboot (disappeard from usb bus)
Re-appearing as (you need to
Bus 001 Device 022: ID 05ac:1294 Apple, Inc.

during the restore to factory settings and restore from backup.

I did not receive emails, all of a sudden on my Mandriva postfix mail service. I think the reason was that postfix had not been restarted since last update, and when I restarted today (when adding my new domain wemobilize.dk) a bad change from last update got effectuated.

post delivery

The log said:

 status=deferred (connect to mail.efef.dk[/var/lib/imap/socket/lmtp]: No such file or directory)

http://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/info-cyrus/2007-September/026838.html gave the hint to disable chrooting the lmtp service, i.e. use:

lmtp  unix    -       -       n       -       -       lmtp

instead of

lmtp  unix    -       -       y       -       -       lmtp

in master.cf.

I wanted to quickly sketch a user interface, and usually I resort to pen and paper for the first iterations, but I wanted to try a RAD tool, to see if that was quicker. I had played with SWTDesigner and netbeans, but non of them were really easy to use for this purpose — to much tied to the generality of their tool kits (SWT and Swing, respectively).

I googled for linux and RAD and found Gambas – http://gambasrad.org/. It seemed well thought out, mature and well documented, so I gave it a whirl. In four hours I had had a working demo for the concept I had in mind, including images, movies (animated gif), sounds, timers, buttons and screens.

I used xvidcap to capture a move of the demo since it by default only produces linux executables (guess it should be able to export windows executables since it can use QT or GTK+, both of runs under windows, as far as I remember).

Recommended! Do you have any other favorite RAD tools?

Resources

• Gambas RAD
• Gambas documentation
• Gambas examples
• Gambas Movies Doc
• gambas beginners book

Had to hand in my company phone, so after a lot of struggle I managed to sync its contacts with vodafone360.com (catch, if attempting to move data from one phone with one phone number to another, then make sure one phone number only is defined at a time, otherwise the web interface can be confused. Also if something appears to have fake memory, log out and log in).

Another cath, the iPhone zyb app is not working with vodaphone360 even though you are redirected from zyb to vodaphone360. There is a separate download available, people sync it is called.

To factory reset the E70 I found that I had to type in **#7370# (http://my-symbian.com/s60v3/faq/showquestion.php?faq=1&fldAuto=7) and use the default code 12345 (…). The method of holding in #,3, and green button (dial) while togling power did not work (neither did replacing # with * do the trick).

When the iPhone arrived I did not really fancy it much. Circumstances would that a couple of weeks ago I had to acquire an iPhone 3GS due to some work, and hey — I suddenly understood what a revolution it was. You can easily find other phones and gadgets with better specs, but hey, this just works, and the appStore was a master stroke.

Anything wrong with it? Yeah, one thing bothers me enough to nag — that you cannot run stuff in the background. I understand their reasons – less stability to care about, and another upgrade possibility

A single occasion of blank/black screen on the iPhone 3GS was solved by resetting it (10 seconds on suspend on home simultaneously) – thanks to this post (I tried the buttons before googling, but did not realise that I should home them down for SOOOO long, and no, nothing got deleted.

The image of this post was taken with the iPhone and used in a tweet using twitterific.