Safari updates

After a lot of reluctance I decided to update Safari, actually this was by accident and I selected Safari when I meant to only select iTunes. This is part of my jail breaking adventure of version 3.1.2.

Anyway, after the update I noticed a new feature which appears when you open a new tab called Top Sites. At first glance this looked neat, it showed all these sites that I had frequented in a thumb nail... a thumb nail of what seemed to be the last page I had viewed....

I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing right now. There were a couple of sites which I didn't realise that I frequented that much to make it into my "Top Sites". I would love to see someone who frequents porn sites, imagine that...

One thing that did concern me was that it showed my facebook page logged in, it showed my netbank page logged in, it showed my gmail account... logged in. Of course this is only just an image of some sort, and the account is not accessible like that. But it did show quite a lot of detail if you did Control and scrolled up to zoom into the cursor.

I managed to find a way to turn this off using a command line, so to execute this you will need

to open Terminal and enter the following (and then press enter of course), you may need to close safari and re-open it to work:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool NO

If you decide that you want to re-activate this feature, just simply change No at the end to a Yes.

Thanks

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Upgrading and Jail breaking from 3.0.1 to 3.1.2

Well it seems that the IPA file that I have been trying to get on to my iphone requires 3.1+, unfortunately since my last jailbreak I've left the firmware version sitting at 3.0.1.

Now, 3.1.3 has just been released by Apple around the start of this month. But apparently this is nothing special, unless you have had previous issues with it. Also, a proper firmware patch is not available yet. But it looks like a loop hole has been found. Now it's just a matter of time I guess.

Anyway, I'm not getting much luck in getting information on upgrading from 3.0.1 to 3.1.2 in one go, and jail breaking it. There is a lot of information on the net about jail breaking, with many tools, tutorials, and promises. Some of these even contradict one another. So, it feels like I need to filter the fiction from the facts.

If anyone can assist in answering this, please do... need help with this one.

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Installing IPA files from PC to Iphone without iTunes

I've been trying to install a custom IPA without much success. No matter which tutorial that I followed, it all seemed to get a point where iTunes was involved. However, my issue was that I didn't want to use iTunes on my laptop, because it wanted to wipe everything (remove all the apps etc...).

I thought, there has got to be a way without having to use iTunes. Surely since the iphone is connected via usb or by ssh wifi, we should be able to install the IPA. Initially I used Air Sharing app to move the IPA from my computer to the iphone. This wasn't successful at all.

The good news is that, after reading countless number of tutorials/guides/forum posts etc..., I have found a method that suited my situation which I can share with everyone:

Since I had already jail broken my iphone, I had Cydia already installed and I had installed Installous (let me know if you need instructions on how to do this). Also, you need to make sure that your iphone is connected via WiFi.

1. Open Cydia and goto Selections (tab) > Networking > OpenSSH > then select Install
2. Download and open up a SFTP client (an FTP client that can connect via SSH). Since I was using a Mac I downloaded Cyberduck to use as my SFTP client. If you are using Windows then you can use WinSCP.
3. Using your SFTP client, login to your iphone: The server address for the iphone can be found in Settings > Wi-Fi > select the blue icon of your network and the IP address of the iphone can be found there. The login name is root and password is alpine. If this doesn't work then you may need to google this.
4. Once you have connected to your iphone, navigate to /private/var/mobile/library/Downloads. Copy your IPA file to this directory, this is the directory where installous stores the downloaded IPA files.
5. Go to your iphone and launch the installous app, then go to the Downloads tab and select your IPA file to install. You should be able to install this like any other IPA file.

Anyway, I hope you find this useful.

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The Time magazine iPhone app

Today I found the great joy of using the Time magazine's iPhone app. I've always been a fan of Time magazine, and have also thought of the magazine as reputable. But I have to confess that to date I haven't purchased a single magazine, I've only read bits of the magazine from friends and assorted coffee tables.

With this app, and the stories that it delivers to you make my train ride to work a lot more enjoyable.

I've tried some other news apps and have found their articles to be very brief. Whereas the Time magazine is offering full articles.

Fantastic, great work!

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Nexus one

I just saw the nexus one from google and htc. The specs of the phone look amazing, and it certainly comparable if not better than some areas of the iPhone.

At the same token, there's a key note just around the corner... and you know that Apple will not want to loose any market share. The rumours about the next gen iPhoneis that it will contain a multicore processor and a removable battery. But these are only rumours, which I hope will come true. If you remember that the iPhone 3gs, didn't really add much of a wow factor to the iPhone, since the OS added the functionality which was an upgrade.

I'm not an Apple 'fan boy', nor am I an Apple hater, I'm just a lover of technology. What I liked about the last several years of apple's resurgence is that they came out with technology with a bit of flair. I haven't seen any other company take it to the edge as well as Apple.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that technology that is released with a bit of flair will attract people to it. What's easy on the eye will be easy on the back pocket. What I saw from nexus one was anything but that, the specs look great such as the size, removable battery, removable memory, open operating system with plenty of API for developers to play with etc.... With all that said and done, at the end of the day the only ones who will know or like those features is the techno nerds... Like me. But for the greater public what they are interested in is the eye and simplicity . I don't think nexus one brings this to the table, the next generation of the phone might introduce some lessons learnt from htc and google.

My main gripes about nexus one is

a) some features of the phone is not easy to use as a phone. Keeping in mind at the end of the day the nexus one is meant to be a portable device, so you will need the functionality to work quickly and smoothly. Applications need to be well designed and not have every single functionaliy that you may use once in a blue moon, instead have the functionality that you will use every day. Android contains features, a lot of functionality, which leaves little for the developers. It also has functionality that had complex transitions which made it a little slower.

B) most of the functionality needs to be able to be operated with a single hand. Given the voice control was great.

C) the look... The look ... The look. Have I sad it enough in his post? Well if you haven't got the point yet, the nexus one is ugly! Enough said.

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New years festivities

Problem: A group of friends have decided to throw a new years bash. As part of the event, they wanted to record the event.

Solution: the solution that we came up with was to use mutiple webcams in each room, with a laptop/computer to support the recording. I manage to source some low cost web cams (microsoft vx-500) in the post christmas sales, then used my rig at home supplemented with a couple of laptops to record everything.

The plan is to have 15 web cams, 4 to stream to the web and 11 to record. Cyberlink powerdirector is going to be used to do the actual recording, in place of ulead video studio. The recordings will encoded into a div x format, since we will be there for about a week a couple of portable 1tb hard drives are taken along as well. USB extension cords will be used to possition the camera and the laptops/computers will be locked away in cupboards.

Ulead video studio will be used later to piece everything together.

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Flash media server installation

I'm currently working on a small project to stream media via a web site. This is the first project that I have done like this and I'm finding this extremely annoyig, the learning curve is steep.

The streaming server that we have chosen is Adobe Flash Media Server. This seems to be a good product but the streams via http, while running iis seems to be a problem. It looks like iis cannot serve on the same machine, which is a bummer since I needed a webserver on the same machine(remote administration applications).

However, there are ways to do this... Which I need to now attempt. If anyone else is interested in how to do this the please read tech note from adobe: tn_16499 (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/164/tn_16499.html)

- Posted using my iPhone

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