Category Archives: Geeky

Posts about geeky stuff: new technology, cool programs, accounts of computer problems I’ve solved, etc

So is the iPhone any good?

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As revealed in my previous post, I recently purchased an iPhone. The reason for this is that the Internet stopped working on my old phone, and since I needed a new portable Internet device anyway and the web being the iPhone’s forté, it seemed like the best choice for my requirements.

But is it any good as a phone? The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it’s not “great”… yet, a few more software updates ought to fix that. Missing features that, upon reflection, I never used on my old phone include voice dialling (I’m sure voice recognition systems are not tested on west country accents!) and video calling. The one feature that is sorely missing is a character counter in the SMS application, a horrendous omission now there are call plans without unlimited text messaging. The other feature that people talk about is the keyboard which is a joy to use—last week’s Heathrow Express post was written and edited entirely on the iPhone.

Debugging an iPhone

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While a Mac usually “Just Works”, when it does encounter an error situation, OS X often emits a a very vague message that can make debugging a long-winded process. For example, suppose you have recently brought home a shiny new iPhone and upon connecting it to iTunes you receive: “Could not connect to iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000001)”.

According to the web, it seems the most common cause of this is connecting the iPhone via a USB hub instead of directly to the computer, but I had no USB hub. Also, most people were experiencing this as a transient fault after regularly and successfully synchronising their iPhone for some months, while mine was a new connection—all very perplexing.

Fortunately, OS X is really UNIX in disguise, and so while the user interface tries to only display friendly messages, the technical details are being logged in the same way as any other UNIX system, hence I checked /var/log/system.log:

Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not mkdir /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown: Permission denied
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
store_dict_osx: Could not create /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/
6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist: No such file or directory
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not store pairing record at
/Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist

Aha!—a simple case of “permission denied”. (Which, lets be honest, to a non-techie person would be no less cryptic than the message that the GUI actually displays.) This did present another mystery though since permissions on ~/Library look normal:

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -ld Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

except for that little + sign at the end of the permissions string. A quick check on another mac indicates that this is in fact not normal, and means that the directory has an extended ACL (this is the same convention as in Linux) but unlike Linux, OS X does not have getfacl(1) and setfacl(1) commands for viewing and manipulating ACLs—use “ls -le” instead.

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/
 0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
 1: group:everyone deny delete

I have no idea how these ACLs were added to my directory, but let’s wipe them out:

yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 1 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 0 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------  42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

And my iPhone worked like a charm.

No more books?

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MacInTouch has an interesting review of Amazon’s electronic book reader, the Kindle. The review is based on long term usage of the device rather than the initial “test drive” articles which appear when a product is first released.

When the Kindle was launched, the Internet was alive with speculation as to whether this was an ipod-style revolution, or the sainted Amazon’s first mis-step. Since the release I have seen little press coverage, although as I learned from the review, the fact that the initial manufacturing run sold out in five hours and it has taken six months to come back into stock may have had something to do with it.

Netgear DG834Gv3, iChat and Linux

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I recently picked up a Netgear DG834Gv3 wireless router and modem on ebay for a very reasonable price. In order to make iChat video conferences work seamlessly (i.e. without having to configure port forwarding) I had to:

  1. Upgrade it to the latest firmware (V4.01.30).
  2. Toggle UPnP off and on (twice according to some forums).
  3. Disable port scan and DOS protection (Advanced WAN Setup).
  4. Disable SIP ALG (Advanced WAN Setup).

Although my Macbook was now very happy, the Ubuntu box would not connect to the wireless network using WPA encryption: SoftMAC authentication would complete, but the wireless NIC could not see any packets. The web suggests that PS3 owners have also experienced problems after upgrading to 4.01.30 and the only answer is to downgrade, 4.01.20 being the last known “good” version. Sadly Netgear have removed all but the new broken and a very old versions of the firmware from their support page, but the source code is still available and the tar.bz2 contains a pre-built image so you don’t even need to compile it.

At this point I am back to square one since iChat will no longer receive incoming video requests from people behind NAT devices unless I use manual port forwarding.

Firmware 4.01.37 has been released. I have not tested this but it claims to fix the incompatibility with the Playstation3 so hopefully it should also work with Linux machines.

No spots on this Leopard

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Leopard is the product name for the fifth release of Apple’s OS X operating system. I was pretty happy with the previous release, so apart from the automatic backup feature known as “Time Machine”, I was unsure as to how much benefit I would derive from the upgrade but it turns out that the little things really do make a difference:

  • The visual appearance has been subtly modernised, keeping OS X at the forefront of sexy computing.
  • The Front Row app, combined with the remote control supplied with new Macs, provides a simple and easy interface to view movies or show off photos. You can do the same with iPhoto and iTunes separately, but Front Row just seems less fiddly… (especially if you install the awesome Perian package so that FR can play additional codecs such as Windows .avi files).
  • Mail now has this awesome feature called data detectors which makes turning emails into calendar events or phone numbers to address book cards a one-click process: click on the phrase “let’s meet Thursday 12th at 1pm” and the little drop down menu can either create a new iCal event pre-filled with the contents of the email, or just show you your calendar for that time.
  • In a similar vein, QuickLook (the ability to rapidly preview files just by hitting the space bar) is the sort of time saving feature that you really miss when using lesser operating systems.
  • There is an ssh-agent included—no more third-party apps required to manage my ssh keys!
  • From reading Mac websites there is this perception that “.0″ releases are not for the faint hearted and non-techies should always wait for “.1″ before upgrading. I had always regarded this attitude as a little paranoid, but it has to be said that in the three weeks I was running 10.5.0, the Mail application crashed on me twice and once the window manager became completely wedged. Happily 10.5.1 has been a return to form and I have had no problems since.

Of the headline features, Time Machine and screen sharing within iChat are probably the most impressive and a key driver for those of us who are called upon to do Mac tech support. When it works, the implementation of the screen sharing is impressive, but iChat struggles when both computers are behind NAT devices. Similarly, Time Machine mostly “just works” but the default configuration has the caveat of trying to backup everything not included in OS, thus requiring a hard disk at least as big as the one you are backing up. If I trim the configuration to only backup my home directory then I seem to be able to get a couple of months of snapshots onto a partition that is just double the size of my data. Disappointingly, backing up over a network is requires an unsupported hack so hopefully a future update will enable this; it’s probably also worth noting that while backup and restore over the air worked, it was incredibly slow so doing the initial transfer via wired ethernet is a good idea.

Macbook not putting itself to sleep

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Buried in the changelog of the latest NetNewsWire release:

Sleep
Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.

Which is interesting because for some time now my macbook has not been putting itself to sleep after the correct period of idleness (although a manual command to “sleep” worked fine). After shutting down NetNewsWire and leaving my machine idle for 5 minutes, it promptly went to sleep of it own accord. It would be interesting to know the technical details of this one.

“Unmissable” TV

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I was prepared to be underwhelmed by the BBC iPlayer but after catching the last 5 minutes of “Top Gear: Polar Challenge” I decided it might be fun to watch the beginning. The quality of the flash video is surprisingly good—in fact, good enough for full screen on my 13″ macbook—although it is a shame that you can only watch programmes online.

I have often wondered why BBC content is not available (for sale) in iTunes, but since Apple seem to be about to announce time-limited offerings, making BBC iPlayer content available via iTunes would be a “killer app”, and provide a big sales driver for the much-maligned Apple TV.

Towards truly pervasive computing

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With iPhone stories pretty much drowning out all other news on the Internet, it seemed worthwhile to watch the keynote and see this marvel firsthand. Based on that presentation, it’s impossible to know how well the iPhone will perform as a telephone (I noticed that Steve Jobs “fat-fingered” the keyboard on several occasions during the demo), but that’s one impressive iPod and mobile Internet device.1

So, the real point of this post is that I recently obtained a new mobile phone, replacing the Nokia I reviewed 12 months ago. The update on that review is that someone I know obtained an identical model three months later which had a significantly sharper display, and Apple did add support for synchronisation with iSync, but it’s still not easy to synchronise under Linux. Both of my previous phones I had used for nearly two years, and had only upgraded when there was I felt there was a significantly better product available. However, this phone just wore me down with its user-unfriendliness: text and phone calls were easy, but anything beyond that (especially configuration) was just irritatingly difficult.
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  1. There are many features of the iPhone that could be described as “controversial” and could be discussed here. However ultimately the significance or irrelevance of these cannot be determined until the iPhone is actually on sale and in the hands of the general public.[back]

Sharing a Mac Printer with a Windows PC

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I felt I had to blog about this because I’ve tried to do this twice in the last 12 months and each time the Internet has given me some wrong information that has led me to spend a frustrating hour puzzling as to why it didn’t work.

To allow a Windows computer to print over the network to a USB printer connected to an Apple Mac (step 5 is the important bit):

  1. Configure your printer as normal on the Mac.
  2. Turn on printer sharing: System Preferences->Sharing
  3. On the Windows PC, install the Bonjour printer wizard from Apple.
  4. Run the wizard and select your printer.
  5. When prompted to choose a printer driver, choose the default of generic/postscript. If you attempt to use the Windows printer driver which came with your printer, the PC will think that the job has successfully been sent to the printer, but the job will in fact disappear into the ether!

And you are done — Macs are that easy. :)

Gmail: Even better than you thought

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Whenever you give out your email address to a commercial entity, there is always the risk that they will pass it on to some evil spammer. Assigning customised email addresses to a company is a great way to keep tabs on which ones are spammers, and I discovered today that Google’s Gmail allows you to do this using a ‘+’ after your primary email address:
Gmail: Help Center – Can I receive messages at a different Gmail address?

With Gmail’s interface streets ahead of many desktop email clients I have used, and their other applications gaining cool features like weather reports integrated into your calendar, the desktop application may really be an endangered species.