I love my Mac but it’s not very “clean” when working on network shares. If you work in a heterogeneous environment and you connect your mac to network shares, people may complain about the Mac leaving what some folks call “mac dust”. Files like .ds_store and files that have ._ prepended to them with otherwise identical file names to actual usable files.

OS X does this and it sucks. During the creation of a file on a non-HFS+ filesystem the mac leaves this garbage. When other macs look at the drive they don’t display these files. When other computers (Windows) look at the drive they see all of this “dust” and it’s confusing because the garbage has the same filename as the real file prepended with “._”.

The .ds_store files are easy to get rid of. Fire up terminal on the mac and enter defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

The “resource forks” or _. or _.AppleDouble files are harder to get rid of and were the larger problem for me. I couldn’t find a way to tell the mac to stop this bad behavior. Nothing on the web for a defaults/plist solution like the .ds_store fix. Instead I’m running a cron job on the server to remove these. This is an inelegant solution but it works for me: find /your/directory/path -name ._* -exec rm '{}' ';'

Apple should really fix this if it wants to be accepted by the enterprise.

For the impatient, I’ll skip right to the solution. Use AuthDigest for authentication in your webdav server config. That’s the big issue with connecting. Windows won’t connect with Basic Auth. For more detail read on.

First let me say that I will be so happy when Microsoft finally flutters in to irrelevance. I use a Mac and have since OS X got decent. Webdav works great on the mac. “It just works…” just like the Mac commercials say.

However, some of the people that work at Wildcog use Windows. So like many, I beat my head against a wall trying to get Vista X64 and Windows 7 X64 to work with Webdav. If you’re running 32bit Windows 7 or Vista just get NetDrive and be done with it. It works like a champ.

For 64 Bit folks NetDrive doesn’t work. But I have good news, believe it or not Windows 7 actually can connect to Webdav. I have it working and will show you how in a sec. It’s not perfect but it does work through the Windows Explorer (and office apps) using nothing more than the built-in support (if you can call it that) in Windows.

My setup:

Webdav Server = Apache2 with Mod Dav on Debian (lenny).

Clients = Random Windows 7 machines (much to my chagrin).

The problem:

My main issue was that the windows box would throw the error “The folder you entered does not appear to be valid” when I tried any of the various methods of connecting or mapping the drive to the webdav resource.

The Fix:

• Make sure  the WebClient Service is running and set to run automatically.
• Configure your webdav server to use Digest Authentication. Windows 7 WILL NOT connect to webdav servers using Basic Authentication.
• Verify that your webdav server with AuthDigest is good by using a known-good OS/Client such as Linux or a Mac.
• On the windows machine go to Explorer\Computer and right click in empty space. Then select “Add a network location”. Now enter your normal webdav URL such as http://your.drive.com/yourfiles

That should be it. It’s worked for me on several machines now. Once you add the “network location” you can map drives to the network location or to the url (it suddenly works) and do other operations normally. You can also use the “net use” command in the shell which may have more interesting options for you.

Problems:

So far this works ‘ok’ for me. A reboot seems to hose this setup. Although the “network location” still exists it doesn’t work. I haven’t had sufficient time to play with it and work out the kinds. There’s the /savecred and /persistent switches on the “net use” command that may be useful here.

Other Possibilities:

In the event that you can’t change your authentication type you can try going the other way with a registry hack to allow basic authentication. Try this from here:

To work around this behavior, enable Basic authentication on the client computer. To do this, add the BasicAuthLevel registry entry to the following registry subkey, and then set the entry to a value of 2 or more:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
To enable Basic authentication on the client computer, follow these steps:
Click Start , type regedit in the Start Search box, and then click regedit.exe in the Programs list.
Locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
Type BasicAuthLevel, and then press ENTER.
On the Edit menu, click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 2, and then click OK.

Note The mapping is as follows:
0 - Basic authentication disabled
1 - Basic authentication enabled for SSL shares only
2 or greater - Basic authentication enabled for SSL shares and for non-SSL shares
Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

MS obviously hates webdav. It’s a big threat to them. And for a long time they’ve been abusing users in order to lock them in rather than focusing on making great products that people want to use. Other examples are:

• Hotmail not allowing you to forward mail to a non-MS-owned mail service
• Bing being the only search available in IE
• Breaking compatibility with millions of smb devices in the name of security

For the record, digest based auth is better. And it’s good that they’re pushing a more secure solution. But it’s also clear that they just want to make it hard to use webdav. They post no information about the problem. If M$ made money on webdav you can bet your ass it would work or there would at least be a message saying “windows prevented you from connecting to this insecure server ” but no.

Webdav is great. It doesn’t rely on creaky layer two protocols like the antique M$ smb / lanman crap.

Hope this helps. It worked for me.

This morning I altered my gmail based database backup script to allow for larger than 25 Megabyte databases. My previous solution worked great until my DB went over the gmail attachment limit of 25M.

This works great for me. I have a small 80m (uncompressed) database that I need to make nightly backups of. It may not for you. The idea here is to use gmail as a free cloud based backup solution. If you have  a multi-terrabyte database I hope you have enough money to pay for a fancy solution.

As I said, my DB is about 80M uncompressed or just over 25M compressed. Just over the gmail attachment limit for a single message. So to get the job done I need to dump the DB, compress it, and split the files in to < 25m chucks, then encode and mail to my gmail backup account.

I toyed around with “mpack” as a one command solution for splitting, encoding, and emailing the files but ran into problems when I tried to reassemble the file. mpack works great but when it splits and emails the files, the first file has MIME header info to make it appear as an attachment. The second or subsequent files are emailed as plain inline (encoded) text. I know mpack is used to send huge amounts of data to binary newsgroups but in my 15 minutes of screwing with it, I could not get it to add a MIME header to each part (email) of the file. “munpack” is supposed to read the mpacked files and do this for you but it could not work with the files that I produced. The mpack output was unacceptable as it required way to much by-hand processing to re-assemble the gzip. I still used mpack to email the files but i use “split” to break them up before mailing.

What sucks about my script? Everything except the fact that it currently works for me and will work until the database size doubles which should be a while. Specifically it’s not dynamic at all. The script assumes we’re breaking the database into just two files (50M limit). Also it has no logging or error handling. But hey, I’m not an SA nor a scripter. Just a guy who needs to back up his database. Here’s the script:

export d=`date +%F`
mkdir YourDBName.db.""$d""_backup
cd YourDBName.db."$d"_backup
mysqldump --opt -u YourDBusername --password=YourDBpassword YourDBName |gzip -f >YourDBName.db."$d".gz
split -b 20m YourDBName.db."$d".gz YourDBName.db."$d".gz_part_
mpack -s YourDBName.db."$d".gz YourDBName.db."$d".gz_part_aa YourBackupAccount@gmail.com
mpack -s YourDBName.db."$d".gz YourDBName.db."$d".gz_part_ab YourBackupAccount@gmail.com
cd /root
rm -Rf YourDBName.db."$d"_backup

That’s it. To restore the database just do this: Check your email. Download the attachments and combine them. I just use “cat attachment_ab>>attachment_aa” which appends the contents from the 2nd file (ab) to the first (aa). Then you end up with a gziped version of your database under the filename of the first emailed file (*aa). To make it easy, rename the _aa file to YourDBName.gz. Then gunzip and do a “mysql -p YourPassword YourDBName < YourDBName”

Viola. Enjoy your Free Cloud Based Database Backup. It’s saved my ass more than once!

Lot’s of iPhone bending latley. I’m in Buenos Aires so everyone needs their phone unlocked to run on the 3G networks here. Including me.

I lost my iPhone in Buenos Aires due to my own stupidity. So, I got a new one from  AT&T. This iPhone 3GS shipped with OS 3.1 installed and the 05.11.07 Modem Firmware aka BaseBand. I was a bummed at first because there is a lot of outdated info on the web saying that you can’t unlock the 5.11.07 baseband or that new 3GS iPhones which ship with OS 3.1 can’t even jailbreak. Happily this is all bullshit. In fact, this was the easiest, fastest, jailbreak and unlock I’ve done so far (this is my 4th).

Let me say that again. I just did a jailbreak and unlock on a brand new iPhone 3GS factory loaded with 3.1 and 5.11.07. I was up in running in 10-15 minutes and doing a test call on the local (Claro) network here in Buenos Aires. Here’s how:

1. Get a 3.1.2 .ipsw from the net. I used the Softipedia link here. If that doesn’t work just google 3.1.2 ipsw.
2. Download PwnageTool 3.14 from here or check http://blog.iphone-dev.org.
3. Plug the phone in and exit iTunes.
4. Run PwnageTool and it should find the ipsw file you downloaded. If it doesn’t you can search for it.
5. Follow the easy instructions from PwnageTool. It even puts the iPhone in DFU mode for you! No more stupid button tricks. This is about a 3 click process.
6. Once PwnageTool is done it will tell you to use iTunes to restore your custom ipsw. iTunes should launch automatiacally when the phone enters DFU mode. Just alt-click the restore button and select the custom ipsw on your desktop. iTunes does the rest. Just leave it alone and you’ll restart with a Jailbroken 3.1.2 phone.
7. For the carrier unlock; launch Cydia on the iPhone, click manage, click sources, click edit, click add, then enter blackra1n.com and click Add Source. Click done and then click on the new blackra1n.com source, then click blacksn0w and let it free you from AT&T’s carrier locking shackles.
8. Enjoy your brand new, unlocked, jailbroken 3GS with 3.1.2.

To clear a few things up that I had been confused on:

1. PwnageTool 3.1.4 works beautifully for the jailbreak. Don’t worry about blackra1n (the jailbreaking utility), you don’t need it.
2. You don’t need to start with a custom .ipsw. You create the custom ipsw with PwnageTool. So don’t worry about finding the write ipsw that’s already hacktivated etc.. there’s no need. A clean ipsw restore is fine.
3. Blacksn0w (the unlocker) and Blackra1n (the computer utility used to jailbreak) are different. Some say blackra1n is causing wifi issues. I have no idea since I didn’t use it. PwnageTool has never steered me wrong and blacksn0w worked great.

Good luck, I hope this works for you. To figure this out I read http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/211802082/pwnage-pie and other blog.iphone.dev posts.

On an separate note,  I had an iPhone 2G  that was in a recovery mode or DFU loop. It would just display the iTunes connect image and nothing else. No amount of ridiculous button combination solved this. However, a command line tool called iRecovery worked great and it looks like it can do some other neat stuff as well.

UPDATE: blacksn0w did indeed hose my Wifi. The fix is here: http://www.redmondpie.com/youtube-fix-for-iphone-3.1.2-blacksn0w-unlock-9140104/

Just before heading to Buenos Aires I bought a new MacBook Pro. I upgraded from a ~3 year old 2.0ghz Core Duo (not Core 2) model which was pretty much the best computer I’ve ever owned. I upgraded because despite it’s excellent history of reliability, my engineering senses told me that it was time to end on a high note before she blew. I was mainly attracted to the new MBP because of it’s stellar 7 hour battery. Let me just say that upgrading from one Mac to another Mac is not the same as upgrading from a PC to a Mac which is pretty much blissful in any event because OS X is just sooooooo much better and nicer to use. Mac to Mac upgrades eliminate the euphoria that one experiences when ditching Windoze. Thereby allowing more focus on the merits of the new hardware in comparison with the old.

The new machine is the current model as of the date of this post (10/09) and is the  base 15 inch model with 2.53ghz Core 2 and 4GB RAM. Quite an upgrade from my old machine with twice the RAM and a little over 1ghz more CPU performance. So here’s the breakdown of pros and cons as compared with the old machine:

Pros

•  Battery life is great! This is the main reason I wanted the new machine and it definitely delivers.
• Speed — It is quick. Quicker to open apps like Photoshop and Illustrator… a lot quicker. It’s a pretty snappy little machine, not that my old one really felt slow but the extra RAM definitely helps since I’m a totally memory and running-app whore.
• Of course it looks cool. It’s a new Apple product for god’s sake. The designs looks pimp. LOVE LOVE LOVE those tiny little batter lights.

Cons

• 3D graphics suck. The integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M won’t cut the mustard on anything more than the basics. Expose is quick but don’t think you’re going to run anything that requires even medium 3D performance. You’re not. I haven’t compared them directly but this certainly is not an upgrade from the discreet X1600 on my 3 year old MBP. While this may be part of the battery savings, I think it’s shite for a brand new $1700 machine not to be able to run a semi-modern game (Red Alert 3) at a decent quality level.
• Glossy screen. This seems to be the standard these days on everything. I suppose there are folks that love these but I think they suck. I want a monitor not a fucking mirror, thanks.
• SHARP edges. This seems like an odd thing to complain about but it is what it is. Go to the Apple store and run your finger down the leading edge of a MBP with medium pressure… it won’t cut you but it fees like it might. This can be rough on the wrists depending on the angle.

That’s about it. The rest is the same. These are nice machines. If reliability were not a concern would I go back to the trusty soft edged poor-battery-life MBP? Probably not. A portable should be able to run for a long period on battery and this one does. The tradeoffs are worth it but not by a huge margin. Since I was leaving the country I wanted a new reliable machine. I have one now. Plus I got almost $870 for my old machine on eBay taking a lot of the sting out of the new machine’s price. Try selling your old 3 year old Dell for that much!

So I’m in BA and I’m getting all of my tech necessitates sorted out. So far things are not bad. We have DSL in the apartment that seems comparable to AT&T DSL (nothing great but workable) and WiFi is plentiful in the many local cafe’s. I find myself hoping from cafe to cafe to access google maps and skype on the iphone.

One of the first things I noticed was that two services I like, Pandora and Netflix are unavailable here due to licensing restrictions. Basically the media companies are too big and too stupid to provide their own solution yet too freaked out to let the good people of South America have access to their wealth of fine media. At any price it seems. Luckily a simple US based proxy setup will provide you access to both Netflix and Pandora. Find an anonymous proxy on the net or set your own up with Linux and Squid.

The other thing I’ve worked on is a good cheap solution to forward my US based cell number to my iPhone here in Buenos Aires. I looked into rolling my own solution via Asterisk but have so far been using Skype and having a pretty good time of it. The Skype app works well on the iPhone when combined with Wifi. Currently forwarding my AT&T number to my SkypeIn number. This isn’t a great solution because currently I can only access data via wifi so it’s great for being at home or making calls when I’m near a wap but not great for random incoming calls. I’ll get a sim card this week and take it to the next step.

We arrived in BA yesterday. It’s beautiful. We are little tired from the trip but we dig our apartment and we’re getting settled in now. Here’s the tour of the apartment:

I wrote this little script ages ago and it has indeed saved my ass. It may be ghetto but a good friend and much better SA than I thought it was clever so here it is:

“export d=`date +%F`
mysqldump –opt -u yourDBuser –password=YourDBpassword yourDatabaseName |gzip -f >yourdatabase.db.$d.gzip
uuencode yourdatabase.db.$d.gzip yourdatabase.db.$d.gzip | mail YourGmailAddy@gmail.com”

That’s it! You get a free cloud based backup system for your database. It just shows up as an attachment in your gmail. Simply download the attachment (it seems gmail now uudecodes for you) and restore your db with “mysql -p HosedDataBasename < AttachmentFileName”

Add the script to your crontab and you’re done. Of course you have to be mindful of the gmail attachment size limit which is currently ~25megs. Of course you could break a larger db down into smaller files but I’m hoping you’d have graduated from a ghetto solution like this if you’re backing up your 1TB database.

Some people may not realize how much their old scratched up iPhone 3G is worth. The 3GS is out and I wanted it pretty bad for 2 reasons: 1) I’m an iPhone Developer. 2) Video recording. I’d had my 3G since right after they came out (actually waited in line here a bit in SF) so I wasn’t sure how much an upgrade would be. After only about a year I was elligible to get a 3GS 16GB for $200. I’ve talked to a few other 3G owners and everyone has been elligble for a $200 3GS.

So, I bought the new unit for $200. Before I made the purchase I checked ebay to see what used 3G 16GB were selling for. Low and behold, jailbroken, unlocked phones were selling for $400 or more! And these are USED phones. My phone never had a case and it had it’s share of minor scratches. Anyway, you can jailbreak and unlock the phone in about 30 minutes (you may have to torrent some software), then put her up on ebay. I just sold mine for exactly $400. A net profit of $200 for a brand new iPhone 3GS. Not bad… I may regret it on the next upgrade if I’m not elligble, but somehow I doubt it.

Here’s how you can do it too:

1. Check prices on ebay

Seems renaming an application used to be a big pain in the ass in Xcode. I was following some lengthy processes which included renaming the Xcode project, directory and a bunch of manual settings in the build tab, etc etc. That may have been required in prior versions of Xcode.

To change your app name (the name that displays on the iPhone under the icon) all you have to do is:

1. Select target
2. Go to build settings (i)
3. Change the “Product Name” to whatever you want the app name to be.
4. Disco! You’re done. Even works on the App Store.

My iPhone game Dark Nova was released yesterday, 4/19/09 at about 6pm PST. It was installed roughly 100 times from 6pm to 12am. I had a heard a lot of terrible rumors about Apple taking forever to approve apps. I’m happy to say my app few through in less than a month. I submitted on 4/6/09, the game was rejected due to a few bugs on 4/13/09. We fixed the bugs and I resubmitted the same day. The game was in the App Store on 4/19. So Apple’s review time for each submission was about a week. Not bad considering the number of apps coming in.

I’m… stoked to have gotten another project over the finish line. Loving life right now. Building a sci-fi game with Scott, one of my best friends and a fellow sci-fi uber-nerd has been about as much fun as I could have imagined. So far the game has some great reviews and feedback. I’m looking forward to fixing the bugs and expanding the game into the kind of game that people remember, and talk about for years to come. Just like the games Scott and I played for so many hous back in the day!

I’ll be posting more on my blog about how we devloped this game. Our game is also Open Source (code available at darknova.net) so hopefully it will help other develop apps and learn the platform. All in all we spent about 6 months redesigning, porting and testing the game. Cash outlay for the game was about $6K. The game is free for now but we hope to be charging $1 soon.

Awwwwww yeaaaah!

I like little gadgets. Especially ones with funky secret button combos that bring them back to life. My Sansa Express usb stick / fm radio / recorder / mp3 player thingy looked as dead as fried chicken after my laptop’s battery dropped while files were being accessed. After some digging I found this:

To hard reset your Sansa Expres, hold down the large square button and the + volume button. I have it a good 10 seconds and viola… plugged it in and it sprang back to life. Neat-o.

Come on ThingM… churn ‘em out!

Although I haven’t updated the main page yet, I wanted to let gigaQube fans know that it’s still going strong. I get asked a lot why I don’t replace it. Liike I’m a big masochist for running it.  It’s low power (green) and still very useful.

I don’t need a quad-core Linux box. I just need a MIPS R5K with 128 megs o ram and a 32k cache. AKA, the Qube. With big disks it’s still plenty fast to do what I need. It’s currently running Debian Linux. I moved of NetBSD a while ago for various reasons. I’m a BSD-head by trade but I have to say the Deb port is nice.

Anyway here’s what the gigaQube is toiling away on:

• Personal WebDAV server
• DVD storage / streamer (I archive all of my DVDs to keep them handy)
• Samba Server
• P2P applications
• Other misc Unixy tasks as needed

Here’s an example of a well used machine:
oxide:/downloads# vmstat 10 30
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 1 26956 1844 956 103376 0 0 3 1 3 4 2 2 95 1
0 2 26956 1852 864 103296 9 0 529 418 1476 226 42 44 0 14
0 1 26956 2260 712 103160 3 0 523 960 1491 313 32 53 2 13
0 1 26988 2172 764 103332 4 3 554 652 1265 170 45 48 0 7
0 1 27088 3092 788 102564 0 10 456 627 1137 205 40 46 5 9
1 0 27096 2200 860 104228 0 1 278 250 1200 290 38 44 6 11
4 0 27440 1876 924 103568 0 36 344 701 1189 391 36 45 12 7
0 0 27440 2000 912 104136 2 0 316 1236 1328 312 34 52 3 12
2 2 27492 2284 804 104336 3 5 1016 637 1170 171 43 44 3 10
1 0 27492 1944 812 104816 0 0 472 823 1340 235 40 50 1 9
4 2 27492 1992 676 103920 0 0 308 30 1298 332 41 43 6 10
2 0 27840 1824 880 104112 6 37 337 1680 1357 241 31 61 2 6
1 1 27984 2044 972 104612 0 16 367 1086 1285 344 23 54 16 7
1 3 27984 1492 1004 103912 64 0 1112 899 1294 179 25 50 3 23
2 2 27984 1728 696 104628 44 0 847 425 1383 233 26 49 7 18
1 1 27984 1736 760 105012 3 0 440 880 1398 350 21 51 2 26
1 1 27984 1476 540 105784 2 0 503 12 1377 400 20 45 4 31
1 0 28028 2008 712 105412 3 9 458 1238 1362 287 23 57 7 14
2 1 28124 2068 936 104624 22 13 837 1996 1241 276 21 61 10 8
1 1 28124 2648 828 105000 0 0 749 97 1473 182 30 49 0 21


I met with some folks at Apple today and they informed me that the 2.0.1 iPhone software was released last night. It’s supposed to fix all the slow-crappy-buggy aspects of 2.0. After spending 40 minutes trying to type on my time-delayed iPhone keyboard, I sure as hell hope they’re right!

Trust in Jobs… Jobs is good. Ack… maybe there was something in that punch.

That’s right kids. I had my old ass iPod Mini cable laying around and I grabbed it by mistake. Works like a champ. Sync, charge, everything. Don’t pay $20 for a 3G cable, just dig up an old mini cable and you’re good to go. Hell for $20 you can prolly buy an iPod mini WITH a cable from eBay. Re-Cycle.

-Shon

So for the time being I am running a my media center on Vista. Yes yes… I’m sad about it too. It’s a compromise that I’m considering how to fix. Possible solutions include PS3 connecting to media server (not 100% solution), An X86 running OS X and XP (This is most likely at the moment, or giving up good 3D and going with a Mac Mini since Apple doesn’t make the hardware I want. Make me a mini with decent 3D and I’ll buy it Steve, really…

Anyway… Lots of storage on the good old gigaQube, which is now running Debian (gotta update the page I know) which Vista needs to connect to so we can have all that media goodness. XP works, Macs work, everything works ‘cept of course… Vista.  Vista won’t connect to the gigaQube’s Samba shares. Surprise surprise eh? Turns out that MS decided to default Vista to NTLMv2 and refuse all other authentication types. For some reason this wasn’t obvious in the qube’s logs. Anyway this breaks compatibility with a whole bunch of cheap NAS devices using embedded Linux and Samba, as well as my fairly recent version of Samba on the qube. Good news is you can tell Vista to stop this nonsense. Instructions here: http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4434907782.html Or you can upgrade to Samba 3.0.2.something which does support NTLMv2.

I’m gearing up to revive Geek Jeopardy. First step: Build the buzzers. Gotta have buzzers, they’re integral to the process. Plans I’m considering:

http://www.desmith.net/NMdS/Electronics/Jeopardy.html