Tea And Biscuits

A change of pace, and a change of place

2009-10-05T13:08:05+00:00

After several years in its current location, I have decided to move my blog to something I don't have to actually look after myself. Partially this is due to laziness, and partially it is due to having rubbish web hosting.

Anyway, from now on, go to Cuppa Tea and a Biscuit at Blogspot for further ramblings.

The Snow Leopard Cometh

2009-09-07T09:01:06+00:00

After using my lovely Gen1 Macbook for nearly three and a half years with it's default Tiger install, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the latest incarnation of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. I never upgraded to Leopard because, well, Tiger did everything I want and better the devil you know. Or something. I dunno, Leopard just never really "clicked" with me. However, as soon as I heard about what Apple were doing with Snow Leopard I signed up for notification of release.

Snow Leopard isn't a dramatic upgrade from the point of view of the user interface. It's very much just Leopard with polish. But what polish! Lots and lots of small incremental improvements, including a smoother Dock, better popout windows for folders in the Dock, an overhauled Finder, improved window display in Exposé, better image preview and selection in the picture importer ... Just generally better.

Installation was ... well, very boring. Insert disk, double click installer, click continue a few times ... and wait for half an hour. After an automatic reboot, I was sat at the login window. All done, all working.

As part of the upgrade process I got the latest versions of iLife and iWork bundled in the "Mac Box Set". I was still running iPhoto '06 so upgrading to '09 has provided a nice eye opener. Events and face recognition work brilliantly, and the whole thing feels a lot less clunky, which is odd because I'd never noticed the previous versions clunkiness until I played with the new one!

Not much else to report really. I'm very happy with the upgrade, and it's made my aging laptop quicker, prettier and has already improved productivity thanks to the numerous small improvements to the window manager and built-in tools. Top stuff.

iPhone OS 3.0.1 fixes SMS hijack bug

2009-08-01T19:12:52+00:00

A lot of Apple haters have been rubbing their tiny hands with glee recently after news reports of a security flaw in the iPhone OS 3.0 that could allow hackers to "Hijack every iPhone in the world". Many were quick to point out how slow Apple were for not releasing a patch, and many simply made it a soap box for "iPhone sucks, use Android" rants.

However, on July 31st, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1, with a patch for this SMS issue. It installs easily enough, job done. Of course, not being privy to such information as how to hack my own phone with this exploit, I can't check if it does the job. Either way, there it is. A fix. More detail on the OS 3.0.1 release notes.

OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X - Bullet point corruption fixed

2009-08-01T19:05:13+00:00

One continuous gripe I have with OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X is the apparent failure to properly handle bullet points. It only affects MS Word .doc format, and looks something like this:

This is apparently caused by the .doc format itself. Saving a .doc file in Word or OpenOffice.org and opening it in OOo will result in this bug. It is caused by a complete encoding failure on the part of the Word document format for bullet point symbols, as it explicitly looks for a particular glyph in the Symbol font rather than looking for the Unicode code point for the character. So, on machines that don't have the Windows version of Symbol.ttf installed ... it simply displays a nonsense character. OS X has its own Symbol font with different glyphs.

Fortunately the workaround for this is very simple. You can use font substitution to make OOo look at a "Symbol compatible" font for the glyph - in this case, OpenSymbol. Open the preferences panel and navigate to the Fonts page. Then, enter a font substitution for Symbol to OpenSymbol, to be applied Always.

This will take effect immediately, so any documents you have open will magically get their bullet points back. Smashing! Here is the same document immediately after closing the preferences window:

Autobots, transform!

2009-06-27T18:10:34+00:00

So I just got back from seeing Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, and having read various reviews from serious film-lovers and SF fans, I really didn't know what to expect. After all the anti-hype, I hoped it wasn't as bad as all the reviews made it out to be.

But do you know what? I really enjoyed it. Yes, sure, it was absolutely ridiculous. The storyline was present, sort of, and there was a lot of very silly slapstick moments throughout the film, but none of that is really a criticism. If you were hoping that the Transformers franchise would be turned into a serious, epic SF story arc with poignancy and emotion, then you will definitely be disappointed. If you were hoping that it would be a comedy action flick with lots of things blowing up and big robots fighting a lot, then you are most certainly in for a treat!

There's not a lot else I can say about it really. It was a good film insofar as it was very entertaining. If that's not the point of such things, then I await to be enlightened.

iPhone OS 3.0 Upgrade Joy

2009-06-19T23:50:58+00:00

Good news! If you are fortunate enough to own an iPhone 2G, and have unlocked it to any network using my previous instructions ...

the OS 3.0 upgrade will present no problems at all!

Just let iTunes do its thing and upgrade the phone. The baseband on the 2G remains untouched, as does the bootloader. It's all good.

Which are you supporting? The systems or the customer?

2009-06-08T09:46:37+00:00

Last weekend, the company that host this blog (4Uhosting) had a major meltdown, along with several other companies using the same datacentre. The UKGrid Greenheys DC had a major power outage, taking out many servers entirely and effectively causing many hosts to drop off the 'net completely.

A news update on the support page at 4uhosting.co.uk had the following to say:

"We would like to make it very clear that this incident occured through no fault of ours. It could happen at any facility at any time. We rent floor space in UK datacentres to run our business and we do not expect this kind of thing to happen. Unfortunately, from time to time it does and we can neither predict, or prevent such problems."

Fair enough, if your entire data centre melts down and takes servers out with it, you can't expect to have a great deal of control over the situation and it comes down entirely to disaster recovery. They did, in fact, do a grand job of moving their entire operation to a different DC and getting it all back up and running in a few hours. Unfortunately, while the DC power grid melting might not be their fault, there is certainly backlash.

A lot of customers, upon discovering that their hosted domains and the 4uhosting site itself was offline, went on the internet to express their dismay. Many of them vowed to move their domains away to another hosting provider at the earliest opportunity. I was fortunate in that I found a correlation between the 4uhosting issue and the ukgrid issue so realised that it was a matter of time, but speculation was rife that 4uhosting had silently gone under and many people feared that they had lost hosting, data and possibly even their domains.

Even if half the customers threatening to up and leave actually do so now it's all back online, it represents a large chunk of business. So, the DC melting might not be your fault, but if a disaster situation arises and you don't inform your customers of what is happening, they will assume the worst. And that is your fault.

If your notification system consists of a single webserver hosted in a separate DC that can be used in place of the "real" servers in case of emergency, it would suffice. Give the customers something or they will turn their backs on you. Support is not just about getting the system up and running. It's also about making sure your customers know what's happening and don't abandon you because they don't feel that you are supporting them. It's a fickle thing; you can perform technical miracles and support your users' systems to the best of your ability, but if they don't know you're doing it, they only see the downtime. They only see the negative.

Surely a contingency plan for such a situation would cost less in the long run than the cost of lost business due to an actual disaster situation?

Unlocking an iPhone for non-O2 SIMs

2009-04-26T09:58:02+00:00

So I finally joined the 21st century, boosted my Apple nerd cred, and got a funky phone to boot. An iPhone is now in my posession! So far so good, except for one small problem - I have 12 months left on my Orange contract and I don't really want to pay all that off now just to get an O2 contract. I need a way to get the iPhone to work with my Orange SIM.

Enter ... QuickPWN and PWNTools! These two excellent apps allow you to unlock and jailbreak your iPhone in style and comfort. It's not as straightforward as just following the instructions, though, so allow me to elaborate a bit.

In order to unlock the iPhone, you need to build a custom IPSW package using PWNtools. This is because QuickPWN only builds a firmware to jailbreak the phone, rather than unlock it. For that, you need to replace to boot loader as well as the firmware. Ick. To build an unlocked boot loader, you need to have a copy of bl46.bin from somewhere.

My first experiment in building a custom IPSW with PWNTools went well, right up until I tried to install it. While trying to install the image using iTunes, I got the dreaded "Error 1600". Nobody knows what that actually means, but it's bad. However, there is a solution!

The trick is to use QuickPWN first, following the instructions to get the jailbroken firwmare onto the phone. This will jailbreak the phone, but unless you have an O2 SIM, the actual phone functions will be disabled. However, this makes the phone receptive to unlocked firmware packages. Open iTunes with the phone in normal mode and option-click the Restore button. Pick your custom PWNTools firmware and install it. Works fine, no errors (1600 or otherwise) in sight!

Being a bit of a purist, I didn't really want a jailbroken iPhone, and I would like to have the normal Apple logo back on the boot screen (it gets replaced with a pineapple by QuickPWN). I used QuickPWN and PWNTools with iPhone firmware 2.1 to unlock the phone. The beauty of this is that iTunes automatically installed the 2.2.1 firmware update. The new bootloader, complete with SIM unlock, is still there, but I have a genuine, non-hacked Apple firmware.

Obviously (or maybe not), using the PWNTools results in a phone that's already activated. Once you've got the new firmware on there, all you need is to plug it in and let the phone set up wizard do its thing to link it with your iTMS account so the App store works.

One thing to note is that it's quite easy to get the phone out of the development mode if it gets stuck by holding down the Home and Power buttons for 10 seconds. You can then just power up as normal, although you'll probably be left with a phone that thinks it needs activating. It's basically back to square one, but that's as good a place as any to have another crack at it.

Obviously, I do not advocate the hacking, cracking or generally buggering about with iPhones. If you brick your phone, don't come crying to me. On the other hand, it worked fine for me, and even when I had firmware that made the phone appear bricked, it could always be rescued by flashing a "real" firmware using iTunes.

Silverlight ... ouch!

2009-04-25T21:05:52+00:00

For some reason, several places on the web with streaming video (e.g. ITV player) have gone with Microsoft's Silverlight for the interface. I have no idea what Silverlight is like as a platform, but I do know that it's a really bad choice for streaming video.

The main problem I have with it is that, on a 6MB/s ADSL connection, I get skip free performance from the likes of youtube and the BBC iplayer. Silverlight players, not so much. 0% left in the buffer every 30 seconds or so for even small videos, and there is no apparent way to change the buffer settings.

If anyone knows how I can make Silverlight less crappy, please to be posting comments!

Joining the 20th Century

2009-03-06T09:30:50+00:00

Being the Luddite I am, I have thus far shunned the idea of having a television in my flat. I really couldn't see the point, given that I have plenty of other things to entertain me, and the fact that there is seldom anything on. Anything I do watch I do so on DVD, iPlayer, or *ahem* handy, handy torrents.

However, I do have two children who like to watch the these things, and it is much nicer to watch DVDs on a decent sized screen than on my 13.3" MacBook. I have previously used a projector for such purposes, but it's a faff to set up (don't have anywhere permanent to mount it) and in recent months the picture has turned increasingly yellow.

So, I had a plan. Don't get a telly. Get a decent monitor instead. A nice TFT monitor would let me do all the things I currently do on a much better display. Genius. And that's exactly what I was going to do, until I saw a UMC 21.6" TV in Tesco for very little cash.

I went over to my local Tesco (all of half a mile from the flat) and picked one up last night, and was immediately impressed. Everything just worked out of the box, and it has an impressive array of connectors. There's the usual SCART and component inputs, as well as HDMI for HD content and a VGA connector. This last addition is what swayed me. For £170, I got a 1080p HD television that doubles up as a 1920x1080 monitor for plugging the laptop into.

It's quite an impressive little thing, for the money. The interface is clean, easy to use, easy to read and responds quickly to user inputs. It does everything you could want of a TV, and the built in Freeview tuner picks up a suitable amount of channels. The 1000:1 contrast ratio is very nice, producing a clean, crisp and vivid picture even when using my grotty low-bitrate AVIs I have acquired from the internet.

The only problem, really, is that there's still nothing on!