So, I’m pretty lousy at getting this page updated with actual posts - I’ve updated the side bars and wordpress itself.  I blame my general laziness and pounce (and now twitter).  You’ve got to make time for blogging, obviously.  That’s pretty hard for me with the aforementioned laziness and then there’s work and family.

It used to be I could get things written because an idea would invade my brain and fester for a while.  I’d subconsciously write the post over the course of a day or two and finally I’d just make the time to write.

Now with twitter and pounce I can just dump those pesky ideas with a quick “This sucks” “This good” “Grunt grunt”.

Do more professional - or at least consistent - bloggers avoid “the social” all together?  Any tips and tricks for overcoming the lazy enabling instant micro blogging?

If you’re like me and you have to use Vista (sorry) you might be running into an annoyance. If you’re running multiple monitors - might happen on singles, don’t know - when you wake the system up, unlock it, or just basically log in the screen(s) will tend to blank out and rebuild themselves. This has the annoying effect of (at least for me) shoving everything I had on my external monitor back onto the main monitor. This forces me to find all the windows I’d had on the other monitor and shuffle them back over.

After weeks of doing this I just gave up as it wasted lots of time and eventually I had a second monitor that was never used. Vista just oozes fail. Anywho. I tracked down the solution and here it is for your enjoyment.

Bring up the Task Scheduler (found under Administrative Tools). Go down the Task scheduler tree on the left to Task Scheduler -> TaskScheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> MobilePC. There you’ll find TMM. Go ahead and disable that. This supposedly allows windows to detect and configure newly added monitors on the fly. It frankly hasn’t worked properly for me in the past - I run an external as a main monitor on my setup and when I slept my laptop and took it home it still thought the main was there and so displayed the menu bar and all on some non-existent monitor. DOH!

Anywho, disable this task. And then remember to the Task Scheduler Summary (Task Scheduler in the tree on the left) and select “Display All Running Tasks”. Find TMM, it’ll be running, it was for me. And then stop it.

Since then I’ve had no problems with my screen cleaning up all my windows and sweeping them away. This is also supposed to keep you refresh rates and resolutions from being reset. Though I only had that happen once or twice.

Good luck with your further pains of working with Vista. And remember, you’re not alone. Though, in a perfect world…

If you’ve upgraded to Speed Download 5 from 4 and you notice that it’s not as snappy as you remember 4 being, you’re not alone. I was wondering what was going on and a did a little poking around. At least for me the download speed was throttled by default to 64k.

Click that little bar graph icon in the lower left of the window and adjust it there. I went for unlimited, if I’m going to download something let’s get it down as soon as possible and get it over with.

Took me a few minutes to figure out why some of my functions weren’t firing in the afterFinish callback function from an Effect. Apparently you can’t access global variables in an Effect callback. I haven’t dug too deeply into this but I sort of assumed it would work since I can access globals on an ajax callback.

Just a heads up if you’re banging your head against a wall.

So you’ve decided that the iPhone SDK was either too little, too late or both. And so you’re going to jailbreak again. Perhaps you’ve downloaded iNdependence and you’re going to give it a whirl. Well, if you’re like me the app will crash the instant it goes into recovery mode and won’t start properly while it’s attached to the system. So enjoy that restore in iTunes.

While you’re waiting for the phone to finish restoring you might poke around at other options. Maybe you’ll take a friends advice and try iPlus. After googling and digging around looking for the actual files and not just blog posts about how teh awesome it is. You’ll eventually find this download page. And you’ll download the whole package and give it a shot now that your iPhone has finished restoring to 1.1.4 and synching all your stuff.

You might freak when it says it’s just going to go ahead and jailbreak AND unlock your phone. Whoa whoa whoa… you’re already paying AT&T and people who unlock often get screwed with firmware updates. So you go back to the site and find the download that says it’s for jailbreaking ONLY.

Unzipping and looking at the jailbreak only it doesn’t seem much different but you give it a shot. Seems to go well. But… then it sits saying you’ve successfully completed the jailbreak and it’s rebooting. Only, it’s not. Just spinning away. You look at the message on the iphone screen and it says it can’t find the reboot script. Because it’s in the payload that’s not in the jailbreak only bundle. Doh!

So you force a reboot of the phone and yup, no jailbreak. By now of course you’ve found the guide that takes you through the install and you note the point that at which is says

“If you only want to jailbreak your iPhone (you have an AT&T account set up as an iPhone and you don’t want to unlock your iPhone), type ./iplus -j instead.”

So you go back into the first iPlus package you downloaded and you run iPlus with the -j option. Woot! It works! Right on.

But wait. No YouTube. I know, I know. Who cares. Well… you do because you paid for this thing and you want to use it all and then some. So you have SSH on there and Terminal and being a security minded individual you make sure to hop right into the shell and run passwd and get that default password (alpine) changed and fast.

Then you set about getting a few good apps installed. One of which is a handy tweak you found that will fix the YouTube problem. You exit the installer and reboot. WHOA.. wait.. where did all the bookmarklets on the spring board go? Why is it telling me how to move and delete icons from the spring board? Why is it rebooting?! And again? And again?! And… (You get the picture).

Well, crap. Is it a brick? No. Digging around you find that if you connect the phone to the computer and then fire it up holding the power button and the home button (not just the home button like you found earlier) that it’ll go into recovery mode and you can begin the tedious process of restoring your iphone through iTunes. Phew, your ass unpuckers.

While you’re waiting for the restore you go over what you did wrong. Perhaps that “fix” for YouTube wasn’t such a good deal after all. You vow to skip that this next go around and after getting some coffee and going to the bathroom you come back to find the restore finished. You launch iPlus again and go to put the kids down.

Coming back you’re ready to go. Drop to shell, passwd away the security problem. And you set about checking that everything is working. Hrmm well no.. the browser crashes. What gives? Well, maybe you need to reboot to kinda flush things out. Oohh ooh! Yup.. you’re in that loop again. Well, crap.

While you sit and wait for the restore (how many has that been?) you’re online with your friend who is currently running Mono on HIS jailbroken phone. And he suggests maybe ZiPhone. Hrmm okay.. why not? It’s not like you’re the type to learn your lesson. You grab it while your phone is still restoring and get ready for some command line fun. But.. it’s an .app. Okay ready to go… iPhone is restored. You run the app. You click jailbreak. And like that you’re done.

But now YouTube works… everything seems to work. You go into the installer app. Start to set things up, apparently the BSD subsystem isn’t installed by default. As it installs it warns you NOT TO CHANGE THE PASSWORD WITH PASSWD, because it’s borked and it will make your iphone reboot over and over and over…. GAH! That would’ve been nice to know! Wish someone would’ve blogged that, eh?

So, now all is good with the world. You install your apps. Though VTerm won’t install. But you can just grab that here. And you find a site that explains how to change the password if you need to and suggests installing Services so you can turn off SSH to save battery life and keep from tempting folks when you’re not using it.

Phew… well, that’s over. Good job! Now let’s see about Mono.

If, like me, your iPhone camera suddenly stops saving the pictures it’s taking then you’ll be happy to hear I’ve done all the digging and found you the answer. Find it here on the Apple support forums.

This is your friend when you need to trim whitespace in javascript:

replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g,”)

On Pownce Mason Browne posted this fun little exercise. Gives an interesting look at what people are reading and how things sound out of context.

Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book;
2. Open it at page 123;
3. Find the fifth sentence/ phrase;
4. Blog the next four sentences/ phrases together with these instructions;
5. Don’t you dare dig your shelves for that very special or intellectual book;
6. Pass it forward to six friends.

Here’s mine:

From Dreaming in Code (which was slightly closer than The Little Zen Companion)

“(One programmer posting on a coders’ site wearily put it, ‘The name for my pain is…managers.’) Others accept the value of having good management but run screaming from the prospect of taking on the job themselves.

As the hunt dragged on, Lou Montulli and Aleks Totic suggested a name for their Netscape days. Micheal Toy had been one of a band of employees at Silicon Graphics who left with its founder, Jim Clark, when Clark decided to start a new venture that would turn into Netscape.”

I like the first two lines. It jumps between paragraphs and I think the last thought is basically cut off so it falls a little flat out of context. But yeah. Let’s see what you guys come up with.

6 friends? Where am I going to find 6 friends?!

I haven’t been able to get a good answer to my question about loading data files onto the iphone for a new app. Not data files that are part of the app, mind you. But let’s say you’re working on a viewer of some sort for a particular file format - no I’m not going to mention which. How do you get those files on the iPhone?

I sent an email off to Erica Sadun. If anyone knew - out side of Apple’s secret cabal - it would be Erica. But even though I got a fast and polite response, it looks like there are no obvious methods other than to possibly hit a url and save the file to your storage space on the iPhone.

Hrmm… not everyone is going to have access to hosting to get/post file from. This seems like a less than optimal solution, to me. And it certainly seems to lessen the value of my particular application if the user has to jump through hoops to get their files on the iphone and if they also have to put up files they might not want to share with everyone.

I wonder if you can get access to email attachments. I better alternative. I’ll look into it and see what I find.

I’m looking at writing a viewer for the iPhone with the new SDK. But I’m trying to hunt down how I can get files to view on to the iPhone. Nothing is very clear there. If I can’t synch the files on to the phone, as I’m guessing I can’t, then do I have to grab the file off the web or something?

Anyone have the skinny on this?