Jail Breaking

Posted Tue Dec 29, 2009 in

CydiaOne of the things done to my iPhone is that I jailbroke it. There was a couple of reasons why I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. One is that I wanted access to a program called “backgrounder” to enable a couple of applications to run in the background on my iPhone. I sometimes like to stream Last.fm and want to be able to do that while having another application in the foreground. There’s no reason why that can’t be done (within reason — there’s only 150MB or RAM in the device), so I want to be able to do it.

The big winner for me though is the SBSettings program. This program allows a pop-up over the main display to control the radios in the iPhone. I turn off the Bluetooth, WiFi, and 3G radios when I’m not using them. It takes about two seconds to do that. I also clear the RAM on the iPhone when it starts to get kinda-full (technical term). This keeps things running smoothly (probably isn’t necessary, but I do it anyway).

The main program that I use to install these tools (and only a couple of others) is Cydia (note this is a mobile-enabled site) When I applied the jailbreak to my iPhone, I installed Cydia. However, yesterday Cydia wouldn’t load — it crashed on start-up. My suspicion was that there was a cache issue. But, I didn’t have access to the cache, or at least didn’t know where it lives in the iPhone’s filesystem.

This morning, I found a post that has the directory where Cydia houses it’s cache. I used ssh to jump into the iPhone’s filesystem, deleted the cache files, and restarted the program. Ding!

N.B. A few minutes ago (1215) I read this entry and had to laugh at the “only 150MB of RAM.” I remember when my computer had only 640KB (yep, kbytes) of RAM and I thought that was a lot. Times change…

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Runaway aslmanager…

Posted Wed Nov 4, 2009 in

This afternoon the fans in my MacBook Pro went nuts. The system shouldn’t have been particularly busy, but it was.

I pulled up the dashboard to see what process or processes were hogging the CPU. Two processes were runaways — syslogd and aslmanager. Together they were gobbling both cores of the machine’s CPU. Nothing else was getting done.

Of course, I would have a conference call to receive when I wanted to use the computer to keep notes, plus the system had gone bonkers.

I opened a terminal window and killed both processes. After a few minutes, they restarted. So, I rebooted the system (“when in doubt, reboot”). Still no joy.

So, I searched the ‘net a bit (while on the conference call) and found a reference to a runaway aslmanager process. Still in the terminal, I went to the /var/log/aslmanager and deleted the file. That solved the problem.

I’m not sure exactly what the process does, but I think it’s kicked off by the syslogd daemon to assist managing the system logs. System logs will hog disk resources if not properly managed.

That was weird, but I’m glad I figured it out. I also got a lot done on the conference call.

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Windows 7 Adventure

Posted Sat Oct 31, 2009 in

JackalopeWell, this has been an adventure. Yeah, that’s the right word for it. An adventure.

I really only want one computer. My PowerMac is getting a little long in the tooth. There’s no question about it. Yet, I really don’t want to spend the $3K or so to upgrade the desktop. That’s especially true because my main reason to upgrade is video performance for the one game I play, World of Warcraft. Yes, I want to be able to run Windows too, because there are several programs I use that only run under Windows (HEC-HMS and HEC-RAS being the two most important).

So, it’s hard to justify the upgrade solely because I want to play. But, I really wanted a video upgrade. So, enter this old linux server I ran for years to support my research efforts. The need for the server diminished over the last three years, so it’s been sitting in my workroom, neglected.

Young Son and I searched and searched for identification of the board. No joy. We found a few numbers, but didn’t find anything else. He finally gave up and went back to his room. I never give up, however. I used Google to search for fragments of the numbers and finally determined that the board was manufactured by Tyan and the model is the K8WE.

The hardware is still pretty decent. It’s based on a Tyan K8WE S2895 motherboard with two Opteron 275s mounted on the board and two gigabytes of good memory. The video card was lacking (never needed anything too powerful) and the drive space is limited (2×35GB SATA drives), but still it’s decent hardware.

So, Young Son and I did a little research and learned that the NVIDIA 9800GTX of the 260 series are good performers and not top-shelf price. We drove over to Best Buy to pick one up and I shopped a bit. I knew I was going to have issues with my Windows install — I haven’t kept a Windows disk in years. In fact, the last time I bought Windows was 98ME. Yipes! But, I didn’t buy the install (besides, they only had upgrade versions on the shelf).

I got the new display adapter home and prepped the box. The card was easy to install. But then came the hard part. My old Windows 98ME disk would not boot. Neither would any of my upgrades (2K or XP) recognize the 98ME boot CD.

Urgh.

Wife needed to run errands, so I volunteered to go along. I could tell she really wanted me to. It was one of those looks. :) So, I happily went along, but vented along the way because of my frustration.

Aside: I’m learning something about myself as I get older. My frustration level is lower now than it used to be — a lot lower. I also am not current on computer hardware as I used to be. I’m over the hill. Double urgh…

I decided to buy a copy of Windows 7. I guess it’s OK for M$ to get a bit of my money now and again. I still prefer open systems and open source software whenever I can use it. We drove to Best Buy (again), but they only have the upgrades. (More on this later…) But, the nice young man in the blue polo shirt suggested we try Office Depot or Staples. Staples is close to home, so we drove there on the way home.

Fortunately, I snagged one of two remaining copies of the software. We drove home and I began the install. That part was trivial. I chose to install the 32-bit version (for now) — I may upgrade before too long, because I want to install more memory. Then I let the system upgrade while I installed WoW (three DVDs worth). Then I waited while the WoW launcher installed all the patches to bring the system current.

WoW started right up and found my account. I entered my main character and processed my user interface. All well and good. Performance is much better and now I have a machine I can actually play games on. As a perk, I also have a machine that will efficiently run the two major models I routinely use.

This morning, I was messing around with the system and noticed only one of the processors is recognized. A massive Google search began as I searched for why this should be the case. There wasn’t much out there and there are many conflicting reports. Paul Thurrott says yes. However, I could find no way to switch on the two-processor support.

I spent a lot of time searching for answers. I also upgraded the driver set for the Tyan motherboard and upgraded the BIOS while I was at it. (Bootdisk.com is recommended for help there!)

Finally, after talking to an old friend who does a lot of computer support and networking, I decided to go ahead and buy the Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade. It wasn’t an easy decision and I hated spending more money, but there is no reason not to use the hardware I already have. So, I did.

The install went easy. When I finished, I checked Task Manager and I now have four cores running. There’s a lot of processing power available. This is good because I’ll use the system for tasks requiring application that only run under Winder$.

I went ahead and connected an old Sony flat panel I had in the workroom. Wife says “You’re surrounded by computers.”

Oh yeah — the image — is of my back with one of my favorite t-shirts. Wife likes the juxtaposition between the Jackalope and “Lure him with whiskey…” so long as it’s Jack Daniel’s.

Finally, Happy Halloween. Don’t eat too many treats!

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Five Years Ago

Posted Sun Sep 13, 2009 in

PowerMac G5Five years ago I wrote about setting up a new PowerMac. I’m still using that machine, although it’s showing its age now. With the release of Snow Leopard the PowerMac is no longer supported by the current version of the Apple operating system.

It is the ending of an age of powerful processors that couldn’t keep up with the Intel juggernaut. Although the machine still has a lot of computational power to offer, the 8xAGP bus is no longer able to keep up with the demands of some graphics-intensive applications. I notice that Photoshop and Lightroom both are slow to load. These are both big programs. Also, rendering video is slow too.

It’s time for me to upgrade my desktop. That’s why I decided to do a hard drive upgrade on my notebook with the idea of getting another year of service from that machine. I’ll purchase a new desktop computer this year, probably sooner rather than later. I’ll probably either sell the Dual-G5 or send it to my friend at TTU for use as a server of some kind.

Technology changes and time moves forward. Sometimes things end. “Every new beginning comes from some other new beginning’s end…”

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Argh…

Posted Tue Jan 6, 2009 in

Months ago I had some problems with my Texas Tech University email account. The mail was not flowing. So, I contacted the IT help desk. After being passed around a few times, it was determined that, because I was no longer an official employee of Texas Tech, my university email account was disabled.

So, late last year I received an email from one of the administrative folks at TTU about a travel voucher. TTU uses an automated travel-accounting system (reducing paper). However, given that my account was disabled, I had no way of checking TTU email.

Or, so I thought…

Marian used my credentials to log into my email account and found the voucher awaiting my approval. I logged in through the webmail interface and found I could log in.

Argh…

I decided to determine whether my email client can retrieve messages from the TTU email server. They are downloading now.

As Kate would say, technology bites…

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Weird Apple Mail Problem

Posted Mon Dec 8, 2008 in

Over the last months I’ve had this recurring weird Apple Mail problem. I don’t recall when it began, but it’s been back periodically. The unread-message count that appears on the window header sometimes displays a ridiculous number of unread messages — even for me.

Shutting down and restarting Mail sometimes fixes the problem. But, it’s chronic and will not go away.

Irritated, I did a brief web search this afternoon. I found this link: Leopard Apple Mail Incorrect Message Count <http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5653148&#5653148>. I read through the issue, used a smart mailbox to find all of the unread messages, and then deleted them.

The problem went away. The question is whether it is permanently gone or I have just a temporary fix. Time will tell.

Edit 1530: Nope, this didn’t fix the problem. It helped me identify a lot of fossil emails, but didn’t stop the top-bar miscount. I know I have a lot of email, but not four billion messages.

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MacTeX Problem Solved

Posted Wed Oct 29, 2008 in

I downloaded and installed the new MacTeX 2008 a few days ago. I wanted to upgrade my distribution to include updates included in TeXlive 2008. The download took a long time even with broadband. The install, though, went easily.

Then I tried to compile a source file. The compile time was horrendous. The program load was nearly 20 seconds. So, something was wrong.

I was busy and then out of town, so I couldn’t work on the problem. However, yesterday morning I had a few minutes, so I wrote up the problem report and posted it to the mailing list. A suggestion came back quickly and I ran the tests, but I had to run to work so I couldn’t do the follow up.

When I arrived home this afternoon, I started checking things out. I created another user account and tested the install under that account. No change. Therefore, it wasn’t my local texmf tree, it had to be something else. I worked a little more and found a fossil texmf tree. The issue was that I had to do this last year when I installed TeX on my desktop to get my files to work.

I archived the tree and deleted it. When I compiled a TeX file, it went as quickly as it should have. Problem solved.

But, the process started me thinking about my local texmf tree. I have duplicate copies of the files in that tree — one on my desktop and one on my notebook. That’s bad juju. So, I figured out I can create a symbolic link from the local tree to my portable drive and keep my local texmf tree there. Tomorrow I’ll create a symbolic link on the internal disk of my notebook to point to the same location on the portable drive. There will only need to be one copy of the files in my local texmf tree. That’s a superior solution and will mean I no longer have to worry about those files being in synchronization.

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