If you upgrade your iPhone to firmware 2.0 and additionally have jailbroken and unlocked your iPhone using pwnage, you could have the same problems as I had with syncing my Mails (or alternatively, your Safari bookmarks).
I’ve found that by changing the permissions I was able to fix the problem.
More details can be found on the iPhone Link Page.
I just upgraded my version 1 iPhone to firmware version 2.0 using Pwnage, a tool released by the iPhone Dev Team.
The layout of the tool itself, as presented on the screen is very user friendly with lots of hints on what you need to do to upgrade – but still, a nice (short) help file is missing. For example, it could have stated up front that you need certain files and that you need to quit iTunes and iTunes helper (a helper program that runs as a background process). Instead it was mentioned on the page where I downloaded it, but not in the program itself.
As long as you quit iTunes and iTunes Helper (use the activity monitor to find and force quit that process) you should be fine. And as for the bootloader files you need, you can find them on the internet without much problems, and Pwnage will even help you find them (but again, I would have loved to see this mentioned in a help file as the required set list).
After the upgrade from 1.4 to 2.0, which took about 15 minutes in all, my phone seems to be just fine, but a few reminders for those who still need to upgrade :
My guess is that open-source authors will release new updated versions via Cydia, as long as they haven’t switched to the appstore.
Even then I would gladly buy a re-release of such a program via the appstore, for example “Convert” : a jailbreak v1.4 app that can convert just about anything into something else. It featured a downloadable list of currencies that you could refresh by shaking it, and has been of regular usage to me.
But so far I haven’t found any appstore converter to my liking, and so far I balk at paying for something I had for free.
We’ll just have to wait and see if Cydia gets more software available in the near future. Meanwhile, I’m looking through the appstore.
Well, I’ve been a Mac user for over 4 years now, and I can definitely state that I’m not going to go back to windows (any version), so far !
But there is one thing that I miss : windows games. I’ve bought myself an xbox with a seperate screen, which is fine and sometimes better for playing games, but some games only come out on windows, like Team Fortress, Crysis or The Witcher or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Broken Sword and those are all games that I like playing (whenever I can find the time which is, frankly, not a lot).
I bought Parallels Desktop for Mac, hoping that I could play windows games, but they seem to have stopped developing for dx9 games compatibility, and their updates have been become very slow. So recently, when Codeweavers announced Crossover Games for Mac, I snapped it up and have been using it since. Admittedly with mixed results, but boy when it works for a game, it works well !
Crossover Games For Mac is a specialised version of Crossover (which is based on Wine, the not-an-emulator of windows that recently reached 1.0 status) that has been fine-tuned and built for Mac. Of course you can install Wine yourself, but on a Mac this is not exactly an easy thing to do. Especially the OpenGL stuff seems hard to get to install (at least this is where I got stuck when I tried).
Codeweaver (which is a major sponsor of Wine) has list of games for which it is compatible here. Guild Wars, Eve Online and Half Life 2 are all pretty major games, and these and quite few more from STEAM are guaranteed to work.
Highly recommended if the games you want to play are officially supported by them. There is also a compatibility database that you can check for all the other games in existence.
I’ve gone one step further, and have become an advocate for testing 3 of those games (Broken Sword : Angel of Death, Jade Empire and the Witcher) against each new beta. So far, none of them have started magically working, but I keep hoping…
I have restored my last theme, as well as some images, courtesy of my backups and a fresh backup that I got from Priorweb, my hosting provider, who have been very helpful and have reacted promptly.
(I pay them good money for this, of course, but it always nice to be helped along quickly and efficiently).
So. The website is back up, Google has done a site review and have deemed me clean of adware and infectious spirits, and I hope to stay that way.
For now, no other plugins. I’m gonna wait a day or two before activating and installing any plugins, and I certainly won’t do it using the backups directly – it seems that every php page was infected with javascript code.
The code is obfuscated ofcourse, but I would like to plough through it and understand it some more, what it does. I’ll let you know if I find the time and motivation (both of which are in short supply for the moment, work taking up quite a bit of my spare time and going to take even more next week.
The blog got hacked, it seems somewhere around the end of june. That’s what happens when you take a long vacation, both away from your computer and out of the country.
Dammit !
My apologies to all those who were affected by this. I’ve since deleted all files and have replaced it with the latest version of wordpress.
For now, no new themes and no new or old plugins until I’m sure that this has been solved.
Today I realised that iPhone programmers, who have struggled and battled with programming the iPhone since it’s release, using their own custom-written toolchains, have won.
When I read that somebody released a 3D game for the (jailbroken) iPhone, where you can walk about, and attack and be attacked, and he’s done it all on windows using a windows toolchain, writing everything from scratch, I just went ‘wow’.
It’s an early alpha release, but it still fires up my mind with Neverwinter Nights on the iPhone !
You can read more about it here, but from the screenshots it looks to be on it’s way to becoming really cool !
Yup, I totally get the message. Attention to detail is what counts, and that includes making it work juuuust right. That’s the way I try to execute my projects, with attention to detail. So what is a wienie ?
The wienie is the seamless way the glass fits into the metal on an iPod. It's the solid slam of a Mercedes door closing. It's the "Easter Egg" on that DVD you just bought. It's the glow of the logo on the back of my MacBook Pro.
The wienie isn't what you must do It's what you want to do. Its delightful impact arises from the sheer joy of its creation and the desire of its creator to share that joy with others.
I think more and more people are switching from an i’ll-buy-it-if-it-is-cheaper-than-the-rest to a stance where they buy or want something that is made with quality and with love. Where before the only thing that counted was the lowest price, now the quality comes to the fore.
When you buy something that is really well-made and well-thought-out, it’s a marvel.
In the beginning you’ll admire the way the designer thought about this object and the effort he put in it, without really knowing why he did it just that way. You’ll just get a good ‘feeling’ about it.
Then, after a while, you will start to appreciate WHY he put that effort in it. Only now you’ll realise the reason why the glass was beveled just so, or why the shape of it is molded just that way so it better fits in your hand.
And suddenly, weary old me is thanking that unknown designer for his cleverness, once more filled with childlike joy again, marveling about this object.
??????
If there is not a lot of activity currently on this website, that’s because I’ve discovered Twinkle : a combination of twitter + location awareness using the iPhone.
For those who don’t know what twitter is : it’s sorta like sending text (sms) messages to friends, but you can see them all at the same time. You can choose to just post status messages (going out with some friends, now out for a bite to eat, preparing for a big presentation) so that people interested in you can follow your ‘tweets’. But those other people are doing the same thing, so you can decide to ‘follow’ their tweets as well. And that’s when it becomes interesting.
Twitter allows you different views : your personal view which shows your tweets and those you follow, and a public view, where you can see ALL the tweets from that current moment, from all over the world. It’s easy to read something and just fire a few words back, and then you get interested in that persons life, and you start ‘following’ them as well.
And suddenly you are in this microcosmos of lives of other people where you get glimpses of what they are doing and how they are feeling, and man! is it ever addictive !
You can even use it from your mobile phones and cell phones, if you set it up right.
Twinkle for iPhone adds location awareness (using triangulation of the cell phone towers your phone connects to) and by doing so takes Twitter to the next level. You have an additional view where you can specify the range around you (unfortunately, so far only in miles) in which you want to see other people who are using Twinkle.
That plus the ability to post a picture next to your post allows you to discover a lot more friends or similar-minded people who are living in your neighborhood, and are using Twinkle as well. And suddenly you have a lot more things to talk about. The weather, where are you hanging out, cool picture I didn’t know that place before.
It’s a friend (or at least contact) making machine !
You can find me via twitter with my handle “Lexstok“.
I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 – the interface is a lot more streamlined, but as in any good product that gets an upgrade, there is always an accomodation phase where you suss out where your favourite menu options have gone to.
I took me 10 minutes to find the plugin section again ! I can blame my large 24inch screen though. With my browser window stretched across almost the width of my screen they are completely on the right end of it, in plain view all the time.
I’ve also disabled self-user registration. Since the xmlrpc hack, there are several spammers/robots who sign up and test if they can use you for sending spam. Comments can be made on any of my posts without signing up, so user registration is nog longer needed.
Should you’ve passed by the last 48 hours or so, you might have noticed that my domain boschmans.net had been parked, and that you arrived on a meaningless advert page. My apologies for that, this was none of my doing.
So far I have not received an explanation from my website provider (I have been with Priorweb since 2002 or so). I can only guess that the problem was with them thinking I hadn’t payed my bills, as my renewal was up for begin April.
Apparently there is something like paying too early, as I had already paid somewhere in February !
Anyway, the technical reason is fairly simple. If the domain name is not renewed, the name goes up for grabs again. This is why my domain name suddenly pointed to an advert page. There’s a grace period of several days before someone else can claim the name, so I got it back after complaining furiously. The DNS name change needs to be propagated across all the DNS servers, and is normally set to update once a day. So that means that it took at the very least or so one day when the domain registry lapsed, and one more to reset the DNS correctly.
I’ll wait for a better explanation from Priorweb.
