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Paul's Time Sink

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"hacked" E815

Paul Westbrook | 09 September, 2005 15:17

mot_e815.jpg
I just "hacked" my Motorola E815 to enable the File Exchange Bluetooth profile.  Now I can transfer the pictures directly off of the phone, without going through Verizon's network.

SuperJason, pointed me to this post that described the steps to get this to work.  The instructions worked perfectly for me.  I did have a couple of annoyances:

  1. When I was upgrading the Motorola Phone Tools, the upgrader needed to reboot my computer multiple times
  2. In step 5, I didn't realize that I had to install additional drivers.  It looks like when the Motorola Phone Service Tool application runs, it registers more "devices" on the phone.  Until I actually installed the drivers for those devices, nothing worked.

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Red Cross link

Paul Westbrook | 09 September, 2005 11:41

If you have JavaScript enabled, you will see a badge in the upper right corner of this page that links to the Red Cross, so you can make a donation for Katrina relief.  This post on The Brian Alvey Weblog has information on setting this up your self.

[via geek ramblings]

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BluePhoneElite

Paul Westbrook | 09 September, 2005 10:41

I have decided to try BluePhoneElite, that I mentioned previously.  I don't really want to use the SMS features, which it looks like is this applications main function.  I am mainly interested in the proximity features. I just don't know if it is worth paying $20 for just this feature.

When I leave my desk, I want iTunes to pause, the status of Proteus to change to away, and my screen saver to activate.  The iTunes and screen saver integration is built into BluePhoneElite.  I wrote some AppleScripts to do the Proteus integration.
 (More)

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list of files that applications use

Paul Westbrook | 08 September, 2005 22:00

I was interested in getting a list of files that a Mac OS X application attempted to access.  One of my friends gave me the hint that I could use the fs_usage command line tool.  I was able to get this to work, with these commands 

sudo fs_usage |grep appName

I run this command before launching the application, and then you can get a complete list of the files.

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Descent for Free

Paul Westbrook | 07 September, 2005 20:54

I just saw that Descent is now available as an open source game, that is available on OSX, Windows and Linux.  I spent a lot of time in the past playing this game.

[via TUAW]

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Sharing Address Book limitations

Paul Westbrook | 07 September, 2005 20:23

I got a response from Apple today, from my question about sharing address books:

Dear Paul,

You can not share the Address Book with an email-only account.

Thank you for contacting Apple.

It would be great if this was called out in the help text of either Address Book itself, or of .Mac.

So now I have to decide if I want to spend an additional $80 for the Family Pack of .Mac, or find a different solution to let my wife and I share our address books.

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Changed LAN subnet

Paul Westbrook | 07 September, 2005 20:17

Yesterday, I changed the ip address range of my home LAN from the standard 192.168. to 172.16.  I use VPN to access my work's internal network.  Before I made this change, while connected, I wasn't able to access any of my local network resources.  In addition, with the last update of the Cisco VPN software, I wasn't able to access any public sites either.

This change went smoother than I expected.  I have a few devices that have static IP addresses, and I was thinking that the devices would have made it difficult for me to make this change.  Here are the steps that I went through:

  1. Changed my Apple Airport Extreme base station to use DHCP to get it's ip address.
  2. Logged into the server, and gave it a static IP address in the new ip address range. (This cause the server to become inaccessible at this point)
  3. Connected to the Linksys WRT54GS and changed its internal ip address, and the range of the ip address that the dhcp server gave out to be in this range
  4. Physically connected my laptop to the Vonage ATA to change it's ip address
  5. Logged into the WRT54GS to change the port forwarding.
  6. Changed the Airport Extreme to use a static ip address again.

After doing this, everything pretty much worked.  I did have to modify the configuration for cups, as it was limiting connections to the old subnet.

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Sharing Address Books

Paul Westbrook | 05 September, 2005 21:18

I just upgraded my wife's computer to Mac OS X 10.4.  I was looking forward to being able to sharing our contacts in each of our address book.  I haven't liked the .Mac synchronization because it makes a complete copy of the address book on both computers.

In Mac OS X 10.4, you are able to share you address book, and have other people subscribe to it.  In addition to that, when you set up the shares, you can allow other people to modify the contacts.  Here is a post on AppleInsider that describes this feature.
 (More)

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launchd problems

Paul Westbrook | 05 September, 2005 12:49

In this previous post, I mentioned that I switch several cron jobs to launchd.  I have reverted them back to cron jobs.  I have found several problems with launchd

  1. I only saw the jobs run once, and not daily, as I was expecting them to be run.
  2. The interface shows a list of the installed LaunchAgents, but doesn't show when they are going to be run.  I was hoping to see, at the minimum output like happens with crontab -l.
  3. You can't remove LaunchAgents unless you have the original file that was used to install the agent, or at least a file with the same name. 

I will write up these bugs to Apple, and will post links to them here.

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Usefullness of SiteUptime

Paul Westbrook | 04 September, 2005 19:22

In a previous post, I mentioned that I use SiteUptime to monitor some of my servers.  This service is supposed to allow me to be notified when one of my servers goes down.

Over the past few weeks, I have been getting pages stating that one of my servers is down, but when I attempt to log into the server, everything is working fine.

These false positives decrease the usefulness of this service.  I do use WebSitePulse, for monitoring as well, so maybe I will switch to use them.

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Spam comments

Paul Westbrook | 04 September, 2005 18:18

Today, I got over 150 comment spams, within the span of a couple minutes, from one spammer.  This spammer was not very smart.

  1. All of the posts came from the same host (This will allow further spam messages to be blocked, and be added to dnsbl)
  2. All of the posts have the exact same body and title.  (This will make it VERY easy for the bayesian filter to train on these messages.

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random password widgets

Paul Westbrook | 04 September, 2005 17:05

I just saw this post about a problems with some Dashboard widgets that are supposed to generate random passwords.  It seems that some of these widgets use Javascript's Math.random() function, which does not take a seed.  So when on every reboot, the same passwords will be generated.

[via DashboardWidgets News]

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genaliases problems with mailman

Paul Westbrook | 03 September, 2005 21:45

I was moving a mailing list from one virtual domain to another, with the following command:

bin/withlist -l -r fix_url <list> -u <domain.name>

And I noticed that the virtual domain tables that had been created were not updated.  I then ran:

./bin/genaliases

from the mailman install directory, and it only recreated the virtual domain aliases for the last domain.

I went through manually and recreated the other entries.

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"Great" deal

Paul Westbrook | 03 September, 2005 19:04

09-01-05 1912I saw this CD for AOL 9.0, and I though that the deal that they are giving to entice new customers is pretty funny.  They are "giving" 1175 hours to use for free within 50 days.  The funny thing about that is that there are only 1200 hours in 50 days.  How did they decide not to give the whole 1200 hours for free?

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