Paul Danter

SVN Client For Leopard That Fits Right In

admin — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:21:41 +0000

I’m currently using a trial copy of Versions by Sofa.

It’s a nice and slick client app, that is beautifully designed and looks and feels native on the mac. I’ve been using ZigVersion, which is free for personal use, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it, but Versions has a little extra bling. There’s only a 30 trial and no free version, so be prepared to pay the 39 Euros if you can’t help yourself when it comes to great UI.

You can download your trial of Versions here.

On a side note, if you’re more inclined to use simple and functional web applications for SVN, checkout the ruby on rails app warehouse, which is now available free.

Phone Contract Confusion - Even Voicemail Varies!

admin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:46:36 +0000

I’m not stupid. But…

1. I should be able to compare mobile phone contacts and weigh up the benefits
2. Why are phone bills impossible to interpret?
3. I know 1 & 2 are done to confuse me and stop me asking questions, but why do we all put up with it?

The reason for this entry is that while I was trying to find out why I get cut off on some voicemail messages, I found that there quite a difference even in the basic voicemail service you are given on each major operator in the US.

The list is endless, but here are three ubiquitous features to compare:

AT&T

20 messages maximum
2 minute maximum per message
14-day retention

Verizon Wireless

20 messages maximum
3 minute maximum per message
21-day retention

T-Mobile

15 messages maximum
1 minute maximum per message
15-day retention

Sprint

20 messages maximum
2 minute maximum per message? (But I had to get this details from their forum)
20-day retention

Most offer a we’ll-nickle-and-dime-you upgrade for around $1.99 a month, but that’s pathetic!

Some of us rely heavily on voicemail and I’d have though it would be a commodity service, identical on each network. I would never even think to check out the specifics.

What else are we missing?

When you think of all the feature multiplied by all the plan variations multiplied by all the different handset capabilities, I’m surprised anyone ever buys a phone.

Is there a good comparison service out there?

Citizen Journalists And Mobile Technology

admin — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 05:38:52 +0000

The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

The New York Times discusses how, as the story unfolded, news emerged from a new breed of sources – including Twitter and Flickr – as updates were sent from Mobile Phone.

What does this mean to the ever evolving news media? While there are benefits, I hope news cycles do not become further compressed.

View Original Article

RMagick on Rails

admin — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:06:08 +0000

There are some great guides for installing and configuring ImageMagick and RMagick on OS X for use with Ruby on Rails. In my experience, there’s always something missing.

I recently wanted to use the Gruff gem for generating graphs and my standard install failed. It turns out there are some font requirements, which I tracked down (but misplaced the link, so apologies for not linking back to the blog that helped).

Anyway, here is the end to end install that works for me (OS X Leapard, with XCode installed).

Get FreeType:

curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/ \ 
freetype/freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz
tar xzvf freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.1.10
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Get LibPNG

curl -O http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ \
libpng/libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2
bzip2 -dc libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2 | tar xv
cd libpng-1.2.10
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Get JPG

curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

If you get the following error with the JPEG install:

install: /usr/local/man/man1/cjpeg.1: No such file or directory

...you just need to check the man1 directory exists. If not, add it then re-run the make install (from within the jpeg-6b directory):

sudo mkdir /usr/local/man/man1
sudo make install
cd ..

Get TIFF

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Ghostscript fonts are needed, get the package

Download from here, then

tar vzxf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
sudo mv fonts/ /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/

Get ImageMagick

curl -O http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ \
imagemagick/ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz
tar xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.0
export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-static --with-modules --without-perl \
--without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8 \
--with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Now Install RMagick

sudo gem install rmagick

Ruby on Rails Install on Leopard

admin — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:01:26 +0000

A couple of nice tips for a fresh install:

Dan Benjamin has the most comprehensive guide online for a purpose built rails install. It can be found here.
If you want to install a sepecific version of rails, the syntax is:
```
sudo gem install -v=2.1.0 rails
```
If you use MySQL rather than SQLite, you can get the fixed preference pane here.
If you have multiple versions of rails installed and want to start a project with a previous version:
```
rails _2.0.2_ myapp
```

iPhone Tethering Will Be Official (in 2009)

admin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:40:33 +0000

It looks like Apple and AT&T have decided to do the right thing and offer an official mechanism to tether your iPhone to your laptop. Hurrah.

Details will follow. You can read more about it here.

Here’s my purely academic unoffical guide to how this can be achieved today.

14 Great OS X Apps (IMHO)

admin — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:07:32 +0000

What do you put on a shiny new MacBook Pro? Here’s my list of must have apps one day in (as in – the ones I can’t live without):

Here’s a quick explanation of some of the key items…

1Password. Handy app to keep all those online identities under control.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS4 just got released, not sure I can justify the upgrade yet).
Aperture. While iPhoto is a great app, I prefer the advanced features of Aperture.
AppZapper. Easily get rid of the baggage left when you remove an app. I remove most of iLife in favor of the prosumer apps.
Final Cut Express (includes Soundtrack). I graduated from iMovie a couple of years ago. I’m still blown away by the pro quality functionality offered by this app. And at a bargain price.
Linkinus. The IRC Client that looks like it belongs on a Mac.
Office 2008. Hey, I gotta work and that means talking the ‘open’ MS formats!
OmniFocus. With a plethora of To Do apps available, The Omnigroup’s product oozes quality.
OmniGraffle. Office I could concede. This is the only diagram software you’ll need. Visio, fuh.
QuickBooks 2009. You gotta keep your ducks lined up.
Skype. The best VOIP available. Not to say it couldn’t be better…
Textmate. The most comfortable text editor I’ve ever had the pleasure to use.
Transmit. Who thought FTP (and SFTP and WebDAV and S3), could be so much fun?

Yojimbo. I can’t believe how much I use this app – it organizes my life. Period.

Great get-out-and-vote message…

admin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:48:30 +0000

This is a very funny message from Sarah Silverman to get Jewish kids to Schelp over to FL and encourage their grandparents to vote for Obama…

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Hurrah! The New MacBook Pro Supports the iPhone headset!

admin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:46:01 +0000

I finally got my new MBP and it’s overwhelmingly impressive. The unibody make the whole thing very solid and I’ll be interested to see how it handles wear-and-tear.

For me, it’s the little things that count. Apple always seems to be able to pay attention to things that could be overlooked. One of the simple yet effective additions to the newly designed MacBook Pro is that the headphone input supports the iPhone-style headset. This means the Mic on the headset is also detected – so no need to carry around ugly skype accessories anymore!

iPhone, tethering and all that jazz…

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:19:33 +0000

Even though the iPhone comes with an unlimited data plan, that does not extend to connecting via the iPhone from your computer – a process known as tethering. For this reason, you will not find an application on the iTunes App Store to help if you’d like to do this. In fact using your iPhone in this way falls outside the terms and conditions of your AT&T (if in the US) contract.

In Europe, tethering is pretty common place and I’d previously made Infra Red (in the good ol’ GPRS days), bluetooth and USB connections to various devices in the past to make this possible. It seems crazy to me that AT&T expects you to buy and carry around a second 3G device to plug into your laptop should you want to connect in this way. I suspect they are trying to raise their subscriber count (as a data card counts as it’s a separate MISDN). If AT&T are worried about too much data use on the iPhone plan, they should allow it by simply offering an opt-in – for a fee – to add this to your package.

I have both – a 3G iPhone and a USB AT&T connect card, but for the purposes of research, decided to try to connect to my phone anyway. It goes without saying that if you choose to jailbreak, install and tether your phone, you do so at your own risk and any breech of your contract with your operator/carrier is your own responsibility.

There are a couple of ways to do this, and one really simple way – however, whichever method you use, you’ll (unfortunately) need to jailbreak your iPhone.

Get of of jail…

To perform a jailbreak on a mac, there are some great instructions here

Once your iPhone is free, you will be able to use Cydia to install unofficial applications.

The MobileTerminal and 3Proxy Method…

The typical method for tethering your phone is to install two apps: MobileTerminal and 3Proxy (note 3Proxy is only available if your profile in Cydia is ‘Developer’ – to change this go to Cydia > Manage (at the bottom of the screen) > Settings (at the top of the screen).

Full details of setting this up are available all over the Internet. Try these if you want to use this method.

The only problem with this first method is that after quite a lot of work just to get everything installed, every time you want to tether to your iPhone, you need to go through the pain of setting up an ad-hoc network and adding SOCKS settings to your browsers network settings!

Cut to the chase with PDANet…

There’s a new app on the block which takes some of the pain away from this – PDANet. This app is nicely written – for example it checks your phones internet connection before you start – and all you need to do to use it is set up an ad-hoc network and you’re away. PDANet is also installable free using Cydia and you can get to 411 here.

Finally as of v2.x of the iphone, you cannot simply and easily edit the APN (Access Point Name) for different operators. I recently took my jail-broken US phone to the UK, bought a Vodafone SIM card and wanted to connect so I could browse (and call internationally using the great Jajah service).

Thankfully, if you can get a connection using WiFi (or setup your phone before you travel), you can use a great website (on the iPhone) to download new APN settings. There’s a tutorial here and you can access the iPhone site here—select ‘Next’ then ‘Set Custom APN’.

If you don’t know the APN of the operator you will be using, this seems like a pretty comprehensive list (although I don’t know how up-to-date it is). Remember any changes to the APN will effect your ability to connect to your default operator – so you’ll need to reset the APN when you use the device on your home network.

Good luck.