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Author: doug

iTerm crashing on launch

Published April 10, 2010 by doug

I’ve recently been using iTerm on the Mac. I was happily using it, until it started crashing on launch. After searching around on the internet, I finally figure out what is wrong. The issue occurred because I was using an external display. When not connected to the external display the app would crash.

I found details in this bug here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2889711&group_id=67789&atid=518973

There are 2 easy ways to solve this problem.

1. In the normal terminal type:

defaults delete net.sourceforge.iTerm "NSWindow Frame iTerm Window 0"

2. Open ~/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.iTerm.plist and removed the following entry:
NSWindow Frame iTerm Window 0:

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Buying an Apple Product

Published March 3, 2010 by doug

Apple is very secretive about it’s products and releases. This makes it very difficult to know if it’s a good time to buy a particular Apple product.

To aid you in your decision, Macrumors.com has a Buyer’s Guide. This guide lists the release history of each product and gives a recommendation as to if now is a good time to buy or not.

If you’re looking to buy a new mac, iphone, monitor, etc.. this guide should be your first stop.

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Naked Domains in Google App Engine

Published November 7, 2009 by doug

After setting up an app in the google app engine with a domain name, I found that accessing the domain via the naked domain name (no www.) would not work.

Worked:
http://www.mydomain.com

Didn’t work:
http://mydomain.com

After search for a while, I came across this answer:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=91080

The solution is to forward mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com with your domain registrar. After doing this, it worked as expected.

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iPhone Development Helper: Fill up your Address Book

Published June 12, 2009 by doug

AddressBookFill is a simple application which populates your address book with contacts. This is useful when developing for the iPhone and working on the emulator.

On many occasions, I’ve spent quite a bit of time adding contacts to the emulator to test something. Then when I change emulator version, they all get erased. This is very frustrating. So I put together this simple application which allow you to programatically fill up your address book.

Currenly the address book is populated with U.S. Presidents. Values are set for:
* first name
* last name
* photo
* phone number
* birthday

I’ll make it more robust in the future. But you may find this useful for now. The code might also be interesting if you’re learning how to program the address book.

Download: addressbookfill-10.tar.gz

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ASIHTTPRequest – Uploading Photos

Published April 8, 2009 by doug

Recently I used ASIHTTPRequest to upload images and other data from an iPhone application to a web server. I search around and looked at all the different options and this was best and easiest to use. It’s open source and comes with lots of good examples. I was particularly impressed with the network queue.

The one thing I did not find, was sample code for was posting an image to a server. Here is some sample code:


// Initilize Queue
[networkQueue setUploadProgressDelegate:statusProgressView];
[networkQueue setRequestDidFinishSelector:@selector(imageRequestDidFinish:)];
[networkQueue setQueueDidFinishSelector:@selector(imageQueueDidFinish:)];
[networkQueue setRequestDidFailSelector:@selector(requestDidFail:)];
[networkQueue setShowAccurateProgress:true];
[networkQueue setDelegate:self];

// Initilize Variables
NSURL *url;
ASIFormDataRequest * request;

// Add Image
NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory,
NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *dataPath = [documentsDirectory
stringByAppendingPathComponent:@”myImage.jpg”];

// Get Image
NSData *imageData = [[[NSData alloc]
initWithContentsOfFile:dataPath] autorelease];

// Return if there is no image
if(imageData != nil){
url = [NSURL URLWithString:@”http://myserver/upload.php”];
request = [[[ASIFormDataRequest alloc] initWithURL:url] autorelease];
[request setPostValue:@”myImageName” forKey:@”name”];
[request setData:imageData forKey:@”file”];
[request setDidFailSelector:@selector(requestWentWrong:)];
[request setTimeOutSeconds:500];
[networkQueue addOperation:request];
queueCount++;
}
[networkQueue go];

Note: It’s not necessary to use a queue here because I’m only uploading 1 thing. But in my application I’m uploading many things and a queue was helpful. It also runs in the asynchronously in the background, which prevents the UI from getting locked up.

Note 2: When sending large files you should use “setFile” instead of “setData”. Files are then read from disk instead of memory. Here is an updated example. Thanks again to Ben Copsey for this library and his useful comments below.

NSString *imagePath = [documentsDirectory
stringByAppendingPathComponent:@”myImage.jpg”];
url = [NSURL URLWithString:@”http://myserver/upload.php”];
ASIFormDataRequest *request =
[[[ASIFormDataRequest alloc] initWithURL:url] autorelease];
[request setPostValue:@”myImageName” forKey:@”name”];
[request setFile:imagePath forKey:@”photo”];

More info on streaming here: http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/How-to-use#streaming

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WD My Book 1 TB Hard Drive – Partition Failed

Published February 27, 2009 by doug

I recently bought at Western Digital My Book 1 TB Hard Drive for my MacBook Pro. I wanted to use it for Time Machine backups, which meant that I needed for format it as Mac OS Extended. It came pre-formatted as FAT.

I used Disk Utility to partition it and got an error a few seconds into it.
wd-error
The error window said: “Partition failed. Partition failed with error: File system formatter failed”.

After pulling my hair out for a while, I finally figured it out…

I’m not exactly sure the reason why, but Mac OX has an issue with a “Master Boot Record” bigger than 512mb. Luckily the solution is easy.

1. Open up Disk Utility.

2. Select your drive on the left hand side.

3. Then click on the “Partition” tab.

4. Choose Volume Scheme: “1 Partition” and select the format: “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”
wd-options

5. Then click on the “Options” button.

6. Here is the important part. Choose “GUID Partition Table” instead of “Master Boot Record”. Then click “OK”.
wd-partition

7. Now click “Apply” to start the partition process. That’s it!

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Undefined symbols: _SCNetworkReachabilityCreateWithName

Published December 23, 2008 by doug

I was recently adding some code to check for the availability of the network, so I can display an error to the user if unavailable.

I looked at the SeismicXML application and borrowed the following code:


// Use the SystemConfiguration framework to determine if the host that provides
// the RSS feed is available.
– (BOOL)isDataSourceAvailable
{
static BOOL checkNetwork = YES;
if (checkNetwork) {
// Since checking the reachability of a host can be expensive,
// cache the result and perform the reachability check once.
checkNetwork = NO;

Boolean success;
const char *host_name = “earthquake.usgs.gov”;
//const char *host_name = “localhost”;

SCNetworkReachabilityRef reachability =
SCNetworkReachabilityCreateWithName(NULL, host_name);
SCNetworkReachabilityFlags flags;
success = SCNetworkReachabilityGetFlags(reachability, &flags);
_isDataSourceAvailable = success &&
(flags & kSCNetworkFlagsReachable) &&
!(flags & kSCNetworkFlagsConnectionRequired);
CFRelease(reachability);
}
return _isDataSourceAvailable;
}

I wouldn’t compile unless I added the following import:

#import

After adding this I still go 2 more errors, but these were a bit more cryptic.

 Undefined symbols:
"_SCNetworkReachabilityCreateWithName", referenced from:
-[TheElementsAppDelegate isDataSourceAvailable] in TheElementsAppDelegate.o
"_SCNetworkReachabilityGetFlags", referenced from:
-[TheElementsAppDelegate isDataSourceAvailable] in TheElementsAppDelegate.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

After some digging around I realized that I was missing the SystemConfiguration.framework framework.

So here is what I did to add it.
1. I right click on “Frameworks” and choose: Add < Existing Framework
add_framework

2. Browsed to the file: /System/Library/Frameworks/SystemConfiguration.framework

3. Rebuilt the project and my error was gone.

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Install SUN JDK on Fedora 10

Published December 4, 2008 by doug

Installing the SUN JDK on Fedora is pretty simple. Here are some steps you can follow:

1. Go to: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

2. Click the download button next to: “Java SE Development Kit (JDK) 6 Update 11” or which ever version you want.

3. On the next page, select Platform: “Linux” and Language: “Multi-language”.  Click on Continue.

4. Then click on the file to download: jdk-6u11-linux-i586.bin  This will download the file to your computer.

5.  Next we need to make the file executable:
     chmod a+x jdk-6u11-linux-i586.bin

6. Then run the installer:
     ./ jdk-6u11-linux-i586.bin

You’ll need to read the Terms & Conditions and accept them.

At this point you can use it as it or set it up more.  Here is what I did.

7.  As root I moved it to /usr/local
     sudo mv  jdk1.6.0_11 /usr/local

8. Then I updated my .bashrc to add it to my path:
     vi ~/.bashrc

Add the following:
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk1.6.0_11
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

9.  Now to use java either source the .bashrc like:
     source ~/.bashrc

Or open a new terminal window.

Note 1: Note, these steps should work on most linux distros.

Note 2: If you already have OpenJDK installed, you can remove it with:
     # yum remove java-1.6.0-openjdk java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin

Note 3: If you are missing some dependancies, you can add them like:
     # yum install compat-libstdc++-33 compat-libstdc++-296

Adding javac to your Path
To make javac available to any individual user, just add the following to each user’s path:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk1.6.0_11
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

For example, if you have a user called doug, you’d open:
/home/doug/.bashrc

And add the 2 export command. (This assume you are using bash and the /home/doug is your home directory)

If you want to make is available to all users, as root edit the file:
/etc/profile

And again add:
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk1.6.0_11
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

If your shell is tcsh, you can add it here:
/etc/csh.cshrc

Firefox Plugin
You need to manuallly install the plugin. I followed the instructions in this thread: http://www.e-graviton.com/ird/node/195

On my Linux box, the plugins directory does not exist. So I have to create a new one first. Here are the steps:

1. Make a symbolic link:
$ mkdir plugins
$ pwd
/home/doug/.mozilla/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/local/jdk1.6.0_11/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ./libjavaplugin_oji.so
$ ls
libjavaplugin_oji.so
$

2. Then I added the following lines to my .bash_profile
MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=$HOME/.mozilla/plugins
export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH

3. Log off and log on again, start the firefox, and I can run the java applet on linux!

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Distribution Provisioning Profile not showing up

Published November 11, 2008 by doug

I recently spent about 2 hours trying to get my Distribution Provisioning Profile to show up. I followed the instructions and did everything, but still it would not show up.

Then I came across this thread: http://www.v2ex.com/2008/10/22/distribution-provisioning-profile-not-showing-up/

The first suggestion was to create a new project. I created a new project and my Distribution Provisioning profile appeared in it. Then I went back to my main project and it appeared there too. Problem solved!

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