1. Download and run the jailbreak app called Absinthe
2. Read the install instructions
3. Follow the installation instructions
4. Be patient.

When you are done you’ll have the Cydia App installed.

“This is where the fun begins” – Anakin Skywalker

My shortlist of apps:

• Activator (Control over gestures)
• SBSettings + Toggles & Themes
• Custom BootLoaders: animate + animate fix (Boot Logos)
• FakeCarrier (or removal for space!)
• Firebreak (Enabling the hidden Panorama Camera feature)
• Five Icon { Dock, Folder, Switcher }
• Five Column Springboard.
• Sound/Ringtone themes.
• Winterboard Themes
• Veency (VNC)
• MXTube
• My{Wi,3G} (Paid$$)
• SSH (only if you know what you are doing)
• Mobible Terminal

SSH:

• Install OpenSSH in Cydia
• Change your default password.
• use public-key/private keys
• Mount and browse your device over SSH

Mobile Terminal:

The one in the Cydia store is *old* and won’t work on iOS4 or iOS5.  I’m not sure why, but it seems like the contributor abandoned this package.

You can install it by other means.
http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/wiki/Installation

• Adding another repository and installing via Cydia
• Manually installing it (files + Permissions on the device)
• Open the deb with iFile (Paid$$ but with a free trial)
• Cydia auto-installed deb using Cydia’s auto-install feature
• dropping the .deb in the /var/root/Media/Cydia/AutoInstall folder (create it if its not there, case-sensitive)
• http://www.thedailybuggle.com/autoinstall-deb-file-package-cydia-terminal-command-line/

Animated BootLogos:

Back in the early days you could use an app called LogoMe to update a custom boot logo. Then came animate which let you animate your boot logo (Like the Windows 98+ startup logo screens) You’ll need the animate fix to get them to work now.

I ended up making my own Boot Animation of my AppleTux logo with the help of a couple blogposts

The process is simple: basically create a series of PNGs {0.png, 1.png, 2.png, ... n.png} and place them in a named folder inside of /Library/BootLogos/

/Library/BootLogos/AppleTux/ looks like this:

And can be downloaded here:

The Arduino IDE (hosted on google code) doesn’t work with ChipKit so They remade the the IDE and called it MPIDE (Multi-Platform IDE) and its hosted on Github. The released binaries are found here.

They have a decent wiki page on how to run MPIDE which helped.

The article cited issues with 64 bit systems:

64bit Systems

The binary packages for MPIDE are all built for 32bit Linux distributions, if you are running 64bit you need to have some additional libraries installed. You’ll need to have 32bit versions of libelf.so and libreadline.so to be able to program the chipKIT, these need to be in /usr/lib32. You may well need to sym-link these latest versions manually, installing these libs is a fairly advanced operation and will vary significantly between distributions.

So this is what I had to do to get it running on 64 bit Ubuntu (Maverick/10.10):

1) Download the Linux Version and unpack it somwehere.

2) Getting librxtx-java and other jni items loadable via the LD_LIBRARY_PATH or CLASSPATH, which I wrote a post about.

3) The next issue that I ran into was a permissions issue

Cannot run program “/home/username/mpide-0022-chipkit-linux32-20110619/hardware/pic32/compiler/pic32-tools/bin/pic32-g++”: java.io.IOException: error=13, Permission denied

I initially solved it by chmodding everything in that directory, but that resulted in:

pic32-g++: error trying to exec ‘cc1plus’: execvp: No such file or directory

So I followed the advice in this forum post and executed chmod +x  -R ./hardware/pic32/compiler/ and that seemed to do it for me.  I think I was able to compile/verify the blink example at this point.

4) Add 32bit versions of libelf and libreadline6 to /usr/lib32:

The first error I ran into was:

/home/username/mpide-0022-chipkit-linux32-20110619/hardware/pic32/compiler/pic32-tools/bin/../pic32mx/bin/gcc/pic32mx/4.5.1/cc1plus: error while loading shared libraries: libelf.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I solved this by downloading the i386 deb from here, opening it with archive manager and copying /usr/lib/libelf-0.147.so to /usr/lib32/libelf-0.147.so. after this I creating the versioned symbolic link via ln -s libelf-0.147.so libelf.so.1

Tried it again and was onto my next error:

/home/username/mpide-0022-chipkit-linux32-20110619/hardware/tools/avrdude: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Repeat the same process for libreadline6 (which contains another required lib too) And I was able to upload the and run the blink example.

Now on to making the TLC Library work..

Synergy2 comes with a GUI on Windows, but for Linux or Apple/Mac OSX there isn’t a GUI packaged with synergy itself. I’ve since found the Quick Synergy GUI to work fairly well between Windows and Linux since the key mappings are very similar.

Installing it on Linux was a breeze: sudo apt-get install quicksynergy

When I went to use OSX from a Linux Host, I found that Quick Synergy wasn’t able to configure the key mapping options that are needed to achieve keyboard zen. “No Problem”, I thought, “I’ll just edit the settings file that QuickSynergy Uses” – but it turns out that the changes are overwritten and my GUI dreams died with that issue.

I ended up finding the right key modifiers from Linux to OSX and reverted back to launching Synergy manually from the command line. synergys -f --config /path/to/synergy-config.conf

Its easy to setup aliases or other shortcuts but here is the magic sauce complete with key modifiers:

java.net.BindException: Address already in use
at sun.nio.ch.Net.bind(Native Method)
at sun.nio.ch.ServerSocketChannelImpl.bind(ServerSocketChannelImpl.java:119)
at sun.nio.ch.ServerSocketAdaptor.bind(ServerSocketAdaptor.java:59)
...


It took me a second to figure out how locate the process, but it turned out to be a really easy task using the netstat command by executing ‘netstat -anp | grep 8080‘ (a = all interfaces, n = numeric, p = show pid)  This isn’t perfect since it will still show you anything with a pid of 8080 (the port number I was looking for), but its a great quick-and dirtry way to identify the process.  and once I’ve found it I can kill it with a ‘kill -9 <pid>‘

user@machine:~/$ netstat -anp | grep 8080
tcp6       0      0 :::8080                 :::*                    LISTEN      19884/java
user@machine:~/$ kill -9 19884

Which reminds me of this classic (please excuse the profanity):

ps:
Windows => netstat -ano
OSX => lsof -i -P

Playing with a multi-color LED

I found the Arduino IDE in package manager, and went to install it
sudo apt-get install arduino

Or Via Synaptic:

When I went to run it died with the following exception:

A little googling turned up the this bug. It basically describes that there is an issue with Ubuntu 10.10 + sun-java not including the jni directory in the classpath. There are several solutions, but basically this comment sums it up the best:

1) don’t use sun-java but default-jre instead. This bug is actually a known bug in sun-java. (bug #325506)
2) add export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jni to your .bashrc, the .deskop file (in /usr/share/desktop), or on the command line before starting arduino
3) add the new package (instructions are above).

I opted for #2 so far…  The idea flow for potential projects are unending.  I should try some CI build Lights/lamps next

I dual-boot OSX and Ubuntu, but primarily live, work and play in Ubuntu.  The only reasons that I boot up into OSX these days are to sync an iPhone, or more recently play some Steam Games (Go Steam for Releasing an OSX Client!  A Linux client shouldn’t be too far behind right?).  Windows is now relinquished to a VM for IE testing & other software that is stuck on that platform.

I’ve always been bothered by mice in OSX, they never felt good and didn’t handle as I had expected.  This is especially important when doing some intricate work with Photoshop, or in a computer game.  I don’t have much time to play games on the computer, but I’ve been able to get a few hours in recently and really noticed that the mouse acceleration was unusable/unreliable for fast-paced action…

A little googling turned up the “Mouse Acceleration Preference Pane” for Mac OSX by Christian Zuckschwerdt.

I downloaded version 1.1 and then had this preference pane is my System Preferences:

Which then lets me configure the acceleration for both the mouse and trackpad.

Even better, I could turn off acceleration all-together!

From Christian Zuckschwerdt’s site:

Extented mouse settings

“The Mouse Acceleration PrefPane is a GUI and startup item to Richard Bentley’s MouseFix.  You can set up extended speed parameters and acceleration curves for your mouse.”

Good work Christian!

I typically work running large web applications (Grails…) that typically use a lot of CPU power when running tests, launching the apps or refactorings within an IDE.  I like the ability to quickly adjust the CPU ‘govenor’ which governs how the CPU is utilized from a power/performance perspective (see CPU Frequency Scaling in Linux for more).

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) uses Gnome 2.28.1 which requires authorization to change the CPU Frequency (which makes sense).  Earlier versions did not require this authorization since it is new in Gnome 2.28.

With policykit-1 (also new in Ubuntu 9.10) you can grant yourself authorization for the cpufreq-applet based on a user or group by creating a policy file (at /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/org.gnome.cpufreqselector.pkla for example) that looks something like this:
[org.gnome.cpufreqselector]
Identity=unix-user:YourUser
Action=org.gnome.cpufreqselector
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

Thanks to this post/discussion for pointing this out   be sure you change YourUser to your username or group that you wish to have authorized.

I don’t know of a policy GUI that works with policykit-1 yet, so let me know if you find something.

I also replaced the icons in the /usr/share/pixmaps/cpufreq-applet/ with something I found on  gnome-look.org

Downloading it and setting it up was pretty easy.  I went to Hulu Desktop and selected download for linux.  From there It gave me choices for Fedora and Ubuntu (both 32 & 64bit versions!)  Since I run Ubuntu I downloaded and installed the deb – easy enough.

When you first launch it it asks you to accept the EULA.

The first time I launched Hulu Desktop I got an error, that "Hulu Desktop could not locate the Flash plugin.  If you do not have it installed, please modify ~/.huludesktop with the correct location of libflashplayer.so." (remember the beta sticker?)

I had to edit the ~/.huludesktop file to use the wrapped version of the Flash plugin /var/lib/flashplugin-installer/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so and it worked like a charm!

Playback worked great, probably better than the in-browser experience.  The interface is slick, better than the web-interface and more along the lines of Boxee.  Fullscreen worked well for me.

Props to Hulu for providing a Linux version.  The Linux desktop is a first class citizen.  Skype has a Beta version that rocks on Linux.  Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. Who is next? Adobe?  CS5?  I’d pay for Adobe CS5 on Linux.

So far its been pretty good stuff for Beta Software!  I’ll definitely be using Hulu more now. 

Here is a shot of the opening screen:

And another of the Menu (while watching media):

Maybe I’ve been spoiled with the speed of a Linux desktop without intrusive ‘virus protection’, but everytime I use a Vista machine, I find myself frustrated.  I guess I get sick of the waiting, double confirmations, the "I told you to shutdown, why are you installing updates… ", etc.

I have professionally developed on all major desktop OSs (Windows[98,2k,XP,Vista], OSX, and Linux) as well as used many others over the years (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Solaris, HPUX, Windows[2k3,2008], etc.)   So when I started my current contract, I had a bad dream the night before.  I dreampt that I was forced to use Windows Vista.  I’m not going to call it a nightmare, but it came close   (They ended up giving me an XP box)

This is my OS Preference as it stands today:
Vista < XP < Windows 7 < OSX < Linux (Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.)

I honestly expected more from Vista seeing that it was coming from the largest/wealthiest software company/OS vendor in the world.  Using Vista isn’t the end of the world, but you don’t know better until you get a taste of freedom   To be fair, Microsoft has put a lot of effort behind Windows and it is a big responsibility when you take the OS Market in the 90′s and into the 2000s.  MacOS was saved by OSX; can Microsoft follow suit?  Either way, good competition makes for a better Operating System landscape. 

I first used a tool called Mumbles, which attempted to be a clone of Growl, but I later realized that the built in notification system is probably the way to go.  After I learned of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) had some major visualization enhancements to the notifications, I thought that it was definitely the way to go. 

This is what I currently have with Ubuntu 9.04:

Implementing this is very simple, you simply create an _Events.groovy file in your ~/.grails/scripts  directory (create it if it doesn’t exist) with the following contents (modified from the Growl Script):

eventStatusFinal = { msg ->
    libNotify('Final status', msg)
}
eventStatusUpdate = { msg ->
    libNotify('Status', msg)
}
eventCreatedFile = { fileName ->
    //libNotify('Created file', fileName)
}
eventStatusError = { message ->
    libNotify('Error', message)
}
eventExiting = { code ->
    libNotify('Exit', "Return code $code")
}
eventCreatedArtefact = { type, file ->
    libNotify('Created artefct', "$type with name $file")
}
eventCompileStart = { kind ->
    //libNotify('Compiling', "Compiling $kind")
}
eventCompileEnd = { kind ->
    //libNotify('Compilation complete', "Compiled $kind")
}
eventPluginInstalled = { pluginName ->
    libNotify('Plugin installed', pluginName)
}
// Do the notification
void libNotify(title, message) {
    def cmd = [
        'notify-send',
        title,
        message,
    '-i',
    'grails'
    ]
    cmd.execute()
}

It is simply using Groovy to execute "notify-send $title $message -i grails".   if you don’t have notify-send, it is part of libnotify so sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin will get you what you need.  If I get some time I’d like to find a way to take advantage of a Java Dbus implementation to talk to the notification system without having to go through libnotify.

If you want mumbles notifications just do something like this:

void mumblesNotify(title, message) {
    def cmd = [
        "mumbles-send",
           "-l",
        title,
        message
    ]
    cmd.execute()
}

Occasionally I’ll get a failure that there are too many files open (using .execute() in Groovy) and that should be cleared up by using a Java implementation of the DBus notifications.

Let me know what you think.  Anything that could be done better?