Sometimes, you just have a need to have a file that is of a specific size.  For example, I want to test the real throughput of copying a file to my external drive over different connections (eSATA/FW800/USB2.0).

You can do this with the dd command.

Here is an example that will create a 100MB file file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1024 count=102400

The bs operand tells you what byte size to use and the count operand tells you how many of bs you want.  So in the example, we are essentially asking dd to use a 1KB bs x's 102400.

You can also use k, m, g to instead of the full byte amount.  For example:

dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1m count=100

Now you can use the time command to see how fast you copy goes:

time cp testfile /Volumes/externaldrive/

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I recently purchased a MacBook Pro.  It's not my first Mac as I have a Mac Pro that stands as the "family" computer. Although it houses all of our media and important family data, I really don't use it much with the exception of remoting in to do our finances.  This new laptop however, has enabled me to really dig into OS X and get more comfortable with the OS and all the great applications available for the Mac.

I have been investing a considerable amount of time staging my laptop with all the apps that I will need to use moving forward.  One of those apps is the Google Chrome web broswer.

I don't use Chrome as my default browser, primarily because of site rendering issues.  I do however love the application shortcut feature that Chrome has for Windows/Linux and use it quite heavily.  I was terribly dissapointed when that feature was not available in Chrome for Mac.

Knowing that an OS X app is really a folder with special permissions that contain application data and configuration, I sought out to find a way to create and application shortcut for my web apps.  Below you will find instruction on how to do this.

The example I will use is for the toodledo.com web app.  You will want to just substitute Toodledo in the example with the name & info for your web app.  These instructions assume you already have Google Chrome installed.  It also assumes you know what a text editor is.  TextEdit, Word, Pages are word processors and CANNOT be used.  You can use Terminal based editors like vi or nano.  If you want a gui based text editor, TextMate has a 30 day trial you can use.

1.  In Finder, go to your Applications folder.  Create a new folder called yourapplication.app (where yourapplication is the name you wish to give your new app shortcut, mine was Toodled.app).

2.  You will be asked if you are sure that you want to add the extension ".app" to the end of the name, click add.
3.  Secondary click yourapplication.app, select "Show Package Contents".
4.  Now, create a new folder called "Contents" then open the "Contents" folder.
5.  In the "Contents" folder, create two new folders: "MacOS" & "Resources"
6.  Using your favorite text editor, create a text file called "Info.plist".  It is important that it ends in plist and that no other file extention is appended.  In this file, copy & paste the following information then close and save the fle:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key
<string>Toodledo</string>
<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>toodledo</string>
</dict>
</plist>

7.  Open the "MacOS" folder and create a new text file called yourapplication, where yourapplication is the name of your app minus .app.  In this file, copy & paste the following infomation:

#!/bin/sh
open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app -n --args --app="https://www.toodledo.com/views/duedate.php"

Here, you will want to replace my toodledo.com url with the url to your web app.  Close and save the file.

You now have your application shortcut!  Drag it to your Dock and fire it up!

If you have an image you would like to use for your icon, simply:

1.  Copy the image to your clipboard.
2.  Secondary click your new app, select "Get Info".

3.  Click the temporary icon that the OS gave you (the upper left corner of the screen) then issue command-V to paste your new image in.

This is a crude way to get an application shortcut, but it works.  If Chrome gives you any permissions errors, simply quit Chrome, then try your app shortcut again.

-boogybren

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I have been getting to know IOS4 on my iPhone 4 for the last 24 hours now.  For the most part, I am very pleased.  I have been lucky enough to have not experienced any of the screen or antenna issues others have been seeing.

I have mixed feelings about how Apple has implemented multitasking.  I love that I can multitask natively.  For at least the past year, I have been using Backgrounder on my jailbroken 3GS and have loved it.  To be honest, I actually prefer the way Backgrounder implements multitasking.  At a single press of your home button, you are in control of whether or not you want to kill the app or keep it in memory.  This is one of my gripes about IOS4 multitasking.

Too Many Steps To Kill An App

I am a Systems Administrator by day.  I am all about efficient systems.  The same goes for my phone.  There are times where it is very beneficial to keep an application in memory as to not loose your settings/input or just to play Pandora in the background while you do other tasks.  However, when I am done with and app, I am done.  I want it out of memory.  To do this with IOS4, I need to:

- double tap the home button
- tap and hold one of the app icons until they get jiggy-with-it
- tap the minus sign on the app I want to kill

Apple could learn a thing or two from Backgrounder.  With Backgrounder, it is simple:

- If I want to background an app, I hold the home button down (a few seconds) until it tells me that backgrounding is enabled.
- When I want to disable backgrounding, I open the app and hold the home button down (again, a few seconds) until it tells me backgrounding is disabled.
- If I want to exit an app and not background it at all, I just tap the home button as normal.

What Apps Do I Have Running?

I am still getting used to using the double tap of the home button to navigate through my already running applications.  But how exactly do I know what is running without double tapping home first?  How many apps can I have running in the background?  When does IOS4 determine when to shutdown an app to make room for another.

What I am finding is that I am double tapping home button only to find that the app I want isn't in the background, so I have to go to the home screen anyway to access the application I wanted in the first place.  That is too many steps in my opinion.

Apps Have To Be Coded Specifically To Utilize IOS4 Multitasking

I get why Apple does this.  They have waited to implement multitasking until it can be done in an efficient manner.  I would whole heartedly agree that their implementation is by far the best I have seen on a phone.  Most phones (particlulary WinMo and Android) will put so many applications in the background the the phone gets sluggish to the point of not being able to make or answer phone calls.  Eventually, either the app or the phone just crashes.  IOS4 does not do this.  But, in order to resume a backgrounded application where you left off, you need to code your application to utilize this feature.  This isn't necessarilly a bad thing.  It does mean however that until your favorite applications get up to speed with multitasking, you will have interesting behavior when going in and out of that app.

All in all, I am happy with IOS4 on the iPhone 4.  I have tested and used numerous devices in an enterprise environment over the past six years.  It is nice to have a phone that just works and works well (with sincere apologies to those who have screen and antenna issues :-) ).

-boogybren

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I have been an iPhone user since the 3G came out in July of 2008.  I upgraded to the 3GS in June, 2009.  As of this posting, I am five days out from receiving my iPhone 4.

Having been a tester of smartphones in a former life, it was refreshing to have a hardware/software platform come out and just works, and work well.  I never had my iPhone hang, crash or otherwise become inoperable.  I never had to restart it.  I never turned it off.  It just worked.

Last month, instead of using my personal iPhone for work, I decided to let my employer carry the burden of my phone bill.  My only carrier option was Sprint and my handset options were abysmal at best.

Having already been burned by the HTC/WinMo options and being uncertain about the Palm/WebOS platform, I opted to try my first HTC/Android phone.  Why not? I have 30 days to return it, right?

I have used my HTC Hero now for 2 weeks and to be candid, I am ready to take this phone out to the gun range and use it for target practice.  I have daily frustrations with this device.  Sometimes it the hardware.  Mostly software.

Below is a list of gripes or warnings should you be considering a Hero or Androd based phone:

• The phone is slow.  It has similar hardware specs to the iPhone 3GS (Hero: 288MB RAM/528Mhz CPU | iPhone: 256MB RAM/600Mhz CPU) yet it is no where near as responsive as the 3GS.
• When I tap on a button (hardware or software), I expect it to do what I told it to do.  When I press a hardware button on this phone, I have to press it 2-3 times before it does what I asked.  When I tap a software button, It recognizes my request by changing the color of the button I tapped, but does NOTHING! I have to do this several times before it will proceed with my request.  Sometimes, it will do something entirely different altogether.  I have missed numerous phone calls because Android decided that I didn't really want to take the call despite my swipe to answer.
• If I have a touch screen phone, I should not have to be dependent on an additional track ball to get things done.
• Why do I have to bring up a hidden menu to do something when it can be done with either a swipe gesture or a small on screen button? Because of this, it takes three or more actions to do something that could have taken one or two.
• When I have an email open and I delete it, why does it take me back to my list of emails instead of opening the next email in the list?
• Why can't I delete more than one email/text message at a time?
• When in a text field, you have to have the precision of a surgeon to place your cursor somewhere else (to correct a typo, etc...).
• Copying text is a task, shouldn't this be easy?
• The Android's response to the touchscreen is way too sensitive.  Makes for a lot of accidental input.
• Managing two phone calls is not intuitive.  It is almost as if they expect you to conference in any additional calls you make while already in a call.  I have yet to find a way to end a second call without ending my first one.
• Because of the oversensitive response to the touchscreen and because the mute button on the phone screen is too close to the End Call button, I end up killing a call when all I really wanted to do was mute it.
• When on a call and the screen goes dark, there isn't a good way to wake the phone without issuing a command like hanging up on the call or dialing another number.  The only safe way I found was to use the volume keys.
• There can be such a thing as too many options.  In settings screens, why not have a general set of settings then a separate screen for advanced settings?
• Why isn't there an obvious way to close out an application and feel assured that it is actually closed and not running in the background?
• Why do I have to power cycle my phone!  I am constantly doing this to reset my data connectivity or increase my performance.
• Why do I get out of memory errors from applications when I have 70MB of RAM available?
• I have yet to get my Google voice commands to work.
• Default browser is abysmal (page formatting is very poor, all of the page content doen't always load). Having installed the Dolphin browser too, if I choose to go back to the default browser it is constantly asking me whether I want to use it or Dolphin EVERYTIME I click on a link or go to a different URL.
• Anything that scrolls (web pages, settings menus) scrolls very choppy.  If I barely flick the menu, it scrolls at mach speed (web pages behave better on flicks).
• When I tap on a URL, I really would like to visit it.  Why do I have to tap it multiple times in order for the destination page to load?  Apparently, the default browser needs more convincing of my intentions.
• Camera function is kludgy and slow.  Picture quality isn't the best for 5MP.  I have to use the dang trackball to take the pictures!
• When I input my Google information on a site, why does Android assume I want to use all of the Google based functionality on the phone?  I have to explicitly remove my credentials and/or turn off the Google functionality on the phone.
• I use my phone with Exchange.  Although I have my phone set to push as emails arrive, it is far from realtime.  I have seen upwards to 45 minutes descrepancy.  This isn't good when you are required to respond to system alerts within 10 minutes of the event.
• If I read an email from my desktop client, it doesn't mark it as read on my phone.  And vice versa.
• Although my appointments are pulled from exchange and stored locally, it appears that if the calendar can't sync with the Exchange server (because my data needs to be reset :-P) then my appointment alarms don't go off.
• Software from the Android Market often doesn't work.  I attribute this to the fact that there are way too many choices for Android devices.  Too many differences in hardware.  I see a lot of software on the market that is device specific.  So if I don't by the hottest Android phone, am I just screwed?  What happens if my phone is 1-2 years old?
• If I want my phone to get the latest Android update...AND have it actually work, I either need to wait for my carrier to provide one or some platform enthusiast to produce one.  My carrier could drop support of the phone at any time and not provide any updates.  If I wait on the community, I could be waiting forever or be in a perpetual beta.

- boogybren

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So you have an iPhone and for whatever reason, you don't actually need your data plan.  You really like your iPhone and all of the apps you have grown to love, but really could get by just using Wi-Fi from time to time.

Of course, AT&T will tell you that you cannot have an iPhone with out a data plan, so what is one to do?

Just follow these instructions and you will be on your way to having an iPhone with no data plan!

1.  Walk into your AT&T store with a non-smart phone and a completely different SIM card than the one that is in your iPhone.  If you bring them the SIM from your iPhone, you are less likely to garner their cooperation.  Additionally, just leave your iPhone in the car.

You can achieve #1 in a number of different ways:

           -  If you have an old GSM phone, use it.
           -  Borrow a phone from someone.
           -  Buy a refurbished Go Phone from http://wireless.att.com for around $10.  They usually throw in free shipping.

2.  Tell them you want to activate this new phone/SIM for your phone number.

3.  Make sure you request to deactivate data and to completely block data from that number.  This will prevent any billing for accidental data use on your iPhone later.

4.  Because the iPhone uses data to download your voicemails for the Visual Voicemail feature, you need to tell your representative to make sure that you have standard voicemail enabled.  This is an easy one for them to miss and could mean some inconvenience for you later as you work with AT&T again to enable it.

5.  Perform some final in-store tests:

           -  Call the representative from your phone to ensure it works and to ensure that your number is what is coming up on their caller ID.
           -  Call your own number to make sure it prompts you to setup your voicemail.
           -  If your phone could support data, try browsing a web site or use some data dependent feature to ensure that data is blocked and that it fails.

6.  Thank them :-), then walk to your car and slap the SIM into your iPhone.

You should be all set to go with data free goodness on your iPhone!

~ boogybren

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Want to stream private video to a user via your phone? Check out knockinglive.com.

Check it out.  Let us know what you think.

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I understand somewhat what Opera is trying to do here, presumably in the name of performance.  However there are two security risks that I am not willing to take by installing and using Opera on my iPhone.

All traffic is proxied through Opera's servers. It’s one thing for an app on the iPhone to query the web, talk to its own or others’ servers, but something entirely different for Opera Mini to proxy the entire web through its own proprietary servers. Opera gets in between you and every single URL out there, from your bank to your school to your doctor’s office. You never communicate with any site directly, only through Opera proxy servers that first go to that URL, get a page, recompile it into its own markup language, compress and send it back to the mobile client that alone can understand it.

Man-in-the-middle encryption. Opera breaks your end-to-end security chain.  Because all of your traffic is proxied, when you visit a site that is encrypted via SSL, Opera will actually decrypt our data before recompiling it and encrypting it again before sending the data back to your browser.  Something to consider when you do online banking from your phone.

Of course because of their proxy, you can forget about jumping onto your VPN and viewing sites on your company intranet.

-boogybren

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Gizmodo's Jason Chen has managed to get his hands on what really could be Apple's next iPhone.  As the story goes, this phone was left at a bar in Redwood City, CA.

There are a good number of knock-off iPhone out there which made me a skeptic at first, however Jason's list of why this could be a real iPhone is quite compelling.

Check out Jason's write up with pics at:

http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone

-boogybren

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via appadvice.com

Can’t afford an iPad or still waiting for international availability?

Here is a little trick that should smooth the wait…

-boogybren

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Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about AIX :-P.  One of my peeves is that out of the box, I cannot tar/gzip a directory with the “tar -cvz” command without breaking it up into two separate tar/gzip commands.

Every once in a while, you need to pull a large directory off your server to your local machine or just to copy it to another server.  Sometimes it’s easy just to copy the entire directory uncompressed.  Other times, it just makes sense to tar and gzip the directory so that the file that you are transferring is in a single archive and is compressed as to shorten the transfer time.

The problem with the tar/gzip option is that if you tar then gzip, you need the disk space to do so.

On AIX, here is a solution that will allow you to send what you tar to stdout then gzip it on stdin with no problems with disk space unless the gzip’d tar is still bigger than the diskspace you have available.  This *should* work on other *NIX systems that you cannot throw the gzip switch in the tar command.

tar -cvf - /path/to/dir/you/want/to/tar | gzip > /destination/for/gzip'd/tar.tgz-boogybren

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ioreg -l | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber-boogybren

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Short story long…

This week, Apple officially release support for Windows 7 in BootCamp 3.1.  I thought to myself “Self, you have a wonderfully powerful Mac Pro with 8 cores and 10GB RAM that is being completely unused by your XP install, you really should upgrade to to Win7 x64 now that Apple officially supports it”.

So, that’s what I did, with no thought as to how much MORE disk space I would need on my BootCamp partition.

So after installing Windows 7 and a bunch of games, I received my you only have < 500MB of disk space left alert.

This brought me to a point where I needed to resize my OSX HFS partition and grow my Windows NTFS partition.  During this madness, I realized that with BootCamp 3.1, I could view my HFS partitions from Windows!  But much to my chagrin, I couldn’t see my slice that had all of my useful data because it was a part of a concatenated RAID.

After resizing my OS partitions, I decided to move data off my RAID slice so I could break it then just create a normal HFS partition that can be viewed from Windows.  The problem is, moving almost a TB of data can take a long time and turning from my laptop to my left 45 degrees to my desktop on my right every time I wanted to see how my disk space looked left me with a pain in my neck!

I was at that very moment reminded about using while & sleep. Below is a handy little command that will run any command every number of seconds until you break (ctrl-c) it.

while truedocommandsleep 30 (seconds)done

I personally ran:

while truedodf -h | grep disk1s2sleep 30done

Which allowed me to monitor the growth of the destination disk I was copying to.

-boogybren

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I have an application that runs on AIX that is nothing short of ugly when it comes to pointing it to a different datasource.  This application currently uses an outdated version of Savvion BPM that requires manual editing of any config file that contains the datasource and/or credentials.  To complicate things further, our application which runs in WebSphere also has some config files that need manual updating.

Today…I decided to try and document the process as to save me and anyone else who comes behind me some serious grief.

Because AIX’s version of grep doesn’t have a -R option, I will give you syntax that *should* work on any flavor of UNIX/Linux with grep.

find /path/to/parent/directory -type f -print | xargs grep -i -E 'word1|credential1|server1|server2|server3' > /path/to/output/file

Let’s dissect this for clarification:

find /path/to/parent/directory -type f -print

We are telling the find command where we want grep to search.  You can either specify the explicit path for example, I searched under /opt, or you can change directory to the parent directory then issue a “.” (sans double quotes) to tell find to “search from here”.

The -type f simply tells find to locate regular text files, not binary files.

The -print is important.  It will print the full path to the file.  The reason this is important is because when grep finds a match in one of the files, it will print the full path out in addition to the line it found within the file so you know exactly where the file is located for future reference.

xargs

xargs simply is a command that allows you to issue any command (grep in our case) against the list of standard-in (list of regular files) one at a time.  As if you did it one at a time manually.

grep -i -E 'word1|credential1|server1|server2|server3'

grep is a command that allows you to search the contents of a file for a specific pattern.  The -i tells grep that this search is case insensitive.  The -E tells grep that we want to use regular expressions in our search.

We then follow with a basic regular expression.  Our search is in single quotes and each word we want to search for is separated by the pipe symbol.  We are just asking grep to find any word that matches in the list.

> /path/to/output/file

Here  we are just redirecting the results of our search to a file so that we can review and modify as we deem necessary.  Remember that if you already have data in the destination file, a > will overwrite the contents with the new data found.  A >> will just append to the file.

Once this command has finished, you will be able to edit the file and remove any false positives that grep might have come across.

Some what dirty, but a simple solution.

-boogybren

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- boogybren

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I am not a big Computerworld fan, but I came across this article today and felt it had a lot of valid points.  This more than likely will not translate to a lot of the readers here, but if you have had anything to do with IT in a large business I think its worth a few moments to read.

Opinion: The unspoken truth about why your IT sucks

~dub

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This should be linux/unix OS agnostic.

sudo find . -type f -exec du -m {} \; | sort -nr | head -50

If you need more or less files, adjust the last digit following ‘head’.

-boogybren

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Though I’m usually at my desk, in my office (like a good worker bee), there are times when I want to be, um, away. Sometimes this is legit. Sometimes I want others to think it’s legit. And other times, I’m stuck dialing into a conference call whether I’m supposed to be away from the office or not.

This isn’t a big deal, since I almost always have my mobile phone with me (currently, a Blackberry Bold). I open up my appointment and click on the number to dial it. The only problem then is to remember the passcode to get into the meeting.

This wasn’t a problem when the numbers were 6 digits long–I’m just barely smart enough to remember 6 digits for 15 seconds while I dial.

However, for some reason, they’ve gone to 10 digit numbers now, and my brain can’t handle that much. This usually means that I have to get people around me to help me remember. Or I have to find a scrap of paper lying around and write it down.

However, I have found the end to all my woes, and it comes in the form of formatting numbers so that my Blackberry will dial BOTH the number AND the passcode with one click of my trackball. Here’s the secret:

1-800-555-5555×1234567890#

Where “1-800-555-5555″ is whatever your conference dial-in number is and “1234567890″ is whatever your passcode is. Though I don’t have a Windows Mobile device, I’ve heard it works on those, as well. Basically, with it formatted this way, one click dials the number and enters the passcode (complete with the obligatory pound/hash key).

Of course, in my excitement to discover this, I overlooked a major flaw in my logic: It isn’t MY meetings I’m dialing in to. So, in an effort to make my life better (and to help all those around me), I plead with those people that hold a bit of my future in their hands. Please, please, PLEASE use this whenever you send out a meeting invitation.

Thank you.

(source: http://forums.crackberry.com/f79/auto-dial-24126/#post690129)

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1. Obtain a copy of %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.dll from a non Windows 7 machine that has .NET 3.5 SP1 installed.

2. Create a folder in the Windows 7 machine where the vSphere client is installed and copy the file from step 1 into this folder. For example, create the folder under the vSphere client launcher installation directory (+%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+).

3. In the vSphere client launcher directory, open the VpxClient.exe.config file in a text editor and add a <runtime> element and a <developmentMode> element as shown below. Save the file.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<configuration>
…
<runtime>
<developmentMode developerInstallation=”true”/>
</runtime>
</configuration>

3. Create a batch file (e.g. *VpxClient.cmd*) in a suitable location. In this file add a command to set the DEVPATH environment variable to the folder where you copied the System.dll assembly in step 2 and a second command to launch the vSphere client. Save the file. For example,

SET DEVPATH=%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+
“%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe”

4. (Optional) Replace the shortcut on the start menu to point to the batch file created in the previous step. Change the shortcut properties to run minimized so that the command window is not shown.

You can now use the VpxClient.cmd (or the shortcut) to launch the vSphere client in Windows 7.

courtesy of Fernando

-boogybren

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I really got a kick out of this article.  It makes me feel much better about my normalcy level in life.  The article is an “oldie but a goodie”.  I am not a Beatles fan, but couldn’t help but hum the tune to “With a Little Help from My Friends” while reading this.  So in some way, I suppose this is a little shout-out of thanks to my friends for sticking around and ignoring my geeky-ness so I could avoid the predicament these fellas are in.

“Geek Heaven”

~dub

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