Archive for the Technology category
August 1st, 2008
This is probably the most obscure post ever – but I need to put it up here, in case it helps someone, somewhere at some point.
I recently had a consulting job, where the client wanted a little help with a software installation of some ‘enterprise’ software at their office. (Quite why the business community have decided that their software needs to be labelled ‘enterprise’ still eludes me – it makes it sound like a naval vessel.)
Anyway – this business runs Mac OS X server (10.5) and needed to install a web app called LiveTime. LiveTime used to be a WebObjects application (the history of WebObjects is a fascinating topic – which I won’t go into here) but now is almost entirely Java-based and runs from an instance of the Apache Foundation‘s Tomcat application server. Apache are the fine, fine people who brought us the Apache web server, which is basically the back-bone of the Web: it serves the majority (apparently 70%) of web sites that you’ll ever visit (including this one.)
Mac OS X Server comes with Tomcat built-in – so I started by trying to deploy the web application through the built-in version of Tomcat (which seemed pretty up to date.) That didn’t go well and I got errors from Tomcat when I tried accessing the webapp along the lines of ‘Servlet WOServletAdaptor is not available.’
Googling this error message only lead to WebObjects developers on Apple’s WebObjects mailing list attempting to deploy applications that they had written themselves. Googling for ‘LiveTime’ and this error got one result, which wasn’t useful.
It’s quite telling how you can often solve open-source application install issues, simply by googling, yet with proprietary apps, you have to go through their own support systems due to lack of public information. I’m not saying that LiveTime’s support was bad – in fact I got (24 hours later) very good support from a very nice, very knowledgeable and very busy Aussie who walked me through the install process. I do wonder, however, how much more quickly the issue would have been resolved if I hadn’t had to call the vendor.
So, one of the first things that I learned from my support guy was that the supplied Tomcat install on Mac OS X server wasn’t quite right for their software. Once I’d installed a fresh copy in /usr/local/ (instead of the default Mac OS X Server /Library/Tomcat/ install) things went a lot more smoothly, although not entirely smoothly. Apache and Tomcat weren’t playing well together – The LiveTime application was serving most of the application correctly from Tomcat’s own webserver on port 8080, but Apache (on the normal port of 80) simply couldn’t get a proper connection to the Tomcat server via its Jakarta Connector.
At this point the support guy and I hit a wall and I spent the next day working though each part of the install trying to work out where we were going wrong. After a lot of hair-pulling I figured it out: it turns out that the bridge by which Apache and Tomcat were trying to communicate (mod_jk – the Jakarta module for Apache) could not get up and running because the port it was trying to use (8009) was already in use by Mac OS X Server’s iCal Server.
So – if you’re trying to install LiveTime on Mac OS X server note the following:
1 – don’t use the installed version of TomCat which comes with Mac OS X Server – install a fresh version in /usr/local or /opt/local
2 – don’t use the suggested port for the jk worker, pick another.
August 1st, 2008
I am currently using BeThere as my ISP. They are pretty good, you can get upto 24Meg DSL and there’s no port blocking, throttling or any of that non-sense, and they’re a reasonable price. Alas I only get just under 2 meg down (in central London!) and just under 1 meg up.
They give you a free router which is a re-branded Speedtouch box. It’s very flexible but only if you’re prepared to telnet into it and alter the config via the command-line. Mine served me pretty well, until the BBC brought out the iPlayer. It has a terrible habit of crashing when streaming flash audio or video from the BBC’s iPlayer. This was an irritation, but now that all video on BBC sites and BBC Radio’s ‘listen again’ use the same flash delivery system, it became untenable as a router. (I believe that BT’s Home Hub router is having similar issues at the moment.)
So I decided to move back to my ever-trusted previous router: a 3COM OfficeConnect. I bought it years ago – and although it was more expensive than your average bargain-bucket router it’s never failed me, is rock-solid and surprisingly even supports ADSL2+ (even though I bought it back in… the early 2000′s.) If you’re going to buy networking kit – 3COM isn’t a bad bet, they know what they’re doing.
Anyway – I had a little bit of a tough time getting it to work with BeThere (who don’t use PPPoA like most DSL providers in the UK) so I thought I’d document what I needed to do to get it working.
In order to get one working with BeThere you need to use the following settings:
Protocol: Dynamic/Fixed IP in 1483 Bridge Mode
IP address: (my static IP address)
Subnet Mask: (my subnet mask)
Default Gateway: (my Gateway address)
VPI/VCI: 0/101
Encapsulation: LLC
QoS Class: UBR (not sure if this is correct, but it’s the default)
PCR/SCR/MBS: 4000/4000/10 (again – the defaults)
DHCP Client – not checked.
If you don’t have a static IP, then you can probably leave the IP address/netmask/gateway empty and just check the DHCP checkbox.
If you do use a static IP then you can get the relevant addresses by calling BeThere customer support.
Oh, by the way – if like me, you have a static IP address and want one of your LAN machines to be the public face of your network (place it in what router manufacturers call a ‘DMZ’) then the OfficeConnect will gladly let you do this – but it simply won’t work unless you turn the firewall on. If the firewall is disabled then you won’t be able to connect to that machine from outside the LAN.
June 10th, 2008
I’ve decided to cave-in and buy a new iPhone, I’m really looking forward to being able to code for it and the UI, but it’s the day after the announcement of the device and with a bit of sober thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be a downgrade from my current phone (Nokia E61) and 1st gen iPod Nano: here’s why:
- 3G – the E61 which I’ve had for a couple of years has 3G, so this is just catching up really.
- The E61 speaks the name of the caller, this is especially useful in the car.
- The E61 has voice recognition, again, very useful in the car when you want to dial by voice.
- The iPhone has no concept of profiles – the E61 will switch to the profile of your choice when it connects to a carkit, I like having a different set of tones when in the car.
- The iPhone doesn’t do MMS. I don’t use it often, but I do use it.
- The iPhone doesn’t act as a bluetooth modem. With a third-party app (Joikuspot) I can even get my E61 to act as a 3G wifi hotspot.
- The iPhone doesn’t do sending of files via bluetooth – This astounds me, I mean really astounds me. I send contacts/photos/audio files from my phone to other bluetooth devices all the time.
- My iPod Nano has a remote with FM radio, will this work on the iPhone? I doubt it.
- The iPhone is only available on O2. Carrier locking is EVIL! Handsets should never, never be tightly coupled with networks, this goes against the whole GSM ethos. O2 gets no coverage in the part of the country in which I’m interested. I should be able to choose the handset that suits me and the network that suits me.
There are upsides though – the iPhone has a camera which the E61 doesn’t, although inexplicably it doesn’t do video and is only 2MPixels. The E61′s mail client is not that good. The iPhone has built-in GPS.
Meanwhile details of the new E71 appeared on the web yesterday. It’s got GPS and and 3.2MP camera.
March 8th, 2008
“The backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 4.2GB, but only 22.9GB are available.”
Just posting this bug so I can reference it in a bug report. It may be my fault though, because I’m using an unsupported volume: a drive on a remote machine on my local network backed-up over airport. Worth noting anyway.
Half of the backup happens to be a disc image of the iPhone SDK.
It looks from what I’ve seen so far: i.e. nothing but the video of the Apple announcement, and a few iTunes U Apple Developer Connection introduction videos, pretty good. I’m getting more and more keen to get an iPhone. I’ve been waiting for three things before I do: Version 2.0 of the phone hardware (hopefully with GPS and 3G), the SDK and an end to the network lock-in. I hate being told that to use a specific handset I have to use a specific GSM network, it’s just wrong. Now the SDK is here, I’m weakening…
The info about the SDK looks very impressive so far – Apple taking 30% of the revenue from sales of the apps seems a little bit steep – but (in my opinion) they generally tend to be a benevolent dictator. Symbian has had voluntarily signed apps for a long time, however, very few developers bother to sign their apps, so users tend not to care or know about code signing. Even worse – when they find out about code signing it tends to confuse them. Apple mandating signing of all code means it can be seamless.
Having a single channel of delivery for iPhone apps may, to many, seem draconian and I would imagine it’s not long until someone writes an app which Apple denies distribution, yet most people find inoffensive.
I don’t know…. I’m torn – Steve’s Reality Distortion Field has really got me this time, yet I still in my heart of hearts think ‘hey – this is *my* miniature, hand-held computer – how dare you tell me what I can and can’t install on it.’
My resistance to not having a physical keyboard is also waning, and although being a Nokia devotee since I first had a mobile phone (back in oooh 1996), and therefore a Symbian fan of late – my experience with the mail client on my E61 and the limitations of Series 60 compared to Mobile OS X (network/email/voip config on the E61 is a real bore – and it doesn’t get the concept of falling back to different networks depending on what’s available) make the iPhone a very desirable next phone. Plus I’m familiar with the development environment.
I have noticed, from my limited peeking around, that there is no access to the Bluetooth functions of the phone. I could be wrong about that though. I think that the intention is that most external comms are to be done via TCP/IP over the wifi hardware.
Anyway, enough of my prattling – congratulations to all the engineers at Apple who are delivering the SDK, it’s a stunning feat of engineering.
March 7th, 2008
Time for one of my annual blog posts.
I recently bought a GlobalSat DG-100 GPS datalogger, which is a device that records your GPS position over time, so that you can later review those data, and do all sorts of fun things. I specifically wanted it for aviation, so you can review your flight track, and see how good your navigation is and how far off your desired track you wandered.
There are Windows drivers for the device, and only a Windows utility for extracting the recorded tracks and altering it’s preferences. Normally this would preclude a Mac user like me from buying it, however, the nice people at GlobalSat have published the specifications for communicating with the device, and some people have made their own apps for talking to it. There’s a Windows .net application for it and a linux project for talking to it as well.
I’m in the early stages of writing a Cocoa app which will do the same for Mac OS X users.
Anyway – The spec was a bit dry, being a .txt file – so I’ve spruced it up a bit and put it into a web page for Google to index.
[edit] – Good lord, Google indexed this post in less than 17 minutes!
April 2nd, 2007
Please don’t be an April Fool’s joke
[edit] – It’s true!, hooray! This is a very good thing, and hopefully more labels will open-up their catalogues. Apparently un-DRM’ed albums will not have any price increase, but single tracks will.
February 2nd, 2007
Not that anyone in their right mind reads this blog, but just in case:
I’ve enabled OpenID as a method for authenticating when posting a comment. I look forward to this distributed ID system becoming more common throughout the net.
If you have a blog of your own then I recommend enabling OpenID (I used the wpOpenID plug-in for WordPress – very easy to set-up.)
edit: I’ve also enabled Gravatars
March 13th, 2006
Well – My Blog appears to be atrophying to beyond the post-per-month status…
Here’s a quick update on my uninteresting life:
- Broken a life-time habit, and bought a Microsoft product – the XBox 360 – very impressive – most impressive part is ‘Live’ – especially the marketplace and the downloadable demos – currently very much enjoying ‘Geometry Wars’ and ‘The Outfit’ multiplayer demo….
- Meanwhile – in PS2-land – Loving ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ and ‘Black’ – both fine examples of farewell salutes to the platform…. Especially ‘Black’ – which has humourous mission objectives and Matrices-esque destructible pillars in large (soldier-filled) rooms.
- Became 30 – sigh…. on the upside – got an HDTV for my birthday – very nice – just need Sky to launch their HD service…
- If by any chance you are reading this because of my software – - – yes, a Universal Binary of ‘More Internet’ is forthcoming – soon…..
January 10th, 2006
So – PowerBooks are no more – from now on it’s MacBook Pro.
Some interesting points:
- No FireWire 800… Odd.
- No more PCCards – we now get ExpressCards
- Most bizarrely, no modem! This is a laptop and the modem is sold separately. That makes sense for an iMac, but a laptop with no modem?
- I like the magnetic power connection – I have a ding in the corner of my PB from when it shot off a desk due to foot/power cable entanglement – and just last night I got my foot caught in the power cable again.
‘MacBook’ is another really bad name – what *is* going on in the Apple naming department?
I like the look of the FM receiver for the iPod though – it even has RDS.
I almost forgot: Happy New Year 
[edit 18 hours later]
Well – I’ve been following the discussions about the new laptop on the forums, and a couple of other notes:
- FireWire 800, apparently 2 port FW800 ExpressCards are the way to go here, although Apple dropping it (built-in) on their pro laptop doesn’t signal a strong future for FW800. I assume the new Intel PowerMac-equivalents will have built-in FW800.
- ExpressCards – currently there aren’t that many about, but Apple always is ahead of the game on this sort of thing – e.g. USB/No Floppy on the original iMac. Some people are worried about how long until there are GPRS/G3 cards in this form factor.
- lack of modem as standard. I’m amazed by how many people seem to equate the modem with the death of floppies – lots of comments like “I can’t remember the last time I used a modem.” Do these people travel with their laptops? Have they never been to places without Cellular/broadband coverage? I suppose it’s not really a big point, since you just add the USB modem to your order, and it should last you across several laptops. However, these laptops only have two USB ports, and there goes one…
- No S-Video out – I missed this first time round – I suppose we’re all supposed to have HDTVs and use DVI->HDMI cables, or perhaps the DVI->S-Video adapter that works on the PowerMac G5 / MacMini will also work on the new PowerBooks.
It seems like we’ll have to buy and carry around a lot of extra add-on bits with these new machines…
Mind you, the speed improvement is a welcome new feature, and my two-year old 17″ PowerBook should last a while yet before I need to worry about upgrading.
April 15th, 2005
The Cocoa Frameworks on Mac OS X have some very cool things in them.
One of the very, very coolest – that relatively few people know about, and I should imagine even less people use, are NaturalDateFormatters.
Bascially they allow you to enter a date in English-like syntax, and it will be automatically converted into a form that the computer recognises.
e.g. It’s a friend of mine’s birthday today, and another’s was a couple of days ago. I realised that I didn’t have their birthdays in the Address Book, so I added them pretty quickly, without ever looking at iCal – or clicking on the clock to get the date.
Here’s how: (2.4mb MPEG-4 Quicktime Movie)
Cool, n’est pas?
p.s. Rendez-vous’s new name (‘Bonjour’) is terrible.
February 13th, 2005
A Fascinating Video of a Demo shown recently.
Finally – Military commanders can plan missions just like in the Movies…
February 3rd, 2005
BT is offering better access & prices to the local-loop in an attempt to head off Ofcom’s threat of using the Enterprise Act to split the telco.
That’s good news.
Meanwhile – in related news, Bulldog still can’t provision my DSL order — five weeks after the order — because they are waiting for BT to open slots in the Bayswater exchange….
Which reminds me – I’ve got a dilemma for my three readers: Easynet haven’t disconnected my DSL yet (as you can see by reading this post) – even though the three month cancellation period has elapsed (and they sent me a three month bill instead of my normal annual bill.)
Do I ask them about it now, and probably lose my DSL, or wait until I get a definite provisioning date from Bulldog?
Knowing my luck – they’ll try and charge me another three months for not telling them, or something…
December 10th, 2004
There’s a lot of buzz at the moment about which company is going to “own” your sitting room. The tech watchers (in the financial industries) are predicting that either Sony, Microsoft or (less likely) Apple will release a machine that bids to become your Home Server.
MS already has two threads of attack – the XBox 2 and Windows Media Centre Edition (which is basically a normal PC with a TV tuner in). Sony is thought to want to position the PS3 (or a more expensive variant of the PS3) as your home media server.
I’m not sure that people want a closed/proprietary converged system (that it’s illegal to modify) lurking in their sitting room – I think that they want the consumer electronics equivalent of Unix.
Unix is all about components – it’s built in small parts that interact with each other in open standards. That means that if you want to swap a part out and replace it with a better part (that performs a similar function) then you can.
Compare this with MS Windows and Sony’s PS2 – They fear loss of control, so they have closed, secret systems – e.g. Sony’s ATRAC audio codec and Windows’ symbiosis with the IE rendering engine. Sony might be coming round to open standards with their acceptance of MP3 in their Digital Audio products – mind you they’d be suicidal to continue ignoring MP3.
Here’s an example of a good component-like device: The Zensonic Z500:
It’s a DVD player that plays all the acronyms you can throw at it (MPEGs, DivX, etc…) and also has wired and wireless networking.
The networking becomes interesting when you see that they have server software (win/linux/mac os x) that streams media from your PC to the device.
Nice. And at about £170 – in March 2005.
December 7th, 2004
There’s a massive essay on DrunkenBlog on the topic of Microsoft and Security.
It’s a lot longer than your average blog post (13k words), and is probably way off your geek-scale – but if you are interested in Operating Systems security (especially Windows) then it’s well worth a read.
November 27th, 2004
The Economist has several articles on Simplicity in Technology which are a good read.
I also noticed that Philips have simplicity as the theme of their entire advertising campaign at the moment.
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) is one of the mantras of design – Simplicity is a good thing.
That’s why my blog posts are so short
October 19th, 2004
shiny shiny: Designer Sky Boxes – mmmm.. nice.
I may have to invest in a Sky+ box now.
