Hello everyone, please head over to mullac.org for the new blog.
(Don’t worry I will be syncing some posts here, just so you can keep up to date)
January 10, 2008
New site
December 26, 2007
I’d recommend a WM6 3.5G device anyday over an iPhone
I was asked one day at work whether a business man should get an iPhone or a HTC TyTN II. My instant reaction was to get the HTC, one decision that I still believe in even after giving it some thought. I recently purchased an i-mate JasJam from eBay, it was boring at first running Windows Mobile 5 but after hacking it to run Windows Mobile 6 I find it to be a great and powerful phone (3.5G HSDPA) that I am satisfised with my purchase. Sure it doesn’t look as flash as the iPhone or run the slick OS X but it has a super fast broadband connection as well as WiFi 802.11G.
The reason I recommended the HTC over the iPhone is because it lacks the practical use for a business market. A business user expects email to be delivered quickly with attachments and all; he does not want to be waiting for the EDGE and often GPRS connection to pull down a 3MB PDF or PPT document if he needs to review it quickly. A 3.5G HSDPA connection will normally operate at around 110kb/s which is as good as most people get coming out of their phone lines and perfect to recieve rich content on a phone.
As for emails, you are limited to HTTP, POP3 or IMAP. I know for a fact that IT departments rely so heavily on the services of Exchange that it is impossible to squeeze this through even in IMAP or HTTP, users need tight LDAP integration and this is something that Windows Mobile and even Palm devices provide to their users. The iPhone is just a glamourous consumer device that is just as good as a stock standard Razr or Prada phone, it provides no special benefits over a WM, BlackBerry or Symbian device.
What the business areas need to get over is the blinding aspect of being so good looking and the fact that is Apple and really look at what they do with their desktop and Outlook and watch how it converges to a Windows or BlackBerry phone with ease.
Can an iPhone synchronize my contacts, emails, tasks and calendars off my Exchange server ready for me to read to in the morning? Does it authenticate my workplace’s RADIUS powered wireless network? Is WiFi so well rolled out that it erases the woes of falling back on GPRS for costly data and snail speed access? Would my IT or anyone tech savy I know be able to service it after I have hacked it? These are all the questions you should look at, if you just use a phone to be a SMS/Hotmail/GMail/Phone device then I recommend the iPhone but if you find yourself handling emails that need to be ready ondemand at lightning speed or rely on the huge library of applications including ActiveSync then I suggest you look at anything powered by Windows or Symbian.
TIME may of labelled it the Invention of the Year but does the design fit the purpose of your intended use?
December 25, 2007
Merry Christmas!
I would like to wish you all an amazing Christmas and a safe holiday. I hope you all enjoy your time with your family.
Merry Christmas!
To anyone reading I hope you and your family have a safe and Merry Christmas!
December 23, 2007
The collapse of TechTV was the best thing that could of happened.
People complain that the end of TechTV was a sad thing that happened and that it should be brought back. Nonsense, the internet owes it to the collapse of TechTV for the development of the web in the forms of podcasting and social networking. Digg, Pownce, Revision3, WebbAlert, Undo.TV and TWiT.tv are all spawned out of the death of TechTV, without these the internet would not be the same. If we want to go deeper, even their competitors would not exist. With this paradox I leave you with an image of the spawns of TechTV.
December 22, 2007
Transparent file logger for Apache.
I have written a small PHP file that will log all downloads for a specific directory with the help of Apache’s ModRewrite. This is so you can place the file in the middle and have it log all downloads without having to modify a specific CMS’s settings to handle the new PHP file. To the user it appears as if the file is actually being served normally.
PHP
include (”/var/www/html/flv_script/mysql.php”);
//a transparant file download script
//logs to SQL
//Written by Callum Jones (mullac.wordpress.com)
$uri = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['uri']);
$filename = “/var/www/html/downloads/”. $uri;
$handle = fopen($filename, “r”);
$contents = fread($handle, filesize ($filename));
if (!empty($contents) && (filesize ($filename) != 0)) {
header(’Content-Type: application/octet-stream’);
echo $contents;
mysql_query(”INSERT INTO `gen`.`fileadmin_log` (
`referrer`,
`id` ,
`uri` ,
`time` ,
`IP`
)
VALUES (’”. $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] .”‘, ”, ‘”. $uri .”‘, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP , ‘”. $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] .”‘);”);
} else {
echo “No file available”;
echo “”;
}fclose($handle);
.htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^downloads/(.+) file.php?uri=$1
SQL table
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `fileadmin_log` (
`id` bigint(10) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`uri` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`time` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
`IP` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`referrer` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
Feel free to email me (callum.jones at gmail com) if you want to know more.
December 18, 2007
Need to sync Windows Mobile with Mac? Stuff MissingSync, use SyncMate
After purchasing my new hot i-Mate JasJam and hacing it to run Windows Mobile 6 (more on that new post) I needed a way to sync my Macbook with my phone. Originally I was running VMWare with Windows XP and just syncing it in there but it came a time when I wanted to control my contacts and use Mail and other applications to access it, so it was time for a native application.
I wanted to use Missing Sync for Windows Mobile 6 but their store lacks the PayPal purchasing option, so thus I discovered PocketMac which ended up detecting my device during setup but refusing to detect it further while the application was running: what a waste of 30 Australian dollars.
So I browsed the XDA Developers forum and found out about SyncMate, this beta but free application uses iSync to talk to all the Mac services but slips in its own agent on the desktop and mobile device to initiate the sync. It takes a bit of plugging and unplugging but afterwards it provides Contacts, iPhone, iTunes, Calendar, Notes, Time, Folders and CAB installation all in one FREE app. The application will also query your SMS and storage devices, something I believe PocketMac lacks.
Head over to http://www.eltima.com/products/syncmate/ to check out the FREE beta, if this ever goes to stable I will no doubt buy it. Without it I would be sucking down valuable RAM with VMWare.
December 12, 2007
DivX Pro for the Mac : FREE!
It really isn’t that exciting if you think about it, you can already get great conversion tools like iSquint and ffmpegX for converting not just DivX but also XviD and FLV. All this DivX Pro gives you is the weird Convertor and the Player (VLC anyone?).
But if you still want your DivX goodness check it out: http://tinyurl.com/2yhmjl
Every Linux server should have Webmin
I have recently been rebuilding my school’s web server from scratch with the awesome Fedora Core 8 distribution and one of the first things I did after running a system update was the grab the latest RPM of Webmin. Webmin isn’t really picky and has no real dependencies on packages other than the defaults that come with your Linux distribution.
Some may argue that Webmin isn’t needed or that it takes the real work out of Linux and maintaining the server, but with Webmin I use it to save time and quickly administer changes to Apache or MySQL without having to fire up a terminal and hack around in config files. If I need to set a quick directive I just pop open a browser and tick the option, no hassle of using vim over SSH.
What I really like about Webmin is the simple backup system it provides. Just head to Filesystem Backup and add a directory to backup this while give you plenty of options to help you easily backup your important data. For backing up the Apache HTML root I have chosen to use gzip coupled with a filesystem mount to the NAS every day at midnight. This has saved me a lot of hassle writing python scripts and editing crontab which has left me with more time during work to focus on writing PHP ffmpeg scripts.
Webmin also provides a very simple MySQL backup script that appears messy at first but once you realise that it combines crontab with it’s own python script to perform the backup then you can easily manipulate the SQL settings in the MySQL page or specific times in the Scheduled Cron jobs.
Webmin means that when I finish my temp job and head to uni, the other IT staff can easily modify settings on the web box without having to call me in regarding some perl or python script that needs modification, as long as they know where the specific settings are the GUI makes it so simple to configure.
Webmin beats the Windows GUI for administration because it provides a unified place for system administration. Instead of relying on certains apps the to use the MMC snap-in and hope they also provide network support, you will find that most popular services on Linux have a third party plugin for Webmin from Pure-FTP to Bacula.
If it wasn’t for Webmin I would of gone insane with my 20inch widescreen Samsung populated with terminal windows.
