I needed an excuse to add my new signing to the JDE, and quickly threw together an app (with an ugly icon) to lock your screen.

ScreenLock OTA (.jad) Installation
ScreenLock Offline (.alx) Installation

Get FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a fantastic cross-platform audio/video encoding solution. In fact it's so good that many commercial applications like to use it without paying license fees to the appropriate patent holders.

Download Windows ffmpeg binaries from http://ffmpeg.arrozcru.org/autobuilds/

On some Linux distros, like Ubuntu, you'll likely need the -unstripped builds.

There aren't many binary releases of ffmpeg for OS X, but the Audacity Project has a build from July, 2009 available. You can also compile it yourself, or use MacPorts.

Conversions

When quality is not a concern – and with such a low quality source, it isn't – you let ffmpeg use it's default settings without issue. Codec names will vary based on the age/version of your ffmpeg build. Run ffmpeg -codecs to see all the available codecs. If you want to keep the video bitrate the same, pass the -sameq parameter to ffmpeg.

Convert .3GP to Xvid

libxvid may just be xvid, and libmp3lame may be called mp3 instead.

ffmpeg -i MOVIE.3GP -f avi -vcodec libxvid -acodec libmp3lame MOVIE.AVI

A 4.3 MB .3GP file was encoded to a 783 KB .avi, 82% reduction in size.

Convert .3GP to MPEG1

ffmpeg -i MOVIE.3GP MOVIE.MPG

A 4.3 MB .3GP file was encoded to a 910 KB .mpg, 79% reduction in size.

Convert .3GP to standard MPEG4

ffmpeg -i MOVIE.3GP MOVIE.MP4

A 4.3 MB .3GP file was encoded to an 825 KB .mp4, 81% reduction in size.

Convert .3GP to standard Windows Media 7

ffmpeg -i MOVIE.3GP -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 MOVIE.WMV

A 4.3 MB .3GP file was encoded to an 885 KB .wmv, 80% reduction in size.

I don't think I'd ever say that about an iPad – even if the reading experience was superior – because an iPad will always be a computer first; everything else is secondary. The Kindle was designed to replace books, not let you read books, watch movies, listen to music, browse the web and play games.

If you're building a single-purpose device there shouldn't be any compromises with the design, and the overall experience while using it for its sole task should always be more enjoyable than with a multipurpose competitor.

I don't want my Kindle to do more, I just want it to be better at what it already does.

And then came Snow Leopard, OS X 10.6. They included built-in IPSEC VPN, freeing users from the shackles of the horrible Cisco IPSEC client. But yet again, Apple decided that users don't need to copy and paste text into the password field.

For anyone with a OTP soft token (like a RSA SecurID), this is a pain in the ass. Half the benefits of generating a passcode on the same device that you're using it on, are not having to type it.

Enter AppleScript, everyone's favorite natural language that thinks it's acceptable to use apostrophes when referencing variables. I've never actually written an AppleScript longer than tell application "iTunes" to playpause so this was new ground for me. Joe mentioned he has a similar script for junky non-RSA soft token solution he uses, but he left the country immediately after taunting me with the prospect of getting the code.

If you're doing any moderately serious AppleScript development, I highly recommend Script Debugger from Late Night Software. It was invaluable to seeing what objects and properties were really available, and troubleshooting errors.

What it does

• Prompts for your SecurID PIN (you can save this in the script, I highly recommend you NOT do that)
• Launches the SecurID application (it if it's running it will quit it first), generates a token, stores the token in a variable, and then quits the SecurID application
• Kicks off the VPN connection process, types in the generated passcode when the window is available, and logs in.

If there's any type of a banner with terms to accept, it won't click OK there.

Download the script, view the source code and read more at the project page.

If you're not familiar with Dwell (shame on you), Jeff Speck sums it up well with An Open Letter to Dwell Magazine:

Dear Dwell:

Love the magazine. As a favor, I have rewritten the Table of Contents of your July/August issue:

Cover       House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 43    House with Vertical Wood Slats
Page 52    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 58    Ice Cream Makers
Page 66    Pavilion with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 70    Philadelphia
Page 80    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 88    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 96    House with Vertical Wood Slats

I hope you find this useful.

Fondly,

Jeff Speck, AICP
Washington, DC

Some of the goodness you'll find at Unhappy Hipsters:

He sipped his tepid coffee and pondered how to tell her that, in fact, the pants made the sack dress even less appealing.

Everyone always leaves.

1. where most of the images come from

My first Seagal-themed project is off to a roaring start, and I built a custom DMG packaging script purely so I could force the beta testers to look at Seagal's (self described?) "striking and somewhat boyishly handsome" mug while they rush to install the latest build of my project.

Beta testers, this is what you have to look forward to for the next release!

It's useful for things like extracting the version number out of your Info.plist during a Run Script Build Phase.

PlistBuddy wasn't in my existing path, I found it at /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy

Example Usage

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print :CFBundleVersion" Info.plist

Outputs: 0.14, or whatever the value of the CFBundleVersion key in Info.plist is.

- Security is using HTTPS to encrypt traffic between my browser and the web server.

- Security would be to have the page automatically time out and redirect to a page without any of my personal information.

- Making me re-enter something I just typed because I forgot to fill out a form field is not added security, it's just inconvenient and annoying.

The same is true for sites that believe using fields with TYPE="PASSWORD" to mask the text somehow increases security. I have no empirical evidence, but I'm sure those forms are re-submitted significantly more than non-obscured counterparts. At the very least it makes users want to bite your face.

Apple's Developer Tools ships with a utility called GetFileInfo that does just the trick.

/Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo -aa _SYMLINK_ >/dev/null 2>&1 ; echo $?

This will return 0 if the symlink (_SYMLINK_) points to a valid file, and as near as I can tell, 3 if the file does not exist.

Bonus

On Linux you can find the filenames of all broken symlinks in a given directory using find/xargs/grep/sed with

find . -type l -print0 | xargs -0 file | grep "broken symbolic" | sed -e 's/^\|: *broken symbolic.*$/"/g'

The only piece that doesn't work on OS X is the sed regexp (which I'm too lazy to fix), but you can kind of work around that with cut, as long as your symlink filenames don't contain a colon.

find . -type l -print0 | xargs -0 file | grep "broken symbolic" | cut -d':' -f1

Android users complain that they can't install the newest OS on their device, that Exchange sync doesn't work, that third-party applications crash, that Android Market is horrible, that core applications crash, that settings are obtuse and scattered, that it's awkward to use and uncomfortable to hold, and even though the browser uses WebKit, it sucks.

Two generations of phones later, and all of the current iPhones are capable of running the latest OS from Apple. Third-party apps exist, and for the most part don't crash. Except for hardware differences (GPS, speakerphone, camera), most applications run on any of the 6 iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Even the screen doesn't get greasy any more, and Apple introduced the word "oleophobic" into the vernacular. The major failure is still AT&T, who apparently uses frame-relay and microwave links for their backhaul.

Meanwhile the problem with Android devices lies much deeper. SDKs aren't released until weeks out after an OS release, resulting in masses of applications that aren't compatible with the new OS release (and with the newest device, as long as Google continues their new device, new OS trend). The Android Market is a mess – applications are being published that steal personal information, easily half of the apps are filled with comments to the tune of "doesn't work on device XXXX" or "crashes immediately!" because of the massive API changes occurring between OS releases and developers that lose interest after a single application.

Notification controls are non-existent – I have yet to find a way to shut my Droid up. Even if I go into every application and turn off all the sounds (and boy is that fun) and shut the phone off, for some reason the Motorola demon spawn will power itself back on and chirp at me.

And the browser. Oh the browser. Sure, it renders pages fine, but it's slow, and doesn't support multi-touch. The screen itself is capable of supporting multi-touch, just not the browser. The free Dolphin Browser has tabs and multi-touch gestures, but shares another flaw with the bundled browser – animation speed. Animations take much too long. Aim for about 200ms from start to finish. Any more than that and users will become impatient. And after waiting 600ms for a pinch-to-zoom, impatient is accurate.

Apple has demonstrated that they listen to user complaints, or at least that they plan ahead well. Most of the iPhone complaints were addressable with newer hardware, but the problem with Android is that Google seemed to want to take the exact opposite tact of Apple, and go for complete openness. That's great, but it looks like they started by attacking standard UI controls and behavior. Maybe they consider it a feature? ANDROID – where every app is so different it's like having 15 phones in one!

Google needs to tighten up the operating system and address the sprawl of OS releases and devices quickly before they fall into the same trap that RIM is in – a nasty pit one where a developer has to build multiple versions of a single application to overcome massive feature disparity between OS releases¹.

1. Although in RIM's defense they're addressing this with OS 5.0 which has a unified codebase. If only the carriers would get off their asses and approve the 5.0 updates.

Less censorship is always a good thing. No, what's wrong is that Google had to include this in their statement:

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today.

Google's not only concerned about their business in China, but they obviously recognized a need to protect all of their employees in China, a country where people regularly get sent to prison for life for criticizing the government. Sometimes you forget what century we're in.

Your meeting was forwarded

XXXXXXX has forwarded your meeting request to additional recipients.

	Meeting
	Evaluate PostPath

	Meeting Time
	Friday, July 31, 2009 2:00 PM-3:00 PM.

	Recipients
	YYYYYYYY
	ZZZZZZZZ

Disabling Notifications

Use the following PowerShell commands on your Exchange server to disable meeting forward notifications.

Disable External Meeting Forward Notifications

Set-RemoteDomain -MeetingForwardNotificationEnabled $false

Disable Internal Meeting Forward Notifications for a Single User

Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -Identity user_email@example.com -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true

Disable Internal Meeting Forward Notifications for All Mailboxes

Note that this only affects current users, new users will still have the default forwarding enabled.

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited | Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true

PHP Warning: mysqli::mysqli(): [2002] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) in xxx.php on line 2
PHP Warning: mysqli::mysqli(): (HY000/2002): A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
in xxx.php on line 2

PHP bug #45150 suggests that this is due to issues resolving localhost on Windows. This is partially correct, more specifically it's an issue with localhost resolving to ::1 when IPv6 is enabled.

While it feels like Windows has shoehorned in IPv6 support, the blame seems to lie with MySQL, which won't support IPv6 until version 6.0.

I'm not sure why the timeout isn't instant, the port is closed, so it could be partially a problem with PHP or Windows.

> nmap -sT -p 80,3306,3389 -6 ::1
 
Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2009-11-20 15:48 Mountain Standard Time
Interesting ports on cfg64 (::1):
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
80/tcp   closed http
3306/tcp closed mysql
3389/tcp open   ms-term-serv
 
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 3.14 seconds

The Fix

Open up %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts with a text editor and comment out the line that looks like:

::1             localhost

Prefix it with a #, like so:

#::1             localhost

Save it and your PHP/MySQL connections will immediately begin working. You could also use 127.0.0.1 in your connection string instead of localhost, but I didn't want to change code in innumerable files.

If you want to ping your Server 2008 machine and receive a response, open a command prompt or Run dialog and type:

netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8

This will allow your server to reply to ICMP requests.

To disable this and block ICMP requests, run:

netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8 disable

I'm not saying that Steve is verbose, but the post I've drafted a few hundred times in my head goes something like this: if you are going to sniff for mobile browsers, redirect me to the mobile version of the page I am loading, not your brokedick mobile homepage that doesn't provide me with any path to the story I actually want to read.

Steve's post clocks in at around 730 words (and 5 pictures), but it's worth the read.

Someone hooked me up with a new pre-release BlackBerry 9700 last week (just in time for the BlackBerry Developer Conference), and unfortunately it still doesn't allow you to charge the phone while it's holstered.  When it comes to usability this is pretty basic shit; instead users are presented with a few millimeters of stupidity.  At least the USB port is at the top of the device, so you can set the phone vertically into a car cup holder with a charger connected, one more place the design of the Storm 1, Tour and 8900 fails.

My high-school French teacher¹ used to refer to screw-ups like this as "mansy-pansy junk" (or something along those lines), and I suspect he'd be just as disappointed with this as he was with what he referred to as my "Franglais".

1. Hat tip to Mr. Bergeron

To view the Event Log on a Storm you need to switch to the Home screen, show the keyboard, and activate alt/num lock by holding down the '123' button. Once alt is 'locked', press ", /, ", /. That's double-quote, forward-slash, double-quote, forward-slash. On all the QWERTY devices you can type ALT+LGLG.

The OS released approved for release by Verizon (application version 5.0.0.328, bundle 508) doesn't have a Show Keyboard menu item on the home screen, leaving users with no way to view the event log or configure any event log filters.

I thew together a quick little application that does one thing, and one thing only, launch the Event Log Viewer.

OTA install: http://coreygilmore.com/ota/eventviewer/EventViewer.jad
Desktop Manager install: http://coreygilmore.com/ota/eventviewer/EventViewer.zip

Steven Seagal – Expected Plot Summary Tag Cloud

Instead the result was:

Steven Seagal – Plot Summary Tag Cloud

Just to be safe I removed all of Seagal's straight-to-video movies from the list.

Steven Seagal – Non-STV Plot Summary Tag Cloud

Interestingly enough, there was more of an emphasis on CIA and murder in his STV movies, while anything that hit a theater tended to be about police and bombs. There's always a healthy amount of killing, but the STV movies introduced drugs and Asian gangs. Seagal has definitely become more an international ass-kicker in his direct-to-DVD days. He also seems to be over his save the environment kick as well.

Steven Seagal- STV Movie Plot Summary Tag Cloud

Tag clouds were generated using the very cool Wordle.