Author: root42

How to make Hybrid Apps that run on 3.1 and higher devices (iPod, iPad and iPhone)

This fantastic blog entry helps you to actually use the UserInterfaceIdiom message, which is only available in iOS 3.2 and higher. This way, you can actually build a hybrid iPad / iPhone app that even runs on the original iPhone, which only comes with iOS 3.1 at best.

iCal woes: Event invite for Google Calendar is never sent

Ok, here is another bugger that annoyed me for quite some time: I am using Google Calendar as my main method of dealing with appointments and shared calendars. I use the mostly fabulous Apple iCal for managing those dates. However, if I create an event to be shared with several people, and I try to send an invitation to those people, this doe not work. In the event properties, I enter a list of Email adresses, hit “Send” and it never gets sent. The event is marked as “waiting for answers”, though. But that will never happen… So I have to fire up the Google Calendar website and resend the invitations manually. Bit annoying.

I haven’t found a correct problem description so far for this in the discussion boards over at Apple, but I’ll update this post if I find a bug description or some workaround. However, a preliminary search yields several problems relating to iCal and event invitations, but also with event invitations on Google calendars.

Mystery calls by my iPhone

In the last couple of days my iPhone made a couple of ghost calls. I.e. it called some people from my address book, without me doing the actual calls. I think I found the reason for that now. When you hit the home button for several seconds, an iPhone 3GS with iOS 3.x or 4.x will go into voice command mode. This even works when the phone is keylocked. The voice function is not so robust and will misinterpret quite a few background sounds, noises and voices for commands. I couldn’t yet make 100% sure that this is how it happened, but it seems to be the only possibility so far, since my phone is always keylocked, when I carry it in my pocket. So I figure the home button was accidentally pressed, and thus the voice command was activated. Will try to investigate this further…

Wishlist item for the iPhone: Clickable Maps Icons

What annoys me most in the maps application of the iPhone: You cannot tap or click on symbols. E.g. when you tap a bus-icon in the maps.google.com website, you will get a popup with the name of the bus stop and the lines that go there. This is not possible on the iPhone. I also use the fantastic Fahrplan application, however if you do not know the name of the bus stop you want to go to, you’re out of luck.

OS X graphics driver bugs

On both our MBP as well as our iMac I can get OS X to crash when using a perfectly fine fragment shader, which works well under Linux. Both under Linux as well as under OS X I am using NVIDIA hardware. This is what the crash looks like:

OS X crashing when using complex GLSL shaders from Arne Schmitz on Vimeo.

Update 2010-07-13: Apple already wrote back, and requested a sample app, which I provided. Let’s see if they can figure this out. Kudos for reacting so quickly!

me.com woes

I have been using me.com for a while now, and am relatively happy with it. The automatic sync of the data between my work laptop and my iPhone is absolutely priceless. Now I’ve upgraded to the family account to share the (for my needs) ample 40 GB with two friends. Turns out, the other two accounts can only get 5 GB of storage. Ouch. That sort of sucks. Right now, 10 GB cannot be used at all, cause they are reserved for two more people. Why am I then paying for the extra storage anyhow?

New Book: Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation

There is a new book out, for which I contributed part of a chapter: Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation. The book is meant to be a textbook for everyone who needs to simulate computer networks. From the physical layer to the application layer, some best practices are described. Contrary to Amazon and Springer’s webpages, the book has more than 256 pages. It’s got more than 500 pages, so it is rather comprehensive.

Shortcuts on OS X

I use Spark for defining global shortcuts to tools, applications etc. One of the best things is shortcutting to the login window. This way you can quickly lock your screen, which is not bindable by default in OS X. Also useful: shortcuts to AppleScript, e.g. for opening a new Safari window. This is what Spark looks like, when you edit the shortcuts:


Yellow pages when printing with Debian?

We had the problem of yellow tinted printouts on our Debian Testing machines. With my OS X machine, I did not have this problem, although both system use CUPS 1.4.3 for printing. It seems that Ghostscript was the culprit. The pstopdf filter to be exact. This bug report in the Debian bug tracker describes the exact same problem. The idea is to comment out the “-dUseCIEColor” option. I am not sure in how far this will also change the colour reproduction, but since our systems are not colour calibrated anyhow, I think this will not matter.