A collection of coding snippets, tips, hints and random thoughts.
Yes, it’s true. The iPad WiFi problems are definitely there. I currently have one iPad lying around here, which has obscenely bad WiFi performance: bad signal, slow, disconnects. The eduroam node I am using is 6m away, almost line of sight (two open doors).
I forgot where I read this, but this is a neat way of swapping variables in python:
u = 1
v = 2
print "%i %i" % (u, v)
u, v = v, u
print "%i %i" % (u, v)
Since OS X is a UNIX like many others, I usually put my environment variable settings like PATH in ~/.profile. However, for Cocoa based apps, that are not run from a terminal, this will not help. Luckily, there is a documented procedure for setting environment variables for Cocoa applications. In short, you just have to edit a plist. If it already exists on your system, just type the following in a terminal:
Ok, so I just tried out the new libimobiledevice. Installation was a breeze, using the provided OpenSUSE repository. A first run of ideviceinfo returned successfully detailed information about the attached iPod Touch. I also upgraded libgpod4. But Amarok 2.3 did not show a thing. Mounting of the iPod needed to be done manually using “ifuse ~/my-ipod-dir”. Supposedly, this happens automatically with Gnome, usin gvfs. But since I am using KDE, this is at the moment a no-go. Ok, so Amarok fails at this point in time. What about gtkpod? It works, although it throws some mysterious error message (“Eweiterte Informationen werden nicht verwendet” — wtf?), and that program is dog-slow. I though iTunes is bad, but this program is really, really slow as a snail. But here a proof of concept that I was able to sync to albums to the device:
I have an OpenSUSE machine running a Samba server to provide files to my network. Now when I use the MacBook Pro to access those files, this happens awfully slow, with 80-200 KiB per second. I never figured out why, since rsync and sftp work very fast (for WiFi at least), at speeds of around 1.2 MiB per second. Today I googled for it, and it turns out that OS X delays ACK packages. I have no clue why it does that and what good this does, but you can disable it by running:
One more stupid bug in Qt found. When using the Designer, you can’t drag and drop QActions, if you are using the Cocoa version of Qt. The bug is described here, a fix will be available in Qt 4.6.3.