dufault.info

I’m starting to notice that mobile network carriers disable features in their handset on purpose (as shocking and cruel as that may sound.) That strikes up a great deal of irritability from me — I am a sound believer that if I paid for a product, I should be getting full access to what I paid for.  Carriers disabling features on their products is an even greater incentive to not deal with the majority of large cell phone corporations in North America — their dodgy tactics of forcing their customers to pay more money for features they already possess is despicable.  Some providers are starting to open this up, most notable Verizon unlocking the GPS for third-party program use (Google Maps for Mobile, for instance.) Source

Thankfully, the good guys over at xda-developers and ppcgeeks can help you unlock the disabled functionality of your handset, and use your phone like you paid for it.

Google Maps for mobile — it’s one of the greatest offerings that Google’s made in my humble opinion. Armed with my handset (and data connection) and this software, I can never be lost again in the city. Hungry and need to find a local pizzeria in a hurry? No digging through Yellow Pages, viewing shady-looking ads for terrible shops. Why not use the search via Google Maps for mobile and you can find all sorts of pizza shops, and peer reviews for these shops is a touch away! No longer will you find a new pizza place, only to be disappointed with expensive cardboard-like slices.

Also, to make this service better, Google Maps for mobile integrated in with your mobile phone’s GPS receiver, so you can find the closet shop to you quickly, get blow-by-blow walking instructions to where you need to go, driving instructions, or even transit instructions if Google is connected with your local transit authority.

Other neat functionalities of Google Maps for mobile is favorite places, and looking up the addresses of my contacts. Now, I’ve set my home as a favorite, If I’m deep downtown and looking for the fastest route home, I can do that very quickly and easily by selecting my favorites. Similarly, if I’m out and looking to visit my friend, I can just look it up directly within Google Maps, and get instant directions to him — again, using the inbuilt GPS receiver in my phone. Convenient, and very relevant to my life when travelling by car, walking, or busing — you also get a reasonably accurate time estimate for travel.

For my life, Google Maps for mobile is a regular application that I run, I simply can’t live without it.

A few weeks ago I purchased a replacement handset to my HTC Touch, the HTC Touch Pro from my local CDMA provider, Telus. I’m very pleased to say that the upgrade was a complete success, and that the majority of my complaints with the Touch have been resolved.

My new HTC Touch Pro has improved call reception, better battery life, a delicious high-pixel density screen, faster processor, and built-in WiFi; the phone ships with Windows Mobile 6.1 as well. I’m very pleased with it.

What seems to be usual is a terrible OS or ROM is shipped with every Windows Mobile-based phone, giving them a terrible reputation. As soon as you flash a ROM from the guys at ppcgeeks, things will be better. I experienced less lockups, better battery life, and a more responsive phone by using a ROM from there.

I wrote an article for a friends site, check it out: Guide To Easy Logins With SSH On Linux

I didn’t know that article writing took so long — the amount of writing, rewriting, critiquing, etc etc was a new experience. I’ll have to keep writing articles — teaching others is a good way to reinforce things in your own head. When writing this article, I had to do a lot of fact-checking to make sure the thing I was saying were proper, and a learned a few things while doing so.

Please check out my friend’s site and read my article. I’d appreciate it if you’d register there and leave me a comment.

Usually on Linux server, we have issues with logging the commands that our users are running, especially with BASH. BASH doesn’t log the commands as soon as they’re executed, and the user can do a number of simple things to prevent the log from ever being written to the disk, preventing you from knowing what’s going on. They can do a number of things to still dodge our efforts, but this is one step we can do to fix many of the things they can do to evade you. The requirements of this are: BASH, extended attributes support for your file system of choice, and root access to the machine you’re installing this on. This can be done with BSD-based machines as well, I might right a modified article on that (only difference is the filesystem command.)

Here we go:

1. First step in this, is getting BASH to log each command execution immediately to the logfile. We can do this by adding “history -a” to the beginning of the PROMPT_COMMAND, which causes BASH to flush all of the logs to disk.Next, we need to keep the user from deleting their .bash_history, which is the default location for BASH’s logging.
2. We’re using the Linux extended filesystem attributes here, we’re enabling the append-only option.  It’s perfect for this:

   chattr +a .bash_history

   This command will allow appending of data to the file, you can’t open the file and edit and save it, you can’t delete it, can’t move it, unless you’re root and you remove that attribute first.

3. Next, we need to set variables to read only status, so our users can’t change where the log is stored, how big the logfile can get, etc. So open up your /etc/profile, and add this to the bottom:

   if [ "$BASH" ]; then
   	PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;$PROMPT_COMMAND";
   	readonly PROMPT_COMMAND
   	readonly HISTSIZE
   	readonly HISTFILE
   	readonly HOME
   	readonly HISTIGNORE
   	readonly HISTCONTROL
   fi

Please not that this will cause some griping by those that like to customize their BASH environment, and you can talk with them in order to integrate this with their custom environment.

Any comments or questions about this setup are more than welcome, and any ideas on how to improve this are also welcome.

I did my 2nd blood donation in Canada today.  I’d like to encourage any Canadian’s that read my blog to go out and schedule a donation to the Canadian Blood Services, it’s a worthwhile experience that can save someone’s life.  It’s free, it’ll take an hour of your time, and you get juice and cookies.

To snitch their catchphrase:
it’s in you to give

Update: did my 3rd donation on Nov 18, 2008.

For anybody that cares, Android v1.0 has been released along with the T-Mobile G1 handset running Android on it.  The future is finally here — I can hardly wait.

Here’s the download site:
http://code.google.com/android/download_list.html

Their download page hasn’t been updated yet, but here’s the link to the SDKs:
http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.0_r1.zip
http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk-windows-1.0_r1.zip

I’m very excited now.

While it’s easily cleared by a malicious person, this can easily extend the usefulness of your history file with the information of when you ran that command.

This works in bash v3 and up.

If you’d like to add the timestamping to all users on the machine, the file you’d want to edit is probably /etc/profile.  If not, add it to your .bash_profile in your home directory (~).

Add this to the end:

HISTTIMEFORMAT="%D %T "

To get your current session to use the new settings:

source /etc/profile

Check it out your last 20 commands, datestamped:

history | tail -n20

I love bash, the more if the inbuilt features I learn, the more I realize how great it is.

Martin (or dzo) has released another update for the Vogue, updating his release to the newest SDK available from Google, which was made available from last monday.

This release has broken a few custom applications made by some, as the phone keyboard now needs to be written, and the previous method used an on screen keyboard hacked into the kernel.

However, the data access and voice data works fine in this release, although the SMS app (due to the broken keyboard functionality) isn’t working yet.

I’ll update when I see more!

Apparently this was released without much fanfare, but Google Maps Mobile v2.2.0.16 for your Windows Mobile smartphone / pocketpc has been released, which means it now provides transit directions on the go.

This makes me extremely happy, but annoyed as well, as it was released quietly — I’m even subscribed to the Google Latlong blog.

Give it a try, and enjoy it if you live in a supported city.