During the course of the day I encounter lots of challenges, some of which take minutes to solve and others that take much longer. My goal for this section is to keep track of these challenges and their solutions. I will turn the longer ones into articles, while the shorter ones will stay as blog entries. You can expect topics to range from very specific programming challenges to broader topics like life.
Below is a list of the recent blog entries. You can also browse the blog by using the tags on the right side, or if you know what you are looking for then you can use the search box at the top right.
I recently reinstalled OS X Lion on my MacBook Pro and one thing that I had forgotten about was the Control + Scroll gesture to zoom in to a specific part of the screen. This is especially important for me because I am running 1680×1050 on 15” screen (i.e. generally very small font). Finally after a few minutes of research I found out how to get that functionality back.
Here is what you need to do.
2013-03-17: I have duplicated Nick’s add-on and created a version that I am hoping I will update on a timely fashion as new songbird versions are released. You can find this add-on on the Songbird add-on website.
2012-11-04: Updated xpi for Songbird 2.1.
Apple Keyboard Media Key Support is a must have Songbird add-on if you use Songbird on a mac. With the recent Songbird update (1.10) it is no longer compatible and cannot be installed. I decided to update the compatibility in the install (xpi) and see if still works. Guess what? It does.
So, until Nick uploads the official version to the add-on site I am uploading an updated version here. I have emailed Nick so he can upload this to the official site. Note that I have updated the version to 1.4.1 (from 1.4.0) so Songbird will let you install it.
I have recently had to setup an Asterisk server. I decided to use Ubuntu because I wanted to utilize the server for a few other low priority things. As I was setting up the server I noticed that it complained about not finding a custom sound that I had recorded.
[Oct 27 00:22:05] WARNING[4136]: file.c:653 ast_openstream_full: File custom/TestWelcome does not exist in any format [Oct 27 00:22:05] WARNING[4136]: file.c:959 ast_streamfile: Unable to open custom/TestWelcome (format 0x4 (ulaw)): No such file or directory [Oct 27 00:22:05] WARNING[4136]: pbx.c:9579 pbx_builtin_background: ast_streamfile failed on SIP/xxxxxxxxxxxx for custom/TestWelcome
After some troubleshooting I found out that the Ubuntu packages configured Asterisk to look in /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/ instead of /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/ where the custom sound was being saved to. A quick fix for this is to create a sym link.
ln -s /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/custom
I think the correct way might be to edit astdatadir in /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf, but that’s something that I still need to research.
I recently read The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande. I was skeptical that I would find much value in the simple tool that it covered, a checklist. Especially, when I think of highly complex projects and roles.
I bought Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch about two weeks ago and was noticing that whenever I had the stock USB cable/charger plugged in the screen would become very unresponsive and behave erratically. So, I decided to take it to a Sprint store today and get it checked out. The rep tried a few different combinations and found out that the problem was only with the stock USB cable and the stock charge combination. The phone would work OK with USB cable plugged into another charger, and the charger with another USB cable.
So, if you are seeing the screen on your Galaxy S II behave erratically when plugged in then try either a different USB cable or a different charger.
I just got a confirmation that Wake-on-LAN for WebOS has been accepted in the official app catalog. You should be able to install it from there now.
I recently bought the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The very first thing that I generally do with my devices is to check for any firmware/software updates. So, that’s what I did with the tablet… Settings > About > System Updates > Update…and to my surprise I got an error claiming “Wrong Password.” So, I went to the Samsung website and was able to login to my account there with the same password. I still reset my password and tried again with the same result. Afterwards, I tried a few different passwords and finally found one where I started getting another error “Processing failed.”
After some searching I found out that the tab connects to a service that has a separate account than the online account, and further searching revealed that I have to manually add the Samsung account before this will start working.
So, here is what you have to do.
Settings > Accounts & Sync > Add Account > Samsung account
Once you add the Samsung account through the above menu then go back and try updating. It should work now. Enjoy!
I am learning new things about vim all the time. Today’s revelation was the pipe symbol (|). I had to update a function call across multiple files, here is what I was doing.
vimgrep functionname ** to get the list of matching files.%s followed by w and cn, but given the large number of files this seemed very inefficient (I don’t want carpal tunnel syndrome!).So, a quick search revealed the pipe/bar (|). This lets you specify multiple commands at once. With this new knowledge, I replaced step 3 above with…
:%s | w | cn
…and now I can quickly review the call before doing the modification.
After some research I am concluding that my Play Button iTunes Patch DOES work on OS X Lion. The patched file is replaced by the upgrade process so you will have to re-run to patch the latest file.
Please let me know if you experience otherwise.
2011-08-18 fa: Users have confirmed that the patch works OK in OS X Lion.
2011-07-26 FA: Please see the latest post.
As you might have heard, Apple released OS Lion yesterday. I am not part of mac developer program so yesterday was the first time that I got to play around with Lion. One thing I noticed right away was that the upgrade broke my iTunes Play Button patch. I will look into fixing that as soon as I get some time.
Among other broken things were the VMWare Fusion bootcamp instance which I haven’t had the time to recreate. Plus Apple removed the four finger swipe app switch gesture, which I used quite a bit 😐 Time to find another utility to bring that functionality back.