Michael Henley

December 12, 2009

Gomadic with iPhone 3G follow-up

Filed under: Apple, general tech, ipod — michael @ 7:26 am

Following on from my post here I have just spent the past week using the Gomadic pack as my main source of power for the iPhone and I have to say that the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. When fresh batteries are used it can charge the phone back to full in a matter of hours. I would say that it is almost as effective as a wall charger for charging and you can even continue to use it while it charges – I am listening to music and writing this and the battery is still charging from it. I have barely connected the phone to the wall all week instead preferring to keep it in bed to use as an alarm (I was on the top bunk away from power). Every night it has charged the phone. I would guess that a set of batteries (4 AAs) lasts for maybe 1.5 full charges.

One thing which had me puzzled for a while was that sometimes the phone would tell me that the accessory was not compatible for charging. I think I have discovered that this happens when the batteries are running low and need to be replaced but I can’t be 100% sure. Also, sometimes the phone will stop responding when it is connected. Pulling the dock connector makes the phone start responding again and you can then reconnect it. Weird. Not sure why it is causing this behaviour but it doesn’t seem to be a permanent problem.

Overall a pretty good investment which has made this week must more enjoyable not to mention the ~16 hour journeys each way. Be aware that there may be the odd problem with it being recognised but despite this I would recommend it.

3 of 5 stars

October 31, 2009

Data loss, data recovery, and a feeling of uncertainty

Filed under: Apple, Mac, Really Useful App, Windows, general tech — michael @ 1:57 pm

I have been thinking about how I should write this post for a few days now, and also been waiting for an (as yet unreplied to) support ticket to go through.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that shortly after installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro I made a big mistake. After seeing that the Snow Leopard drivers allowed me to read and write to my internal HFS+ volume I plugged in my two WD MyBook Studio external drives to see if I could also read them. They didn’t mount so I popped into Disk Management and was asked what partition table they were using. ‘Simple’, I thought. They are GUID so I selected this and clicked ok. Then things went wrong. The drives came online but disk management showed them both as being unformatted. This was when I started to panic. Still hoping that this was Windows being silly I rebooted into OS X, only to be presented with two dialogs, one for each drive, saying that they were unrecognized and asking if I wanted to initialize, ignore, or eject. Now I start to panic. Disk Utility shows them as two partitionless drives.

Backups?

Ok, so I try to be pretty sensible about my backup policy. My MacBook Pro’s internal drive mirrors to a partition on one of the effected drive each night with SuperDuper!. Due to size issues however I keep my Aperture library on one of the external drives, with a vault on the other. My theory went that with this in place, and the most likely failures being a physical one on only one of the drives, my most important things kept on these would be safe. I admit that I never planned for both drives dying at the same time. Very very foolish on my part I know but I simply can’t afford to buy another set of 1TB and 500GB drives to image the external ones to. This seemed like the best solution.

Getting some data back:

I have to admit that I was pretty bummed out by the prospect of losing my largeish collection of photos from Aperture, many of which I haven’t put on Flickr for quite a while. There was also a collection of install images which generally come in quite useful along with some other bits and pieces. Basically I wanted/needed to get a lot of this back. Working on the principle that it was just the file tables which had been nuked I set to work trying out a couple of file recovery solutions. After scouring some blogs and support forums I found Boomerang Data Recovery Solutions. I ran the trial version of BoomDRS on the 500GB and was pretty damn happy to see it reporting the three partitions on the drive and detailing file sizes and names along with complete directory structure. I smiled for the first time in a few days. I knew that two of the partitions didn’t need recovering as one was an image of my internal drive which I could remake and the other was a copy of the OS X install DVD expanded to a partition which again I could remake.

Boomerang charge based on the amount you want to recover. This is where my problems with them began but I didn’t know it yet. I paid my £99 for a 1TB allowance (which I couldn’t really afford, but I digress…) and waited. Paying via paypal means you have to send your payment through a third-party called 2checkout. They take your money and then do fraud checks. After you have used paypal. This holds up the whole process for a day or so while they waste time. Once they finally release the order to Boomerang you get your activation code. I proceeded to begin the recovery to a third volume I labelled ‘Lifeboat’. My files began to reappear including the Aperture vault. To say I was happy would be an understatement.

After running for a few hours the folders I selected from the 500GB drive were all back. Boomerang were my new most favourite software company. Once I had repartitioned the 500GB drive and it was restored to its former glory I turned my attention to the 1TB drive. However every time I ran the scans from the Boomerang application on this drive it would crash. This happened regardless of the type of scan I tried to run. The support ticket I submitted including the crash report has not been responded to whilst they promise a response within 72 hours.

So I am sat here with ~850GB of unused recovery, a drive which I can’t use, and data still missing. Admittedly this data isn’t mission-critical. Mainly DVD ripped movies and TV shows along with the virtual hard drive for a Win 7 RC1 VirtualBox installation I had set up. I would rather not lose it but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

So I am torn. I have the most important data back thanks to the boomerang software and for that I am really happy and wouldn’t mind recommending them, but they have treated me as a customer pretty badly. I have extra usage which I can’t use thanks to their application crashing and no response to my support enquiry. I think if as a company you are taking this much money off people then you owe them a degree of support especially if it is due to a consistent crash.

So what have I learnt from this experience?

Firstly I think this shows just how much we need a unified file system standard. MS, Apple, the open-source community along with other interested parties need to get together and sort this. Waging their war on consumers machines is not a good way to go. If I as a fairly savvy user can make this kind of mistake with relatively little effort then you can imagine how easy it would be for someone less knowledgeable. Secondly I need to have an even more robust backup solution. I thought what I had was pretty good but evidently not. I also need to be a lot more careful but I do have a habit of blindly running into these things believing I can fix it if I mess up. Thirdly I need to make sure I put even more effort into checking software recommendations. I would love to recommend Boomerang for the work their software did on my smaller drive but the whole experience is marred by buggy software and lacking support. There are other solutions such as Prosoft’s offering which is highly rated but I am reluctant to spend a further £50+ on the hope they are any better. Once bitten, twice shy I guess.

As an aside, I have written this whole thing on my iPhone over a coffee in Nero. I am still pretty impressed with how easy it is to type on this thing. Why it consistently thinks I am trying to type ‘Whig’ instead of ‘which’ I am not sure but on the whole it works well. Aside from slightly aching thumb joints this is easy. I might actually be touch-typing better on this than on a desktop.

September 30, 2009

Updating MovableType to send email via sendmail on NFS

Filed under: blogging, general tech, internet — michael @ 11:07 am

When initially setting up MovableType on my NearlyFreeSpeech-hosted site, I couldn’t find a way to get around the need for Authentication with Google Apps for email. Commenter Kevin Doyon informed me how to make this work, but as I had already finished the MT set up wizard I had to make the changes manually. I must begin by saying that I am no expert at this and am learning as I go. This is what has worked for me and might not work for you. You undertake this at your own risk, and as with any changes I advise you to make backups of everything before you start making changes.

Using your favourite FTP client (Transmit in my case), connect to the site for your MT installation. Navigate to /public/cgi-bin/mt, and find the mt-config.cgi file. Make a copy and rename it something like mt-config-old.cgi, and then open up mt-config.cgi in a text editor. At the bottom, add the following lines:

#========== EMAIL SETTINGS ===========

MailTransfer sendmail
SendMailPath /usr/bin/sendmail

Save the file back to the server, and then open up your web browser and navigate to http://domainname/cgi-bin/mt.cgi to access your installation’s control panel.

Select ‘System Overview’, and then settings:

From here you will immediately see the General Settings pane where we need to make changes. In the ‘System Email’ box, enter the email address you want to be displayed in the From: line of any emails sent by MovableType and click Save Changes.

Once it refreshes, enter an email address you have access to into the Send Email To: field and send the test. If all goes well then you will see a test email arrive in your account sent from MovableType, and the dashboard will report success:

That is it. Your MovableType installation will now be able to send emails as and when you have configured it to.

September 20, 2009

Burning Issues with the MacBook Pro

Filed under: Apple, Mac, general tech — michael @ 10:23 pm

This likely only applies to the ~2008 MacBook Pro:

Recently my MacBook Pro has been rejecting burnable media. When I put those discs into the drive, it would make some noises a few times but never even spin up, and the after a little while would just eject the disc. The computer would simply state that it was waiting for the SuperDrive. While considering booking in (yet again!) to the Genius Bar at Regent St, I read somewhere that the suggestion was the try blowing some air into drive. I can only recommend using canned air for this, but after a few blasts the drive has started recognising the discs and is burning again.

September 7, 2009

Using Google Analytics with MovableType 4.31

Filed under: blogging, general tech, internet — michael @ 10:39 pm

This is based heavily on Daniel Sirz’s useful piece for using Analytics with MT which can be found here. I found that it was missing one or two little bits which had me scratching my head for a while and so have rewritten it for the most current version of MT. This will include the Analytics code into the header template, so that it is included in every page of the blog.

Ensure that you are managing the blog, and not the global MT install. From the Dashboard, navigate to the Templates section:

Scroll down to the Template Modules section, and select Create Template Module:

Copy your Analytics tracking code from their website, and then create a new module called ‘Google Analytics’:

Save your changes, and then navigate back to the templates by clicking ‘List all templates’

Click the HTML Head Template to edit it:

Click the line below the last one currently present, and enter:

<$mt:Include module="Google Analytics"$>

Once you save, you should see this:

Head back to the main screen by again clicking ‘List all templates’. The final step is to rebuild your blog to include the new code. To do this, click the ‘Publish Blog’ button in the cross bar:

Tell it to Publish all files, and then wait while it rebuilds. When it is done you will see a box telling you that it is complete and how long it has taken. If you now go to any page on your blog and check its source, you will see that the analytics code is being included in the header and so will report back the stats.

Installing MovableType on NearlyFreeSpeech Part 2: Set-Up and Config

Filed under: Uncategorized, blogging, general tech, internet — michael @ 9:24 pm

This guide continues from a previous post which can be found here, which details the steps required to download, arrange, and set the permissions required to install MovableType onto a NFS-hosted site. The same disclaimers as posted there apply to this post.

In a web browser navigate to http://domainname/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi , where domainname is the domain name of your blog.

Here you will be presented with a box where you will configure the static path of the MT installation:

As with the page URL, replace domainname with the domain name of your blog, then click ‘Begin’.

If everything is as it should be you should see the following screen:

Continue to the Database config page.

Here, select MySQL Database:

Once you have selected the Database type, the window will expand to give you more options. At this point we must set a few things up on the NearlyFreeSpeech end. Don’t navigate away from the MT set up page, but in a new tab log into your NFS member area, and then click the ‘mysql’ tab. If you already have a MySQL process set up then we can just use that. If you do not, then click ‘Create a new MySQL Process’ and follow the on screen instructions.

Once created, click ‘open phpMyAdmin’ and log in with the details emailed to you by NFS when you created the process.

I like to create a new user for each database I create. This helps to keep it more secure. From the main page, click the Priviledges tab:

Then click ‘Create a New User’, and you will be presented with the new user window:

I am going to give my MT installation the username ‘moveabletype’ and have generated a secure password for it. Take note of the username and password you create as you will need to enter these into MovableType later. Select the ‘Create Database with same name’ radio button below the user credentials, and then click ‘Go’ at the bottom right. The page should refresh showing you a colourful box at the top informing you that the new user has been created. If you were to go into the databases tab of  phpMyAdmin you should also see that a new database has been created called, in my case, ‘moveabletype’. You can now log out of phpMyAdmin and head back to the MovableType installation page.

Once you clicked MySQL Database some new options will have appeared. You must fill them in as follows:

For Database Server, you must enter the process name you created at NFS. If you did not take note of this, it can be found on your NFS mysql page, and is listed as DSN. Fill in the other fields with the info you entered in phpMyAdmin when you created the new user and database. The click ‘Test Connection’. If everything goes as planned you should see the following window:

After clicking Continue, you are presented with the Mail configuration page. At this time I have not figured out how to make this work with Google Apps where I host my email on michaelhenley.co.uk, and so have chosen to skip this step simply by clicking continue. My issue is that Google Apps requires me to authenticate before they will pass on email, but the MT installation does not present me with a way to enter user details. I will update with a plugin later if I find one to make it work.

Simply clicking Continue allows you to skip this step.

[Update]: Thanks to commenter Kevin Doyon for informing me on how to make this work. Select the option to send email via sendmail, and set the path to

/usr/bin/sendmail

The test email will now send correctly even from a GoogleApps Address. If, like me, you had already skipped over this step then follow the instructions here to configure sendmail from outside the wizard.

If you have done everything correctly your MovableType installation should now be set up and you will be presented with the following window:

Once you click Continue you must set up a user for yourself:

Click Continue, and then enter your blog title, and change the paths so they point to the ‘blog’ directory:

Once you click ‘Finish install’ you will see the system initialise the database, and then you will see the Installation Complete! Screen:

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed MovableType onto your NFS-hosted site. I hope these two guides have been useful.

A few credits:

I have put this guide together based on information found at the following sites:

  1. http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2007/01/28/writing-files-in-php/
  2. http://wiki.movabletype.org/Main_Page
  3. http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/installation/quick-start.html

Installing MovableType on NearlyFreeSpeech Part 1: Downloading and Permissions

Filed under: blogging, general tech, internet — michael @ 9:19 pm

I host this blog and the rest of the michaelhenley.co.uk domain on NearlyFreeSpeech and have yet to have a problem with them. However, while in California @alexmuller and @zethraeus were trying to set up the back end for MiscellanousGeekery, the tech blog which they are running, and at first decided to try to use MovableType instead of Wordpress. After they spent a day getting nowhere at it they decided to go with Wordpress instead and that was that. I had attempted to offer a helping hand while there, but being completely unfamiliar with MovableType and no sort of expert at configuring these things anyway I was about as much use as a chocolate teapot. This afternoon however, resolving not to be beaten by a piece of CMS Software, I decided to have a bash at it myself and see if I could make it work. After a few hours poking, proding, shouting and screaming, I finally managed to make it work.

Below is a step-by-step guide to how I made it install and run. I must preface this with saying that I am no sort of expert, nor do I claim to be. This is simply how it has worked for me and how it will hopefully work for you. Some things to note:

  1. I use a Mac and as such my main tools for interfacing with NFS are terminal SSH and Transmit. I will keep Transmit to a minimum to try to make this as universal as possible.
  2. The only configuring I will do is to install the blog.
  3. I found things a lot harder to approach than Wordpress. While this is not surprising as Wordpress is a little more dumbed down, this guide is the product of much Googling and I owe pretty much all of this to various guides, manuals, wikis and blogs. I will try to give credit where I can
  4. I am trying to make this as comprehensive as possible. Skip over any explanation you don’t need.
  5. Only enter commands in black. I am including the prompt in grey for clarity. The idea is that before you hit return to execute the command you should see exactly what is written on each line of the guide.
  6. This shouldn’t break anything, but if it does, please don’t sue me :) You are undertaking this at your own risk.

In your NearlyFreeSpeech control panel, create the site where you are going to install MovableType, and take note of the credentials you will require to connect to this site over SSH. If you are simply adding to an existing site then ignore this step.

Head over to movabletype.org and copy the URL to the latest distribution of MT (4.31 at time of writing). Open up the terminal and SSH into your site, and enter your NFS password when prompted:

ssh nfsusername_sitename@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net

You should then be presented with a prompt similar to this:

[sitename /home/public]$

From here you can download MT directly to the site using wget. Replace the URL with that obtained from the MT website for the latest release:

[sitename /home/public]$ wget http://www.movabletype.org/downloads/stable/MTOS-4.31-en.zip

You can follow the progress of the download on screen, and after a short while it will have downloaded. Next unzip it:

[sitename /home/public]$ unzip MTOS-4.31-en.zip

Once this is completed, if you enter the ls command at the prompt you should see that the public folder contains one file and one folder. The file is MTOS-4.31.en.zip, and the folder is simply MTOS-4.31-en. The folder contains the unzipped contents of file downloaded from MovableType.

Create a folder in public called cgi-bin, and then a folder called mt inside of it:

[sitename /home/public]$ mkdir cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public]$ cd cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ mkdir mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ cd ..

The contents of the MT download have to be split between the cgi-bin/mt folder and the public folder. At the prompt enter the following:

[sitename /home/public]$ cd MTOS-4.31-en

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ cp -rf mt-static ../

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ rm -r mt-static

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ cd ..

[sitename /home/public]$ cp -rf MTOS-4.31-en/* cgi-bin/mt

[sitename /home/public]$ rm -r MTO*

To summarise, these commands have copied the mt-static folder into the public directory of this site, and have copied the rest of the contents into the mt directory we created inside of cgi-bin. The final command is simply housekeeping to remove the downloaded zip file and the folder to which its contents were extracted.

One of the differences between MT and Wordpress is that it requires the server to have the ability to write to certain folders. NearlyFreeSpeech limits how this can happen and so the permissions for the folders and files to be written must show the group as ‘web’ and allow the group to write. It also requires the blog to have its own subdirectory within the domain. I am going to assume that this directory will be ‘blog’, but if it is not then simply substitute ‘blog’ for your chosen name in any commands. Finally the world must also be able to execute files within cgi-bin/mt.

[sitename /home/public]$ mkdir blog

[sitename /home/public]$ chmod -R 775 blog

[sitename /home/public]$ chgrp -R web blog

[sitename /home/public]$ cd mt-static

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ chmod -R 775 support

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ chgrp -R web support

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ cd ..

[sitename /home/public]$ cd cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ chmod -R 775 mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ chgrp -R web mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ cd ..

At this point we should have completed pretty much everything which needs to be done in the terminal and via SSH. To disconnect from the server simply enter

[sitename /home/public]$ exit

This completes part 1. In the next part I will walk through how to configure your MovableType installation and set up MySQL database which it will use through phpMyAdmin. This can be found here.

June 18, 2009

Comparing the iPhone 3G and 1st Gen iPod touch

Filed under: Apple, general tech, ipod — michael @ 11:51 pm

I am at home this evening, and so I decided to update both my parents iPhones to version 3 firmware. My mum has the 3G and my dad has the original EDGE iPhone. While using my mum’s iPhone after it’s set up, I noticed something which they had commented on since she got the new iPhone – it isn’t very fast. I had never heard that the iPhone 3G was particularly slow but I really did notice how sluggish it seemed. With that in mind, and the fact that anecdotally my iPod touch 1st Gen felt faster, I did a side by side comparison using the DSLReports Mobile Speed Test over the home wifi. With the proviso that our home internet connection is appallingly slow, I found some interesting results:

iPhone Download Speed

iPhone Download Speed

iPod Download Speed

iPod Download Speed

I was pretty surprised by these results. I am not sure why this iPhone 3G is so sluggish but it is much slower than the 1st Gen iPod touch.

May 27, 2009

What’s that in your pocket? Or are you just pleased to see me?

Filed under: Apple, Mac, general tech, internet, ipod, oxford — michael @ 11:32 am

I am sat in Caffè Nero on the High St in Oxford. Having paid in a cheque and been fitted for a ball suit I have popped in for a spot of brunch. While eating my meatball and mozzarella panini and drinking my latté I am keeping up to date with the news on my iPod touch. The guy at the next table is from college and is doing much the same but he is reading the dead tree Times. Over the past few days I have been fairly heavily revising for my prelim exams in a week and a half’s time and so I have been spending large portions of time in the Radliffe Science library. V easy place to work with the advantage of being undergroud and so there is no mobile reception. I periodically check Twitter on my iPod using their Wifi or access the online book database to find the Dewey reference of a text book to supplement my notes. It works perfectly.

Were I carrying around my laptop I would probably be crippled by the weight by now, but I can’t justify buying a netbook yet because my laptop is (kinda) portable and does more than I need despite being 2 years old. Looking at the new Asus Seashell I find myself very tempted but I keep thinking ‘it would be nice if it ran OS X’ (though I’m not sure how much that would change). This isn’t fanboyism, but more that I have a routine established there. I know how to make drive imaging work perfectly and jungledisk backs up my homefolder hourly to S3. Despite how beautiful Windows 7 is, and it really is. You know it’s good when @alexmuller with all his MS hating bile says it is the best netbook OS.

So what am I trying to say in all this. Something, and nothing. Partly I just really wanted to write something that wasn’t related to Biochemistry or Organic chemistry, but I also realized just how little I need something netbook- or even tablet-esque. The iPod is doing everything. It isn’t powerful enough and the frequentish keyboard hangs are getting a bit frustrating but if this had more power and a much bigger battery of would be the perfect computer in my pocket. If I am spending the day writing an essay then I will bring out the MacBook Pro if for no other reason than staring at this for prolonged amounts of time strains my eyes and 15″ screen is easier.

Would an OS X tablet/netbook be nice? Hell yes. Would I buy one? Honestly? probably not… I am not sure I am happy with the middle ground at the moment. My MBP may be heavy, but I bought it for some good reasons which still hold true and so if I am using a laptop I want that. A netbook or tablet won’t fit in my pocket for me to pull out, look up a reference, and then slip it away to dash off to the shelves. Make this iPod/ iPhone better or indeed bring out a competitor that has a similar app infrastructure and availability and then maybe we can talk. Until then the money is staying in NatWest, even if the eye candy is tempting.

May 6, 2009

Nike+ iPod

Filed under: Apple, Really Useful App, general tech — admin @ 7:01 am

I know, I know, I am *so* late to the game on this one, the game has in fact finished and the stadium is in darkness.. but despite that, I have decided to post a little something about Nike+ and an iPod. As I mentioned yesterday, my big gripe with this system is that Apple have decided to totally skip out the iPod touch 1st gen from supporting it. It frustrates me that I have to have and manage two iPods. As @hotdogsladies would say, totally a first world problem, but still a bit annoying.

This term I decided to try out the whole ‘being a bit healthy’ thing, and it isn’t too bad, but exercise truly is the most stultifyingly boring portion of my life. It is right up there with Statistics lectures. Yes. *That* boring. Therefore any little bit of shiny technology to distract me from this might just do the trick. What’s more, I have also learned something from looking at the past few days of records:

Screencapture of Nike+ site for last run

Screencapture of Nike+ site for last run

The info is uploaded the the website, and from there you can track progress over the past few days, weeks, months or years. Turns out that I can keep up a decent pace for ~1mile, but then start to drop and fluctuate my pace wildly. Something to work on perhaps.

Is the Nike+ a neccessity? Nope. Is it quite nice to have and use? Definitely. If you have a nano or touch 2nd gen then I would recommend spending the £15. You’re out in the rain if you have an iPhone or touch 1st gen though. While I was reading before buying one I found some great apps for the iPhone 3G which use the GPS to achieve a similar thing. Seemed quite useful so maybe I’ll give them a go in October.

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