un.fold

So you’ve just Jailbroken your IPhone, and you came across those post which say that you can connect to your little machine via ssh, so with a jaded attitude, you open Terminal and type the well known ssh root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (the xxx being the ip of your Iphone on your local network), you hit enter, and you get the dreaded “Connection refused” message. you ping the ip address, and there seems to be something alive. So what can be the problem?

Well, as you’ve jailbroken your machine, you forgot to install the SSH server, Cydia offers you, through its catalogue, to install a decent number of applications (people are frustrated with the low offering of Cydia vs. Installer.app, but that’s another story), Just install OpenSSH, and reboot your machine, you have now a working SSH server, type root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx again, give it some time (to generate keys etc.) accept the prompt, and enter the password, alpine (don’t forget to change it, if you’re from the paranoid bunch).

You need to be reprimanded though, because the whole thing is explained on the first page when Cydia loads.

There is another nice app to install, BossPrefs, which is like another Settings.app on steroids, instead of dealing with starting and stopping the SSH daemon, this application, provide you with a switch (a la Wi-Fi on/off) to toggle the SSH service, so go and Install it.

So you’ve just aquired your shiny new toy, and after all the excitement, you realise that you’re not really close to cause damage to your ears, being on the louder side of things, I tried to look for ways to uncap the volume limit of the Iphone 3G, but I was quickly disappointed because most of the apps, such as IUncap only work with Jailbroken 1.x versions.

So I had not only to Jailbreak, but also hope that I could manually find and alter some file, namely “RegionalVolumeLimits.plist”.

So after using the pwnage tool and one or two hiccups (such as restoring with the original firmware and discovering the I had to hit option AND click restore to be able to choose the modified firmware), here I am discovering the joys of Cydia et all.

Now, Where is “RegionalVolumeLimits.plist”?, I’ve installed Terminal, while taking few seconds to grok the awesomeness of having a full fledged terminal in my pocket, I was ls-ing like hell, going down the well known /System/Library/Frameworks/Celestial.framework/ path, only to discover with major dismay that there is no trace of THE file nor the Celestial.framework for the matter. I started lamenting on the fact that I’ll have to sit and wait for some brave soul to find a solution for me.

Just before giving it up, in a state of denial, I fired up ssh from my trusted Macbook, and connected to the Iphone via Wi-Fi, used a combination of find grep xargs whatever, and voila! There it was, hiding in another place, this time, it is here: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Celestial.framework/.

Downloaded the file, openned it with the plist editor (the content is garbled if you use a regular text editor), and changed all those 0.83 values to something more fullfilling like 1.00, I rebooted the Iphone and now, my ears hurt

TechCrunch does it again:“Google announced that they have agreed to acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash (nearly double the size of their YouTube Acquisition)”

What is left for the giant to buy?, well even if we weren’t really sure that Adwords were already the king of internet advertising, well now it is a fact , just few days after the Maxthon participation what will they buy next?

En lisant les dernières news peu consistantes concernant les attentats à Alger, j’ai pu remarquer que Le Monde donnait aux utilisateurs la possibilité aux éventuels témoins surplace de laisser des témoignages vidéo dans le groupe LeMonde sur DailyMotion.

En plus des commentaires laissés sur les news, le journal adopte une attitude pragmatique par rapport à l’évolution du journalisme, mais sinon, comment ça peut se monétiser tout ça?

The Washington Post made a very interesting experiment, they managed to get Joshua Bell, the great violinist, to street perform incognito in the hall of a government building, the bottom line, around a thousand passed by him, total earnings: 32$ and one person recognized him.

“Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out”

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

US Treaty with Tripoli, 1796-1797

How ironic

Straight from mister TechCrunch:

“Multiple sources are confirming that the Chinese/Israeli startup behind the Maxthon Browser has sold a minority stake to Google. The total investment size is rumored to be around $1 million. We are also hearing that this investment is part of a “much larger strategic deal” between the two companies.”

Of course this is not really because of the technical merits of this browser (nor for the revival of the GBrowser, the elusive stealth Google browser), but simply to set Google as the search engine by default, in a quest to beat Baidu , a very popular search engine used in China.

Well, it was true after all, the brits were really “gathering intelligence” on the iranians, Sky News interviewed one of the captured sailors, just before the crisis, and witheld the scoop right after the freeing of the captives, for their safety.

Mule is an ESB (Enterprise service bus), now that’s an acronym , in this article I’ll build on a simple example to show a tiny part of its power.
As an example, Mule will be configured to monitor a folder, and move the contents to a different location on the file system, this example is inspired heavily by this article on the MuleUMO wiki. in another article, we’ll work on a more “enterprisy” application. This example will show how Mule can simplify matters.
What I’ll try to achieve can be done in plain Java, but the idea is not to reinvent the wheel; there is no need to build a fragile event driven framework, or bother with reading and writing files, not to mention the configurability aspect of the system, like changing the source and destination folder.
By using Mule you can add nifty things like recieiving a notification email when a file arrives or even uploading the files to an ftp folder, all these without programing, but simply by configuring Mule.

The installation of Mule is straight forward, go to the official site and download the latest distribution, unzip it, set the MULE_HOME environment variable, you may also add MULE_HOME\bin to your path.

To configure Mule, a configuration file must be created, the Mule container can then be run by invoking the following command: %MULE_HOME%\bin\mule.bat -config=configuration.xml (Yes I am on windows )

Instructing Mule to monitor a folder:
To be able to interact with the filesystem, the FileConnector needs to be configured, by setting some properties:

• autoDelete: delete the moved file?
• binary: has the file transfer to be in binary mode?
• outputPattern: what will be the name of the moved file, this can be set to be the original filename, the date and many others which can be combined.
• pollingFrequency: the polling frequency of the folder

Configuring the source and destination folders:
The input and output here can be abstracted as endpoints, a specific channel through which two parties can communicate (RTFM). only the endpoint address matters here, which are naturally the full path to the source and destination directories.

Configuring events are routed into and out of the system:
This is the role of the inbound-router and the outbound-router respectively.

Transformers:
they are used to convert data to an object required by the next element in the processing chain. In our simple example we don’t need those, but because the current Mule version (1.3.3) is afflicted with a bug, we still need to invoke a special filter on the inbound-router, a noActionTransformer, which will basically do what it suggests, no transformation, that is. The current FileConnector has a default transformer activated.

So basically the flow is:

1. Files are in the source directory
2. Mule moves them from one directory to the other
3. Files arrive in the destination directory

In a future article, we’ll build a very simple r-sync clone (well nearly)

Download the mule configuration file here.

Well I just couldn’t find a better title for that, blatantly plagiarising the source, hopefully, I’m forgiven