jamesoff.net » my stuff

iPhone apps, Xcode and Dropbox

jamesoff — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:33:27 +0000

A while back I put some of my Xcode bits (i.e. the Random Recipe Generator) into my Dropbox to make it easier to stay up to date on my laptop and my desktop. (Yes, I know, source control blah blah blah :)

However, building the Distribution version of the app gave me this warning:

“The CodeResources file must be a symbolic link to _CodeSignature/CodeResources”

which I duly ignored. However, the Application Loader (used to push the new binary to the App Store) also complained about that and wouldn’t upload it.

It looks like Dropbox’s replication may have been to blame for the symlink stopping being a symlink, so the solution is to use the handy new selective sync option in Dropbox and not sync the build/ directory between my machines (which is pretty much pointless anyway and certainly generates a lot of network overhead when you build). Having done that and built a clean copy it worked fine.

Mac OS X Service to use b.oooom.net

jamesoff — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:03:43 +0000

Use this Mac OS X Hints tip and use the following URL for the “download” line:

http://b.oooom.net/shrink.php?api=1&url=

Irssi typing speed script

jamesoff — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:40:45 +0000

I have written an irssi script which measures how fast you type on IRC and reports both words per minute and characters per minute.

More details and download: WPM script.

Detecting memory type on FreeBSD

jamesoff — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:45:12 +0000

If you need to upgrade your RAM on a Windows machine, you can just use the Crucial Memory Advisor wotsit, which scans your computer using the power of, er, power to find out what your motherboard is, what RAM you already have, and then can tell you which overpriced Crucial RAM to buy.

On FreeBSD, this doesn’t work so well. However, you can tell manually tell the Crucial site what motherboard you have and it will tell you exactly what sort of RAM is best.

This is fine if you know what motherboard you have.

if you don’t, the answer is dmidecode(8) (/usr/ports/sysutils/dmidecode). This utility grabs the same information which the Crucial thingy does, so all you need to do is find the info you need.

This is pretty easy:

# dmidecode -t baseboard
SMBIOS 2.3 present.

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: ABIT 
        Product Name: 694X-686B (VP6)
        Version: v1.0 ~
        Serial Number:

Not masses of useful information returned from my old system, but still enough to identify the motherboard as an Abit VP6. This is all I need to know to find out what memory I should be buying.

I already know what size sticks of RAM I have, but just incase you need to check:

# dmidecode -t memory
SMBIOS 2.3 present.
...
Handle 0x0021, DMI type 17, 21 bytes
Memory Device
    Array Handle: 0x0020
    Error Information Handle: Not Provided
    Total Width: Unknown
    Data Width: Unknown
    Size: 512 MB
    Form Factor: DIMM
    Set: None
    Locator: BANK_0
    Bank Locator: Bank0/1
    Type: Unknown
    Type Detail: None

Again, not the most useful information ever seen, but enough to tell me I have a 512MB stick in bank 0. (On my newer desktop, I get much more useful information like the speed and voltage of the RAM.)

A productive day

jamesoff — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:52:46 +0000

What a productive day (for a Sunday):

Released bMotion 0.1.0 – only about 3 years after I planned on it originally. 0.1.0 is greatly improved over the previous version, and a few weeks ago I finally decided I should stop pointless tinkering with it and get a stable releasable version :)
Finished Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the DS – mainly in celebration of releasing bMotion.
Started using my Simple Monitor project at home and on my colo, and it’s working well so far. The only problem was that both machines needed Python updating to support the native sqlite class. Once that was fixed, both worked fine and are now monitoring their services. Once I get some other features I’m planning on written in, I’ll release it for other people to try.