Since Apple announces their keynote addresses in their respective time zone (Pacific Standard Time or PST), I always thought it would be nice to have some sort of automatic time zone aware converter that shows the start of a keynote address for everyone’s local time zone. Since no one else is providing this kind of service (at least not that I know of) I took matters into my own hands.

Once Apple announces a keynote address, wheniskeynote.com will show the start time of the keynote depending on the time zone setting it finds on your computer. By the way, did you know they have a :45 minute time zone offset on Chatham Island?

The link list gets shuffled every time the page is loaded so not to give preference to any of the linked web sites. I wanted the site to look like a real keynote slide and I think the design comes pretty close to that. This was primarily a fun project to try out some programming techniques I wasn’t too familiar with. It would have been a lot more work if it hadn’t been for the fantastic jQuery JavaScript library, the very useful time zone detection JavaScript from Josh Fraser and Jon Nylander and the uber cool looking countdown timer JavaScript from Vassilis Dourdounis.

Check out wheniskeynote.com.

Mac OS X Lion boot performance has been optimized and shows off some ridiculous boot times if booting from an SSD. Here’s a video of an ASUS P6T based Hackintosh booting OS X Lion.

Inspired by MacRumors post about the new 27-inch BTO iMac being the fastest Mac ever, here’s the same with an ASUS P6T based Hackintosh, obviously it uses an SSD too just like the iMac shown in the video. The ASUS P6T rig is 2 years old and uses a Lynnfield Core i7 CPU (4 cores), so no fancy Sandy Bridge there.

Both videos were taken with an iPhone and no modifications were made, it’s straight from the iPhone’s camera.

Pretty sick, isn’t it?

A few weeks ago I started working with WSO₂‘s Enterprise Service Bus software, which is a lightweight and extremely high performance, open source enterprise service bus (ESB). One reason it’s so lightweight and fast is that it doesn’t have to be run in a bloated application server environment (although it can, but where’s the point). Instead, it’s running in an OSGi container. While the ESB itself still needs some polishing, especially in the area of deployment in large company environments, it looks extremely promising. We even flew in a few guys from HQ in Sri Lanka to help us with the initial setup of the product. Judging from the guys I’ve met, there must be a lot of talent in that company! Support is top notch and fairly priced.

One thing I was working on over the last few days is a command line remote control utility for the WSO₂ ESB. It supports deployment and undeployment of the Eclipse Carbon Studio .car files and many other features, which at the time are only available through the web based user interface. The utility comes with an awesome name too: Carbonara :) We need this command line functionality for our fully automated change and configuration management processes. There’s no point in releasing the whole thing to the public because it’s tailor-made for the staging processes in my company.

Here’s a small Carbonara excerpt that shows how to send administrative commands like shutdown or entering/exiting maintenance mode to any WSO₂ product using JMX. You can also use JConsole to remotely control any WSO2 product by the way. You will have to activate the JMX registry in the carbon.xml file in order to be able to use JMX. The supplied username and password will have to match a user with administrative privileges in the user store. Read more »

The latest XPC EFI boot loader version 0.83.02 allows you to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion dev preview 2 without having to change or copy a single file on the OS X install volume. Apart from configuring XPC it all works out of the box which simplifies installing OS X Lion a whole lot. XPC now fully supports the new disk-image based installation process that was first introduced in Lion dev preview 1 and is able to boot from mounted .dmg volume images. I just gave it a try and it worked flawlessly on my Hackintosh rig! Read more »

For unknown reasons, the iOS video player app found on all iPads locks itself up in rare situations. Opening the video app results in a black screen, all you can do is jump back to the home screen using the home button. Both, restarting the iPad or re-syncing it on iTunes won’t help.

Now before you restore your iPad, there are two quick things you could try first:

1. If you know the title of a movie on your iPad, use the search function to look it up and start it by tapping it
2. …or open the iPod app and select a video podcast or iPad video and play it

The video app should be working again from now on. If it doesn’t then I’m afraid, you probably have to do a full restore of your iPad.

If you’re on an Ubuntu Server with multiple IP addresses and you want to bind networking software like sshd or Squid to a dediated network interface (unlike 0.0.0.0) you
might eventually end up with error messages like:

error: Bind to port 22 on 123.234.456.789 failed: Cannot assign requested address.

Which is bad, since you may lock yourself out of the server.

The same may also happen to Squid:

commBind: Cannot bind socket FD 19 to 123.234.456.789:3128: (99) Cannot assign requested address

Both, Squid and sshd, have in common, that they’re upstart-ed from /etc/init. What happens in 10.04 is that ssh or squid are started too early, at least if you configured multiple network interfaces on the server.
And another weird thing is that for every network interface in /etc/network/interfaces the scripts in /etc/network/if-up.d/* are being re-executed when the network is brought up at boot time.
That’s pretty lame if you ask me because if the server has 10 network interfaces, sshd is being started and stopped 10 times during boot.

Anyway, the trick is to tell upstart not to start certain processes until the last network interface on a server is up.
In my case, the last network interface is venet0:8 so the start command in /etc/init/ssh.conf and/or /etc/init/squid.conf has to be modified to:

start on filesystem and net-device-up IFACE=venet0:8

This also prevents the useless restarting of sshd when the network is being started. And again, this only happens if the server has multiple IP addresses and you’re not using the standard bind-’em-all address 0.0.0.0 for processes that are started from /etc/init.

TorrentFlux is a web-based PHP front-end for the BitTorrent client BitTornado. It’s a great software to download torrents on Linux servers that have no desktop manager installed.

BitTornado uses the server’s default IP address for it’s peer-to-peer connections by default. If your server has multiple IP addresses, you may want to assign a different IP address for the torrent traffic. All you have to do is to specify a bind parameter in the TorrentFlux settings. On Debian-based servers however, downloading stops instantly if the bind parameter is specified. After doing some debugging I found out that is has to do with how the parameters are passed from TorrentFlux to BitTornado. A small modification to the index.php file will fix this problem. Here’s how to do it. Read more »

Using the XPC method loosely described in this post I tried to install the new Mac OS X 10.7 11A419 build aka developer preview 2 on my ASUS P6T Hackintosh. Once the prepared USB thumb drive OS X 10.7 installer booted to the command line using the -s kernel argument in XPC, I tried to kextload FakeSMC.kext as usual. But after typing exit to continue the boot process, the system always hangs with the last message being

Kext com.apple.driver.DiskImages.FileBackingStore might not load – kextd is currently unavailable

The boot process can’t be completed successfully if a kext is being loaded from the console, no matter what kext it is. Read more »

I finally managed to run Mac OS X Lion 10.7 developer preview on my ASUS P6T Hackintosh rig. Installation from a USB thumb drive is not as easy as it used to be in 10.6 and earlier because the new OS X installer boots from a BaseSystem.dmg in 10.7 Lion. But the really hard part was to find an EFI boot loader that doesn’t double panic/double fault when the Mach kernel is being loaded from an SATA-drive, once the installation is completed.

Chameleon and iBoot didn’t work on my Nehalem Core-i7 equipped P6T mobo, and I tried every version I could get hold of. Read more »

Since a few days you may get a warning using RTMPDump v2.3 saying “WARNING: HandShake: Server not genuine Adobe!”. RTMPDump v2.3 usually quits with a handshake error after it’s instructed to use a type 9 handshake by the server. For some sites using the older RTMPDump version 2.1d fixes the problem. If you’re on Mac OS X 10.6 or higher you can download the older binary from this site’s download area.

Did you know that you could easily convert recordings from a Dreambox sat/cable receiver using HandBrake to watch them on your iPad or iPhone?

Here’s the preset I use on my DM800 HD. It should work for all recent Dreambox models like the DM500 HD and the DM8000 as well. The preset is optimized for standard definition (SD) recordings and takes care of deinterlacing if needed using the decomb filter in HandBrake. To import the preset open the Preset menu in HandBrake and select Import. After importing you’ll find the new preset in the preset window (use the Toggle Presets button to open it).

Download HandBrake iPhone/iPad preset for (interlaced) Dreambox standard definition (SD) recordings.

To convert HD (720p) recordings make sure you use the built-in iPad or iPhone presets in HandBrake.

Apple just started canceling iPad 2 orders in the U.S. that ship to freight forwarding services or international addresses. This is the email you receive from Apple if you try to order an iPad 2 via nybox.com:

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for your recent Apple order.

While we appreciate your interest in iPad 2 and iPad 2 accessories, we
are unable to process your order. Apple is unable to fulfill orders
that exceed the quantity limit per customer, or that ship to an
international, freight forwarder, or an APO/AFO address.

Your iPad 2 order has been cancelled, and you will not be charged.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Team

It seems only iPad 2 orders are affected, Apple store orders shipping to freight forwarders for accessories like JAM by Apogee are still active.

I’ve been looking for a solution to stream recorded or live video from my Dreambox DM800 sat/cable receiver to my iPad for a while. I was able to stream recorded video using an uPnP server on the Dreambox and an uPnP client on the iPad, but the iPad app involved was somewhat limited.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon an iPad app named “Dreambox LIVE”.

Read more »

I just updated my Dreambox DM800 cable/sat tuner to Gemini Project 3 (GP3). There’s a detailed installation how-to available on how to install GP3 on the more recent Dreambox models, which include the DM500 HD, DM800 (HD/SE), DM7025 and the DM8000. GP3 is a major step forward because you don’t need to flash the Dreambox every time a new GP version is published. GP3 is independent from the DMM base image (well, with some limitations regarding the kernel version) and can be updated in the “Blue Panel”. To start, you’re best off if you flash an original Dream Multimedia image. Don’t forget to backup your channel lists and bouquets.

After installing GP3 you’ll probably notice that no software CA modules (a.k.a. softcams) are available in Blue Panel. Read more »

You probably already know Apple is bringing GarageBand to the new iPad 2  (it probably works on the old iPad as well).  But did you know you can also plug a real e-guitar into the iPad and use all the guitar amps built right into GarageBand? How awesome is that!?
All you need is the Apogee JAM.

Read more »