PinKeeper

My favorite software company (ok, I admit it, it’s my company) just released a great tool to keep your pin numbers, padlock numbers, alarm systems codes, door codes, etc.

iPhone Development

I have recently turned my attention towards iPhone development. I am building a set of modules to help me with some other projects. The first module I am building is a push server for messaging to the iPhone. I had to workout some quirks to get JSON integrated “properly” into my project. There are many posts out there about how to do this, but most of them use the simple method of copying the JSON files into your project. I don’t like this, it seems wrong and breaks the DRY principle.

So, to get it installed, follow the Option 2 in the json-framework install instructions, then reset the compiler to gcc 4.2 this is a key point, somehow adding the framework breaks this and you start getting all sorts of strange errors. Then finally you need to add the SDKs code signing resource rules ($(SDKROOT)/ResourceRules.plist) to the code signing resource rules path

Hope this helps!

Blackberry development on Mac OS X

I have recently been dabbling with a bit of Blackberry development. When I started I was using the horrible antiquated, old netbeans based blackberry JDE (the ultimate insult, take a cross-platform java app and turn it into a Windows only app… don’t get me started!) from Parallels. This was painful, so I searched around the web to see if there was something I could do about it.

I happened across this great article on how to use Eclipse for Blackberry development, but the real interesting bit was that the screenshots where on a Mac!! Eureka!

The only bit I want to add to that is the setup of the Blackberry SDK that I did. In my workspace (the place I keep my development stuff, not the Eclipse workspace), I copied the SDK installation except the simulator (C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry JDE 4.3.1) from windows on to my Workspace(~/Desktop/Workspace). Note: I replaced the spaces with -

What I wanted to do now, was to have Eclipse, on the Mac able to publish directly to the simulator living in Parallels. This was painful because Parallels mounts the C drive to a different path on every run.

To solve this, I wrote the following script to find and mount the correct path and put it in ~/bin

#!/bin/bash
c_path=/private`mount | grep fuse.*\/C | sed -e "s/^.*\/private//g" -e "s/C.*\$//g"`C
simulator_path=$c_path/Program\ Files/Research\ In\ Motion/BlackBerry\ JDE\ 4.3.0/simulator
local_jde_path=~/Desktop/Workspace/BlackBerry-JDE-4.3.0

rm -f “$local_jde_path/simulator”
ln -s “$simulator_path” “$local_jde_path/simulator

Now, to get this automatically re-linked every time I start Windows, I wrote this bat file that runs at login. This of course means that if you simply suspend the windows session you will have to manually run either the script above from the Mac or the one below form Windows.

Having downloaded Plink and placed it in C:\Program Files\Putty
@echo off
call "C:\Program Files\Putty\plink.exe" -pw XXXXXXXX you@yourmac ~/bin/link-simulator


Then you put this batch file anywhere on your windows disk and create a shortcut to it in the Start->Programs->Startup (if you really want, you can probably have the batch file live there or create a windows shortcut containing the whole line w/o the call, I haven’t tried it but I imagine it must work)

If you don’t want to keep your password in the batch file you can do the ssh key dance, plink will support it via puttygen. Someday, when I get around to doing it, I will write a tutorial about this.

geo-dislocated

I thought I had just invented a word: geo-delocated to describe my situation in life (as per the about page on my brand new blog), but then I started analysing it: “located” is somewhere, “de + located” is the opposite so, nowhere and “geo-” makes this nowhere earth centric. Which would mean that I am in fact not on earth. Now because of the high cost of outer space internet connections, this is very unlikely, so I decided to invent a different word: geo-dislocated, meaning not where you would expect it to be but still, on earth.

So, this describes my life, my entire family is geo-dislocated. I have immediate family in 4 continents. If I add a few more relatives I have people I can drop in on, uninvited, in 9 countries.

What does this have to do with Software? Chewbacca!