internet » w00kie’s ramblings

Jun
18
2009

352

Activate tethering on Softbank iPhone

A friend of mine, @kuriburi, just sent me this to publish for him, so here you go:

So it was the news of the day: Someone managed to activate tethering on an AT&T iPhone 3G by means of a "carrier support file", a.k.a. "ipcc". Here in Japan, the story was a bit more tricky : Softbank declared that they would not support tethering on their network and had no plans to do so in the future either.

Nice! So, with those brand new Macbook Pro without any pc express card slot, how are we supposed to use Softbank's data cards? This bothered me to no end thus I went on a search for a Softbank carrier support file that I could modify somehow. I stumbled onto this very interesting post on a Japanese blog that talked about the same thing, but with a beta version of the iPhone OS 3.0.

OK, well, doesn't hurt to try with the official release, right?

Now I need to get my hands on that damn file. Turns out, it was right on my hard drive at work since August 2008. So I went to work and modified the file (which incidentally is just a bundle in a zip archive with a special extension) and tried to update my iPhone with it. The steps are simple :

in the Terminal, execute defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
on windows, execute C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1 in a DOS window
plug your iPhone to your computer via the USB cable
in iTunes, display the summary page of your iPhone
while pressing the "alt" (option) key, click on the "check for update" button
you will be presented with a finder window. Locate the Softbank_jp.ipcc file, select it
iTunes will now update your iPhone with the modified carrier settings
Once finished, unplug the iPhone, go see into Settings>General>Network, and voilà! screenshot

Oh, before I forget, if Apple or Softbank issues an update through iTunes, wait a bit before updating... you never know...

Update: I updated the link with the latest file from @kuriburi that activates both tethering and MMS. よろしく！

Update: This IPCC file does not work with 3.1 update. If you value your tethering, do not upgrade yet.

Written by w00kie in: apple, internet | Tags: iphone, softbank, tethering

Jun
10
2009

WWDC Keynote on MacBidouille.com with App Engine

No bandwidth, no servers, no infrastructure, no money required. Just a bit of python and a tad of javascript and you can live stream an event to 10.000 people concurrently (theoretic figure, Analytics said the live-blog site had 30.000 visits in all) within Google App Engine's free quotas.

keynote requests per second

This is the graph taken from my App Engine dashboard the morning after the WWDC'09 Keynote after MacBidouille.com live-blogged the event in French through my application. We always had scaling problems while Google's infrastructure was in beta and we were bound by smallish quotas, but since they opened fully the service a couple months ago, the sky is the limit.

Written by w00kie in: apple, internet | Tags: appengine, apple, coding, keynote, wwdc

May
30
2009

Blacklisting words in Twitter Tools

There's a new game trending on Twitter these days, Spymaster, and it likes to write out stuff to your twitter feed. There's a good controversy running on the web whether these tweets are spam or not. I'm playing and I've set it up to tweet out only level ups which is pretty minimalist.

However, I am also running the Twitter Tools plugin to copy my tweets back from twitter to my blog. But if I'm fine with exposing my twitter followers with #spymaster notifications, I'd rather not show them to my blog readers.

There is no way currently in the plugin to exclude tweets based on words, so I made a patch for it:

blacklist in the twitter tools options menu

You can download the patch for the current 1.6 version and apply it with the following command:

patch twitter-tools.php < twittertools-blacklist.patch

I hope this feature will make it in the next version of the plugin.

Written by w00kie in: internet | Tags: coding, twitter, wordpress

Apr
28
2009

Web Identity and business cards

With the recent talk of business cards, I decided to make me some personal 名刺 for use in non-corporate context. I used to have some - home-made by my graphic designer brother - but even those were linked to one of my activities, co-founder at MacBidouille.com, and not 100% personal.

This all got me thinking of my web identity - the face I show to the web, which in this day and age is the only world that matters. I am lucky enough to have a rare name, rare enough that I am pretty sure me and my cose-related family (8 people) are the only bearer of this family name. So when you search my name on Google, all the results are actually related to me, myself and I.

However, when looking at these results, the top ones are my profiles at various websites such as LinkedIn or Flickr. Although these are mine and I define what is written there, I do not have 100% dictator-like control over them. This bothers me a little...

So I started working on my webpresence portal, a website that defines me and should eventually become the nº1 search result for my name. It will be the website I write on my business card, and although it currently only shows links to stuff I do, I have plans to expand it with new functionalities: a portfolio and make it an OpenID provider for starters.

Update: Google now offers 10.000 sets of business cards to their Google Profile users.

google-businesscard

They are kinda lame and cool at the same time. Anyways, they do no ship to Japan so I won't get one. My design is better.

Written by w00kie in: Me, myself and I, internet | Tags: openid, website

Apr
18
2009

Meta-tags proposal for the new DiggBar

Many think the DiggBar is evil. I don't. I find it ingenious, especially the digg.com pre-pending which will automatically generate a shortened URL for you as well as a "Submit to Digg" button if the page URL has not been submitted yet.

unsubmitted diggbar

However, when you submit a link to Digg by this way, the title and description of the item are empty by default, placing the burden to fill up these fields on the submitter. He needs to go back to the page, copy the title, copy some text of the article or make up a better description, which is all a pain and poses a big hurdle...

Digg submission - all empty

Digg offers a way for webmasters to create a link that will pre-fill these fields with the data you want your readers to use. This is done by simply setting some parameter in a URL to put as target of the link:

http://digg.com/submit?url=example.com&title=TITLE&bodytext=DESCRIPTION&media=MEDIA&topic=TOPIC

But this process is not compatible with the DiggBar and its URL pre-pending feature. What we, webmasters, need is a way to define these values that will work everytime.

Why not Meta tags? Step 1 of the step 2 in the screenshot above is Digg downloading the page to check it really exists and provide potential thumbnails for the submission. At this stage they could read a couple of meta tags in the <head> of the page and use that to pre-fill these fields.

<meta name="digg-title"  content="My title here" />
<meta name="digg-description" content="My 350 characters excerpt." />

It would then be trivial to write a WordPress plugin that generates these meta from your post title and excerpt (or similar concepts in other CMS platforms).

If you think this would be a feature you would like to see, I invite you to digg this blog post: http://digg.com/d1p1YV

Written by w00kie in: Random, internet | Tags: coding, digg, wordpress

Apr
18
2009

Twitter integration

As you might have noticed, in the past weeks I have more tightly integrated my twitter messages into the blog. When they used to just show up in the sidebar, they are now posted simultaneously here as full blog posts, albeit with a special minimalistic styling.

tweetshot

You can clickity-click on the cute blue birdie to go to the post page and comment, as with every other post, on the inane stuff I post there. This wonder of technology is brought to you by the twitter tools wordpress plugin and my awesome coding skills.

Alas, I know some of you are already following my tweets on your twitter account and might find the double punch effect of reading these messages twice, in your twitter timeline and in your RSS feedreader, a bit overwhelming.

feedsanstwitter

Which is why I created an extra RSS feed to which you can subscribe and get only the fat fleshy blog posts, free of the 140 characters tweets. You can switch to that, I won't begrudge you...

Written by w00kie in: Me, myself and I, internet | Tags: blog, coding, twitter

Mar
15
2009

New look for the blog

I've updated the design of the blog to a totally different look. I've had the previous one forever, and though I was refining it and adding little details all the time, I wanted a radical change.

Here's a screenshot for archival purpose. Goodbye green, hello black...

Written by w00kie in: Me, myself and I, internet | Tags: blog, design

Sep
23
2008

United States of France

Speaking of politics, this article from TIME Magazine is pretty funny, if not pathetic:

You just know the Frogs have only increased their disdain for us, if that is indeed possible. And why shouldn't they? The average American is working two and a half jobs, gets two weeks off and has all the employment security of a one-armed trapeze artist. The Bush Administration has preached the "ownership society" to America: own your house, own your retirement account; you don't need the government in your way. So Americans mortgaged themselves to the hilt to buy overpriced houses they can no longer afford and signed up for 401(k) programs that put money — where, exactly? In the stock market! Where rich Republicans fleeced them.

[...]

We've always dismissed the French as exquisitely fed wards of their welfare state. They work, what, 27 hours in a good week, have 19 holidays a month, go on strike for two days and enjoy a glass of wine every day with lunch — except for the 25% of the population working for the government, who have an even sweeter deal. They retire before their kids finish high school, and they don't have to save for $45,000-a-year college tuition, because college is free. For this, they pay a tax rate of about 103%, and their labor laws are so restrictive that they haven't had a net gain in jobs since Napoleon. There is no way the French government can pay for this lifestyle forever, except that it somehow does.

Anyways, with all the financial institutions going bankrupt everywhere, I'm just glad Nomura bought back Lehman Brothers' Asian operation and saved the jobs of 2 of my friends... at least for now.

Written by w00kie in: internet | Tags: france, politics, usa

Jul
16
2008

Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible: don’t miss it

Joss Whedon's pet project, in answer to the writer's guild nonsense, came out yesterday: Dr. Horrible's sing-along blog. A mini-series exclusively for internet and for free, done on the cheap with his friends.

It's a mix between Pinky and the Brain, Mistery Men and a video blog, executed musical-style. It's brilliant, especially since I was a big Doogie Howser fan as a kid (Neil Patrick Harris) and burned through Whedon's Firefly series in a straight 2-days stand.

Act 2 will come out July 17th and Act 3 on July 19th. Catch it while it lasts!

Written by w00kie in: internet | Tags: internet, video

Jun
19
2008

Custom Django filters in Google App Engine

You want to create your own custom Django filters in App Engine without running a whole Django stack? Here's how in a few lines of code.

First create a specific python file to hold your custom filters at the root of your application. In my case I use customfilters.py like this:

import re
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
 
register = webapp.template.create_template_register()
 
def escapeimg(body):
	return re.sub(r'&lt;img (.*)/&gt;', '[IMG]', body)
 
register.filter(escapeimg)

Then in your main application source file, call the following line outside of the main() definition, for example just after your modules loading:

"""Load custom Django template filters"""
webapp.template.register_template_library('customfilters')

You should then be able to use the new filters you registered in customfilters.py straight away in any of your Django templates without any % load foobar % call

Written by w00kie in: Work stuff, internet | Tags: app engine, code, google

Jun
18
2008

Crossdomain proxy on Google App Engine

Here's a crossdomain proxy to pipe Javascript Ajax calls from you Google App Engine application to the Flickr API, since most browser will not let you call another domain directly.

import cgi
import urllib
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.api import urlfetch
 
class FlickrController(webapp.RequestHandler):
	"""Proxy for Ajax calls to flickr"""
	def get(self):
		flickrapiendpoint = 'http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/'
		flickrapikey = 'you_flicker_api_key'
 
		params = self.request.GET
		params.add('api_key', flickrapikey)
		params.add('format', 'json')
		apiquery = urllib.urlencode(params)
 
		result = urlfetch.fetch(url=flickrapiendpoint + '?' + apiquery, method=urlfetch.GET)
		self.response.out.write(result.content)
 
def main():
	application = webapp.WSGIApplication(
		[('/flickr/', FlickrController)],
		debug=True)
	wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
	main()

I didn't see examples of such a script anywhere else so I thought I'd post it here for all to see.

Written by w00kie in: Work stuff, internet | Tags: app engine, code, flickr, google

Jun
09
2008

WWDC Keynote

Tonight (at least in Japanese time) is Steve Job's WWDC Keynote. It is widely accepted that he will be announcing the new 3G enabled iPhone and I am secretly hoping he will give us a release date for Japan live from the Moscone West.

These past weeks, I've been developing a live-blogging system for my other website to cover the event minute by minute. It's a challenge to devise a system, both software and hardware-wise, capable of handling the huge loads involved in such a big event. We are expecting more than 50.000 persons to follow the Keynote via MacBidouille.

Until now, all our attempts have failed. But this time, I'm trying something new with an Ajax based interface running on the new Google App Engine platform. It's been really fun using a new technology, Python, on Google's own architecture.

I have no idea if this new system will withstand the load this year, especially with the tight quotas in place for the beta phase of App Engine. But I sure hope Steve announces the iPhone launch in Japan starting tomorrow and I'll take the day-off to rush to the Apple Store in Ginza as soon as it opens...

Written by w00kie in: apple, internet | Tags: apple, coding, iphone

Jun
04
2008

Contact Juggling

Found this video on Digg, looks like Yoyogi Park. This guy is a million times more impressive than all those stupid jugglers and beanbag fanatics you find in such parks.

Yes, there's only one crowd I despise more than beanbaggers, it's the drum players. That's probably the main reason why I never hang out at Yoyogi Park...

Written by w00kie in: internet, japan | Tags: japan, video, yoyogi park

Jan
29
2008

Address Power

Last July I wrote about a popular Japanese webservice that built an image of your brain out of your name. Everyone at work and on TV was talking about it. The concept was even copied overseas (replacing the kanjis with emoticons).

This weekend I saw on TV another of those websites that you know everyone will talk about. Its name is 住所パワー which aims at calculating your "Address Power" from the number and proximity of restaurants, schools, train stations, etc.

住所パワー - Address Power

My address, even though I live out in the relative boondocks, 20 minutes from 池袋 - the closest station on the Yamanote line - into 埼玉県, scored a nice 3,321 points and is ranked A-class.

details of my ranking

Here are the results by criterion, with the number of shop and the distance to the closest one (I added the translations). I probably owe my good score to being extremely close to the station and across the street from a supermarket on one side and a mall on the other.

Note that the number of Love Hotels and 風俗 - basically any kind of shop/bar/club/salon related to the sex industry - comes as a criterion, although they probably need a broader databases because there are at least 2 dozen hostess bars/キャバクラ in a 200m circle around my place that should have gotten me a lot more points...

Written by w00kie in: internet, japan | Tags: address, japan, saitama, webservice, website

w00kie’s ramblings

making compressors in Japan