Luke Sheldrick's Blog

Have been playing with my iPhone this evening, looking at what’s new, and I must say am really quiet impressed with some of the software coming out. VLC Remote, is especially well welcomed, simple but effective.

I was thinking of getting a GPS plotter / tracker, as carrying a PDA + Bluetooth Receiver, is slightly annoying. Cue, iPhone, which does more for me everyday.

There is a cool app called InstaMapper which will plot / track where you are, and even though I have a first gen iPhone, does very well considering, it doesn’t have GPS. Then using their API’s can add it to facebook / here should I wish. Example below…

Also found (via jailbroken / cydia) an app called Backgrounder, so you can run processes, in standby, which the nice folk at Apple don’t like. Very impressed.

Randomly discovered a nice feature of VMWare products, the in-built VNC Server. I quick look at their KB reveals http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=1246 as being listed for GSX server, however happily works for me on VMWare Server 2.0 (Haven’t tried on 1.0, just yet, but will do later).

Quite simple really, edit the Guest’s VMX file in question and add the following [changing to suite your needs] to the bottom of the file.

RemoteDisplay.vnc.enabled = “TRUE”

The below are optional, but recommended.
RemoteDisplay.vnc.port = “5900″
RemoteDisplay.vnc.password = “vncpassword”

With the 5900, change the 00, to whatever you please, if you have multiple guests running for example. The 00, will become vnc screen ’0′ and 01, would become ’1′….etc

Quite a nice feature, so I don’t have to [1] Use a vnc server on each of the guests + firewall rules for them [2] I don’t have to run fusion on my mac, to boot an XP guest, just becuase there isn’t a plugin for OSX + VMWare Console [for 2.0 :@ not that I know of anyways, please shout if you know of one though]

If you’re getting the above errors, when you try to run a .sh or similar [I've seen it with perl scripts too] this is will be due to the file being in dos [windows] format, and probably written in notepad or similar.

If you need to get this into unix format, it can be pretty painless, just run the command

dos2unix filename

dos2unix should be available under most releases of linux. Happy coding.

Didn’t take the dev team long to update their pwnagetool for use with 2.2. It’s always a pleasure to re-install all your apps, and set your phone up how you like it

Although this time, I was quite looking forward to it, as my phone had got a serious bloated gut from all the apps, so time to start a fresh

No network unlock for the 3G iPhone as yet, although they do tease that it’s coming very soon

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/61060174/the-man-from-delmonte-he-say-yes

It’s been something that is on my every growing to do / look at list, and finally got around to setting it up, my own shinny jabber server. I already use jabber in a number of ways [work IM, gtalk, to name a few] but wanted to set one up on my own domain. The only drawback I could see is that the jabber protocol will use the A record of the domain/sub domain, so had to tweak my dns slightly.

I opted for OpenFire, as of all the servers I looked at, it seemed the best one for me. Relatively easy setup via rpm, then a bit of config, to get it to play with my domain, rather than the domain / rDNS of the server it’s hosted on. Then had a bit of a snafu with the firewall I use on the particular server [apf], but just by coincidence it cropped up at that time.

So the server is all up and running now, at least for chatting, I am currently playing with a few perl scripts to integrate with a few systems I am playing with. I’ve just got it to play with Nagios, so I get alerts via Jabber too, which is quiet cool.

Feel free to add / message luke[@]sheldrick.co.uk without the []