It’s hip2b2

For the love of my friends, I was forced to research high and low for a hack that would allow iPhone’s with versions 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 OTB to work. Fortunately, the iPhone community came out with the appropriate documentation at just the right time.

Downloading the following first:

• Jailbreak 1.1.2
• iPhone 1.1.2 Firmware
• iPhone 1.1.1 Firmware

The I followed the instructions from the iPhone unlock site.

Some strange things that did not work right away:

• Please make sure you are using iTunes 7.4 and not iTunes 7.3. While using iTunes 7.3, I get the dreaded “unknown error (1)”. I am using iTunes 7.4.3.1.
• Instead of using AppTapInstaller.exe to kick the iPhone out of recovery mode. I used jailbreak 1.1.2 and ran the ‘windows.bat’ script. Then I selected “Boot from Recovery”. If you are doing this from a 1.0.2 or 1.1.3 firmware release then it is possible that you won’t get the activation screen. If this happens just repeat the process.
• Sometimes, you have can change *#301# to *#307# to make it work. I had one phone that refused *#301# for some strange reason.
• You need to have a SIM on the phone to do the above sequence. You will get a “please insert valid SIM” error if you don’t.
• If you do something and loose the Phone application, just dial “0″ then answer, then hold, then decline and you should get your Phone application back. If you restart the iPhone just go through the *#301# or *#307# thing again.
• Join a WiFi network using the “prefs:” link. Sometimes, the WiFi prompt in Safari is flaky.
• Sometimes, the “Tap to activate iPhone” in the i.unlock.no site does not work. It just goes back to the Activation screen without restart. You have two options. You can wait or you can reboot and re-visit the i.unlock.no site again.
• After the 1.1.2 upgrade, if you get a cable in the screen instead of the activation windows then some screwy happened. I don’t know what causes this but I had to do the whole thing again from the 1.1.1 downgrade.
• Some CPs like using the alphanumeric character short codes that crash the iPhone. Please install the SMS Fix application to remedy this situation.
• Install the iWorld application to allow use in Smart and Globe SIM cards. If not SMS does not seem to work.

Don’t forget to donate to the people behind all of this. Happy Hacking!

I spent a bit of last night cleaning up this patch to support the option for breaking the First Name Field into Multiple Lines in a GenealogyJ report. This is a wonderful report written by Przemek Wiech that allows people to create nice printable family trees.

Here is the patch file:
http://cng.ateneo.net/cng/wyu/software/patch/genj-20080205-multiline_firstname.diff

Good luck!

I spent a bit of last night cleaning up this patch to support the option for removing dates in a GenealogyJ report. This is a wonderful report written by Przemek Wiech that allows people to create nice printable family trees. Aside from adding the removal of dates option, I noticed that it only colors upto 13 generations. I modified the code a bit to cycle three times to give us 36 generations.

Here is the patch file:
http://cng.ateneo.edu/cng/wyu/software/patch/genj-20080118-draw_dates-support.diff

Good luck!

I expected my upgrade to Fedora 8 to be as flawless as my upgrade to Fedora 7. Oh. But, I was mildly disappointed. The upgrade itself was fine but there were a number of issues that you might encounter along the way too. Here are my notes that should help you in your upgrade or installation of Fedora 8 on Dell hardware.

• Problem running Fedora 8 installer from DVD-ROM. Yes. The first thing you do to upgrade or install is actually problematic. This is because of a possible (never ending) issues with ACPI. Just add the following string to the end of the kernel options boot line.

  nohz=off noloapic
  

• Installing TuxOnIce (formerly known as Software Suspend 2). Ok. Since, I did an upgrade it should have upgraded the kernel and support files too. Which it did nicely. But, after testing hibernation, my machine refused to wake-up and it hung at the “going atomic” part of the resume. So, I went into single user mode and tried disabling and enabling each service at my run level to find the guilty service. I did not have to go to the module level because my runlevel 1 hibernates and restores nicely.

  Anyway, here is the yum repository file for those of you who want to install TuxOnIce for the first time. Put this file in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory.

  [suspend2]
  name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Software Suspend 2 kernels and utilities
  baseurl=http://mhensler.de/swsusp/download/yum/fc$releasever
  enabled=1
  gpgcheck=0
  

  Then run the following commands:

  yum install kernel-tuxonice
  yum install userui-tuxonice-fbsplash userui-tuxonice-theme-fedorainfinity
  

  After this … It still won’t work. This is the point where my upgrade left me. The solution is to make sure that NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher services are disabled before hibernating and that they restart after a resume. Simple edit the /etc/hibernate/common.conf and add the following line.

  StopServices NetworkManager NetworkManagerDispatcher
  StartServices NetworkManager NetworkManagerDispatcher
  

  The current working version of the Linux kernel with TuxOnIce that I used and tested is 2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8.

• Nice TuxOnIce GUI hibernate screen is not working. My problems did not end there. Apparently, the was a bug in the mkinird-tuxonice script for this version that failed to increment the version number of the tool. Another problem is that you can’t seem to use any other splash theme like the nice fedora-infinity theme you installed above. What are we to do?

  First off, patch the ‘mkinitrd-tuxonice’ script with the following:

  --- mkinitrd-tuxonice.old       2007-12-08 14:34:21.000000000 +0800
  +++ /sbin/mkinitrd-tuxonice     2007-12-07 17:25:35.000000000 +0800
  @@ -83,7 +83,7 @@
   nolvm=""
   nodmraid=""
   tuxoniceuserui="none"
  -tuxoniceversion="20209"
  +tuxoniceversion="20212"
   tuxonicefwtarget=""
   splashtheme="suspend2"
  

  Then regenerate the initrd file with this commad. Replace the 2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8 string with the appropriate version of the kernel-tuxonice you are using.

  ln -s /etc/splash/fedora-infinity /etc/splash/suspend2
  rm /boot/initrd-2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8.img
  mkinitrd-tuxonice -v --tuxonice-userui=fb --splash=suspend2 
      /boot/initrd-2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8.img 2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8
  

  Notice that splash is set to suspend2 instead of fedora-infinity and that a hyperlink was created pointing suspend2 to fedora-infinity. why such a round about way of changing themes? Well, it seems that mkinitrd-tuxonice only uses suspend2 during boot-up but packages the custom theme on creation of the initrd. Using suspend2 eliminates these issues.

  These simple instructions should solve the ‘/sys/power/suspend2/do_resume file not found’ error when trying to boot up with this initrd and will give you the beautiful fedora-infinity boot-up screen.

This is now officially the fifth Fedora I have installed in this notebook. Hope this helps. Good luck!

Maybe they can’t resist the nice ambiance and food? This time it is the Manila Peninsula.

Closing Makati Avenue.

Reinforcements have arrived.

Lot’s of Free Parking Space.

High sigh …

Typically, business trips do not leave us much time to go around and check out the sights. However, here are some quick shots taken during my last trip to Macau.

Cab anyone?

Authentic Enough?

The opulence of the Venetian is really something with Venetian-style in-door canals, 3000 rooms, huge convention space and a 15,000 seater arena for concert and sporting events. It is considered the second largest building in the entire world at 10.5 million square feet for space. The largest building in the world is the Boeing Everett Factory.

Don’t miss the Macau Grand Prix from your hotel room! Yes. Just like the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix, Macau closes a number of its main roams to make way for this sporting event.

A China experience would not be complete without a mythological creature guarding the doorway.

Have a nice day!

For my AMC 153 students, here are your “pre-final” grades. Please be sure to submit your final conference ready papers via email. Also post your final submissions in Moodle.

Hope you guys learned a lot this semester. Good luck!

It is that time of the year again when I hear my current batch of students finish their projects and write their papers in preparation for their defenses this week. While reading on some of the latest developments in the space, I found some interesting things that could be worked on.

Here are some ideas for graduating students SY 2008-2009 or SY 2007-2008 who are good at cramming:

Management of Application-level Virtualization Environments
Because of the sustained growth in the availability of computing resources, virtualization is getting more common nowadays. However, as enterprises deploy virtualized environments, new problems such as management and support of virtualized resources become more common place. Together, researchers can study community initiatives like RedHat’s ET and contribute to development a more manageable virtualized computing environment for data centers of the future.

Parallelization of Commodity Computing Tasks
It is common to see parallel computing projects be written using parallel development environment such as MPI. using commodity computing hardware. I would like to study options of using some of the more commodity software instead. Together, researchers will study parallel computing architectures are aim to find solutions to making parallel computing more accessible to the general populace. To be specific, I would like to investigate the Apache Hadoop and Google’s MapReduce. The goal is to promote accessible commodity computing with commodity hardware and software.

Fun with Mobile LBS
Location-based services on mobile phones are one of the hot topics in the telecommunications industry today. Beyond typical LBS applications like local services and mapping, what other applications can we create? With commodity applications available in retails, we can build a number of interesting mobile applications that are location aware. Check out JSR-179 for J2ME-enabled mobile phones.

Fun with Mobile Contactless Technologies
Same with LBS services, Near Field Communications (NFC) or contactless technology is making significant headway in the industry too. What are the interesting applications we can build? If we can come up with an existing application then we can probably get handset to play with. Check out JSR-257 for J2ME-enabled mobile phones.

If you know anybody who is interested in these projects then please feel free to drop me an email or comment on this post. Of course, if you guys have ideas too just bring them on. If hardware or expert advice is need then we can find ways to obtain hardware and expert advice. Good luck!

Yes, there are some lemon iPhones that don’t allow you to receive SMS messages. Yes, you can’t receive SMS message in your iPhone. After a bit of playing around with the unit, it really feels like BETA quality hardware. Lots of little issues left and right. Oh well. Maybe their new version will be better? iPhone 2.0? Anyway, here is the procedure for fixing this issue. Fair warning: Make sure you know what you are doing and ensure that your units are fully charged. You don’t want to interrupt the process in a middle of an update.

1. Grab latest 1.0.2 (latest safe firmware) firmware update. Extract the bbupdater, ICE03.14.08_G.fls and ICE03.14.08_G.eep files. You can do this by unzipping the firmware file then mounting it in a MacOSX or Linux box. If you are using Windows then I suggest you Google for the files there are links lying around. I just don’t want to link to them myself. When you have them upload them to the iPhone. I suggest you use iBrickr or SCP them to the iPhone. Create a directory under /Applications/relock and store the files there. Putting executable files in the /var/root directory won’t allow you to run them.
2. Reflash baseband to its original state. Ok here is the challenging part. Make sure you have enough battery life, good network connectivity and that you don’t get interrupted. Then, login to the iPhone via SSH or use MobileTerminal.app on the phone. Type the following commands:

cd /Applications/relock
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist
./bbupdater -f ICE03.14.08_G.fls -e ICE03.14.08_G.eep
launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist

3. SIM Unlock again. At this point, you have a fresh baseband firmware. Of course, this baseband firmware is still SIM locked to AT&T. Therefore, you will have to do the entire SIM unlock process again. I suggest you use the anySIM.app application as it works pretty well already. Or you can use the procedures that I have collected and documented before here.

So if you cannot receive SMS message in your phone. Try this procedure out. Enjoy!

Should have been a straight forward process but quirks in the Darwin installer added around one (1) hour of twiddling to an otherwise simple process. Here is what I had to do to get it all working.

1. Download Darwin OSX install image. You can do this by visiting the Apple Open Source website that contains a nicely packaged ISO for your installation convenience.
2. Make sure your copy of VMWare Server is working. You can download VMWare server for free to the VMWare website. Fortunately, they have fixed the kernel bugs already that prevent VMWare from properly building before.
3. Create a new Virtual Machine. Ok the normally procedure would be to create a new VM. Select “Others” as the operating system. Specify the amount of RAM you would like to assign that VM (I choose 256MB). Create a new IDE hard disk to install your Darwin files (take note it SHOULD BE IDE and not SCSI). Mount the ISO image under the CDROM device. Normally, this should be ok. But, it will get stuck with the error “still waiting for root device”.
4. Shuffle around IDE devices. You will notice that the CDROM is mounted as the IDE (1:0) device. Your hard disk is mounted as IDE (0:0). You should move the CDROM to IDE (0:1) instead.

The rest of the installation process should proceed by answering the questions prompted by the install. I allowed the installer to specify the partitioning. The system will then proceed to install the files. After which it will prompt you for a reboot.

Here are some additional things you might want to do to get a decently working system.

• Setting your hostname. This can be done by editing the /etc/hostconfig file and filling in the hostname field. You can also configure your default router here. However, I plan to use DHCP so this should be moot.
• Configuring networking. Edit the /etc/iftab file. Replace the line under the en0 network device from AUTOMATIC to DHCP. This is because I plan to use DHCP.
• Running the SSH daemon. Edit the /etc/hostconfig file. You can see an option for SSHSERVER there.

Still more things you can do here. When in doubt this is a BSD system so your BSD knowledge should come in handily.