Using the 3G network to check email and browse the web is not as fast as I would like, but it is definitely useable. It was a fantastic companion when I flew to Las Vegas last month allowing me to alternately read some great fiction by Cory Doctorow, listen to some of my favorite classical music and get caught up on some old episodes of Doctor Who. Battery life has been great; I don’t think I’ve seen the meter drop below 50% once in the past month.

The phone portion works great for me. I’ve been primarily on the 3G network when using the phone (usually with the included earbuds) and I’ve been quite pleased with the sound quality. To me the call-quality is every bit as good as the Motorola RAZR that it replaced.

The one feature (if you could call it that) that I loved about my palm pilot was the abundance of third-party apps. The iPhone’s 2.0 firmware and the App Store bring an abundance of third party applications for my downloading pleasure! I can even browse and download new applications directly from the iPhone. I wish it was that simple with my old palm pilot! I’ve downloaded, used then deleted several dozen applications and there are now just a handful (five to be exact) that I use the most.

My top five favorite apps so far:

1. Pandora (free)
   Streaming internet audio while I drive to work! I plug my iPhone into a cassette adapter, fire up Pandora, choose one of my stations and I get to enjoy and discover new music! Because of this app I no longer feel the need to sync more than a handful of songs via iTunes. With Pandora, I always have a great selection of music available anytime.
2. MobileFinder($2.99)
   Once a loooong time ago, I made the switch from using the Palm Memo application to using plain text files to maintain all of my notes and memos. Boy, has that decision ever paid off! This app not only provides an ftp server on my iPhone to transfer files back and forth, it also allows me to edit and create text-based files!  How could this be better?  How about adding scp file transfers instead of or in addition to the ftp server.   Maybe add the ability to assign a username/password to the ftp connection?  At least the server is only on for a very short time while I actually transfer the files from my desktop, but I’d feel so much better if the connection was encrypted.
3. Stanza (free)
   With all the talk about no one reading anymore, I was really concerned that I was not going to be able to find a suitable replacement for Mobipocket. Stanza is turning out to be quite a fine e-book reader! It handles the simple comforts like being able to change font and background colors to providing an online catalog that you can access from the application to download free books from Feedbooks, The BBC, Wired Magazine and others.
4. Twittelator (free)
   This is one of several twitter clients available, and so far it’s my favorite; narrowly beating out Twitterific. I like the fact that it can post my current location via Twitter (although I almost never use this feature)
5. WeatherBug (free)
   The built-in weather app is nice, but I like looking at the radar maps and this app has them! (you have to pinch-out and center the world-map on your location; not sure why this isn’t automatic, but maybe in a future release it will be)

I haven’t added an ssh client yet. There are now at least three apps available purporting to be good ssh clients, but each one seems to have its drawbacks of one kind or another. Since I haven’t had the need to connect to a command line lately, I’m waiting for these apps to go through a round of updates to see how (or if) they mature before making a purchase there.

https://support.bea.com/application_content/product_portlets/securityadvisories/2793.html

It appears that without a username and password that a remote user can exploit a buffer overflow in the Weblogic plugin for Apache, potentially exposing confidential information.   Time for everyone to patch their Oracle Weblogic installations!

So there is a certain logic in yearning for a convergent device that rolls all of the necessary functionality into just one, shiny little object. I wouldn’t need to lug around three different devices (all with separate charging needs, no less) and lighten my load, so to speak. I’ve kept a close eye on the iPhone developments over the past year (including the whole ‘jailbreak’ thing) but after seeing how quickly the new 3G version sold out, I realized it would probably be a few months before I finally got my hands on one.

I would regularly check the stock levels for our local Apple stores (of which we have two!) after 9:00pm each evening and as could be expected, they’ve been regularly sold out day after day. Friday night I checked again and to my surprise both local stores showed that they would have stock of all models for Saturday. Not getting my hopes up, but thinking I would just go by one of the stores a bit early in the morning to scope things out, I arrived at the larger of the two stores around 9:00am. The mall doesn’t open until 10:00am, so really this was kind of silly. I left my ipod in the car because I was just going to walk around the mall once, scope out the Apple store and probably just head back home. (this turned out to be a mistake, it would’ve been quite handy later)

I entered the mall and was shocked (why I didn’t actually expect this, I don’t know) to see at least a hundred people already in line! I walked the length of the line, noting that people seemed to have been there for quite some time already. I found out later that people had started lining up before 7:00am! I found the end of the line and out of curiosity more than the expectation of a new phone, I took my place at the end of the line. Before too long (mere minutes in fact) the line had already grown to half a dozen people past me.

An Apple employee was quickly moving down the line handing out a pamphlet of some sort (maybe they would be vouchers!) so I waited to see what they were. They turned out to be just some informational pamphlets regarding rate plans, but then I noticed that a couple more Apple employees were moving down the line (albeit at a much slower pace) and pulling people out of line, walking them into the store, then escorting them back to their place in line a few minutes later. I also realized that the store was actually open, and those in the very front of the line were making their iPhone purchases and leaving! The line was moving at a pace that would make a snail zoom past us, but it was moving!

I figured, what the heck! I drove all the way down here, I’m already in line… the people at the very front of the line were actually making their purchases, I might as well stick it out for what, maybe an hour? Well, after an hour and a half or so, the Apple folks that were escorting people in and out of the line finally made it back to me. They brought me so that they could ‘pre-qualify’ my purchase. They wanted to make sure I was already an AT&T customer, that I was eligible for the upgrade, and that I wasn’t trying to use any corporate rate to get my iPhone. Once I was escorted back to my place in line, I was actually given a voucher for the iPhone of my choice! (black, 16gb btw)

A couple of hours later and there were a group of about four or five of us that were getting along like old friends. Chatting about our children, our phones, how silly we felt waiting in line. This lasted for the first couple of hours after which point we were commiserating about our aching feet, our full bladders, our empty stomachs and our parched throats. We kindly watched one another’s places in line for the inevitable bathroom breaks, but alas Starbucks was not pushing a cart up and down the line so our thirst went unquenched.

About noon (yes, three hours later) there were only three people ahead of me in line. And that’s when the Apple employees must’ve gone to lunch. The line didn’t move at all for forty-five minutes!!! But at this point, there was no way any of us were going to give up! We were too close! We had waited for too long to just give up!

Finally around 12:45p I was allowed into the Apple store to make my purchase! I was only in the store for maybe ten minutes while my new iPhone was activated and the Apple employee gave me a quick tour of all the features. Then I was free! After four long hours in queue I left with my new iPhone.

Next up: What do you mean ‘There’s no native ssh client’? Are you kidding me?

Did you know that PHP could interface with a MySQL database? Well it can, and here’s how! The code below illustrates just how easy it is to produce a nice table with headers populated with data culled from a database. One little trick I like to use (and have used for a very long time) when displaying table data is to alternate the background color. This makes it a bit easier to read the data (at least it does for me) Notice that when the table is initialized (<table><tr bgcolor=\”#afafaf\”>), I define the background color. Later as the code iterates through the lines of data, I test to see what the current backgound color is, and then reverse it. Not rocket science, but it spruces things up just a bit. I have been using a heavily modified version of this code in several places, whether it is for displaying log files or pulling intrusion reports from a Snort database and it has worked quite well. Any comments or improvements are always welcome!

<?php
$link = mysql_connect("database_host", "user", "password");

mysql_select_db("database_name", $link);

$qry = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table_name", $link);
echo <table><tr bgcolor=\"#afafaf\">;
if (mysql_num_rows($qry) > 0) {

for ($i = 0; $i<mysql_num_fields($qry); $i++) {

echo "<td><b>" . mysql_field_name($qry, $i) . "</b></td>";

}

}else{

echo "<td>No entries found in the database</td>";

}
echo "</tr>\n";
if (mysql_num_rows($qry) > 0) {

for ($j = 0; $j<mysql_num_rows($qry); $j++) {

if ($bgcolor == "#ffffff"){

$bgcolor="#cccccc";

}else{

$bgcolor="#ffffff";

}

echo "<tr bgcolor=\"$bgcolor\">";

for ($k = 0; $k<mysql_num_fields($qry); $k++) {

echo "<td>" . mysql_result($qry,$j, $k) . "</td>";

}

echo "</tr>\n";

}

echo "</table>";

}
?>

Looks like Google may be having some issues w/their IMAP services.  I noticed earlier that my palm pilot couldn’t access my gmail account via IMAP, producing a connection error.  When I log into my gmail settings, the IMAP section from the ‘Forwarding and Pop’ tab is now missing:

Perhaps a brief explanation of virtualization (of the software variety) might be in order here. Normally your operating system (be it OSX, a Linux-variant, or WindowsXP) runs on top of the hardware platform that you’ve chosen. The operating system needs to have various drivers that allow it to connect to and control the myriad little pieces of the system. From network connections to video cards, they all need corresponding software for the operating system to be able to utilize them. So imagine that you have a program that runs on top of your operating system that intercepts and mimics all of the system calls and abstracts and isolates them from the real hardware you are running on. This software creates a separate ‘virtual’ computer on top of your existing system. You can then install a new operating system along with various programs into this ‘virtual’ computer and you then have a computer system running inside of (or on top of, depending on your viewpoint) your original system.

But that’s silly you say. Why in the world would I want to run two operating systems, one inside the other? Surely that can’t be very efficient! Actually there are several benefits to running a virtual system. First and foremost is the ability to create distinctly separate environments in which to work. For example: My primary laptop is as I’ve mentioned previously a wonderful little Apple Macbook running the latest OSX Leopard operating system. There are times when it would be beneficial to have access to various WindowsXP programs, such as Internet Explorer when I am trying to work out some cross-browser html/css hack. Or I need access to certain security tools that are only available for Windows (read: Cain & Abel ~ caution: this site is not safe for work environments) or perhaps I’m working on a particular Solaris 10 issue. Wouldn’t it be handy if I could just fire up the operating system of my choice from within my macbook?

And that’s exactly what I do with VMWare Fusion! Not only do I have two full WindowsXP installs, I also have the latest Ubuntu Stable version (7.10 as of this writing) and a full version of OpenSolaris 10 (Indiana) all available to me with just a click!

Another advantage comes from the ability to consolidate server hardware.  Suppose that you have a web server that is used primarily during business hours and a secure ftp server that has its peak activity during the middle of the night.  Instead of maintaining two separate servers, you could consolidate them onto a single server by migrating them into a VMWare instance running on a single server.   With some of VMWare’s other tools you could even load balance both the web server and the ftp server across multiple machines.

So you get the ability to access multiple operating systems from a single desktop, giving you the ability to create an on-the-fly virtual lab.  From a server perspective you can consolidate hardware resources (reducing power, heat and physical space consumption) or leverage your existing hardware better by taking advantage of VMWare’s Virtual Infrastructure.

One particularly useful benefit of VMWare’s Fusion product is its ‘Unity’ feature that allows you to run applications from a virtual machine along side your mac software.  Instead of a single window dedicated to your virtual machine and all of the programs that run inside of it, you get a drop down menu that allows you to run the individual applications in their own window!  Pretty slick and a fun trick to show your co-workers that you can run the latest Internet Explorer on your Mac (useful for testing those browser html/css hacks mentioned earlier!)

See some initial Fusion screenshots after the cut.

VMWare Fusion for OSX

(click on image for larger version)

Start up Screen:

Network Configuration:

Output of the ‘zoneadm’ command within a bash shell on Solaris:

(running within the Fusion virtual server)

Setting up a new virtual machine:

Choosing the O/S type:

Setting up the virtual file system:

Initial boot:

Starting the O/S install:

From here on its just a normal install process for whatever operating system you’ve chosen to run inside the virtual machine! Once up and running, you can take snapshots of the system to enable restores or clones, and you can also suspend the virtual machine in whatever state its currently in, close Fusion, turn off your computer, come back in a couple of days and start everything back up and the virtual machine will start up exactly where you left it. You can even move the virtual machine to a different host computer if you wish. You could have a big 8-core box that you do most of your development on with a bunch of various virtual machines, and then transfer the ones you need to a usb drive to take along on that business trip! Very convenient!

If you’re using a virtualization product, I’d love to read about your experiences (good and bad) in the comments!

From a few conversations with a collegue I learned that I could very easily tailor the build process to my specific environment by customizing the make.conf file for emerge.  Unlike some package management systems that either grab a generic binary for your platform, emerge will pull down the latest source code and compile it directly for your specific machine.  If I recall correctly, the FreeBSD ports collection also works this way, as does Debian’s apt (although I’m not sure of the ability to modify machine-specific compile time flags with either system)

The install detailed in the walkthrough (see link above) is a bit sparse on background information such as why call emerge with the oneshot option. (still not sure about that myself, from the emerge man page: “Emerge as normal, but do not add the packages to the world profile for later updating”)  Each of the build steps took a rather long time on the aging Mac G4 box and I unfortunately kept running into compile errors about 3/4ths of the way through the process.  The process failed trying to compile Autom4te (an M4 replacement for autoconf) due to various reasons (one of which might be a missing perl library)

After stepping through the various stages of the install a couple of times and only getting marginal success, I decided the easiest route would be to script the install process so that I could re-run it at my leisure.  I just grabbed the commands listed in the walkthrough and stuck them in a shell script (no error-checking or anything fancy) which would allow me to set a couple of variables and then re-run the script as often as needed.   The script (and the author’s walkthrough) relies on another script called ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ (also available from the walkthrough site) so I created a directory called ‘emerge’ and therein placed both the ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ script and my own ’setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh’ script.

I set my ‘EPREFIX’ variable to /usr/local/gentoo, so everytime the process would fail, I could just ‘rm -rf /usr/local/gentoo’ and start over.   Since part of the process includes pulling down all the latest sources I figured that if I just waited a week, maybe someone would have found the issue and fixed it.  But alas, as of this morning the process still fails in the same spot.  So I’ll send a note to the maintainer and see what happens.  Until that time I have to conclude that emerge on OSX constitutes the ‘epic-fail’ tag.

After all of this, I finally just grabbed the latest macports and within minutes I installed several standard software packages.  Both macports and fink provide very easy access for OSX to most readily available linux software.  However it does appear at the moment that macports has been getting more attention and is more supported (at least by comparing the verbage on each of their websites) and even though I’ve been a big fan of fink in the past, I went with macports if for no better reason other than its the one that I haven’t utilized before.

Code for setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh located after the cut.

#!/bin/sh

export EPREFIX=/usr/local/gentoo
export PATH=”$EPREFIX/usr/bin:$EPREFIX/bin:$EPREFIX/tmp/usr/bin:$EPREFIX/tmp/bin:$PATH”

./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX tree
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp wget
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp tar
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp sed
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp python
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp gawk
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp findutils
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX portage

export LDFLAGS=”-Wl,-search_paths_first -L${EPREFIX}/usr/lib -L${EPREFIX}/lib”
export CPPFLAGS=”-I${EPREFIX}/usr/include”

hash -r

emerge –oneshot sed
emerge –oneshot “<bash-3.2_p33″
emerge –oneshot –nodeps wget

emerge –oneshot coreutils
emerge –oneshot findutils
emerge –oneshot tar
emerge –oneshot grep
emerge –oneshot gawk

env FEATURES=”-collision-protect” emerge –oneshot portage

emerge –oneshot baselayout-prefix