Latest Articles : Andy Jeffries

4 Reasons Why Ruby Syntax Is Better Than PHP's

Andy Jeffries — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:18:07 +0000

Having been a Rails developer for a little over a year now and after completing a few Rails projects successfully, I thought I'd post a set of reasons why I think Ruby has a cleaner syntax than PHP.

The worst part of this for me is that PHP can fix a lot of these things and have a much nicer syntax but in the interests of backwards-compatibility are fairly tied to the current syntax.

Design Patterns vs Agile Development

Andy Jeffries — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:15:34 +0000

I don't think there can be a professional developer out there that isn't aware of the term Design Patterns. Put simply these are standard solutions to common program architecture problems that have stood the test of time and have been abstracted to the point of being applicable to a number of different domains without needing simplification first. As part of my Continued Professional Development, I've obviously kept an eye on Design Patterns, reading books like the Gang Of Four's seminal work and other great books such as Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Of course, I've also implemented my fair share of them over the years.

The problem comes from the fact that in a modern web development (B2C or web application) running in an Agile way I'm not sure how often they are applicable and I think they often complicate a solution unnecessarily from a very early stage. Indeed one of the corner "Patterns" of Agile Development is YAGNI - You Ain't Gonna Need It. With Agile Development currently being "The One True Way" of developing Web Applications, are the two mutually exclusive?

Developing components considered bad form in Rails

Andy Jeffries — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:01:27 +0000

On a typical modern website, most pages are dynamically generated from various database tables. There is normally the main content area which contains content such as the latest news stories. Then there are usually various boxes in a side bar such as the latest pictures from the galleries which contains the latest content in various other tables.

In a modern Model-View-Controller based website the View layer gets it's content to display via the Controller which in turn gets it from the Model layer. This separation of concerns helps to keep things nice and clean. For example, the controller gets a request for the homepage so it runs the appropriate action (a piece of code to handle a specific request within a controller). The action then asks for the latest news stories from the model layer and passes them through to the view layer to be displayed in the layout.

The question comes to how does this work for the side bar content such as the latest pictures.

Rebuilding a site from Symfony to Rails

Andy Jeffries — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 06:15:01 +0000

My personal site has been through a number of transitions. It was initially a flat/traditional/simple PHP based site with a custom ORM layer. Then I decided that I spent longer maintaining the site and wanted to blog more so I changed to using Serendipity. After a while of still not writing many posts and not updating Serendipity for a while my site got hacked. I'd always advised my clients of the risks of using open source software - that you have to keep it updated otherwise a security vulnerability found in the software means you are one evil mind and a google search away from being hacked - and then ignored that advice myself.

Therefore I decided as I was learning/using Symfony at my contract at the time that it would be a good experiment to write it in Symfony. I was very pleased with the site, I relatively quickly got up a blog, tagging and quick links system with a Lucene based search system, RSS feeds, Flickr photos and Google Sitemap generation. The site did fairly well when I posted but I still posted infrequently.

After a while, I realised that the best use of the site wasn't in blogging (although I still plan to blog more and want to make a commitment to blogging once per week - we'll see how I do on that goal) but in using it as a test bed for developing new functionality/playing with the framework. After my previous article on Why I think Ruby on Rails is an ideal web development environment,I recently developed two sites in Ruby on Rails (one small not yet launched, another medium - but I'm the last man in an outsourcing chain the end client doesn't know about so can't name it) I decided to rewrite it again in Ruby on Rails so that I'd enjoy working with it again (as you can tell my spare time is limited so I'd like to do it in a language I actively enjoy rather than just one that pays the bills).

It's been an interesting experiment. It's hard to get direct comparisons as some of the initial build time was coming up with the look and feel, conversion to HTML/CSS and refining how features would work. Also it's hard to get comparisons of lines of code as there are certainly things I'd have done differently if I restarted it now in Symfony. But there are some useful lessons I learnt...

A Video Every Teenage Girl Should Be Made To Watch

Andy Jeffries — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:59:24 +0000

As a father to a girl (albeit she's only coming up to 3 years old) it's a concern that when she's older she's open to more risks of physical/sexual assault than my son. As a Taekwondo 3rd Dan black belt I've always said that my children will learn Taekwondo until black belt level (after which they can decide to continue or stop). However, I know that not everyone has the level of training to teach their children or the finances/opportunities to send them to a class.

In 2006, a young girl named Dallas Jessup made a movie called Just Yell Fire with the support of her local community and her Philipino Street Fighting coach Chad Von Dette. This movie has been released free of charge on the internet and can either be downloaded as a normal PC/Mac playable movie or as a DVD image for burning to a DVD and showing on TVs in school.

The video is a great production. It goes through a Dating Bill of Rights which, although very american sounding, is a great list of rights a girl should consider herself to have in any dating situation. It then goes through 10 techniques for self-defence in abduction situations.

The first two are excellent. The first is to bite your opponent. As it says in the video, children are conditioned from an early age to not bite people. However in an extreme situation where you are being abducted this is an amazingly effective technique. The second is to yell Fire at the top of your voice. The instructor in the video says that often Help is ignored as are screams (I know this from having lots of kids living near me, I often tend to ignore them as it's used when playing). Yelling fire gets more people's attention as a fire could potentially affect them.

They then go through a selection of techniques, some of which I doubt the effectiveness off (the hair comb release from a choke by a much larger attacker) and some of which I remember are banned from being taught in some countries (the ear slap), however as a collection they probably represent a good selection of simple techniques that could stop abductions.

I'd highly recommend the video to ALL parents of teenage girls, schools that could show the video to teenage girls and any martial arts instructors that are willing to teach this simple system as a short course.

Why I think Ruby on Rails is an ideal web development environment

Andy Jeffries — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:12:50 +0000

Introduction

I've been a PHP developer since 1999, am currently a Zend Certified Engineer for PHP4 and PHP5 and work as a contractor for a large media company developing systems in Symfony. While Symfony is an excellent PHP framework (it takes a lot of inspiration from Rails), there are some things that make it less than perfect when compared with something like Rails. I decided to pick a new skill to learn this year as an investment in my future. Out of all the new frameworks, I decided to look at Rails because it seemed to have most of the hype (don't get me wrong, frameworks such as Django have excellent potential, but I went with the one most people were talking about).

After doing a bit of reading about what makes Rails so popular/hyped I found it irresistable! I've listed below some of the cool things that Rails does/makes easy and these together describe why I think Ruby on Rails is an idea web development environment, combining a lot of best practices in to one easy to use package.

This article isn't aimed at non-technical users, nor is it aimed at experienced Rails developers. To be honest, it's not really aimed at anyone - it's purely a collection of my thoughts that someone may find interesting.

UPDATE: Having read (and replied to) a long blog post about how I've given Symfony a short-shrift, I'd like to explain. This isn't a list of what Rails has above Symfony. It's a list of what makes Rails cool. I know Symfony has some/a lot of them. Some are done better by Rails, some are equal (I don't actually think Symfony beats Rails in any of them). This is purely my list of reasons why I think Rails has everything a professional web developer needs, particularly in comparison to a non-framework development methodology (I still have 4 legacy sites I work on that aren't even Symfony-based and are too large to migrate easily). [17 April 2008]

Be careful choosing a domain name for your site

Andy Jeffries — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:47:04 +0000

1. A site called 'Who Represents' where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain nameâ€¦ wait for itâ€¦ is www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com

5. Then of course, thereâ€™s the Italian Power Generator companyâ€¦ www.powergenitalia.com

6. And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales: www.molestationnursery.com

7. If youâ€™re looking for computer software, thereâ€™s always www.ipanywhere.com

8. Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is www.cummingfirst.com

9. Then, of course, thereâ€™s these brainless art designers, and their whacky website www.speedofart.com

10. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at www.gotahoe.com

Well done to whoever wrote this list originally; unfortunately in the days of emails being sent round with attribution it's difficult to give credit to original authors.

Sharing music, pictures and videos between a Mac and an Xbox 360/Playstation 3

Andy Jeffries — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:35:12 +0000

Our previous computer (a beast of a machine now sitting gathering dust!) was running Vista Home Premium so it natively ran all the sharing gubbins we thought we'd need: Windows Media Player and Windows Media Centre. Now we've gone to a Mac full time at home, we needed a solution.

In the past I've had fairly good experiences with TwonkyMedia under Linux and we've also used TVersity under Windows, due to some weird issues with video sharing.

We are in the fortunate position of owning both an Xbox 360 and a Playstation 3, so we needed a solution that can handle both systems. After a brief look around it seemed the solutions that had the hype were both by a company called Nullriver software. The problem is that there were two pieces of software, one for the 360 called Connect360 and one for the PS3 called MediaLink.

While reports on the internet seemed to be positive in saying that the respective software worked fine for their console there were a lot of questions about whether the two would run together as they apparently share the same port.

Well, I can confirm they work perfectly together. Last night I was happily playing Ne-yo's album Because of You on the Xbox 360 at the same time as playing Stephen King's 1408 on the PS3.

Each piece of software is $20, so cheap-as-chips and as they play so nicely together it's a bargain. They both use iTunes/iPhoto and a folder for videos so they share the same content easily too, without duplication of files.

A highly recommended solution.

UPDATE: Quite a few people have emailed me and told me they can't get it working. I just got a response from Alex at Nullriver Support (I sent in a question before I bought the software and posted this blog post, but Alex does say they have been swamped with emails and are busy trying to improve the software) saying that it does work:

They will work together, right now you must start connect360 first, we're fixing that right now

Hope that helps those of you having problems. Start connect360, then MediaLink and all will be fine (I must have just been lucky that the 360 is in the same room as the iMac so it was the first one I tested, then I tested the PS3 so it all worked).

Visiting our New Puppy

Andy Jeffries — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:27:26 +0000

We've had our name on a list for a black labrador bitch since November last year. Today we took the kids to go and see her (and her 4 brothers and 3 sisters). There are a few pictures up our Flickr account (see the bar in the right hand side of this site) but unfortunately the 2 we took of the kids holding black labradors didn't come out well.

Last time we went the kids were very suspicious/wary of the puppies (we visited to see the mother of our puppy in December and her mother had had puppies 6 weeks before that). This time was a completely different story! The kids loved it! At one point Tom was sitting on the floor with 3 puppies all around him and crawling over him and he was just throwing affection in all directions.

So, it's 3 weeks till she comes home and although it will be hard work and a major adjustment we're sure it's the right thing to do now.

More pictures at Flickr

First Choice Holidays Scam

Andy Jeffries — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:21:46 +0000

We booked a holiday through First Choice Holidays (part of the TUI Travel Plc group) about 2 weeks ago. We took advantage of their £99 low deposit scheme. After some careful consideration (impulse purchase) we decided against going on that holiday and decided to cancel.

After a discussion about losing the £99, we decided that it really wasn't a good idea (us and the two kids in a hotel room for two weeks - early nights all round every night) and that we'd accept the loss of £99.

That's where the situation gets interesting: what actually happens when you sign the form to book the holiday and take advantage of the £99 deposit deal you are actually agreeing not only to the two pages of terms and conditions on those pages, but also all the small print in the brochure. After complaining it was confirmed that this wasn't explained to us and the girl that served us "isn't very good" (according to the store manager).

So, the terms in the brochure basically state that even though it was explained as a £deposit, it's actually £130 per person if you cancel before 56 days before the flight. Therefore instead of losing just under a hundred pounds, it was actually going to cost us just over five hundred!

We tried talking to the Office of Fair Trading's Consumer Direct helpline and they said that while we'd have a good case to argue in front of a judge, that there was no alternative but to not pay the bill, let them sue us (after going through various levels of scummy debt collectors) and then explain it to a judge.

They said the three grounds for claiming that it was unreasonable was that it was advertised as a £99 deposit with no asterisk and small print stating that it was actually a much higher deposit, that the terms they were claiming us to have breached haven't been signed by us and therefore cannot be proved that we even saw and finally that they are only allowed to claim for actual damages not punitive fees so they would have to justify that it had actually cost them £520 for two weeks worth of a holiday booking (in February for a holiday in August).

After much discussion (between Julie and myself, and then subsequently between me and First Choice Holidays) they said they would transfer £260 of the deposit to Julie's sister that wanted to book a holiday anyway but we would lose the additional £160 on top of the £100 already paid. In the interests of a low stress level, we went for it under protest.

However, I did already go to the step of getting the home addresses for each of the Directors of First Choice Holidays Ltd so I'll amend this blog entry with their details on Monday - to save anyone else the £1 it cost to get them (and in case they don't know where from.

21st Century Communications - iChat AV on Leopard

Andy Jeffries — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:38:49 +0000

After a horrendous end to last year where I was working all the hours under the sun I had a chat with Julie (my wife) and decided that 2008 would be different* and that I'd only work 3 evenings a week (instead of 4+ evenings and all day on Sunday). Aside from the fact I've just taken on a large project so it's gone out of the window, changes had to be made.

So I started talking with a PHP developer I know about subcontracting some work out to him. He's a guy I trust to do a great job so in that respect I feel safe for the first time in letting an external developer have access to 'my code'. I know, I know, it's technically the client's code (well dual licensed) and it's not agile to consider ownership over code - but it's been my blood, sweat and tears that's gone in to it over the past 2+ years.

Initially we were communicating over email, SMS, MSN (using Adium as we both use MacBooks) and occasional brief phone calls (normally to say, 'Jump on MSN'). Then one day we decided to have a go at using iChat on Leopard. Well, everything before that point seems so primitive now. I don't know why I didn't just post him a stone tablet with the instructions chiselled on it!

Our typical evening development session is now run with a To-do list shared over Basecamp (although for private list functionality to work I've had to add him as a member of my company), then we video chat over iChat AV to discuss problems. Then we started Screen-sharing so he can see my screen (e.g. so I can show him how something looks in a browser) or I can see his (e.g. so I can see the code he's seeing and type on his screen to change the code to make my point clearer).

While screen-sharing it even maintains audio conversation and seems to prioritise it over the screen visual data (speech is always crystal clear, but sometimes the screen is blurry then fills with detail).

We also use git with it's amazing gitk visualisation so I can see what changes he made (in individual commits) and how they related to my push/pulls.

It's so much better communicating when you can see someone's face and hear their voice. Albert Mehrabian said that only 7% of a conversation takes place in the words used; 38% is in the tone of voice and 55% is in body language. Considering before iChat AV we mainly used text-based means we were only getting 7% of the communication intended (in fact probably less as MSN/IM tends to be a very brief/succinct communication method).

Anyway, I've yet to try a 3/4-way video conference (and now I'm on a 20Mb Virgin Media connection I should have enough bandwidth to support it) but it feels so 21st Century using modern technology this way - and I really feel like I'm feeling the benefit of it.

Book Review: The Explanation of Taekwondo Poomsae

Andy Jeffries — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:40:00 +0000

My brother-in-law just kindly sent over a book from the States called The Explanation of Taekwondo Poomsae by Grandmaster KANG, Ip-kil and Master SONG, Nam-jung. The book is 195 pages filled with colour photographs of the two authors performing every movement of the official WTF/Kukkiwon poomsae.

The two authors are at the top of their game, both won gold medals at the 1st World Taekwondo Poomsae Championships and GM Kang was a Trainer for the Korean National Poomsae team for that championship. From the videos of the two new poomsae on mookas.com it appears the two authors were involved in the development of the two new Kukkiwon/WTF poomsae Beekak and Hanryu. GM Kang definitely demonstrates Hanryu in that video and I think the lady is Master Song.

Anyway, I digress. The book itself is excellent. Every page is just colour photographs and diagrams with annotations on how to perform the movement correctly (or at least the final position in most cases - as my original instructor Master PAN, Sim-woon always said too many taekwondoin perform like they learnt it from a book, they have the right final position but didn't get there correctly).

The information quality is excellent and the pictures are clear. Along with the authors notes on the correct ways of performing the movements there are also occasional breakouts on things that will earn you a deduction in WTF Poomsae competitions.

Personally I would have like to have read a bit more information about general Taekwondo or their experiences in teaching and performing Poomsae, but for what the book is it's invaluable. Also some of the comments are Korean only and my Korean is fledgling at best (I'm planning on making a dedicated effort to learn Korean properly from February but until then...). Finally, some of the translations have minor errors (not enough that you can't get the meaning but occasional typos or saying one word where they obviously mean another - e.g. I think they say "the fist faces..." where it's obviously from the picture and every other source they mean "the wrist faces..."). But these minor negatives aren't enough to earn this book any less than 9/10.

The book is available (in USA) from Golden Tiger and costs $49.95 - I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in competing in WTF Poomsae or who is just anal about their practice and likes every movement to be absolutely perfect and 'to spec'.

I don't get it from books!

I can soak up knowledge from everywhere (it sometimes takes me a few tries, but I'm generally adaptable to any media type). Some people aren't, and as a special bonus review in the same parcel from America I also received a copy of the new Kukkiwon Poomsae New 6-DVD Set.

I only had a quick watch of the last DVD last night (as I've recently learn the higher patterns) but I have to say it is fantastic. The poomsae are demonstrated by the absolute pinnacle of Taekwondo Poomsae (including GM Kang, Ik-pil by the way). Each poomsae has an introduction which is basically a complete demonstration of the pattern with a rotating camera set in beautiful surroundings and with a narrative about the pattern at the same time. Then the sections are a normal demonstration of the pattern (from the front, set against a black background for clarity), a demonstration of the details of the pattern (the whole pattern but repeating certain parts with a detailed narrative) and an application section that shows how one or two special movements in the pattern are supposed to work.

I already own the Kukki-Taekwondo 2-DVD Set from the late 90's and the Dartfish WTF Poomsae 6-DVD set and I have to say this set puts them to shame! I haven't been through the whole series yet, but the level of production is brilliant. On a side note GM LEE, Kyu-hyung is my new hero! I've seen demonstrations of him doing destruction before (and I'm sure poomsae too), but his demonstration on this 6th disk of (IIRC) Hansu was absolutely beautiful to watch. Anyway, 10/10 for the 6th disk of the set and I'd imagine the other 5 will follow suit.

Anyway, I'd highly recommend both products to anyone wishing to learn the details of Kukkiwon Poomsae.

Book Review: Programming Collective Intelligence

Andy Jeffries — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:04:23 +0000

Having never written a book review before (well maybe at school, but nothing in any recent memory) I'm not really sure to start with this - so maybe I'll go completely arse-about-face and decide to post my verdict first...

Verdict

If you have any interest in how things like Google or spam-filtering works, BUY THIS BOOK. The descriptions are clear and there are working code samples to help clarify the descriptions.

Explanation

The book contains many chapters on things such as how systems such as Amazon recommend products based on purchases by other users and how search engines work. The cool thing is though that each section goes beyond the basics but keeps the descriptions and (Python) code clean enough to understand.

For example, considering the two examples above the recommendation chapter describes not just matching up "you bought X, user B also bought X and he also bought Y so therefore you might like Y" but mapping how close your tastes match on other books therefore how likely the recommentation will be successful. Likewise, the search chapter takes you from basic tokenising of content, through determining how close in distance multiple terms appear through to a simple implementation of Google's PageRank algorithm.

As a note of warning, the book isn't light reading (I first started reading it at about 10:30pm and decided it would be better to start in the morning with a clear head) but it's not as heavy as other text books on the topics go (I've recently got in to modern information retrieval systems as part of my current contract with IPC Media).

Buy the book at Amazon.co.uk.

Installing XP on an SATA drive (200GB Maxtor DiamondMax on MSI KT6V/VIA 8237)

Andy Jeffries — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 20:47:57 +0000

Apparently this is the only blog entry from my old site that was missed - so here it is again!

Given the amount of looking around I had to do to find out the correct sequence of events to get XP installed on a 200GB SATA drive, I thought I'd post the steps I've taken to get it on there.

All in all it went pretty flawlessly, but I don't know if that's a factor of the amount of research I did beforehand on the correct steps. So on to what I did:

Installed the drive in to the cage and plugged in the red SATA cable that came with the motherboard (MSI KT6V) and the power connector that came directly from my new power supply. I also disconnected my existing PATA drive (Western Digital WD800JB, 80GB/8MB Cache)
Went in to the BIOS settings and ensured that the boot order was CDROM, BBS-0 (why BBS I'll never know, but my Maxtor disk appeared there).
Put in a MaxBlast3 floppy disk (I tried using the bootable CD but I use a USB mouse and it wasn't happy for some reason) and formatted the new drive as one big 200GB NTFS partition (I do video editing using EditStudio and DVD-LAB so I prefer NTFS for big capture files)
Installed a slipstreamed SP2 verson of XP Pro (apparently you have to use at least an SP1 version of XP to install on to SATA properly - however I wasn't willing to take the time to test with and without)
At the appropriate time hit F6 to install a SCSI/RAID driver (SATA apparently appears as a SCSI disk) and put in the disk that came with my motherboard.
Chose to leave the filesystem intact and installed as per normal.
After booting in to Window for the first time I then installed the Maxtor Big Drive Enabler and everything seemed fine.
Since then I've rebooted lots of times and all seems fine (currently have about 20GB free after a large capture from Sky+ so I guess I'm past the 137GB limit :-) )
The only outstanding issue is that after reinstalling my WD drive, I can't boot in to Gentoo using XP's boot loader - only by using the F11 boot menu. For more information, see this Gentoo Forums Thread.

How I Bricked then Fixed an iPhone

Andy Jeffries — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:25:29 +0000

How it all got started

My wife Julie asked me to put some more music on her cracked 1.0.2 iPhone (running on T-Mobile in the UK) last night. While I was doing that I thought "I know, I'll put the app installer on there and configure it for email, give her the full iPhone experience". Well, the problems started when the App Installer crashed part way through and the phone just died.

Simple enough: a reboot, restore the firmware and re-sync should solve the problem. The phone had been synced fully when I put the music on there so she shouldn't lose anything (bar her call log, SMS messages and notes - but I'll come back to these). So I set about the process of Option-clicking Restore in iTunes to restore 1.0.2. That completed without a problem so it was time to crack the iPhone for a second time (activate, jailbreak and AnySIM).

This is where the problems began. First off iNdependence wouldn't let me do it with iTunes 7.5 (and as I'm a good Apple fanboy now I'm running a completely up to date Leopard system). So I downgraded iTunes to 7.4.3 using a dodgy .dmg I found on the net. Then whenever I tried to Jailbreak with iNdependence (1.2) it crashed (asking if I wanted to relaunch it).

Maybe iNdependence 1.2 doesn't work with leopard or maybe there was some other conflict. Still not panicking, I downloaded the beta of iNdependence 1.3. I ran the Mob Tool (you have to do this after installing iNdependence 1.3 to copy the "Mobile Framework" in to it). There came my problem, it couldn't find the Mobile Framework within my iTunes.

A short bit of Google searching later (getting slightly nervous saying to Julie 'Erm, I'm having a little problem, just give me a minute') I found the version of Mobile Framework to download so I did that and iNdependence accepted it as being right.

Reboot (ad infinitum)

So I tried to Jailbreak the phone at last. After a minute or so the phone rebooted. And rebooted. And rebooted. It never got past a quarter turn of the spinning indicator before the screen corrupted (the best way I can think of describing it is different colour horizontal lines up the screen for a split second, followed by a white flash, then all black, then reboot).

OK, now things were really getting warm where I was sitting. Still, there's an easy option - just do the whole "Connect to iTunes" thing, restore the phone and try again with the right iNdependance/Mobile Framework voodoo. Uh-oh! I couldn't get it to go in to recovery mode. No matter how many times or how long I held down the Home and Sleep buttons, it wouldn't do it (it would either ignore me or just power off).

At this point I had to go and have the sheepish conversation where you explain to a woman who has just fell in love with a gadget for the first time that it is now a Â£200 paper weight. I offered to get her a new one (I've been working a LOT recently) but she said that was a waste of money and would prefer to just spit at me every time she saw me. Well, she didn't actually use those words, but I think that covers the jist of the emotion behind the conversation. I said I'd keep trying...

After 45 minutes of constant reboots, eventually I managed it (and I think this is the trick that may help someone else if they ever get in this situation). The key move seemed to be holding down the home/sleep button just as the screen corrupted. Holding them down while the screen was black or at the apple logo (even keeping them held down if they started being held at that point) did nothing. When I held them down as the screen got corrupted (that took a bit of timing) the corruption slowed down Matrix-style and was flashes of varying colours and then after it rebooted it went in to recovery mode.

So back to 1.0.2...

Now being back to where I started (and after rebooting my Mac, you never know, and getting completely fresh copies of iTunes, iNdependence, App Installer, etc) I thought it should be plain sailing. No such luck. After every restore the phone would just reboot in to "Connect to iTunes".

Running out of ideas, my last gasp idea was "maybe if I can upgrade to 1.1.1 that may flash stuff that restoring to 1.0.2 hasn't". So, I downloaded 1.1.1 (from a link on iphone.unlock.no) and upgraded to that using an Option-click on Restore within iTunes. Yay! At last the "Activate through iTunes" screen, along with a message about the incorrect SIM.

Cracking 1.1.1

I won't go in to detail for the instructions on how to crack firmware 1.1.1 at this point, just point you to the world's best iPhone cracking resource iphone.unlock.no. I have no association with them, I am just an exteremely satisfied visitor to the site.

I did have an extra step to perform, basically after activating the phone I had to "re-virginise" it using the 0.4 version. This is all detailed on iphone.unlock.no, but it's so easy it's untrue. After that I had a virgin 1.1.1 phone so I set about activating/jailbreaking/sim-freeing it.

Comparison of cracking 1.0.2 and 1.1.1

When my friend got his iPhone (about 2 weeks before me) we had to use some SSH voodoo and a command line ./iunlock command. It took ages and was very finicky. When it came time to do mine, things had advanced and I used AnySIM. It was much better, but still a laborious technical process.

Cracking 1.1.1 was quite simply child's play! With the instructions at unlock.no, you can go from Unactivated, Unjailbroken and SIM-locked to completely wide open sim-free with nothing more than a Wi-Fi connection. There are some complex key strokes to get you in to setting up Wi-Fi and adding a contact (using the Slide for Emergency option at the Activation screen) but it works like the instructions detail.

After setting up Wi-Fi and visiting http://jailbreakme.com on your iPhone your phone reboots and has been jailbroken, activated and automatically has the App Installer on it. It still hasn't been SIM-free cracked, but that's as easy as adding a new source to the App Installer, installing AnySIM from the installer and sliding the slider.

After doing all that, I connected it to Julie's Mac account and iTunes 7.5 (I'd re-upgraded) and it happily told me that I had a backup of an iPhone in the account, would I like to restore it to the connected iPhone. After doing that and a sync I was amazed to see Julie's phone back in all it's glory - wallpaper changes, all contacts, SMS messages, notes, everything back how it was just 4 short hours earlier!

I'm not touching my iPhone (I was tempted for a moment after seeing how easy it is to revirginise, install, crack, sim-free and resync - but considering the panic before that point, HELL NO!). I may wait until 1.1.2 is cracked (if it's as easy) and then go for that if it has any killer features, but other than that I'll just have to accept that my Wife's iPhone is more up to date than mine. As a geek it's hard to do, but I'll live with it...

New Symfony-based Site Launched

Andy Jeffries — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:04:00 +0000

For years I've advised clients that off-the-shelf web site software is great, but that you need to absolutely stay on top of security updates or being hacked is a Google search away. For my personal web site, those rules never really applied - I barely had the time to update my blog let alone code a custom one.

Then a friend sent me those fatal words "for a professional web site programmer, it doesn't look good that your own site has been hacked ;-)" - lo and behold not only was my previous site down and a simple message 'w3 0wnz U' or something similarly childish, but they'd installed a 'rootkit' on my server.

Removing the rootkit wasn't too hard - a fair bit of searching and rebuilding on Gentoo worked a treat. I know the normal advice is to wipe the machine and start again, but to be honest this is only a test machine and hosts websites for a few friends. So then the only thing left was what to do about my site...