Wednesday 31 October 2007

free ringtones are really easy on hacked iphones...

So this friend who hacked his iphone was telling me, you just use Fugu as an FTP client and copy any MP3 / AAC files you want into
/Library/Ringtones
And hey presto, they just work as ringtones on your phone. Neat!

[LazyWeb] maven pom trimmer plugin idea...

So its so easy for maven pom.xml files to get a little large; full of stuff they don't really need - or more importantly, full of stuff the end user doesn't really need to use your library. Its even easier for the stuff you depend on to pull in heaps of stuff you don't need.

e.g. ever picked the wrong clogging pom.xml section and shoved in a dependency on log4j, logkit and avalon on your project? (Its such a shame sun messed up the clogging space btw).

Its way too easy in maven to not really see or care what dependencies you really have, including those transitive ones - and we end up with lots of unnecessary crap. It can be a bit scary to run 'mvn site' then look at dependencies.html to see all the stuff maven's pulling in.

So here's the idea. Its a bit like Jester. When all your tests pass; you run the pom-trimmer; what it does is try removing bits of your pom to see if your tests pass. It tries all the permutations to figure out how much crap it can miss out. (So commenting out sections/>).

Next though is it should walk the transisitve dependency graphs and find all the transitive dependencies and try avoid those (using tags on the dependency) so it can clean your pom down to just what you really need.

We should try get into the habit of running this before a release so we can all try keep released pom's as free from junk as possible.

So any volunteers to hacking up this little Mojo?

Friday 19 October 2007

iPhones rock, even in the UK!

This blog post is obviously about a friend of mine; as I'd never be naughty and hack an iphone. So i've got this friend right, he's a bit of a geek and lives in London m'kay. A friend of his showed him his iphone working beautifully in the UK with a normal UK SIM card. My friend was super jealous and got another friend to buy him an iphone while in the states.

The iphone then turned up in the usual gorgeous Apple packaging. After following these instructions (as it was a 1.0.2 firmware) it was activated and jailbreaked like a charm with some neato apps on it (and openssh etc). I love 'Sketch' BTW! :). Colloquy is pretty good for IRC too

Then these instructions were followed to unlock the SIM...
From your phone, open Safari and visit the following website: http://i.unlock.no - a dialog will appear and ask if you want to add a new package source. Tap on Yes. The Installer application will now automaticly launch, and it will refresh the list (if it doesn't refresh, tap the refresh button).

In the list of applications, scroll down almost to the bottom. Under the category "Utilities" you should now have "anySIM" there. Tap on it and install it (hit yes on the warning dialog). When done, press the home key, and wait for the phone to refresh. Now you should see an anySIM icon on your phone.

Before you start anySIM, go to Settings ? General ? Autolock and set it to Never. Now you can press home button, and tap on the anySIM icon.

Slide to unlock, and read to the bottom and tap the red button. This process will take some time, so just sit back and relax. When it's done, you get a message telling the result. If it's an error make note of that error, but don't worry yet.

Insert a SIM from a carrier of your choice.
If you get signal, your phone is unlocked and you are done!
See iphone.unlock.no for additional reference notes.
Finally these instructions were used to change the SIM card and hey presto - a totally working iphone in the UK with a normal SIM card.

My friend is really really happy with his iphone - and is especially glad he accidentally broke his previous phone by dropping it which meant he just had to get an iphone to replace it :). Other tips from this friend of mine is to surf your gmail use
Though you didn't hear any of this from me m'kay. I've gotta say am really impressed with the iphone - its an awesome device.

Wednesday 3 October 2007

Update: Screencast of Apache Camel and EIP - now for windows! :)

Some folks on windows reported issues watching the screencasts (thanks James and Chuck for your feedback!). Well you could always treat yourself and just buy a Mac! :)

For those still waiting for their Mac who are still stuck on a windows box there's now some WMV formats of the quicktime movies. For example
Also thanks to Dan for converting them :)

Monday 1 October 2007

Screencast: An introduction to Apache Camel and the Enterprise Integration Patterns

I've created a short screencast introducing Apache Camel.



A high quality version of the screencast also available.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to create another screencast soon walking through a demo and showing the various visualisation tooling etc.