Andy Huang

Posting to blog from Windows 7

By Andy Huang on October 25, 2009 9:25 PM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes

This is just a test to post something to blog from Windows 7. Let’s see how butchered Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer will make this post be… If the image is in wrong directory etc., I’ll have to edit / remove them later..

Ah well, not too bad, I’m lazy, this will stay for now.

My Snow Leopard Upgrade Experience, and General Impressions

By Andy Huang on August 31, 2009 3:30 PM 2 0 Vote 0 Votes

Snow Leopard came in the mail today (finally). Thank you Apple, for killing a small tree to deliver me one DVD. Using a box large enough to house at least 16 retail packages to ship 1 single disc to an end line consumer is definitely the right choice!! Seriously, if I'm paying you $40 for the rights to kill a tree, I better be the one doing the killing, not you!

The upgrade took just about 1 hour from inserting disc to the green check mark with "Install Succeeded" text... Maybe they could've done it faster, I don't know. But what's important is I am now on Snow Leopard.

The upgrade was, unfortunately, not quirk free. Read on for a few problems that I encountered and how I fixed them.

Continue reading My Snow Leopard Upgrade Experience, and General Impressions.

URL Shortener and Base 62 Encoder / Decoder

By Andy Huang on August 5, 2009 4:43 PM 2 0 Vote 0 Votes

I'm creating yet another URL shortener script. Why? Because I'm not keen on over paying for simple scripts -- because, well, I'd be over paying -- and I'm not too keen on using open source scripts -- because the more people using the same script, the more likely people will find exploits in it. So with all that in mind, I set out to create my own script.

Continue reading URL Shortener and Base 62 Encoder / Decoder.

Unlock iPhone OS 3.0 With Push Support and no Rapid Battery Drain

By Andy Huang on July 21, 2009 3:23 AM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes

With the 3.0 iPhone OS, new baseband, and everything, there are several problems floating about. First, there are a large handful of users plagued by the rapid battery drain problem. How do you know if you have this problem? Well, its quite simple actually. Before upgrading to 3.0, your battery is good for 12 hours, 8 hours, whatever. After upgrading to 3.0, it discharges even if you have the phone plugged in, and you're generally looking at no more than 3 hours idle time. Second, if you hacktivate your iPhone, you don't get youtube and you don't get push notifications.

I've found that the battery depletion problem is usually to do with activating using an official SIM, and then hacktivating the device, because apparently it leaves some messed up APN settings on the phone. As for the push notifications, hacktivating it directly is not going to work because you're not going to get the certificates required for push notification.

Luckily for me, having an official SIM card and a third party SIM card means I can have the best of both worlds, and not have to worry about either problems. Unfortunately, though, it does mean restoring the phone is a bit more time consuming.

Now, I must note that this is a memo for myself, and nothing but. Don't complain if you do not have an official SIM card so you cannot get it to work. Don't ask me for my certificates, because I don't want to share my pushed email messages and risk getting banned. With that said, let's start.

Continue reading Unlock iPhone OS 3.0 With Push Support and no Rapid Battery Drain.

Sideways Hacking Time Machine to Work with SMB (Windows) and Potentially Other Shares

By Andy Huang on June 18, 2009 10:50 PM 2 0 Vote 0 Votes

I have a NAS with four 400GB harddrives running a RAID 5 installation, which means I won't lose data on there unless two of the drives go bad. It's done through my TS-409 (shown to the right). Since I have all these space, I might as well use it to backup my MacBook regularly so I don't lose any of my important data. OS X users know, Time Machine is awesome. It helps you take hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots of your computer. But unfortunately, it only works with additional harddrives attached to the machine, OR Time Capsule on your network... right? Wrong. Today, we will sideways hack Time Machine, and make it work with your SMB (Windows) share folder.

Before you get started, counter intuitive as it may seem, please be sure to have your data backed up before proceeding. While the memo is written with the best of intentions to help people make backups, I will not be responsible for any data loss as result of you following through this memo of my. You have been warned.

Continue reading Sideways Hacking Time Machine to Work with SMB (Windows) and Potentially Other Shares.

Fiio E5 Review

By Andy Huang on June 10, 2009 3:55 PM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes

Well, those that follows me on twitter knows, my net died on me earlier. And to make the best of the situation, I decided to go bowling:

Well, no, that wasn't fun actually. What's more fun is, I picked up my Fiio E5 from the post office today! The postal system did a good job on damaging the package, but thanks to my crappy iPhone's auto-no-focus camera, I won't be able to show that...

To be honest, aside from the out-dated iPod Shuffle look alike, the controls made it looks (and feels) kind of cheap:

Oh well, I can live with that I guess. Let's try to plug it into my Audio Technica A700 and see how it sounds...

Because the E5 is intended to be a pocket amp, my guess is that its target earphones aren't usually too good with bass. The frequency range it supports is 10Hz to a ridiculous 100KHz. But my A700 does 5Hz to 35KHz, so I guess I'm going to be missing out some bass... oh well, not like I can hear those 5Hz anyways (I might feel it, but that's for another discussion)...

Preliminary testing gives good impression on the iPhone, because it did as promised, improve the output quality, and sound volume. I can hear the layering of different instruments and sounds a bit better than without it, which is definetly a plus. But on the other hand, I'd still need to put the phone's output volume to be pretty high to hear the quality, so it is by no means going to help save battery.

Next up, MacBook. When it gets plugged into my MacBook, unfortunaetly, it didn't sound so great... I got the feeling of literally plugging something in between my earphone and my laptop, which acts as nothing more than an external volume control... There might even be a little bit of distortion to the higher sound spectrum (16 to 18KHz range, beyond that I can't really hear, but only feel, so I can't really judge it)... and the sound layering feel isn't as obvious as well... that's probably because the MacBook already gives a pretty decent sound output. Oh well, you get what you paid for...

In general, I did noticed that the sound seems to be muddled a bit... that is to say, I wasn't able to tell the exact direction of the instruments anymore. Also, I noticed that the "Bass boost" switch is best remained off. When the bass boost is enabled, the entire sound sounds like it is being covered under something. Not my kind of preference, maybe it'll float some other people's boat better.

All in all, I think it's a good buy. For pocket amps, anything under $100 USD is probably as good as a fancy toy with volume control... and this one is only $17. So its ability to make my iPhone sound better is good enough. I don't foresee myself whipping out my MacBook to plug E5 and A700 in, but I do foresee myself keeping it plugged to my iPhone.

Not just an iPod anymore

By Andy Huang on May 30, 2009 7:24 PM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes

Those that may remember my other post a while back, where my iPhone had no modem usage, will probably be glad to see that my iPhone is no longer just an iPod with phone anymore...

Finally gotten around to get it a data plan... And from the looks of it, my 500mb/mn isn't quite enough!! -- Post From My iPhone

Google Gears, Fluid, RTM, and Greasemonkey

By Andy Huang on February 20, 2009 2:33 AM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes

I started using RTM a while ago, and it works great. It helps me keep all my to-dos together in one place, and allows me to set different deadlines so I don't forget them. But the problem is, there is no way to manage my to-do list while I'm on the go... you know, the boring bus commute, and things like that... Until I ran into an article on how to use Fluid, an OSX application that converts webpages into small Applications for you. Fluid is nice because it offers both userscript (Greasemonky) and Google Gears (offline syncing) support. But this is where my problem begin...

There is a really nice GM script I want to use, but it seems to cause problems with the Google Gear synchronization. Whenever I have the script enabled, and Google Gear tries to sync, everything goes wonky and the page refuse to load. I must disable the script, have Gears sync, and then re-enable the script.

If anyone knows how to make these work in harmony, please do leave a comment to let me know how! In the mean time, I'll have to keep the script disabled...

Making Your OSX Run Faster

By Andy Huang on February 19, 2009 4:20 PM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes

As you guys are aware of, I just got my MacBook, and I'm still experiencing the should-not-exist-learning-curve... Anyways, today, I noticed something funny, and I figured I'd share with all of you.

Earlier today, I was unable to start any applications... I'd type the application name via QS, and QS would go away, but no app. I'd use Finder to go to /Applications and attempt to manually launch it, and nothing would happen. Finally, when I tried to start iTerm, it told me it was unable to fork. Linux instincts kicked in and told me that the problem came from lack of resources or PIDs. So I quickly quit a few apps (I had upwards to 30 applications running at that time), and long and behold, I was able to start applications again. I checked my processes list via terminal, and noticed a bunch of idle perl processes -- It's still a mystery to me as to what they are, as I was unable to kill them individually, nor through killall, nor could I see them via Activity monitor, but that's besides the point. I rebooted the system, and it seems to be running fine now (and the idle perl processes have yet to return *touch wood*).

I decided I want to pay attention to my resources usage, and make sure my system doesn't lock up on me. I have the habit of leaving commonly used applications running... this is even the case when I was still on Windows. This is when I started to notice a funny trend. It'd appear that applications on OSX suffers even more evident memory leak/consumption problem than their Windows counter part! Here's a quick break down of memory usage oddities after around 12 hours of me working:
iTunes - Real Memory: 220.8MB, Virtual Memory: 2.0GB
Firefox - Real Memory: 208.4MB, Virtual Memory: 1.7GB
Mail - Real Memory: 150.2MB, Virtual Memory: 1.4GB
Last.fm - Real Memory: 92.7MB, Virtual Memory: 1023.49MB
uTorrent - Real Memory: 16.28MB, Virtual Memory: 973.33MB

iTunes I understand, I have tons of music (library of 1699 tracks, 14.13 GB total) and most of them are tagged with album art, so it takes resource to load when I play songs. But on Windows, my iTunes usually floats at around 150MB of memory usage, not 220MB! So I quickly quit iTunes and restarted it. Surely, it dropped down to 70MB of real memory, and arond 1GB of virtual memory -- though, as I wrote these, it grew slowly to 85.52MB and 1.07GB already.

Firefox I understand... The prefetching "feature" and caching of tabs etc. does eat up quite a bit of resources... On Windows I've seen it gone up to as much as 600MB of memory, too... So I just killed it and restarted. It's coasting at around 107MB right now...

Mail - I wonder if it downloaded all my mails from gmail, even though I said IMAP, and tries to load them into memory over time... Mail is now consuming only 51MB and 1.0GB after quit and relaunch.

Last.fm - WHY?! It's a tiny icon that does nothing but scrob my musics! ... and I don't even listen to music from it. Restarted it and its now only eating 21MB and 986.49MB of memory.

uTorrent - This one is tiny, but still worth mentioning... Because I didn't do anything with it! I simply decided to download it to see if it is exactly the same as the Windows counter part. Forgot about it, and left it idling. No downloading, no seeding, no hash checking, nothing. Main window isn't even open (so I don't see it on expose)! Restarting it seem to have make it go down to 13.17MB, and 966.61MB though.

So, yeah... tip to make your OSX run faster? Just quit your apps and restart them every now and then! It's surprising to see their memory grows so rapidly, even if you're not doing anything with them...

Toggle Nocturne via Quicksilver on OSX

By Andy Huang on February 7, 2009 2:50 PM 1 0 Vote 0 Votes

Getting into the Mac world, I encountered two awesome tools from the same author; Nocturne, a tool which allows you to invert screen colors so your eyes doesn't go blind in dark places, and Quicksilver, a rapid application launcher allowing you to perform complex tasks with just a few key strokes. However, they don't integrate well together.... I can't seem to use Quicksilver to toggle Nocturne.... not until I wrote a quick AppleScript for it... And you can do it too!

Here's how I did it.

First, start Nocturne normally, and go to the preferences panel. Disable sensor auto switch... that will bump you right out of invert mode if you are in a bright enough place.

Then, enter night mode, and quit the application... it will auto revert back to day mode upon exit, but when you launch it again, it will start in night mode, which is what we want.

Next, go to script editor (Quicksilver > Script Editor, Enter) and create this script (copy & paste should do the trick):

Apple Script

property Disabled : false

tell application "System Events"

	set TheList to get name of every process

	repeat with i from 1 to the count of TheList

		if item i of TheList contains "Nocturne" then

			tell application "Nocturne" to quit

			set Disabled to true

		end if

	end repeat

	if Disabled is false then

		tell application "Nocturne" to activate

	end if

end tell

Save the script you've just created into ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions as Nocturne.scpt and you're almost ready to rock! Trigger your Quicksilver, use Command + R to force refresh of your catalog, and type Nocturne into the first box of Quicksilver. Because Quicksilver weights the application more heavily than your script, you need to hit down a few times to find the script instead of launching the application directly. I gave it three times and then Quicksilver learned that I want to use the script instead of real app... it might take you lesser or more, depending on how many times you've launched Nocturne via Quicksilver. But once it learns that, its all good.

Now, each time you want to toggle mode, just trigger Quicksilver, type Nocturne, and it'll switch day and night mode for you. Pretty neat huh?

Got it to work? Please let me know how things are working out for you via comments section :)