Martin McDowell's Pro Corner

iPhone 3.0 firmware installation info

2009-06-17T20:30:00.003+01:00

Many sites have commented on the current release of the 3.0 firmaware. I definitely could not call myself competent to give a proper analysis on it, but I am pasting the installation information that you are informed about upon upgrading to this version of the firmware.

iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update

This update contains over 100 new features, including the following:

Cut, Copy & Paste with shake to undo
• Landscape keyboard in key applications
• Enhanced Messages application
- Send and receive photos, contacts, audio files, and location via MMS*
- Forward and delete single or multiple messages
• Added search feature in Mail, Calendar, Notes and iPod
• Spotlight search across iPhone
• Support for CalDAV and subscriptions in Calendar
• Improvements to Safari
- Performance
- HTML 5 support
- HTTP Streaming audio and video
- Auto-fill usernames and passwords
• New Voice Memos application
• Sync Notes with a Mac or PC via iTunes
• Internet Tethering over USB and Bluetooth*
• Browse and download movies, TV shows, and audiobooks from the iTunes Store**
• Stereo Bluetooth***
• Wi-Fi auto login
• Enhanced Stocks application
• More Parental Control options for Apps, Music, Movies and TV Shows
• iTunes account creation and login**
• YouTube account login and access to subscriptions, ratings and favorites**
• Shake to shuffle
• New languages, dictionaries, and keyboards
• Find my iPhone and Remote Wipe via MobileMe (subscription required)**
• Support for more Exchange policies
• Create and send Exchange meeting invitations
• Search mail on server (Exchange Server 2007 and supported IMAP servers)
• Search LDAP company directory
• VPN on demand and VPN proxy support
• Encrypted configuration profiles
• Encrypted iTunes backups
• 1,000 new developer APIs, including:
- In App Purchases
- Apple Push Notification Service
- Accessories support
- Peer to Peer Connectivity
- Embedded Maps
- iPod Library Access
• Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3G S

* Compatible only with iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S and requires support from your wireless provider.
** Not available in all regions or in all languages.
*** Compatible only with iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S.

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guide for your iPhone at:

For more information about iPhone, go to:

To troubleshoot your iPhone, or to view additional support information go to:

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:

GAK = YUK

2009-06-17T18:00:00.005+01:00

Considering the after-taste after using the on-line music instrument company this is certainly true. I was ordering some guitar stands for myself all-in-all three items were purchased and paid for. Considering this was bought in the UK and the company is based in Brighton the postage was extremely high - ₤10. I had good experience from a previous purchase from this company when I bought a guitar amplifier.
After the purchase I started to receive e-mail messages where it was just stated that the "Your order has been updated...". It also stated that you should look on the website for more information but once there there were no useful information whatsoever. This was happening for over a week and I got ticked off and started to wonder what happened to my order.
When I called them they told me they did not have one of the items in stock - WHY didn't they tell me that or even better, why is that not stated on the website. To top it all they, in the end, dispatched only two of the three ordered items. No apologies were made.

Then came the next problem - delivery. It is terrible. They use a courier service that comes at only certain times of the day and if you are not there that's it. The problem is that rearranging delivery does not help as I am employed and cannot be at home all day for some stupid delivery. If they would have used the Royal Mail I would be able to pick it up without much drama, however this courier service would require me to travel about three hours!!! Crazy.

In the end GAK just was unable to get the items to me and I called them up. Despite their apologies they still decided to blame me for the non-delivery despite I made the order in good faith and they charged the courier to me. I even asked them to deliver to my work address, which is just 3 miles away from my home - NO, was the answer. They just did not budge. - Fraud, apparently, was the reason. Now, if I was a fraudster, would I really have bought a few items and then called them up to deliver the items just down the road from where I lived. The workplace is actually a respectable company and the company's name is listed in the postcode database.

One of the things that ticked me off is how inflexible they were for such a small company. Also in this day and age where the credit crunch is pressing down, you would think that serving the customers would be a top priority - not standing behind a corporate policy like idiots.

And also, the first item I bought was the before mentioned amp. After just a few weeks it went dead so quality of their products is questionable. When I asked to deliver it back to me I used my work address. Did that help, oh nooooooo. It was like talking to some computer controlled drones with no practical reasoning. I sort of wished that the crunch will force them to close their business as I sincerely don't think they should be in business with that sort of attitude towards clients.

So whatever you do, do not use this company. I have used Amazon (a proper faceless drone corporation) with hardly any problems for years.

Running Premvet on an old PC

2009-05-08T16:10:00.006+01:00

You have probably been in the same situation, you would like to use another terminal to access Premvet but find it difficult to buy another PC,e specially when considering you might have one or two old machines laying around gathering dust. This was a case with an old Dell Inspiron laptop. It had Windows XP installed but you had to take a holiday before being able to do anything on it. Considering the laptop was useless and could be just as good if it only ran Premvet then it would be better to have a more lean fast operating system installed.

I looked around the Linux distros and found ArchLinux. The fact that it was very technical and not for noobs scared me. I have dabbed into Linux a little bit and have even installed Ubuntu on my personal laptop (and kept it) - I gave it a try.

The download was relatively quite small and once I burned the .iso image on a CD-ROM I had a viable install CD. The system will first ask you to install a Live CD. I thought this was wrong and that I perhaps downloaded the wrong iso image. Don't worry, this is just an instance that helps you do the actall install on your hard-drive. The installation went smoothly and recognized my network card so I could install the FTP way.

First thing I remember doing was to create a user with non-admin privileges - I was consistent with the Network Solutions system and created vet. I had some problems logging into this user so I found the best was is to use the verbose method by just entering the useradd command. Also make sure you have inetutils installed. Also it makes it easier if you automatically log in to the "vet" user. This can be found here.

If everything works fine and you can login to a user automatically then all you have to do is to automatically call the telnet command from the bash:

telnet [premvet-server-ip-address] [port-number]

Some information is available here: http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/fofc00/telnet.html

To automate this you should add this line in the /etc/rc.local file.
I also made an alias for the user to shut down the machine at the end of the day. I made an alias called end for the command sudo poweroff
Sudo is to tell Linux to execute unser root privileges as Linux wouldn't be Linux if verything wasn't very secure. A normal user cannot even power off the system without special privileges. There is probably another way of doing this but I gave the user "vet" some priviliges in /etc/sudoers - you can edit this in an editor like nano or you can call it up directly in vi with "visudo" (http://www.go2linux.org/sudoers-how-to).

To make it even easier for my colleagues I even found a way of automating the login once the Premvet server was contacted. This is by using Expect. It successfuly logged in and entered the username and rendered the extra carriage return needed to get to the Premvet user login screen. The only problem I could not solve and I presume is a bug in Expect is, that it messes-up the rendering of characters in Premvet. The characters used to format the boxes is all wrong. This shouldn't have happened and I found no workaround.

So now the user must still enter the unix username and hit enter twice.

don't forget to change the terminal settings for Premvet for that machine: http://www.premvet.co.uk/premvet/manual/pv5/ch29b.html#29b2

There has just been one other snag besides Expect not working - colours. Premvet doesn't load a clolour scheme for this type of terminal so everything is in black&white. you can change the colours manually in Premvet for that machine but there is probably a workaround for that.

Running the Premvet client on Ubuntu Linux

2009-04-03T22:56:00.004+01:00

PremVet is a veterinary practice management and clinical records computer system based on Unix, made by a Scottish company VetSolutions.

Running the Premvet client on Ubuntu is actually very simple and worked very well. I was using Ubuntu 8.10 with the Gnome desktop. All you have to do is:

start the Terminal and enter
run the following command telnet [ip-address] (where the ip-address is the IP address of the Premvet server)
voila

It managed to draw the characters, including the lines that are used for graphics, right out of the box. There was only a couple of glitches. The bacspace did not work. To fix this it might be better to use a dedicated profile in terminal and change the setting for this profile by going to Edit - Profile Preferences. Click on the Compatibility tab and change the value for Backspace key generates from whatever it is (in my case it was ASCII DEL) to Control-H.

If you want to save yourself from extra typing you can create a launcher, but would somehow have to be able to set the profile for that launch. This is how you do i t.

The only thing I could not get to work is the colours of the user interface.

Accessing Premvet on the iPhone

2009-02-26T20:46:00.026Z

I got tired of keep having to go and see the waiting list on a PC that could have been away from the tea-room, making you get up and walking to the other side of the surgery only to find out there is nobody waiting for you or, worse still, someone has been on your waiting list for 15 minutes and nobody has told you about them.

So after getting my iPhone I wandered if there could be a way of seeing the waiting list on it. To give you the short version - YOU CAN. But there are a few pre-requisites. First of all you need a relatively secure Wi-Fi connection and that connection has to be open to the internal practice's network and the Premvet server must be visible from it. you can try calling the server's website or you can use other iPhone apps to ping it.

Please be aware that WiFi networks are a potential open back-door to your system and should be set-up by a pro or someone who knows what he is doing. Don't complain to me if the system gets hacked so consider yourself warned!

If you have successfully established a connection to the internal network you can follow this by installing the appropriate terminal emulator app on your iPhone.

Many of the settings that need to be entered can be found in the configuration of you Anita terminal emulator. If you don't have an Anita installed on any PCs you might have a wee problem.

I have tried several apps for this:

pTerm (from Instant Cocoa), cost: £2.99
which is based on the popular terminal emulator called PuTTy. Was the first one I tried and worked relatively fine.
- You set-up a new host, enter a nickname - something that will distinguish this connection from possible others.
- Enter the username - this s the username which you enter in the Unix system before you get to Premvet.
- Port - this is the port number that is open on the Unix server. On our system it was 23 but check with an Anita connection to see what is yours.
- Protocol - must be set to Telnet

Advanced settings can help with some in-depth configuration. I set-up the Terminal (3rd one down). Set Rows to 25 and Columns to 80. Type strings to »ansi«. I left the variables as is.
The emulator worked relatively fine but the age-old problem of drawing lines was repeated on this app. Instead of showing lines it is returning some weird characters. Also I could not make the delete button to work, if you use it it seems to freeze the emulator :-(

This app is quite nice to manouver in, if you tapp the emulator window it will bring up the keyboard. Tapping it again will remove it. Premvet keyboard shortcuts worked fine - the ever popular w-s for the waiting list summary. However the emulator froze on many occasions when I wanted to leave that page to get back to the main menu. Closing the app did not help.
MTelnet (from Mocha Telnet Lite), cost: FREE
looks like absolute winner, you set up the Server IP address, port (23), I left the Termtype to vt220 and it worked fine, using the username in this app actually worked and was able to auto-login to Unix, however pressing the return button is still needed. It worked like a charm and also drew the lines in Premvet - nothing garbled. Did I mention the Lite version of the app is free! The app is much different to pTerm and has a shortcut on the screen to the keyboard and has a permanent Return/Enter command button on top.
Keyboard shortcuts worked nicely and the emulator seemed more stable than in pTerm. There is a more extensive payable edition (for £3.49) of this app but I'm not sure if you will need it. The Lite version just rocks.
Telnet (from ThroughPut Inc), cost £1.19
This app fared the least. The setup seemed to simplified and the output was not impressing the whole Premvet login page was a complete mess.
iSSH (from Zinger-Soft), cost £2.39
This app I have tested the least. Might give more info on it later.

Zemanta - the great resource add-on

2009-02-23T16:29:00.004Z

I first heard of Zemanta a few months ago when it was , I think, mentioned on the TV Slovenia's IT program called »Resnična Resničnost« as an upcoming and innovative Slovenian company. It has founded a London office which it seems to use as the head office. Well, Zemanta has now been selected as one of the 20 companies that will be going to Webmission09 in San Francisco.

What the 20 companies will be doing there? Read here...

Read more here: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/02/23/20-startups-selected-for-webmission09-next-stop-san-francisco/

Blogger to Wordpress.org import discrepancy (bug) regarding tags, categories and labels

2008-07-13T14:40:00.004+01:00

You can follow the discussion here:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/188535?replies=1#post-802194

or by RSS here:
http://wordpress.org/support/rss/topic/188535

or through Zemanta community support:
http://tinyurl.com/5p2hbm

I posted this on the Zemanta support site:
http://tinyurl.com/5p2hbm

There is definately a problem with the import of blog from Google's Blogger (Blogspot) to Wordpress.org.

Problem:
- Google -> labels
- Wordpress -> categories, tags

The import puts labels into categories and I am sure this is wrong, especially after reading what tags v. categories really is. Labels are really tags and not categories and this is where the Zemanta addon shows the discrepancy. In Blogger it will help you add labels and in Wordpress it will, in my opinion correctly, help you add tags.
Then you suddenly see there is a problem, your old imported posts have lots of categories, while your new ones have tags.

The added problem was that I could not uncategorise in my post edit but had to remove all categories through the Manage - Categories menu.
I was about to report this as a bug but wanted to put it to the Forum.

What do you guys think?

Firefox 3 is finally here!!

2008-06-17T20:04:00.003+01:00

After a long wait and an apparent server crash we finally have the much anticipated new browser from Mozilla. You can get a detailed how-to on the product here.

The "big download" should have commenced at 10 am PDT but was delayed at least an hour an a half. I managed to get it at 19.30 GMT (20.30 CET). I encourage you to get you own here:

http://www.mozilla.com/

What your pet shouldn’t eat

2008-03-27T21:51:00.003Z

There is a lot of discussion among dog owners regarding certain foods that are supposedly poisonous or not. When talking about potentially poisonous substances we should keep in mind the (in)famous father of toxicology, one Mr. Paracelsus of Switzerland and his famous saying “the dose makes the poison” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus). Put another way, whichever substance you consider, it may be a poison in a large enough quantities. To turn it around, not every poison is poisonous if taken at a low enough dose. Here are just some of the more “controversial” foods our vets have been asked about in their professional careers.

Chocolate

This is the most asked about food in relation to its toxicity. The compound in chocolate that causes serious concern is called 'theobromine'. It is also known as 'xantheose' and is part of the methylxanthine group of chemicals, which includes the very well known caffeine (found in your morning coffee) and theophylline (found in your afternoon cup of tea). It is present in all kinds of chocolate, but in very different concentrations. The basic rule to follow is the more cocoa in the chocolate, the higher the levels of theobromine. Plain or dark chocolates contain more cocoa than milk chocolates and have 4.5-10x more theobromine in them. The amount of theobromine in chocolate varies from one manufacturer to another, but a toxic dose (the dose, where your pet may show signs of poisoning) for a 20kg dog would be about 600-900g of milk chocolate and about 130-200g of dark chocolate.

So giving your average collie a small piece of chocolate shouldn’t harm him, but you shouldn't give him a whole bar.

Theobromine/chocolate can cause problems in humans as well as dogs, but it takes higher doses to cause more than a bit of guilty conscience! This is because animals metabolize theobromine much more slowly than humans. Clinical signs of theobromine poisoning appear within 10 hours of ingestion and include vomiting, diarrhoea, excitability, irregular heart rhythms, and a slow heart rate. The vomiting and diarrhoea can cause a severe loss of body fluids (dehydration). Later stages of poisoning include epileptic-like seizures and even death. The term death by chocolate should not be taken lightly!

Dogs in particular may eat dangerous amounts of chocolate, especially around Christmas and Easter. However cats (especially kittens), horses and parrots are known to be very susceptible.

If you suspect that your dog has eaten a large quantity of chocolate (particularly dark/plain varieties), consider contacting your vet as soon as possible. Treatment can potentially save your dog’s life! This may include inducing your dog to vomit, limiting the absorption of the toxin by administering activated charcoal as an absorbent, and intravenous fluid therapy to prevent dehydration.

Grapes (including raisins and sultanas)

This may be becoming a bigger problem in recent years with more reported cases every year. There is a lot of potential danger with grape ingestion. Even small quantities (9g - 18g) of grapes or raisins have been associated with acute kidney failure in dogs and even death. The toxicity relates to all products of the woody climbing vine (latin: Vitis vinifera).
Clinical signs occur between 6 and 48 hours after ingestion. They include loss of appetite, vomiting, lethargy, shivering and increased water intake. The danger of grape toxicity is great, with high mortality rates. In many cases the owner will not even know their dog has eaten grapes.

What actually causes the poisoning is currently unknown and there are many trials under way to try to shine light on the problem. One of the possible culprits could be a toxin from a fungus called a Mycotoxin, but so far nothing has been confirmed yet.

As with chocolate poisoning you should contact your vet if you suspect your dog has eaten grapes or raisins. The therapy is supportive and quite similar to the one for chocolate poisoning.

Onions (including garlic, shallots, leeks and chives)

The toxicity relates to all plants from the latin named Allium species but the most common plant that causes problem is the onion (latin: Allium cepa). All parts of the plant, whether raw or cooked, should be considered poisonous. The plant actually contains several toxins but only one of them is the biggest cause of problems as it causes a condition called a haemolytic anaemia.
Clinical signs take one to five days to develop and include vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal tenderness, loss of appetite and change in urine colour.
Treatment is, again, supportive, but in severe cases a transfusion might even be required. This poisoning is rarely fatal and dogs usually recover without any complications.

Macademia nuts

The exact cause of this toxicity is, similar to grapes, unknown but the fungus toxin Mycotoxin is a real suspect. These probably get onto the nuts during processing.
Clinical signs include weakness, especially in the back legs, vomiting and elevated body temperature and start within 12 hours after intake. They recover after a day or two and the positioning is considered non-fatal.

Bread dough

Due to the indiscriminate feeding habits of dogs they are most susceptible to bread dough related problems although other animals can also be affected. Bread dough is a two-fold problem: the warm and moist environment of the stomach acts like a great incubator for the yeasts in the dough and causes the dough to produce a lot of CO2 (carbon hydroxide) that makes the dough rise. This can cause stomach distension and in severe cases gastric dilatation and torsion, which some of you will know is a very serious and often fatal condition.
The other side-product to a rising dough is ethanol (also known as the alcohol found in alcoholic drinks). Its results cause various degrees of alcohol intoxication and a condition called a "metabolic acidosis".
Bread dough poisoning can be fatal and is mostly because of the alcohol effects rather than the gastric torsion.

Treatment is not straight forward as the dough cannot be removed from the stomach with usual methods and in many cases a surgical removal might be needed. The effects of the metabolic acidosis can be treated with various medications and intravenous fluids.

Antifreeze (ethylene glycol)

All animals are susceptible to this poisoning, but it is most common seen in dogs and cats. The most common way of poisoning is ingestion of radiator or car antifreeze, solar panel coolant, some break and transmission fluids but here have been cases in cats where the animal was poisoned through skin absorption. The poisoning is unfortunately quite common, especially if there is no access to drinking water. An added problem is the quite sweet taste of the antifreeze and thus its inherent high palatability amongst dogs.

The minimum lethal dose of undiluted ethylene glycol is 1.4 ml/kg body weight in cats and 4.4 ml/kg in dogs. Please beware that younger animals may be more susceptible!

The clinical signs of intoxication vomiting, increased drinking and increased urination, decreased body temperature, seizures and even coma.

In case of ingestion you should contact your vet as medication needs to be started straight away, preferably within 12h of intake.

Laptop with Ubuntu Linux

2008-01-06T18:33:00.000Z

As I had to replace the hard disk on my laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43 1871-4AG) with a new 80GB Hitachi I also decided to have (another) go at installing Linux. I have tried it before on an older PC I had and had quite a few problems with getting the drivers. Also the Linux environment is pretty daunting and quite demanding, esp for someone used to Windows. Then I think I tried it again in 2006 using the Parallels virtual desktop app on my Windows XP. There were many issues with installing and I kept on getting some error messages that might have something to do with the CD-rom burning process. I was successful with Red Hat and Ubuntu but it expectedly all worked quite slow.

This time I had a fresh hard disk on a not-so-old computer and tried to install the ever more popular Ubuntu distribution of Linux. The version I used was 7.10 (latest at the time). I burn the ISO image from ubuntu.com with the tools they specified (InfraRecorder). I do suggest you test the MD5SUM values as the first download had a problem and I didn't check it. The ISO image burnt nicely, but there was an error message during install.
I tried a different mirror (Canonical UK) and the MD5SUM check was fine. The program I used for that was winMd5Sum.
I wish I could give you some pointers on some install problems but I can't - that is because there weren't any. Really. The whole think installed without a hitch.
The only problem I had was with setting-up the internet connection. As I didn't have a spare UTP cable as it was being used on the PC I got from home, I tried to setup the wireless access first. Now I am not sure whether the driver was incorrect or it had to be set-up manually. I installed the WiFi driver from MadWiFi, then entered the IP address, subnet mask... manually and it worked.
After that the update service installed 150 updates and after that the network didn't work again and the new drivers went missing, or so I presume. This time I didn't bother installing the drivers again but just re-entered the network data. The little Thinkpad WiFi light came on and the internet was back and running.

For those who will have a try at this with the similar computer can find a somewhat usefull but very advanced (for my taste) website at http://foosel.org/linux/t43. As a novice I was surprised to see how little standard programs are made for Linux. The only luck I had was with Kaspersky antivirus, but even that seems to be mainly for servers and after installing it it doesn't seem to work. There are probably think I missed during installation but I will probably try out a native Linux antivirus ClamTK. As the Firewall I installed the Firestarter via the Applications - Add/Remove utility.

There was an added complication with the wireless setup and the WPA connection with my Netgear router kept on dropping. I found some good instructions on how to fix the problem and I am posing them in this post.

How to replace the hard disk on IBM Thinkpad T43 (1871-4AG)

2008-01-06T14:00:00.000Z

I think this might work on all T43 Thinkpads but I do stress that this worked on mine (1871-4AG). Photo gallery.

Shut down the laptop and disconnect from any power supply or docking station. You will need to manipulate the laptop quite a bit later on :-)
Turn the laptop on its front and remove the battery by releasing the two locking mechanisms. The one on the left has to be pushed and then stays there, the one on the right has to be pushed and held there while you pull out the battery.
Unscrew the fixing screw that secures the hard disk in place
Lift the laptop's screen and rest it on the keyboard on a soft surface
Gently pull out the hard disk
Remove hard disk from the holder and re-attach the holder to the new disk
Gently, but firmly insert the new hard disk in the HDD slot. At this point you might experiance a little resistance, like the whole think has stuck. Just gently manipulate it in. It should go in the end.
Screw back the fixing screw and re-attach the battery.
You should be ready to start-up the system.

That should be it.

Hard disk problems

2007-12-19T18:35:00.000Z

Just to let you know I my laptop is no more. Its hard disk departed this earthly world and went to heaven. It will be dearly missed, however I did manage to backup most of the important files. The new disk is ordered by a very good friend of mine and should be arriving next week.

By the way, this blue screen of death is not from my computer.

Google Apps and Blogger in the same domain

2007-03-15T20:10:00.000Z

This post is quite a bit nerdy so, readers, beware!

[nerdiness=on]
I posted this on the Google Apps group last week. I registered my domain martinmcdowell.com through Google Apps and wanted to use the same domain with Blogger, but using a sub-domain blog.martinmcdowell.com. I know Blogger allows the use of your own domain, but I wasn't sure if it will work with a sub-domain and also, if this will disrupt the functionality of Google Apps.

I found out, it worked. As I said, I registered the domain martinmcdowell.com though Google Apps and wanted to use it for my blog at Blogger.com. You do understand that I cannot be responsible, if everything goes tits-up but I do say that this worked for me very well.

What you have to do is the following:

1. go to Blogger.com, sign in and go to Settings - Publishing - use own domain. I entered blog.martinmcdowell.com and saved the settings.

2. then you have to change the CNAME table at the registrars: this is done by signing in http://tdns.secureserver.net using the sign-in number and password you can see in Google Apps settings. The instructions on doing this are here: https://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=47610
The alias I used was "blog" I saved it and it worked straight away.

Sometimes you have to wait longer (a few days) for the DNS servers to update.
[nerdiness=off]