TeamBurns

If you are interested in a short term lease in one of Melbourne’s best water front locations visit http://www.teamburns.com/apartment/

Just adding some google love for my 6 year old’s blog lara.teamburns.com

I thought I’d mention a new product that we’ve been working on in our spare time. It is a service that allows iphone and android developers to keep data on the phones in sync with a master database.

It is very easy to use, is free to use, and is hosted on the BlackDog Foundry. The basic gist is that you log on to the BlackDog website and save the baseline data for your database. You then link in some iphone or android libraries on the device, and make a simple one-line call that will fetch new or changed records. It handles both incremental and full replications.

Check out our latest sqlite replication blog post for an example of how to use it.

BTW, the service also has preliminary support for Push Notifications.

For those of you that are running the new version of MacOS – Snow Leopard, it may come as a surprise that by default, the kernal boots into 32-bit mode. However, you can change the OS to boot the kernal into 64-bit mode by running the following:

1. Run:

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | awk -F'"' '/firmware-abi/{print $4}'

and make sure it returns EFI64

2. If the above command returns EFI64 then edit the following file:

sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

and replace the contents with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=x86_64</string>
</dict>
</plist>

3. Save and reboot

Citation

To change the order of the accounts in Thunderbird:

1. Shutdown Thunderbird
2. Edit ~/.thunderbird//prefs.js in GNU/Linux, C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\****.default\prefs.js in Microsoft Windows XP, and C:\Users\\App Data\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\****.default\prefs.js in Microsoft Windows Vista and 7.
3. Edit those the following 2 lines to change the order of the accounts. The default account is always first one.

user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account5,account3,account2");
user_pref("mail.accountmanager.defaultaccount", "account5");

I had an issue the first time I turned on my new Xbox 360 where I was unable to get audio working via HDMI. After many hours of experimentation I discovered that if you go into the Display settings there is an option called “Display Discovery” which is turned on by default. If you’re running your Xbox through an Audio Receiver or similar device it appears that the auto discovery mechanism built in to the Xbox occasionally results in Xbox being set to “DVI Mode” i.e. video only.

The way to resolve this problem is to just turn”Display Discovery” off and restart the Xbox.

For the last few days I have occasionally encountered the problem whereby my local network access worked fine. However, my Internet access was “unavailable”.

In my case, the problem was due to a race condition between the Apple Bonjour service and the DHCP lookup. The easy way to check if you have the same problem is to start a Windows command and run:

C:\>ipconfig

If your Default Gateway has a 0.0.0.0 listed then the is a fair chance that you may have the same problem e.g.

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : domain.local
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.166
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
                                       192.168.0.1

The solution is to change the Bonjour service “Startup type” from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed Start)

After many ours of googling I finally found the solution to the problem where the “The Peer Name Resolution Protocol” service fails to start. The error displayed in the Windows event viewer is:

The Peer Name Resolution Protocol cloud did not start because the creation of the default identity failed with error code
: 0x80630801

The solution is to delete a corrupt file:

C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Roaming\PeerNetworking\idstore.sst

Solution Reference

Should you ever need to flash erase your Dreambox from the command prompt:

1. Telnet into your Dreambox
2. If you have a DM500, DM56xx or DM7000….issue the following command:

eraseall /dev/mtd/1 && reboot

3. If you have a DM600-PVR, DM500+ or DM7020…issue the following command:

rm -R /etc/enigma && killall -9 enigma

Have you ever had a rogue process chew up all the CPU on your Linux server for a days and nobody notice?

This happens to me quite a lot so I decided to write a bash script that looks for these processes and send an alert email.

#!/bin/bash

#
# cpumon - monitors CPU usage and sends an alert email if limit is exceeded
#
# 2009 - martin [at] teamburns [dot] com
#

host=`hostname`
file="/tmp/cpumon.txt"

rm $file > /dev/null 2>&1

function sendEmail() {
   subject="High CPU on $host"
   /usr/bin/mail -s "$subject" user@domain.com < $file
}

while read a b c
do
   pid="$a"
   cmd="$b"
   cpu_percentage="$c"

   if [[ -z "$cpu_percentage" ]]
   then
      echo "process $pid $cmd is using less than zero percent of the cpu!"
      continue
   else
      cpu_percentage_integer=$(echo "$cpu_percentage"|sed 's/^\([^\.]*\)\..*$/\1/')
   fi

   if [[ $cpu_percentage_integer -gt 10 ]]
   then
      echo "$pid $cmd is using $cpu_percentage_integer percent of our CPU" >> $file
   fi
done <<< "`ps --no-heading -eo pid,comm,pcpu`"

if [[ -f $file ]]
then
   sendEmail
fi

This script can be scheduled to run periodically by placing an entry in the crontab file. Make sure use replace username with a valid name:

*/30 *  * * *   username    /home/username/cpumon >/dev/null 2>&1