Today I imported an existing iPhone project and then checked it out again. To my surprise when I tried to build it I encountered an error. I checked  my SVN repository and discovered that a static library ( .a) was not there.

Apparently .a files are treated as hidden files and they don’t get added to the repository. If you want to “fix” this in Versions app then select View -> Show Ignored Items (⌘ + ⇧ + I) and then simply add and commit.

It’s not hard, you just need to know what to look for.

Cheers…

iPhone WelliBUS reached version 2.5.1. The latest update adds a new feature that allows users to save favourite services not just stops, improves the load times significantly, brings tooltips to a few screens and addresses a couple of small issues.

But the real reason for this post is that this week we launched two Android applications.

Firstly WelliBUS for Android was launched! This first release of the application is very feature rich thanks to the work of @cur3n4 Users can search by stop numbers, station names, street names and even wharfs. There is even a Map view that allows users to find nearby stops. Once the departure stop has been identified the application allows filtering by service number or date/time and goes on to display the departure times and itinerary for the selected routes. Download this free application from the Android Market today.

The other application is the Android version Twister Referee. This is a port of the iPhone application with the same name. Its purpose is simple: enable referee-free Twister play. Rather than having one player operate the spinner the application will do it automatically, over and over again.

Cheers…

Some background information.
- SVN is running as a daemon locally. It gets started by:
svnserve -d –listen-host localhost -r /Library/Subversion/Repository

- trying to checkout stuff using the command below via Terminal works fine
svn co svn://localhost/Project1/trunk WorkingDirName

- trying to browse the svn repository from within Eclipse 3.5 Galileo using either Subclipse or Subversive always ends up with:
svn: connection refused by the server

I tried many things but none of them helped. I googled but failed to find something relevant. Just before giving up I thought I would check what ports were open on my machine, maybe there was some conflict. There was no conflict but…
netstat -anp TCP | grep LISTEN
returned this:
tcp6       0      0  ::1.3690               *.*                    LISTEN
That’s when it dawned on me: the svnserve was binding an IPV6 address and Eclipse could not handle that!

Solution:
ps -ef | grep svnserve
kill -9 (where proc_id is the process id of your svnserve, the second number on the line)
svnserve -d –listen-host 127.0.0.1 -r /Library/Subversion/Repository/ (or wherever you’ve placed your Repository)

Done! Now svnserve is bound to an IPV4 and Eclipse can play nice too.

Cheers…

p.s. please let me know if this worked with other Mac OS / SVN versions too

The reason for it is that when this the error is built in lines like this:

*error = err(EUNSUPPORTED, @"JSON object key must be string");

The error object is not checked for NULL.
According to Apple’s documentation one can call a method that takes a error:(NSError**)error parameter with either of these:
NULL
NSError *error = nil;

So if the argument is NULL you can’t really assign something to it.

To fix the XCode warnings (and your code) just do this test before the call to create a new error object.

if (error != NULL)
  *error = err(EUNSUPPORTED, @"JSON object key must be string");

Cheers…

IMHO this is because of a blend of security reasons, mobile me and
notification issues…

There might be a workaround though but I couldn't be bothered to test
it: what if you configure the iPhone calendar to sync with a CalDAV
capable server and then your app simply posts the events to that
CalDAV server?!
In this scenario the Calendar will eventually retrieve the entries and
you'd be set. Considering that Google's Calendar web app supports
CalDAV it should be fairly straightforward.

Has anyone tried this?

Cheers…

So here is what I have to say about this:
1. By doing this Vodafone interferes with my browsing experience. I hate it.
2. When connecting from a Java Application things get really messed up. Those extra bytes make communication impossible. What this means is unhappy service providers and very angry customers.
3. Customers may think that they are paying for those images every time they see them. Hopefully that is not true; I imagine that they traffic to those resources is whitelisted but hey, one never knows.
4. Downloading a Java Application / Game has just become a tougher task if the Jar is not served from a secure server.

There are some clarifications that I should make:
- https traffic does not get the "extra" content injected in the translated pages
- this problem only applies to one access point: Vodafone Live!. The Internet access point is not "affected" by Vodafone's generosity. In other words make sure you are not using live.vodafone.com as your APN if you do not want the freebies. Just check that you are using www.vodafone.net.nz as your APN and your Java apps will be sweet.

I feel sorry for all the ANZ and National Bank customers that use Mobile Banking and have Vodafone phones. Chances are they are using the default APN (the so called VFNZ Gateway) which means that the requests from Mobile Banking will fail. I guess choosing HTTP for communicating with the back end servers was not the wisest idea. Kiwibank on the other hand stayed clear from that and is still up and running, thanks to the fact that HTTPS traffic cannot be changed on the fly that easily.

Cheers…