Category Archives: Tech Stuffs

All topics relating to technology

iPhone App Review – Upside Down

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I was just surfing the app store and chanced upon this free app, “Upside Down”.

It’s a rather simple app, but does something really fun! You simply type in any message you like, it will automatically flip the text upside down, click on the “copy” button, and go to your SMS and paste it there.

Send out your message, and your recipient will get the message upside down! It’s a fun annoyance 🙂

Be warned though, this will work if your recipient is using an iPhone. I sent it to a Nokia N82, and only jibberish showed up. I wonder if it will work with Androids, Blackberry or Windows mobile recipients. If anyone gets to try it out, drop me a comment and let me know.

PPTP over cellular network with iPhone 3GS

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ever since I upgraded my iPhone to OS3.0, I’ve been having trouble trying to get PPTP VPN to work. Never had the time to seriously look at it until now.

My VPN end point is a Linksys WRT54GL running with DD-WRT. I know that PPTP service works there as I can connect with my notebook, even with my 3G dongle.

Initial findings pointed towards the support for encryption on the DD-WRT implementation, and it has to be forced to “none” on the iPhone. Even that didn’t work.

With the release of OS 3.1, I started to tether my notebook to the iPhone, and through that, the PPTP will fail. That stumped me! Initially I thought could be due to the NAT implementation to enable tethering.

With trial and errors, I found out that over a WIFI connection, PPTP connection will work. Did I forget to mention that CISCO based IPSEC VPN to my office network works nicely over cellular and WIFI? That really baffled me. So, there’s something that’s in place that only works for IPSEC over cellular.

Finally, I came across some forum postings that lead me to the solution. There are many other people with similar issues in Canada and USA, and for some, they are able to tweak their APN on the phone to a different one and it worked for them. Of course they needed to be on different data subscription etc… for that to work.

I’m in Singapore, and my cellular provider is SingTel. I whipped out my iPhone 3GS and compared it’s APN settings to my 3G dongle for my notebook. Wallah! they are different, even though they are both with SingTel. I swapped in the new APN settings on to the iPhone, and PPTP started to work.

So, for all those in Singapore and on SingTel with similar needs and issues, the solution is to change the APN from “e-ideas” to “internet”. And here’s SingTel’s official instructions. BTW, these instructions are generic for all data devices.

For everyone else, what I realize from this is that some services/ports are controlled by the service provider. So, just by changing the APN won’t work if you don’t have access to the relevant APN.

If you need some guide on how to set your APN on your iPhone, the official Apple guide is found here.

*update 2009 Oct 09* after changing the APN, the “tethering” feature disappears. But if I reset the “Cellular Network” settings, “tethering” comes back. Got to figure out how to enable both.

how to make your Windows PC run faster?

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I don’t know anyone who has a Windows computer that doesn’t come to a crawl after using it for about a year. The computer takes 5-10 mins, and in worse cases 20mins to boot up to a usable state.

This happens for several reasons, and one of the biggest reason is due to file fragmentation. The performance hit gets worse if your paging file (swap file) is fragmented as well.

Since nearly 2 years ago, I found a nice, free defragmentation utility on the web. Back then, it was known as JKDefrag. The idea was good and it worked by calling native Windows APIs. This means that the programmer leveraged a lot on Microsoft’s native functions to do the work. His utility just provided the brain and coordinate the whole activity.

This is a good design that the utility will not do anything out of Microsoft’s comfort zone. Meaning, all moving of the bits and pieces of the file is executed as safe as it gets. JKDefrag did not have to re-invent anything.

Now, a newer version has been released and I’ve used it. The utility has been renamed as MyDefrag (mydefrag.com) and it has a new feature. This introduces a new dimension to what JKDefrag did. MyDefrag will now optimize the files, in addition to just defragmentation.

The new optimization idea is great! It basically re-orders the files on the harddisk into zones, and depending on the type of the file, the frequency of access of the file, the files are organized into each zone. I will not go into the specifics here, so if you like to understand in greater details what is done, you may read up from the website.

I’ve installed and optimized on my desktop and 2 netbooks. The end result is phenomenal! I can actually feel that the boot up time of these computers are shorter, and general usage experience of the computers have improved.

For anyone who wants to squeeze more out of their computers, I would recommend trying this utility out.

This utility is free, and you have the freedom to make a donation to the author of the utility if you wish to. I’m in no way affiliated to this author, and I’m writing this just to share with you out there this great utility I’ve discovered.

So, if you do try out the utility, what you need to do after installation is to run “slow optimize” the very first time you use it. That basically does the initial job to re-order the entire harddisk. Be warned though, this can take a very very long time… on one of my netbooks, it took 2 days, and the other took only 3 hours. So it depends how much work needs to be done.

So, go forth and unleash some renewed performance to your computer 🙂

Are you getting MSN SPAM?

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Have you ever received strange messages from your friends on MSN, but they are not really online?

The messages seems somewhat realistic, and often comes with a link for you to click on…. one example I received recently is as below

huhuhahahah thats YOU?!? LOL! :D:D:D http://xxxxx.My-Pictures–Downloads..com/?image=DSC07819.JPG

#1 rule – Don’t Click on It!!! never click on any URL you are not sure of. If you received a message with your friend being offline, it’s a really good chance it’s not from your friend. Clicking on it will likely get you into trouble with malware.

In fact, most of the times it’s actually a malware site that’s spamming you. So the question is, how did the spammer get hold of your friend’s account? There are at least 2 possible ways.

  1. your friend has a poor password used for the MSN account, a password which the spammers were able to “guess”. Most of the time this is true, not many people will have good passwords.
  2. your friend has used a computer that has a malware active, so when he/she logs in to MSN, the malware captures the password and sends it to the spammer

So, how do we combat this? Just a few simple tips should make these go away

  1. immediately advise your friend who’s account has been compromised to change the password to his/her MSN account
  2. if you know that your password is simple, change it as well (no it’s not that it’s now compromised, it’s to avoid it being compromised in a similar fashion)
  3. it’s good practice now to have passwords that mixes numbers and letters. To make it even better, throw in a punctuation. Of course the ultimate password will also contain the 3 components plus the letters are a mix of upper and lower cases, and the entire password is at least 8 characters long. So something like “BitE2mE89$” is great! and “coffeeforme” is really bad.
  4. make sure your computer has an up to date antivirus/malware installed. If you don’t want to pay for one, you can get a free version from AVG. Free, only if you are using it for personal use. For a business PC, you need to buy one.
  5. make sure your computer is patched (updated) regularly, if windows prompt you to update, run it. It often fix problems which antivirus/malware products cannot protect you from.
  6. Patching and having an antivirus/malware product complements each other, together they cover you better.

If you use facebook or twitter, earlier in August 2009, both these websites were hit badly. As a user to these sites, you’ll probably get strange looking webpages, or perhaps slow, or nothing worked. That is the consequence of hundreds of thousands of PCs not properly maintained and have malwares running on them. These PCs were under control via the malware to attack these services. So, for a good couple of weeks, facebook was not really usable. If all computers were properly maintained with the few simple steps above, we wouldn’t have any problem. It’ll be good for facebook and the rest of us.

If you have friends and family who you feel may not know these few basic and hugely important tips, do share these tips with them.

If you have any queries or comments, just drop in a message below or email me 🙂

iPhone Calendar sync with Google – comparison between activesync & caldav

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If you haven’t realized it from my previous post, I am a fan of Google. So, besides syncing my iPhone contacts with Google, I also sync my Calendar.

I don’t have a Mac (YET), and I don’t have a copy of Microsoft Outlook, so I pretty much don’t have anything I can sync with on my Vista Desktop and XP netbook. Without Google, all I can do is backup my calendar to iTunes.

So, prior to OS3.0, I have setup my iPhone to do over-the-air activesync just for my calendar. It worked great and I loved it. What really surprised me that it also took care of subscribed calendars. e.g. My wife shares her Google calendar with me, and that also syncs to my phone; I also subscribe to a public holiday calendar for Singapore, and that syncs to my phone as well.

What impresses me is that once you have more than 1 calendar sync to the phone, all the items will get color coded. E.g. my calendar items will show up with a blue dot, my wife’s an orange dot, etc… On top of that I have permissions (set in Google Calendar) to add/delete/modify my wife’s calendar and I can do all those on the iPhone as well. There’s an option for me to choose which calendar an item is for when creating it.

When I was just surfing around on what’s new and what people are doing, I came across the new feature of the iPhone OS 3.0 and also supported by Google. That feature is caldav sync, as opposed to activesync. So, what’s the differences?

In short, very few differences. I’ll list the few I know

  1. Activesync – just need to setup your main account, and everything that is subscribed to in the Google Calendar interface will show up automatically
  2. Caldav – each calendar must be added for it to show up in iPhone, so this is more tedious.
  3. The advantage here is that activesync and caldav can both be used at the same time! A lot of people will likely sync their calendar with the office calendar via activesync. By using caldav, you can then also add on your personal calendar from Google. Lot’s of feedback I read in forums is that people are really pleased to be able to have both their work and personal calendars in the iPhone AT THE SAME TIME, and still kept separate. This is one of the biggest advantage, the marriage of both protocols.
  4. One thing that is important for me is reminders. In Google Calendar, you can set to receive multiple reminders for an item. E.g. for important events, I like to set pop-up reminders 10hrs, 1hr and 15mins before the event time. The activesync protocol only allows one of the reminders to go through to the phone, however caldav will sync all through. So, my phone will alert me at all the set reminders. Now, this is of a huge advantage for me.

As you probably guess, I’ve dropped activesync totally and now using caldav. Just a note though, when I started using caldav, in my appointments, I can start to specify “second alerts”, which is great! However, if you have more than 2 alerts/reminders for an item, you’ll only see the first and last one. I have items with 3 reminders, and all 3 will pop up in the phone in due time, I just can’t see the settings of the middle one in the phone. But that’s only a minor issue, as I would not change the alerts, but if I need to, just need to log on to Google Calendar to change it.

I’ll just keep things short (relatively) for this post, may post a how-to setup caldav post in the future. The guides I found only managed to get me half way. Had to figure out the rest of it myself by trial and error.

iPhone Contacts Sync with Google – comparison via iTunes and over-the-air activesync

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Traditionally, one would sync a mobile/smart phone’s address book with a proprietary software (e.g. Palm Desktop), or via some conduit with Microsoft Outlook. In the recent years syncing with Outlook seems more popular as it’s more widely supported and it was my preferred way to transfer contacts from a phone from manufacturer A to another phone from manufacturer B. e.g. I once transferred from my Nokia N82 to a Samsung i600, then from the i600 to my iPhone 3G.

Recently I changed jobs and no longer have access to MS Outlook (it was on my work notebook), so I started searching for alternatives. Here are the options I have (in the Windows world)

  • via iTunes – sync with Google
  • via iTunes – sync with Windows Vista Contacts (or Windows Address Book on Windows XP)
  • over-the-air – sync with Google using Activesync protocol

I have been a fan of Google, and been using Gmail for years.  Little did I know, I have been shifting towards cloud computing without planning for it. This seems to be the all new popular shift the industry is heading towards. A lot of what we know now will eventually be hosted in the Internet cloud.

I decided that syncing with my Google account will likely be the best option. One advantage will be that I’ll never have to really worry about backing up my Gmail account. It’s something I trust Google to take care of. I also expect to see more support on syncing the contacts and calendar with more devices. So, this should protect future change of devices. In the worse case, I can export contacts as CSV files to be imported to other PIM tools.

Going off track a little, I tested out syncing with my Vista Contacts. Just to see what it does. The good side is that it can sync contact photos, which Google does not support. But the bad side is that when you delete contacts from the iPhone, they remain in Vista Contacts.

The real test started first with syncing via iTunes. Let me start off with what I started the test with

  • on the iPhone – I have my full set of contatcs with phone numbers, some email addresses, etc.
  • in my Google Contacts – I have some email addresses Gmail auto saved into the contacts.

I put in the config in Tunes to sync contacts with Google. Then I let it rip. The initial sync took about 10mins (I have about 1200 contacts in the phone).

When it was done, I looked through Google contacts and everything was uploaded nicely. I had some contacts with numerous phone numbers and all showed up well. Even some has custom phone types, e.g. I have a contact with a “home kitchen” as a phone type. Google accepted it as well. I was pleased.

Syncing with iTunes over a few days proved the updates and sync are working nicely.

Then, I decided to try out syncing over-the-air. It would be nice not having to remember to plug the phone to sync every other day. Any updates to the contacts will sync within minutes with “push”.

On the iPhone, I went to settings -> mail, contacts, calendars -> add account -> Microsoft Exchange. Went through the account creation wizard, and picked to only sync Contacts, keeping mail and calendar off. (side note, the server you want to connect to is m.google.com)

It prompted that all contacts in the phone will be wiped out (this was pre OS3.0). I know that my contacts are already well sync with Google already so I could confidently hit yes.

My contacts on the phone became blank, and then the over-the-air sync started. I could see contacts starting to be populated. If you scroll right to the bottom of the contacts, you could see the total count of contacts in the phone. In under 10 mins, I could see all my contacts downloaded.

Verification : the number of contacts were right, all contacts were downloaded. Then I picked up some names and check… looked fine. Until I hit some special contacts with a lot of numbers and email addresses… not everything was downloaded. Some numbers and email addresses were missing. Double checking in the Gmail interface, they were still on Google. So the sync was not perfect. After searching around, I found that it was a limitation of the activesync protocol.

You can read the actual post here. But here’s the essence of the issue. It’s not an iPhone nor Google issue. It’s a limitation of the activesync protocol.

Activesync only allows the following per contact

  • up to 3 email addresses
  • 2 Home numbers
  • 1 Home Fax
  • 1 Mobile
  • 1 Pager
  • 3 Work (which one will be labeled as ‘Company Main’)
  • 1 Work fax

So, if you have contacts with 2 Mobile (type) numbers, only one will show up after the sync. You won’t lose the other number, but it will stay at the original source. If you have custom phone types, they won’t show up either. So, this did not work for me.

One more shortcoming when using activesync is that the phone types becomes limited. The list that I used to be able to choose in the iPhone becomes limited to that listed above. It would make sense to conclude that it’s due to the limitations of activesync.

Other than the above though, the sync worked pretty well. The push updates went well and I was pleased with that as well. But since I have needs beyond just a few numbers and email addresses, I prefer to sync via iTunes.

On the 11th July, I picked up my new iPhone 3GS from my service provider, Singtel. Out of the box, I put in my SIM card, quickly configured activesync, and BAM! my contacts came in over the air. Even before I paid for it my contacts are ready for use. That was one proud geek moment :D. But when I got home, did a restore from my 3G backup, I reverted back to sync via iTunes instead.

So, in conclusion, syncing of your iPhone contacts with Google has 2 methods. You just need to pick the option most suitable for you. If all your contacts have very minimal numbers and email address, and you have a mobile data plan, go with over-the-air. Otherwise, sync via iTunes should be preferred. At when during moments where you’ve lost your contacts somehow, or you’ve picked up a new iPhone, you can turn on activesync until you can get back to your computer to sync.

Blueant V1 Voice Command Fix with iPhone OS 3.0

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thought I’ll share something which I found today and worked for me.

Blueant V1

Blueant V1

About 2 months ago I bought my current favorite bluetooth headset. This is the Blueant V1. This headset has built in noise cancellation, provides voice command and dialing for the iPhone and a bunch of neat voice controlled functions.

When I upgraded my iPhone 3G to OS 3.0, the voice dialing stopped working. My only thought at that time was that the OS 3.0 has changed something and so broke then function between the V1 and my iPhone.

I checked with a friend of mine who recommended me the V1, he had the exact same problem with the iPhone after the upgrade.

Searched around for a bit, but I guess it was too early to find any reports on the net… until today I finally found a forum post of someone having the same issue, and a fix was posted. After reading, I realize I have done almost the same steps, except one, to reset the V1. The forum thread can be found here. Below is the steps I’ve summarized and tried, I eliminated some which I thought should be insignificant.

Hope this is useful for anyone else out there who is experiencing the same problem.

  1. Blueant V1 on and connected to iPhone
  2. on the iPhone : settings -> general -> bluetooth -> select “blueant v5.3u” -> “forget this device”
  3. power off the iPhone
  4. on the V1 : press the Blueant button to activate voice command [say] -> “settings menu” -> “reset the V1”
  5. power on the iPhone
  6. go through the pairing steps between the Blueant V1 and iPhone
  7. when completed voice dialing works again

free way to manage IP addresses

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if you’ve ever setup a network and handled IP address allocation, more often than not, you may try to remember the network addressing in your head.

C’mon, how many people out there really document what you do. Techies are well known to not document what we do. Just about very often, we’ll end up forgetting what we have done before. When ever we have to revisit the environment, we’ll need to dig deep into our memory, hoping we can recall our work.

Face it, even I have learnt the lesson of not documenting. Age is catching up and memory is not as good as it used to be. Now, the very least I’ll document the important stuffs.

So, how’s this related to IP address management? I see it simply as documentation of IP address usage. If you do document your IP addresses, I’d guess you’ll probably be using an excel spreadsheet. Heck, a lot of people I know uses excel spreadsheets to track IP address allocations.

Such a document is critical to keep up to date, and you’ll need good team discipline to keep the information current. All you need is just one, yes one, slack in the updates and hell can potentially break loose.

So, here I have stumbled upon a nice tool released by Solarwinds. My network engineer once told me that Solarwind products are very powerful and useful to manage large networks. I never had the chance to experience it, but I’ve played a little with this niftly little free tool they have, the “IP Address Tracker”.

This free version runs standalone, and capable of scanning the given subnet for all IPs which are online at the time. If SNMP is enabled, it will also tryto automatically pick up some details regarding each device. You can also flag each IP manually to categorize them, in addtion you can certainly put down little comments for every address. It will also keep track on the current latency of the IP, the last known date and time it was reacheable.

The user interface is pretty straighforward, and I like it. I use it personally to help me document the few home networks I’m helping to up-keep for my family.

Now, it gets even better, this tool has a paid version which can integrate into the Solarwinds suite of tools. I haven’t seen how it works, but some features I’ve read include running the app as a service, so it can do a realtime tracking of used IP addresses. In addition, it will provide a web interface, meaning a team of network engineers can potentially use it at the same time. That’s my favorite bit, real-time automated documentation and tracking of IP addresses being used.

This tool can certainly save time and effort for network engineers.

With all these said, this tool is only for those networks which allows (I assume) ICMP pings. Otherwise, excel will be your best friend.

Best Home Router?

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For a techie like myself, I tend to prefer devices which are less of an all-in-one design. These devices though reduces the clutter you may have, but makes the situation more restrictive when you want or need an upgrade. You’ll end up having to either find a new device which has all the functions, or you’ll need to start to break them up.

This is especially true for my home broadband connection. I don’t like to use an all-in-one modem/router/wifi device. Although I don’t have a choice to use one provided by my ISP,  as I need it for the VOIP function it provides, but I still use another router to perform the routing function.

So, I have a 2wire 2700HGV-2, it’s a VOIP/WIFI/DSL Modem/Router rolled into one. I only use it for the VOIP and DSS Modem function. For Router, I use a Linksys WRT54GL (with a 3rd party firmware hack).

Don’t trust my 2700HGV-2 to do everything, as it ends up hanging every other day. With this combination, my overall setup runs more stable. And on top of that, I have a great router that does a lot more.

How about giving you a day by day chart on your internet usage volume, a realtime chart on your network & internet traffic, or the ability to create more SSID for your home WIFI network, for those times when a friend visits, needs to have internet access on his iPhone, but you want to only grant him “guest” access? These are features of commercial routers which are at the cheapest, several hundred dollars.

The Linksys WRT54GL costs under S$88 and DD-WRT (the 3rd party firmware) is free! [donation to the developer is available if you like the firmware]

You just need to download and re-flash the firmware and you’ve upgraded your S$88 router to be capable of features found in a US$399 router!

I’ve been using DD-WRT for a few years now, and I totally like the stability and what it can do for me. In fact, one of my main reasons that I encourage my friends to use it is to setup bridged wireless networks.

My next upgrade to my router will definitely a router capable of running DD-WRT, and provides good wireless N performance.