YiBi's Life|Live Log » iPhone Archives -

Switching from Nokia to iPhone 4..seamless!

yibi — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 07:04:11 +0000

One of the first painful things when switching to a new mobile phone is migrating the contact list, especially when you are switch to a totally different brand or platform. Last week I got the iPhone 4 for my wife as Christmas present to replace her Nokia E71.

Prior to the switch, I have already configured the E71 to sync her whole phone book to Google. We are using Google Apps Domain, which is Gmail and all the whole suite of Google Apps, but using my own domain name.

The telco was pretty efficient in activating the micro sim for iPhone 4, which is not expected. We were at the mall and her old SIM card got deactivated and the new card activated, barely one hour after signing up the mobile package. The staff told us it’s going to take 6 hours or more to have the new sim card activated. I’m not complaining though.

Under normal circumstances, having the old sim deactivated means she had to lookup her old phone for contacts and key in into the iPhone if she’s trying to make a call or send a message. What I did was I configured the iPhone to sync with Google on the spot. Within mins, her whole phonebook was downloaded into the iPhone from Google and the phone is fully functional. No PCs and sync software involved. Cool?

This means I can switch phones anytime, as long as the phone supports ActiveSync. Google has implemented ActiveSync for syncing Email, Phone Book and Calendar. Both Nokia and iPhone supports ActiveSync.

Here’s more information on how I did it.

http://www.google.com/mobile/

Google Sync For Nokia

Google Sync For iPhone

Updating iPhone to iOS 4 in Vmware

yibi — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 07:30:59 +0000

While updating my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, I encountered an error on iTunes saying that my iPhone could not be updated. My phone went into recovery mode after that. This is not the first time I’m doing restore and update with Vmware, so I’m pretty surprise why the update process failed.

A peek into dmesg shows the following -

[52420.444795] usb 2-2: usbfs: interface 2 claimed by ipheth while ‘vmware-vmx’ sets config #4
[52420.460159] usb 2-2: usbfs: process 9345 (vmware-vmx) did not claim interface 2 before use
[52420.460222] usb 2-2: usbfs: process 9345 (vmware-vmx) did not claim interface 2 before use

Linux is now capable of detecting the iPhone over USB natively and automatically via the iPhone for tethering and direct access to the underlying filesystem, so it’s hogging the USB port on the iPhone and denying Vmware of accessing it.

Anyway the solution is simple. Just run

# rmmod ipheth

# dmesg

[52445.922401] usbcore: deregistering interface driver ipheth
[52445.964038] ipheth 2-2:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet now disconnected
[52491.228075] usb 2-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 21
[52491.524073] usb 2-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 21

Linux releases the iPhone. On Vmware, disconnect and connect the iPhone again.

Update: Native Tethering To IPhone On Linux

yibi — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:45:48 +0000

I missed out something important in my previous post on the native tethering on Linux. Turns out my tethering works only after I kick off the tether from Windows (Which resides in a VM on my machine). Further digging led me to the following site.

http://giagio.com/wiki/moin.cgi/iPhoneEthernetDriver

In order to get tethering to work, you need to ‘pair’ the IPhone with your machine. The site above provides the source to the pairing program, which surprisingly isn’t part of any Debian package. Or at least I couldn’t find it. Someone please point me to the right package if there’s one.

Anyway, just follow the instructions on the site to checkout the source from GIT and compile ipheth-pair. Plug in your IPhone and check your dmesg for the following:

[40883.744096] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 10
[40883.905582] ipheth 2-1:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet device attached

Run ipheth-pair if your IPhone has been picked up and loaded successfully.

Leave the rest to Network Manager. Just connect to wwan0 like connecting to any other devices.

Native IPhone Tethering On Linux (Debian)

yibi — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:58:04 +0000

For some reason, I can get tethering to work natively on Linux after I did an upgrade on my unstable Debian.

This was not possible previously. Now the kernel detects a new device called ipheth (IPhone USB Ethernet device). This is the magic that made the tethering possible. And the best part is that it works out of the box with Network Manager.

This is really cool. I used to tether from Linux using Bluetooth, but the connection is unstable sometimes.

Screenshots of dmesg output etc. Click for the full size image.

I’m running the unstable distro of Debian, so I’m not sure if this is available on the stable release. It might be possible on Ubuntu, since they get all the cutting edge stuff.

Winscape – Motion aware virtual window and scenery

yibi — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 01:17:55 +0000

This is an interesting piece of work. Imagine waking up to sceneries rom various parts of the world in the morning, instead of staring at the opposite HDB block….boring.

There’s an IPhone app to act as the remote, and the images and app to control the perspective runs from a Mac. It’s also mentioned in the Winscape website, that a Wiimote can be used to track the motion.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqu9NuINKbc

IPhone Tethering – Use and Abuse!

yibi — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:46:51 +0000

This is the geeky sequel to my last Linux to IPhone tethering episode where we used and abused the IPhone tethering function.

Some background, I’m one of those people who contracted (and got stuck) with the 50G SingTel Mobile Broadband Plan before the days of 12GB IPhone plan. My usage was about 4G per month, so none of the plans was suitable for me at that time.

Anyway, that aside. For some reasons my team had to work in a place where we had no internet access while we are building the network for high speed internet access. What irony! The only systems engineer in the team (me) decided that I had alot of data to spare, so here we go…use and abuse!

Configuration’s simple. First you have to setup tethering as per my previous post on IPhone tethering. Once you are done with that, do the follow steps. And again, it’s a 5 minute quick hack.

1. vi linux-router.sh

2. Paste the following into the shell script

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o bnep0 -j MASQUERADE
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i bnep0 -o wlan0 -m state –state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o bnep0 -j ACCEPT

3. Save the file.
4. chmod 700 linux-router.sh
5. ./linux-router.sh
6. Done!

My colleagues are connected to a WIFI router, hence the use of wlan0 as the “inside” interface. bnep0 is the “outside” interface connected to the IPhone via bluetooth. All the machines point to my laptop as the gateway, which bears the IP address 192.168.0.1. All of them are NAT’d out from the outside interface.

I have 2Mbps for my plan. Good enough for the team to check email and do some simple web browsing for information.

There are other things you can do like transparent proxying so that you save abit of bandwidth.

Leave a comment if you have any questions on the configurations. Have fun!

Linux to IPhone Tethering In 5 Mins

yibi — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:57:28 +0000

Tethering from a mobile phone is not new to me. I started from the days of having to script the ppp chat scripts to wvdial to finally having Network Manager recognizing my mobile phone as a 3G modem.

IPhone is new. I have been reading about tethering on Linux as soon as I bought it. Painful ways, jailbreak, run proxy etc etc etc.

Linux didn’t recognize the IPhone as a modem when I plugged in via USB, so it’s only bluetooth now. I tried the tethering of my Mac first. With bluetooth, I found that tethering actually happens over the PAN (Personal Area Network). That should work with Linux, and so it did.

These are steps for me to get tethering on Debian in 5 mins.

1. Run “sudo aptitude -y install blueman” in Debian.

2. Logout and login again. This is for the dbus and stuff to react correctly when you turn on your bluetooth later on.

3. Turn on your bluetooth or insert your USB bluetooth dongle. A bluetooth icon should appear in your system tray or whatever you call it in Gnome. That’s Blueman.

4. Discover and add your IPhone in Blueman

5. Turn on Internet Tethering under “Settings –> General –> Network”. Choose Bluetooth.

6. Go back to your Blueman, click on it and you should see your IPhone. Right click on your IPhone and select “Network Access Point”

7. And you are done!

That’s it! Simple right? No hacking, no jailbreak!

Do drop me a comment if anything’s unclear. The same solution should work with any of the modern distros like Fedora and Ubuntu.

Certificate Error When Building Your First IPhone App?

yibi — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:34:11 +0000

You probably ended up here while searching for the following error message in XCode when trying to build and run your first IPhone app :

Code Sign error: The identity ‘iPhone Developer’ doesn’t match any valid certificate/private key pair in the default keychain

Before you start googling and attempt to move certificates all over, or spend $99 USD getting the developer account check the following:

Make sure you are building and running for the simulator and not your IPhone device. This is rudimentary but easily missed.

I ran into this error upon compiling a test ‘Hello World’ app. So I’m pretty sure there are more people out there running into this error.

XCode defaults to building and running on the IPhone device, which is not possible until you have a developer’s account. Building and running on the IPhone requires the code to be signed before building, which results in the error that you have gotten.

I hope you have found this before going for the last resort of subscribing for the developer’s account. And if you already did, happy programming! Hope to see your app on the App Store soon!