Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Normally I’d be uninterested in the story of how three New Zealand teen allegedly murdered 14 year old John Hapeta in New Zealand. According to the New Zealand Herald, “Two men charged with the murder of 14-year-old John Hapeta allegedly armed themselves with a revolver-style pistol and a claw hammer when they went to his house looking for drugs and cash. John Hapeta was celebrating his friend’s 15th birthday at his home in Justamere Place, Weymouth, when the attack occurred. Police allege the three went to John’s home on August 12 with the intention of robbing what they thought was a ‘tinnie’ house. The draft police summary of facts said Tumata and Williams pulled black bandannas over their faces and walked up to the house, confronted a man and allegedly shouted, ‘Where’s the drugs, where’s the drugs?’”

The story now becomes interesting when Judge David Harvey bans online mention of the accused’s names. No one is sure why print media (which is searchable, through interfaces like Lexis Nexus) gets special treatment here. I certainly disagree, and I’m free to publish whatever I’d like, as a journalist, including the names of the accused.

Anytime anyone wants to suppress totally free speech, I say RESIST!!

I’ve been getting this error trying to send a message to friends on Facebook:

HTTP Error

Transport error (#302) while retrieving data from endpoint `/inbox/ajax/ajax.php’: Unknown HTTP error #302

Weird, I wonder what’s the problem.

If you do much with computers, you might have heard of the home backup solution Drobo, which offers a redundant storage solution with striping and mirroring without any of the pain of a RAID array. Their cute devices take in four drives, use the space of one for redundancy, and give you protection against a single drive failure.

I wondered how fast it actually is, so I ran HD Tune, which measures the read speed of the drive:

On average, you’ll get 16MB/s out of the drobo, which is equivalent to probably half the speed of any of the drives you put into your Drobo. Maximum PC has a review in which the tried a Drobo with 1-4 drives, and they got an even 15.5MB/s in each configuration.

If you recently unlocked your iPhone 3G and found after going through the whole WinPWN / Cydia process that T-Mobile Edge settings only work for Mail, but not for Google Maps, or other important services, you’re not alone. It’s also quite easy to fix, and continues to work with location services and other apps from the AppStore.

1) Install SSH

Assuming you have Cydia, you should install the OpenSSH package onto your iPhone. Just scroll down to OpenSSH, and hit install:

2) Download WinSCP, connect to iPhone

You can download the latest version of WinSCP and install it. Then it will prompt you to connect to your iPhone, which you should have running on your local Wifi. Note that the default username and password for the 3G iPhone will be root/alpine. If you don’t know the IP address you can either guess in the 192.168.0/1.* range, or just logon to your router and see.

3) Verify / Update Proxy.pac

Use the file browser to verify that a file called ./private/var/preferences/proxy.pac exists, and contains the following:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
if (isInNet(myIpAddress(), “10.0.0.0″, “255.0.0.0″))
return “PROXY 216.155.165.50:8080″;
else
return “DIRECT”;
}

You could just run these commands:

Kiwiii:/ root# find -name proxy.pac
./private/var/preferences/proxy.pac
Kiwiii:/ root# md5sum ./private/var/preferences/proxy.pac
8c9a4f4b1692cd3519ce7bcf180c66a4 ./private/var/preferences/proxy.pac
Kiwiii:/ root#

4) Verify preferences.plist

Next you need to hunt for /private/var/preferences/systemconfiguration/preferences.plist, and make sure it contains this section:

<key>Proxies</key>
<dict>
<key>ProxyAutoConfigEnable</key>
<integer>1</integer>
<key>ProxyAutoConfigURLString</key>
<string>file:///private/var/preferences/proxy.pac</string>
</dict>

You should put it on the same level and after the Interface key/dict pair for the network interface which contains your WAP settings, which for T-Mobile’s $5.99 T-Zones are just the WAP APN wap.voicestream.com with no username or password. Save the file, restart your iPhone, and you’re set!

Yep, it found me! Yay! Google maps is working!

This lovely error screen, a window randomly drawn multiple times across the screen, cloned to hell, is a reason why I dislike the Microsoft Windows XP operating system:

As abstract art, though, I think it might get decent reviews!