airpush spamming my android phone

I’ve started getting these spammy notifications to my notification bar (where else? :)). They appeared after I installed and updated several apps, but for the life of me, I could not remember which ones, since the notifications didn’t appear till a day later.

It turned out to be spams from a company called xapush.com. Googling found lots of complaints, and a possible solution. There is an app in the Market, called xapush detector. So I installed that app, and it told me there are two apps that is using xapush.

1. Overclock Widget – org.freecoder.widgets.overclock
2. First Aid – com.usa.health.ifitness.firstaid

Hmm, I don’t mind ads supporting free code, but this is over stepping the boundary. Ahhh, it turns out there is a new option in Advanced Settings for Overclock Widget, where you can turn off airpush. Yay!

Using any NAS as Time Machine

Yes, there are many posts on the web about this.  All the one my google-fu found has manual steps to set one up.  As an engineer, I like to automate things, why do the same steps over and over when you can write a script to package it all up for you?

So here is a shell script to setup sparsebundle ready for you to copy to your NAS and begin using as your Time Machine backup.  Save it to a file, I called mine: create-TimeMachine-bundle.sh.

Then run it with the size that you want to create for your backup.

E.g.  create-TimeMachine-bundle.sh 500g

will create a sparsebundle with size of 500GB.


#!/bin/bash

###################################################################################
# NOTE: even if you connect over WLAN, you MUST use en0 (ethernet) MAC address for
# TimeMachine sparsebundle!!!!

INTERFACE=en0
MACHINENAME=`uname -n | cut -d '.' -f 1,1`

if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
echo "Usage: $0 SIZE"
echo " Where SIZE is total size (k|m|g|t) allowed for TimeMachine backup usage on NAS."
exit 1
fi
SIZE=$1

MAC_ADDRESS=`ifconfig ${INTERFACE}|grep 'ether '|awk '{print $2;}'|sed 's/://g'`

hdiutil create -verbose -type SPARSEBUNDLE -size $SIZE -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -nospotlight -imagekey sparse-band-size=262144 -volname "${MACHINENAME} Backups" ${MACHINENAME}_${MAC_ADDRESS}

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

ReadyNAS PSU replacement

I had a heart stopping moment today. My SO told me that she “smelled” something funny in my office. I went in there and sure enough, smelled like burnt plastic…. I thought no problem, I have backups…. on my NAS’es (two of them).

Heh! Murphy’s Law and all that. One of them (ReadyNAS NV+) PSU was the source of the burnt plastic smell, ah fresh odor of melted circuits. The other one had (thankfully) shutdown because of the heat.

The ReadyNAS is my main NAS (4x2TB), the other one (4x1TB) is my media server, stuffs that I don’t mind losing because they are copied from the ReadyNAS.   Yes, in another word, bad backup scheme.  There is no backup for the ReadyNAS.  I’ll fix that soon enough now.

Anyway, firing up my laptop, manually set IP, DNS, etc. since my server NFS mounted most everything on the ReadyNAS…  google, google and ah ha!  Reports of failed PSU in ReadyNAS NV and NV+.  I am hoping that it’s just the PSU and nothing the main board.

http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13492

Took my ReadyNAS apart, sniff test (smell around the various pieces) to isolate where it is coming from.   Seem to be the PSU.  Got dressed, run to Central Computer near by.  It’s closed, crap!  Head to Frys in Santa Clara…. it’s already 8:20pm on a Tuesday eve…. In luck!  Frys is still open.  Run to the parts aisle, lots of options, big PSU (500W, 650W, 1000W, 1400w….) I don’t need monster PSU, I just need something small and around 220W as that is the original NV+ PSU.

Saw a microATX PSU from Coolmax (300W) CM-300.  Look small, hope it’ll fit in the case.  Only 26 bucks (29.22 w/tax).  Grabbed it, run home.  Followed the wiki above to get the two yellow cables onto the connector.  Lucky for me, the molex connector already has two empty holes where the two yellow cables has to be inserted.  So I just had to find the yellow cables from one of the other connectors.  After some fiddling, got it.   Eventhough its a microATX PSU, it is still too big for the ReadyNAS, won’t fit in the bottom tray (arg!).  Oh well, thread the power cable through the original 3 prong power hole, plug the molex onto the board.

Leaving everything open, I plug the power cord in, then into the AC receptacle and press the power button on the ReadyNAS….. and IT TURNED ON!  Wheeee!  The LCD say “Booting up…. please wait.”   Pulled the plug, now I can put everything back in, put the screws on.  Taped the hole in the bottom tray since the new PSU is going to be sitting outside and I want things airtight for cooling.

My ReadyNAS is now going through its fsck, going to be a loooong time w/6.5TB fs.   But at least I am now back in business.

P.S. Actually, the dead PSU did cause screwed up fs.  I had to manually ssh into my ReadyNAS (thank god I had set up a root ssh login) and fix the MBR on drive 4 (/dev/hdi).  Turns out the simplest way was:

# dd if=/dev/hdg of=/dev/hdi bs=512 count=1

 

GoDaddy Sucks!

Yes, it’s sheer force of habit that I stuck w/GoDaddy after moving away from Network Solutions (another sucky registrar, stay away from them).

As time goes on, I’ve discovered that GoDaddy reliability (ha!) has gone way down, customer service sucks (what customer service?).  For the second time in less than two weeks, my VPS at GoDaddy mysteriously died (unreachable web sites, can’t ssh in, etc.) and it has been running fine for a year now.  GoDaddy support would only said that they found some issues and has “fixed” it without telling me what it was.

Requesting power cycle of the VPS take 90+ minutes!!!! holy jeeze!  actually it is 93 minutes now and I still can’t ssh in, web sites on VPS is still down.

I am moving everything, domains, VPS, sites, to another registrar.  I am tired of this crap.

 

Android tablets

I’ve been wanting (drooling) over Android tablets for awhile now.  Almost bought one several time over Christmas holiday, but managed to stop myself in time.  Knowing that new (dual core Tegra and Android 3.0) things was coming help convinced me to wait for things to settle down before diving in.

In the meantime, I’ve been educating myself as much as possible about Android, phones and tablets.  I did exchanged my two plus years old RIM Blackberry for a Droid 2 Global.  That helped me get familiar with Android, its Markets, apps, rooting, etc 🙂  It took some getting used to with the way Android apps and phone work.  I’ve been so used to my Berry (it’s perfect for email, text) that I almost swap my Droid phone back for the Berry!!!!  I’ll have to say that RIM has done a great job with making their phones work seamlessly in the mobile email environment.  It was painless to get mail from my various accounts – Gmail, Yahoo, IMAPS hosted on my personal server at home, etc.  Also love the way I can customize how I get notified (alerts) when different type of email come in.  Oh my god!  The way I can customize it is just so awesome and easy to setup and use!

Anyway, sorry, back to Android tablets.  I almost bought the Velocity Cruz (T103, T105, T301 and Cruz Reader) several times, and glad I did not.  Stay away from the Cruz and any other tablets that are not based on ARM chips.  The Cruz tablets are based on MIPS architecture and you will have a hard time finding community support.  There are some hacking on the Cruz, but most of the Android hacking community is focused on ARMs and a minority on x86.

This is because Android was first released for the ARM architecture, with the development and emulation done on x86 (build and toolchains were done on Ubuntu x86 Linux at Google).  So there are lots of supports and knowledge out there for those two architecture.

Sooooo…. there was a sale for the Viewsonic G Tablet, and it was at the right time (weak moment) and I bought one.  Heh.  Anyway, so far I am happy with it, only had it for 4 days.  Got an AOSP 2.3.4 build running on it.  I’ve pulled down CM source repo and am going to build my own.

More to post soon.