Bits on Bytes bits on solaris, programming, and all things tech

If you haven’t heard, ACU just announced that all incoming freshmen will receive an iPhone or iPod Touch - the details aren’t hammered out yet - Engadget has even picked it up. There has been a huge movement at ACU pushing this for quite a while and has been fueled even more by a student/faculty/staff created video called Connected. So being the first school in the nation to do this it’s pretty big, which really puts the pressure on us to deliver the applications necessary to utilize these devices in a learning environment.

For the past couple months we’ve been ramping up iPhone development; you can see most of what has already been developed at acu.mobi (best viewed in Safari as it’s designed for the iPhone). NOTE: This is still considered a development site and not production ready. There is a protected section (requires and ACU login id) which allows us to display data customized for the user viewing the site and a demo of what you might see if you were logged in.

A lot of the content on acu.mobi is just links to external apps (like Google Docs, Facebook, etc.) that are customized for the iPhone but there are a few that we’ve developed specifically for the university environment. For example, I created an application that allows professors to take attendance in class from their iPhone. You can see it in the demo section of acu.mobi under My Classes (professor) -> Roster. It allows the professor to easily select which students are Present, Tardy, Absent, or Excused as well as automatically send an email to those students notifying them of their status. When I was a student I would have loved this because often I was marked absent when I really wasn’t and so had no way of knowing I needed to ask the professor about it.

There are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone. I won’t go into all of them but the biggest is usability. Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface. Thanks to all the classes on usability and design standards with Dr. Susan Lewis in the JMC department that I thought I’d never need, I’m able to (hopefully) design with usability in mind.

Well this is just the beginning so I’ll try to keep updating this as iPhone development starts to become more and more a top priority. Hopefully we’ll make some pretty cool apps, both general purpose and for higher education.

I love it when a site that I frequent displays an error message that is actually worth reading. I’ve seen some good ones on digg.com but the one that just caught my attention was at TPB.

Eating waffles, be right back. We need some more power since we’ve been growing lately, so we’re doing additional upgrades right now. Sorry for the waiting period!

That was it. No style or images or anything else. In fact, if you view the source there’s not even an html structure. Just that sentence.

I love it.

Well I finished the Crysis demo and lets just say it’s feaking awesome. It plays ok on my current system with all the settings turned to low, but it’s definitely cause for an upgrade.

What I liked most was that there was so many ways you can accomplish a particular objective. If sneaking in to a compound from one direction doesn’t provide enough cover, just try it from another angle; or use strength mode and jump right over everyone. The game allows you to follow the story line but in your very own way.

Almost there: November 16.

So it’s National Blog Posting Month and I guess I’m gonna give it a shot. Here’s to day 1!

If you feel like participating and you’re like-minded, join the Solaris NaBloPoMo group. http://nablopomo.ning.com/group/solaris

Disable

# /usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d

Enable

# /usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -e

“To create an ISO image in OS X, use Disk Utility to burn a new image choosing CD/DVD Master as the Image Format. That creates an image with the cdr extension. Just rename the cdr file extension to iso and there you have it!”

“If you already have a DMG and want to convert it to an ISO, you can use hdiutil to do so:”

$ hdiutil convert discimage.dmg -format UDTO -o output.iso

Found it here.

First map the .iso file to a device:

# lofiadm -a /path/to/image.iso /dev/lofi/1

Note: You can mount more images by incrementing the lofi device number (/dev/lofi/2).

Now just mount it like a file system:

# mount -o ro -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt/image

The ISO file should now be mounted at /mnt/image

Spent forever looking for this:

# /var/sadm/prod/entsys/SUNWentsys4/uninstall


So I know there is ample documentation on this in the Sun docs but if you’ve ever tried to read Sun docs then you know that someone giving an example is much easier to understand. The goal will be to create a container in the fewest number of steps. This should work on any release of Solaris 10 but I will be using u3. Read the rest of this entry »

In this scenario I am using a fresh install of Solaris 10 u3. There are two network interfaces configured: vfe0 is the “external” interface as it connects directly to the cable modem and gets it’s IP via DHCP; rtls0 is the “internal” interface as it connects to a local network switch along with other computers on the network. Use routeadm to enable IP Forwarding & IP Routing at the system level: Read the rest of this entry »