Archive for April, 2010

NOTE: This article does not teaches how to Jailbreak your iPhone nor how to install Cydia an its apps. There are plenty of info on that out there. Please do not insist.

NOTE: As pointed by Robert, the amount of I/O generated by the swapfile may greatly decrease the iPhone’s SSD lifetime since is designed to be more at rest.

After buying an iPhone 2G from a friend I just couldn’t resists and started hacking all that I could. Put on the latest firmware by the time (3.1.3) and Jailbroke it, put on Saurik‘s Cycorder via Cydia (apt^w repository) (also from Saurik) in order to gain movie recording ability but didn’t went any further than that.

Then, as I don’t have a 3G/EDGE plan on my carrier, I decided only to access internet over WiFI but even scrambling APN credentials my little buddy kept connecting to my carrier EDGE network (and thus spending my money on high taxes).

After reading a while I discovered that SBSSettings would give me the option to control EDGE status (enabled/disabled) instead of just jamming credentials (that were being ignored by the carrier anyway). Installed and it just worked like a charm…. BUT… I’ve noticed that my Spingboard page transitions became a little hangy and apps opening and closing started to take much longer than it usual. From SBSSettings pane, I constantly see my memory running out due to iPhone’s lack of memory and lots of apps in background struggling for resources.

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I administrate several servers and SSH password management were a big issue until I changed all my servers logins to use private keys. Things got really nicer when I discovered SSH aliases.

Some of my clients are hosted on shared hostings and some of them doesn’t allow password-less authentication “in behalf of my security”. Well, I can’t really afford opening my password manager, locating it and then copying and pasting back to my terminal. Too much time spent.

I have heard about expect long ago but never quite stopped to look at it since I never really had that need but in this case it came quite handy. Hop in aboard the new less typing world!
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Error handling and reporting was always a thing that I knew I wasn’t doing it right. Leaded by PHP’s on-the-fly type casting I used to make functions just return false or null but that was not right because I was hurting the return-type integrity of them.
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