CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

update 28.6.2009 :this does not work anymore with the 3.0 firmware and an iPhone. It still works on my iPod touch though.

I subscribe to many video podcasts and most of the time I watch them, but sometimes I want to do something else like playing a game while just listening to the audio of a news video podcast. The problem is that video playback stops when you close the videoplayer, whereas audio continues to play in the backgroud if you run another app. After the latest software upgrade even if you selected a video podcast from the audio library it would launch into the videoplayer, which is a good thing most of the time.

To just get the audio of a video, start playing the video –> close the player(the video stops) –> double click the home button so the small media controll buttons come up and hit play –> the audio of the video is still in the audio que and will start playing for your enjoyment

I recently discovered that the apple remote app is capable of waking up a computer from sleep if it has wake on lan enabled, and it can only be woken up from sleep mode, not if the machine is entirely turned off. So if you keep your media server on all the time this is a handy way to wake it up without paying for one of the numerous wake on lan apps in the app store.

This error showed up when a friend asked me to fix this 2 TB Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition Drive. The drive can not be mounted, repaired or verified.

invalid BS_jmpBoot error

Long story short there is no way to simply fix this error. You can try with TestDisk but I had no luck with it. Don’t jump out of the window just yet since your data is most likely still there. Only the partition table on the drive is damaged and all your data is still in place. Any Data Recovery tool will be able to get your data out of that damaged partition.

If this happend to you consider reading this link

A sad but typical story about why one needs to use backups when dealing with computers

Last Night a friend of mine gave me his almost full 2 TB Western Digital Studio Edition that has a 2 drive RAID 0/1 built in. He told me that he used it with his mac and everything worked just fine. When he connected it to his PC and tried to move some data to the drive it stoped working, which is no surprise since the drive is formated as HSF+ in a RAID 0 configuration. Windows can not handle HFS and somehow managed to serverly damage the pratition table on the drive. After using all tools known to me such as TestDisk, Mac OS X disc utility and Ubuntus partition manager i gave it up as damaged beyond repair. The next step will be to use a data recovery tool to pull out the data, that is still intact on the drive, but all of these programs cost at least 100$. In addition we have to finde 2 Terabytes of free space to recover the data to which also will not come cheap.

Since he used the drive in a RAID 0 mode there was no backup anyway but the very same thing could have happened if it was set up as a RAID 1.

When putting together my home server setup I was considering using one of these RAID drives vs. two stand alone drives and I am glad I chose the two single drives.

Pro RAID

• the consumer versions like the western digital ones are really easy to set up
• good protection from hardware failure
• automatic data restoring
• only Raid 1 will give you some sort of backup
• RAID 0 gives you speed gains
• usually the read feature is a bit more costly than two stand alone drives

Contra RAID

• no protection from software errors
• if the RAID it self craps out on you there is very little chance on restoring things
• if you delete stuff it is gone on both RAID discs instantly
• if the partition is damaged both drives are affected
• the physical proximity of these raid drives makes it more likely to die together in case of power surge for example
• not very flexible – I can always grab one of my two storage drives and go to a friends house to get some data and when I get back home it just syncs to the other drive and everything is fine unless the unlikely case of both drives die at the same time

I do not recommend a single RAID 0,1 or 5 setup as a sufficient backup solution. Backup often, on different devices in different locations!!

today I published my first air application, called iSurveill. A simple webcam surveillance application that takes snapshots with a webcam and saves them to the computer. It’s not very sufisticated but as a first try it will do. The application is now available on my website http://www.chrillo.info/isurveill/ and hopefully it will soon be available in the adobe air market place.

BACK UP OFTEN!!!!

Now that I have my mac mini set up as my home server I also wanted to backup its system drive to preserve all the configuration. I have an Airport extreme basestation that has a 500GB hard drive hooked up to it. I have used it to back up my mac book pro over the air and it worked just fine. When I tried to select it as the backup drive for my mac mini the time machine preference pane would crash every time. So I played arround with it and it appears that time machine is now able to backup to any afp:// file server. It is important that you mount it using the following instructions and not just click on it in the finder. It appears that apple does something differently when using the shares in finder.

Setting up time machine with a remote destination

This is done by pressing command + K in finder and using OS X built in ability to connect to different file servers

connect to server

You might get prompted for user name and password. Once connected the afp source shows up in your finder.

afp source

In my case that is the airport extreme base station called chrillo.Airport with the hard drive. This could also be another mac. Now head over to your time machine preferences and the click the change drive button.

remote time machine backup

As you can see it shows up with its Ip address. In my case I used the internal Lan IP

In Mac OS X when you close the window of an application the app usually keeps running in the dock. Wheter this is a good thing or not is totally different story, but for apps like mail and ical it certainly is since I want my mail app to keep checking for new mail without the window cluttering up my screen. So what if I want to add such behaviour to an Adobe Air Application.

 	var appIsPersistant:Boolean=false
 	var app=NativeApplication.nativeApplication
 	var window=stage.nativeWindow;

public function set appPersistant(b:Boolean):void{ // adding a simple property to your app b:Boolean whether its stays on or not
 appIsPersistant=b
 	if(b){
 		if(app!=null){
 			app.autoExit=false // preventing the app to exit if all windwows are closed
 			window.addEventListener(Event.CLOSING,hideWindow) // listening for the closing event of the main window
 			app.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE,initWindow) // listening for the invoke event if the user clicks on the dock icon
 			app.addEventListener(Event.EXITING,appClose) // listening if the app should be terminated, to prevent the hiding of the window and allow termination
 		}
 	}else{
 		if(app!=null){
 		app.autoExit=true // if app is not persistant the app can close just as usual
 		}
 	}
 }
 public function appClose(e:Event):void{
 	window.removeEventListener(Event.CLOSING,hideWindow) // if the app should terminate with command + Q we have to remove the listener for the Closing event. Otherwise only the window will close but the app will not terminate
 }
 public function hideWindow(e:Event):void{
 	if(window.visible){ // if the window is visible the event behaviour is canceld and the window is hidden
 		e.preventDefault()
 		window.visible=false
 	}
 }
 function initWindow(e:Event=null):void{
 	window.activate() // if the user clicks on the dock icon the window commes back up
 }
 public function get appPersistant():Boolean{
 	return appIsPersistant // just the getter for the appPersistant propery
 }

by adding these few methods your app will exit just fine with command + Q but if you click the close button only the window will close and the app keeps running and comes back up if you click the dock icon

Finally Apple released an update to the mac mini product line. I finally got mine and its already up and running. I set it up to be my HTPC, file server and web server. I want to go through each of these three topics and describe the configuration I used.

Hardware:

The mac mini is way too expensive for the hardware you get. I was really disappointed at first because they even raised the price from 439?(with student discount) t0 526?. For 550 euros I could get twice as much ram and way more disk space, eSata, blueray and hdmi output easily with a linux or windows machine. BUT OS X makes it still worth the money FOR ME. I do not agree with the back and forth disccussion about macs vs. pcs. A computer is a TOOL, like a car is for transportation. There is diffrent cars with different uses and different prices. Some cars are easy to drive some require a skilled driver… Everybody has to decide for himself if its worth the money and if it will do what you want it do in the way you want it to be done. Be glad there is a choice!

1 mac mini 3/2009, 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM

mac mini

Mac Mini – The mean reasons I chose the mac mini over other more powerful computer were that its really small and really really quite. The mini is inaudible and I really hated the constant buzz from my old server, even though I already spent way to much money on expensive CPU coolers. The power consumption is also quite low and since the server will be always on its a big plus. The display output options are sufficient. I use the included mini DVI to DVI adapter and connect it to an DVI to HDMI cable. As soon as reasonably priced mini display port to hdmi adapters hit the market I will change to that. I like the built in SPIDIF audio connectors and the built in Firewire 800 port. In combination witth the 2 FW800 enabled drives it is really faster than a USB 2.0 solution and not much more expensive.

2 Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1 TB

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition – Even though I had some problems with this type of hard drive before I chose them because of their low price and their ability to shut down when not in use. For a HTPC noise is a key factor. The new drives are really quiet in the first place but if the server or just the drives are not in use they turn off and are therefor completly silent. The only downturn to this is that when you want to access the drives it takes a couple of seconds to wake up from sleep but that is not a realy problem. The drives come with a 5 year warranty. Since I already experienced the rather smooth and fast exchange process of such a drive I do not expect any major worries in the next 5 years( In 5 years I hope we will be carrying Terrabytes on our thumb drives).

read more

actionscript 3 does not nativly support a onReleaseOutside Event. When creating things like a scrollBar or other UI elements this can be quite annoying.

Here is a simple work around that uses a simple movieClip as a button:

import flash.display.MovieClip
 import flash.events.*

var myBtn:MovieClip=new MovieClip()
 myBtn.graphics.beginFill(0x003366,1)
 myBtn.graphics.drawRect(0,0,50,50)
 addChild(myBtn)
 myBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN,downHandler)

function downHandler(event:MouseEvent):void{
 stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP,upHandler)
 trace("mouse went down")
 }
 function upHandler(e:MouseEvent):void{
 if(e.target==stage){ // this checks to see if the event is coming from the stage or not
 stage.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP,upHandler)
 trace("mouse went up outside")
 }else{
 trace("mouse went up")
 }
 }

pretty simple

heres the fla for download

I recently found a weird file in my trash that looked like this:

weird file in trash

It is impossible to delete the file or rename it. secure emptying the trash won’t solve the problem either. if I click on “get info” it disappears. I found the following thread, which provides a good solution to the problem. And don’t worry it is not a virus

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5882792#5882792