I finally upgraded my old iPhone 3GS to iOS4, but it wasn’t a smooth process. It seems O2 have a problem with their provisioning process because, after the upgrade, all of the carrier settings had disappeared. There was no way to setup Visual Voicemail in the menu and no internet services worked when I wasn’t on wifi.

Every time the phone was plugged into the computer iTunes would say that there was an update for the carrier settings, but it never applied and the menu entries remained blank. O2 support were only slightly helpful, taking me through the settings which appear on their website but not fixing the Visual Voicemail issues or the prompt in iTunes.

There are threads on the O2 site here and here and a useful one on AVForums which gives the fix.

Unfortunately the fix is to completely reset the iPhone and start from scratch. Restoring from a backup simply brings the old (broken) settings back. I couldn’t find a way to only synchronise contacts back to the phone, though iTunes suggests it is possible.

Follow these steps to repair it:

1. erase the phone from the menu: Settings -> General -> Reset -> Erase All Content and Settings
2. connect the phone to iTunes and restore iOS4
3. set the device up as a new phone, not from a backup!

Browsing through the carrier settings menu should now show the correct values for APN (idata.o2.co.uk). Importantly, the Visual Voicemail settings should also be in the menu.

Now to setup all my apps, account sand contacts from scratch..

The other day I pushed a new version of Net::LibNIDS to CPAN. It interfaces with the C library libnids in order to provide TCP stream reassembly and returns the data to your Perl callback.
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Whilst looking for some music to use as jingles/beds for a charity radio project I assist I found FreeNotesMusic. From a quick listen there are some fantastic tracks, really nice composition and production.

Big thanks go to Simon from the company who responded to my queries very quickly.

Anybody who has used command-line systems for a serious amount of time will love grep. But today I stumbled across ack, which (for many things) is better than grep and a whole lot nicer to use.

The best bit? It’s pure Perl, therefore also uses real Perl regular expressions. Yes, there might be grep --perl-regexp, but nobody bothers compiling that in. Plus ack has some other neat features.

See more at the ack website.

My first bunch of boards arrived back from BatchPCB and I’m really impressed.  Great printing for the silkscreen and a really professional looking product.  One of the boards I ordered was a breakout board for the SMD PIC 18F2321, the first surface mount board I have tried.
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During a recent conversation with another Dave he pointed me at the Facebook group No, you’re not a photographer, you just own a camera.  Whilst I don’t agree with most of the comments on there (they are generally rude and unhelpful) it does raise an interesting point: How high the bar should be set for whether you are really a photographer or not?
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It is sometimes useful to limit the running time of a process, either to stop it from using up all resources or to make sure nightly cron jobs don’t continue into working hours.

I needed this for rsync, to let a remote backup server slowly catch up if large amounts of data were added to the live server during the day. A useful post on the rsync mailing list discusses an rsync patch but also the timeout command.

After installing (the Debian package is simply timeout) it is as easy as running with the number of seconds to run for:

It is also possible to specify the signal which will be sent to a program, which is useful if you do not want to simply send SIGKILL. I used SIGHUP in the hope that rsync would have a chance to exit gracefully:

A full list of signals and their numeric values can be found in man 1 kill.

A wrapper script is also available from Johannes Buchner.

This post looks at what is needed to get a serial connectiong working with BoostC using a PIC with a hardware USART. A later post will cover the BoostC software implementation, when I have finished figuring it out.

By the end of this post there will be a PIC uC talking to Hyperterminal on the PC using less than 50 lines of code.
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I noticed tonight that my Cisco 837 was using hard-coded DNS servers which were no longer valid, hence breaking my internets. In order to keep them updated automatically, I added the following to the appropriate dialer configuration (interface Dialer0 on an 8xx):

This causes the router to request DNS server addresses when the PPP session is negotiated (when it “dials up” to ADSL).

After reconnecting the PPP session (either reload or shutdown the interface and then bring it back) it is possible to check that DNS servers have been obtained using sh host:

If the router is running a DNS server it is possible to direct DHCP clients at the router IP instead, forcing them to use these same settings.

A very short note to say that I have (finally) published my Eagle components library on this site. Right now it doesn’t contain many parts, but I will add to it as I make more boards.