HR Geeks

This was a talk I gave at the HRGeeks ][ meeting, Thursday. You can grab the PDF [4.1MB] as well.

Gather round ye nerds
Coasters, Coupons, were Conversed
Many attended

So, last night produced quite a reasonable turnout, however not prime in magnitude. As in the past, I’ll try to recall the attendance: Jody, BSD Bandit, Sunpuke, Tele, Mark G, TJ, Andrew, Dave, Bill, and myself (enferex). This is not a static association of people to chairs (e.g. order), as we are human and exemplify dynamic properties. Thus, people move around and change sitting order. Phrase of the evening “grind-core.”

-Matt (enferex)

I learned something interesting today – you can get access to a bunch of logs from your iPhone, without jailbreaking it!  There are number of SQLite databases stored in
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
on your OS X machine that the iPhone syncs with.
The filenames are SHA1 sums of their location on the iPhone [src]. Through trial and error, I’ve figured out the following files that should be common to every iPhone:

992df473bbb9e132f4b3b6e4d33f72171e97bc7a.mddata Voicemail list
ff1324e6b949111b2fb449ecddb50c89c3699a78.mddata Call log
3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata SMS Log
740b7eaf93d6ea5d305e88bb349c8e9643f48c3b.mddata Notes database
31bb7ba8914766d4ba40d6dfb6113c8b614be442.mddata Contact List

The schema for most of these can be found here: http://damon.durandfamily.org/archives/000487.html (although he references their on-phone location, and talks about jailbroken phones, these SQLite DB files are accessible on your desktop machine, and are updated in place every time you sync your phone.

In addition to these, a few interesting DBs I found that are specific to apps installed on my phone are:
6639cb6a02f32e0203851f25465ffb89ca8ae3fa.mddata Facebook friends list
970922f2258c5a5a6d449f85b186315a1b9614e9.mddata Flightstats
5ad81c93601ac423bc635c7936963ae13177147b.mddata Daily Burn food log


Each of these database can be accessed via the sqlite3 command line tool for interactive use. For bulk processing and playing with stuff in a spreadsheet or other DB, you can dump whole tables to CSV easily with sqlite3
sqlite3 -csv -separator , 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata "select * from message" > smshistory.csv
you can dump your SMS history to a CSV file.

I’m writing a few scripts to generate ‘top talkers’ and some other statistics, and will post those later.