HR Geeks

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.

The local Hampton Roads Ruby/Cocoa Users Groups / Ken Collins is throwing an event friends, and it looks like it’s going to be good!

“On November 5th, 2009 Hampton Roads’ premier learning and network event for software developers, interactive agencies, and technology entrepreneurs will be held at Grow Interactive, Norfolk.”

Speakers:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
by Andy Hunt
Author & Co-Founder Pragmatic Bookshelf

The Joy of Ruby
Clinton R. Nixon
Development Director at Viget Labs

iPhone Development: Touching Cocoa
Jamie Pinkham
Software Engineer at Mobelux

Sounds like a great event. It’s free, seating limited to 50. RSVP today!!

More information at www.757studio.org

I bought a 1TB Apple Time Capsule today. I plan on replacing my Linksys WRT54G and a Dell Linux Samba server I have.

As usual, Apple nails the out-of-box experience. Pop the CD in, run the utility, follow the directions presented, and the Time Capsule was up and running in about 5 minutes (3 of which were spent rearranging cables to accommodate the new machine).

The utility software picked up the un-configured Time Capsule and walked me through the configuration in just a few simple steps. After confirming that my cable modem used DHCP, entering a password for disk access, and entering a WPA2 password, everything was up and online.A nice little touch, the utility software that configured the Time Capsule’s wireless network automatically reconfigured my Airport card to connect to the WPA2 secured 802.11N network on the Time Capsule.

After getting online, I opened up the Time Machine configuration setting pane, selected ‘Change Disk’, picked the Time Capsule out of the list, and that was it – it’s now doing DHCP, Wifi, NAS, TimeMachine hosting (for both Macbooks), and routing/NAT’ing my cable modem, with a grand total of 5 minutes of configuration and maybe half a dozen clicks. Fairly impressive!

Here’s a cool tool for everybody using OS X that needs to work with files on other UNIXy machines. It’s called ‘MacFUSE‘, and is based on the work done for the Linux FUSE user-space file system driver. Basically, it provides a framework for userspace file system drivers in OS X, using a plugin style architecture. There are quite a few plugins available already, but the most useful by far is ’sshfs’. The sshfs plugin uses the MacFUSE system to provide OS X system mounts to remote file systems using ssh/scp. Once you install it, and give it connection details, the remote filesystem shows up just like any other SMB / network share mount in Finder. Drag / drop works, assuming you have permissions on the remote side to create/modify files. Opening files, mime detection, etc all appear to work flawlessly. It also hasn’t crashed or locked my mac up yet (I’ve been using it for a few hours with TextMate, to do remote editing without getting frustrated by Terminal.app).

MacFUSE Site – http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

SSHfs installer | read_me (requires MacFUSE first)