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.

Norfolk Technical Center is competing in this year’s US FIRST Robotics Challenge. A few HRGeeks members have been mentoring the students – assisting with software design / development, networking, and robot construction and electrical connections.
After 5 long weeks, the robot is moving under it’s own power, being remotely driven via joystick.

NTC FIRST Team’s Robot takes it’s ‘first’ steps! from HR Geeks on Vimeo.

Click through for a higher resolution view of the video.

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

In addition to his previously mentioned 2600 Magazine publication, Matt has been published in the (arguably more prestigious) Dr. Dobb’s Journal. You can find his article, detailing a multi-threaded PRNG implementation, here.

Congrats!

Setting up a new workstation with Ubuntu and Firefox to use a DoD CAC is suprisingly easy.

These instructions work for Ubuntu 8.10 on my hardware.  My card reader is built into a USB Dell Keyboard.  It takes only a couple of steps to enable it for use in Firefox.

1. Install libccid (which requires pcscd as a dependency)
2. Install coolkey
3. Tell Firefox to use coolkey’s pkcs11 library
4. Profit!

To cover these steps in more detail:
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After the recent Apple update, which included ’security fixes’ for Safari, Little Snitch popped up a warning message when I attempted to visit my banks website.  A process called ocspd wanted to visit “EVSecure-ocsp.verisign.com”.  Needless to say, I was instantly curious as to what in the world ocspd was, and why it was trying to talk to Verisign when I was visiting my banks webpage.

It turns out, ocspd is part of Apples new ’safe surfing’ update to Safari.  Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is the functional replacement for the old school PKI Certificate Revocation List (CRL).  It allows the Certificate Authority (CA) (in this case, Verisign) who signed the websites certificate, to authenticate the presented certificate in real time.  This is a much more ‘elegant’ solution than the old, crummy CRL, which had to be manually updated (or pushed down with OS patches, etc) and did not allow certificates to be rejected in anywhere near realtime if they were deemed fradulent.

Despite being a more elegant solution, it also creates a number of new problems.  

First, it places a big new load CAs, who went from being trusted certificate issuers to being real time certificate verifiers.

Secondly (and more importantly), it seriously breaches the privacy of every user using the service.

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I’ve been looking around at what some new storage would cost me – looking for a few TB of space to cover all of my digital media, as well as to allow for easy growth in the future.  As part of this, I spent some time figuring out what is currently most cost effective, from a dollars-per-gigabyte perspective.  This isn’t always obvious, as there are a range of drive sizes, and variations within each size between different manufacturers.  

This stuff changes pretty substantially year to year, so it’s worthwhile to go back and see exactly where the sweet spot is.  Today, from a cost-per-gig standpoint, the Seagate 1.5TB and the Samsung 1TB discs barely nudge ahead, coming in at a mere $0.12/GB.

 Here’s a quick break down of that statistical information, as of October 21, 2008:

(edit: fixed messed up pricing for Samsung disks).

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