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

libsheap is a simple shared library to aid runtime heap analysis of an application. This library wraps malloc and free calls. The allocated data returned by the memory allocator is output as well as the amount of CPU cycles between calls to the true, underlying malloc implementation. If glibc’s malloc, ptmalloc2, is used the actual size, including the header malloc attaches to each returned chunk is reported. The size of a returned chunk is typically more than that of what the user requests, as the extra size can help reduce fragmentation.

Special thanks to Google and stackoverflow.com where I learned about wrapping routines in the GNU/Linux system. Much of the wrapping code was paraphrased from Checker’s answer to a post over at stackoverflow.com Thanks Checkers!

This project is released under the GNU LGPLv3 license. So take to your shears!

-Matt (enferex)

I would like to announce the release of a 757Labs tool, mp3nema.

MP3nema is a tool aimed at analyzing and capturing data that is hidden between frames in an MP3 file or stream, otherwise noted as “out of band” data. This utility also supports adding data between frames, and capturing streaming audio.

This tool is under the GNU GPLv3 license. So have at it!

Thanks to Tele, skhisma, and the rest of the labs!

-Matt (enferex)

I would like to announce the initial release of the 757Labs’ PDFResurrect tool:

PDFResurrect is a tool aimed at analyzing PDF documents. The PDF format allows for previous document changes to be retained in a more recent version of the document, thereby creating a running history of changes for the document. This tool attempts to extract all previous versions while also producing a summary of changes between versions. This tool can also “scrub” or write data over the original instances of PDF objects that have been modified or deleted, in an effort to disguise information from previous versions that might not be intended for anyone else to read.

This tool and accompanying whitepaper can be found over at the labs:
http://www.757labs.com/projects/pdfresurrect

Special thanks goes out to all the hr-geekers, and 757labs. Many were consulted on this and provided suggestions. including Tele, Derez, Remad, Count, Sunpuke. Special thanks to Brent, not really part of the 757 crew, but aided in proofreading the paper. Thanks Guys!

-Matt (enferex)

While it’s not a new tool, it’s new to me!This weekend I was cleaning up my office and decided it was time to throw out a bunch of old hard disks and two old PCs I have been hanging on to for no good reason. I’m a lazy, lazy man, and I knew there had to be a semi-automated way to wipe all these disks without a writing a foreach loop

Say hello to my new friend Darik’s Boot and Nuke.

I installed all the disks in the two PCs and booted them both off a USB key with DBAN. It detected all the disks in the machines and prompted me with my wipe options. The nice part about this utility is that it wipes all disks simultaneously. If you’re in a hurry you can type ‘autonuke’ at the boot menu and it will start wiping all disks automatically. Good if the feds are knocking on your door…

It took just under 36hrs for DBAN to finish wiping all the disks with a 5x wipe. It will never replace my thermite, but it’s incredibly handy.

Okay, sure I could have purchased the 50-Piece resistor assortment pack from Radio shack for $6, but why bother when you can goto China and eBay and for $25 get 2500 resistors.

I will never go wanting again.

This place might join my list of favorite China direct companies Sun-Pec.

My others include:

LED Shoppe

Cell Phone Shop

Who do you use for China-direct stuff other than China-Mart, err.. Wal-Mart.

One of my big tasks at work is rolling out a completely new platform for our internal production and development networks. The goal is to move all of the servers that support these networks to VMs running in Hyper-V under Win2k8 (Yes I’ve sold out my UNIX roots).

As all of our applications are web based, I’m also been given the task of setting up a new SQL 2k5 database cluster that will utilize a portion of the new SAN. This DB cluster will be an active-active setup with a total of three servers.

I setup a couple VMs on my notebook to experiment with different SQL disaster and Win2k8 server failover scenarios. As I wanted my test network to completely standalone on my notebook, I needed to find a way to bring my SAN home with me. I found a really neat app from Rocket Division that would allow me to create a virtual iSCSI SAN on the host OS share virtual disks to my VMs.

For this experiment the 30 day demo works just dandy. There is also a free personal edition but it is limited to only one host connection. The app has an incredibly small footprint and runs quite happily on my notebook with my other VMs. I only have 3GB of RAM on my c2d notebook and am able to run 4 Windows VMs, the iSCSI emulator, and iTunes with really decent speeds.

For my disks, I choose to creates virtual image files on your host PC must like VMware. I’ve never needed more than about 1GB of storage for per LUN for my testing, but it will go all the way up to a terabyte. The options to use physical disks, RAID1 of image files, and snapshots makes for a pretty feature rich test environment.

There is an alternative iSCSI target application called WinTarget that’s worth checking out. I really dig Starwind because of it’s incredible ease of use and small footprint.

toxicboy has recently accepted Make magazine as his lord and savior and has been feeding me some neat project ideas. One of the more interesting items he’s passed along was the Arduino Diecimila Plus USB board. For the low price of $34.99 it’s worth checking out.

I’ve had dreams of building my own UAV to spy on my neighbors pets and thought this little guy would be a great addition to my project. As chance would have it, Hack A Day
has a link to an Arduino powered blimp.

I did some searching for other UAV projects that use the board I found a sub built by University of Ottawa. The ARISE website has some details and an incredibly boring video of their project. Even the catchy music can’t make that video interesting.

I’ve discovered a neat SSH trick / timesaver. You can create per-user ssh configuration files – ~/.ssh/config – which can contain host aliases.

For example, I SSH to ‘host.long.stupid.domain.com’ a lot. I can shorten this by putting:

Host myserv
HostName host.long.stupid.domain.com
User myDomainUser

into the configuration file. Now, I can do:

user:~>ssh myserv

and ssh will effectively run:

ssh myDomainUser@host.long.stupid.domain.com’

without having to type it all. Combine that with ssh keypairs (~/.ssh/authorized_keys2), and you can save a serious amount of typing!