A while back I posted a guide showing how to get the BBC iPlayer to work abroad, but recently, I wanted to try to get the desktop application to work, so that I could watch things offline. However, I soon realised that the BBC's terms and conditions forbids the downloading of programs outside of the UK.

I did however manage to get this to work, without breaching the terms and conditions. This is how:

Follow the guide mentioned above to get the BBC iPlayer website to work. Then head over to the iPlayer Desktop download page, this will only allow you to download the application if you are in the UK, or according to the BBC T&Cs, your IP address must be located in the UK, which, thanks to our SSH Tunnel, is.

Install the app (needs Adobe Air installed), which, if you are not using the SSH tunnel using IE, will fail to let you download things! Doh!

However, as you might have guessed, if you alter your internet options in Internet Explorer to use localhost and port 1080 (using ONLY the Socks proxy), in turn, Adobe Air will use these settings, and in turn, so will the BBC iPlayer desktop app. And of course, as the app is tunnelling to your UK proxy, you are downloading the stuff in the UK. :)

Get in touch if you want to get a UK proxy account (at a reasonable rate).

Some error in the Password Manger add-on for Firefox means that everytime the browser opens, it gives the annoying message that the add-on cannot be registered with Chrome.

The solution is to edit one of the files in the add-on, to support this higher version of Firefox.

I have done this fix, and have provided the file to download here, as although there was an abundance of instructions on how to fix it, no-one seems to have provided the file anywhere!

Hope this helps someone out.

I recently had the opportunity to test out an iPhone 3G, I wanted to see if I could get it to perform the same functions as my current phone - Nokia N95:

• Work with Three Ireland SIM card


• MMS/SMS/Email Messages Etc.


• Internet/Broadband/3G connection/tethering

The answer:YES, but I had to jailbreak it and unlock it in the following way.

Step 1 - Jailbreak

Using the instructions from this site I used the blackra1n application to jailbreak the iPhone, this was surprisingly easy. The reason the phone needs to be jailbroken, is so that it can install an application that allows the SIM lock to be removed (SIM Unlock). I also installed Cydia and Rock, however I don't think I needed to install both.

Step 2 - Unlock

Using the instructions from this site I used the blacksn0w application to unlock the phone. again very simple.

This allowed me to use my Three Ireland SIM card in the iPhone. The settings were automatically detected, and I was able to use the phone, internet, MMS etc. without a problem.

Step 3 - Tethering

The only niggle left, was to be able to share the phone's internet connection with my netbook, which I was able to do very easily with my N95. After a bit of searching, I found this site which carries the tethering settings for most operators, however, Three Ireland is not listed, so using their Mobile Config Generator, I inserted the settings for Three Ireland as shown below, and the iPhone installed the tethering options.

APN	Username	Password
3ireland.ie	none	none

note that 'none' above means you type in 'none', NOT leave it blank

After this, I enabled tethering on the iPhone and it showed up on my Windows 7 PC as a new network connection when plugged in via USB. However, using my Ubuntu 9.10 (UNR) Netbook (EEEPC 901) I was unable to see the iPhone when plugged into USB, however, it worked perfectly well when creating a new bluetooth pairing, and selecting the checkbox 'use mobile devices internet connection', manifested as an option (Showing BT Mac Address) when clicking on the network icon on the taskbar.

I was also able to successfully reset the phone back to the official version of the firmware.

I have noticed whilst reading numerous academic papers, blogs and articles etc., that the Authors tend towards using a the female term to refer to people of an unknown gender, whereas I always understood the default to be the male pronoun.

for example:

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate Herself about the laws of the land:

source


I have often wondered to myself, why this is, I wondered whether it was that no-one would get offended at using the female term, but some might get offended if the female term was not represented. Maybe it isn't that at all, perhaps it's just lazyness, as the correct grammer would be to use both e.g.

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate Himself or Herself about the laws of the land:


Suspended hyphenation may be accetable, Him- or Herself, but the nearest I could find to an appropriate shortened version would be to use Themselves (but not Themself), but I get the impression that is only acceptable in British English (En-UK?).

I think I will try to use the full terminology. Does anyone know and English expert who can tell me the correct usage? :)

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, It's more for my own memory than anything else, and I'm sure my millions of readers will be very un-interested to read it, but after a recent install of a new operating system on my Uni machine (Windows Vista to Windows 7), I thought I would list the tools I use on a daily basis to organise my working/online/offline life.

• Thunderbird - Email and Contacts
  
  
  
  • Thunderbird Message Filter Import/Export add-on
  
  
  • Zindus Google contacts sync add-on
  
  
  
  


• Firefox - Web Browsing etc.
  
  
  
  • Web developer toolbar - a fantastic tool to help debugging
  
  
  • Delicious Toolbar for organizing bookmarks across multiple computers and online
  
  
  
  


• Filezilla


• XAMPP
(Apache, PHP, MySQL, FTP)

• Tortoise SVN


• SVN Client (command line)


• Putty


• WinSCP


• Eclipse - IDE
  
  
  
  • Texclipse
  
  
  • Subclipse
  
  
  
  


• MS Office Suite


• MS Visio


• SCite text editor (Scite CVS Version from a long way back!)


• 7zip


• Avast Anti-Virus


• Skype


• Seesmic Desktop


• Digsby


• Pidgin


• Mendeley Desktop




Online tools



• Delicous (mattstabeler)


• Mendeley (matthew.stabeler@ucd.ie)


• Google Scholar (shared items)


• Remember the milk (matt_stabeler)


• Google Reader


• Google Contacts


• Twitter (mattstabeler)

Hello my dear,

Good day and compliments of the seasons, I am Mrs. Mendula Fett I am from Alderan. I lost my husband during the rebel attacked in 2006 before his death, he had an account with a bank here in Tatooine, where he made a deposit of 10.5 Millions Credits. This money was for the purchase of death-star vending machines and development of another factory, unfortunately he did not meet his target before his untimely death.

Why I contacted you, due to the agreement he had with the bank during deposit, I ve been denied total access to the money, the bank Manager told me precisely that the money was deposited in a suspense fixed account with a clause attached to it for onward transfer into a imperial account. That the bank will follow the agreement written and signed by both (the bank and my husband). I was advised to look for an imperial account where the money can be transferred before I can have access to it.

Since security here cannot be guaranteed besides, i've lost my husband, I hereby ask you to do me a favour by standing as my late husband imperial business partner and the beneficiary of the money to enable the bank effect the transfer into your account.

I have plans to invest this money in continuation with the investment vision of my late husband, but not in this place again rather on your planet. I have the vision of going into real estate and industrial production, please if you are willing to assist me and my only son JaJa, indicate your interest in replying soonest.

The bank has given me requirements I should forward to them:

1. Your full name
2. Species Identifier
3. Galactic Postal Address
4. Occupation
5. Age


If you agree on this, I ll give you 15% of the total share when transferred, then 5% will be given to you if you made any expense on the cause of the transfer. Waiting to hearing from you, please once I hear from
you I'll send you my pictures, also the deposit certificate the bank gave to my late husband. Please call me +22508970496

Vader bless you and your family,

Yours Truly,
Mrs. Mendula Fett

I recently had to submit a paper in IEEE conference format, that required an IEEE copyright notice and publisher ID, the problem I had was that by default, the functionality is removed from any 'conference' class papers, so in order to make this work using the conference class (\documentclass[10pt, conference]{IEEEtran}) it is neccessary to remove these 'locks' using the following command:


\IEEEoverridecommandlockouts


(I put this just after the \documentclass part)

It is then possible to specify the publication id and copy right notice (make sure it is before the \maketitle command )as follows:


\IEEEpubid{\makebox[\columnwidth]{\hfill 9781-4244-3941-6/09/\$25.00~\copyright~2009 IEEE}
\hspace{\columnsep}\makebox[\columnwidth]{Published by the IEEE Computer Society}}


Note: if you leave the 'Published by the IEEE Compueter Society' part blank, then the second column will fill out nicely (and mean more space for writing!).

It is also necessary to use the \IEEEpubidadjcol command somewhere in your second column text, which makes the relevant adjustments for the text.

My research looks like it will involve using mobile phones to collect sensor data, and I have recently been involved in a project that uses a piece of software for the Nokia N95, called Campaignr. This is a nice little application that will log data from all of the various sensors on the N95, and upload them to a server, however, there are a number of issues that prevent a researcher like me from downloading it and running it easily.

So, I've worked around these problems as follows:

Problem 1:
The installation .SIS file, is not signed for all phones, and therefore cannot be installed.

I guess this was something that didn't matter too much before the software was released, as it was being used for research by the developers, and they only signed the .SIS package for a small set of phones.

So, the workaround - Download the non-signed version from the site, get a hold of your phones IEMI number (*#06#) and then follow the instructions on the Symbian Open Signed website. This will give you an application signed for your phone, and will allow access to all of the resources required.

Problem 2:
There is no way of over-riding the hard coded username and password, from the xml campaignr settings file. This means that there is no way to upload data directly to SensorBase.org, without editing the campaignr source code.

I didn't want to delve into the C++ code, edit the lines and recompile, mostly because I haven't written in C++.
So, I wrote a proxy script, that sits on my server, receives the Slog data from the campaignr app, strips out the username and password fields, and replaces them with the correct data.


<?php

$ch = curl_init("http://sensorbase.org/upload.php");

// strip slashes to datastring if the local server adds them
$datastring = $_REQUEST['data_string'];
if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()){
$datastring = stripslashes($datastring);
}

// set post
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

// dont show headers
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

// get the output as a var not echo
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

// set the useragent to that of the calling user agent :)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);

// add the post variables
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,
array(
"email"=>"EMAIL_ADDRESS",
"password"=>"PASSWORD",
"project_id"=>$_REQUEST['project_id'],
"type"=>$_REQUEST['type'],
"data_string"=>$datastring,
"table_name"=>$_REQUEST['table_name']
));

// execute
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
// echo the output from SensorBase.org
echo $data;

?>


I have become a regular user of Skype, and have started to get frustrated with having to use my PC for commincation, because I don't want it on all of the time, so I recently came across this product, which looks fantastic!

The Asus EEE Videophone Aiguru SV1 supports video calling, has built-in wifi, it has rechargeable batteries and seems to have a very nice interface. It has LAN support via an RJ45 cable port, and has microphone and headphones jacks.



When I get some money, I hope to buy one... or put it on the wedding list ;)

I've been thinking recently about location based gaming - of course, this is not my PhD topic, but I have some ideas about how to integrate my PhD into it. I came across this cool mobile phone/location based game called Tourality which, seems to have been well thought out, and has an interesting set of challenging games, based on user generated templates. It doesn't seem to have had much take-up just yet, meaning there aren't any templates for my home town, or in Dublin. So I have created a pub crawl template for Dublin city centre for starters.

I hope they bring out an iPhone version, as this would take advantage of all those new iPhone users :)

Ado and I have had some ideas for a something similar, but with some much more interesting features and gameplay... watch this space...