Jailbreak O2 iPhone

Steps for jailbreaking an O2 iPhone
(This is for those who have a legitimate activated O2 iPhone)
1. Connect your iPhone via USB
2. Press the home and wake/sleep buttons and hold them until the iPhone resets and the screen goes black, then release the wake/sleep button.
3. When iTunes pops up the message "ITunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode" release the home button.
4. 1.1.1 Firmware
Jailbreak
Download both of these, if you are on a mac, don't use safari to download the firmware as it will extract it and you don't want that.
5. After these files have downloaded, hold Option+Alt and click on restore in iTunes, Select the 1.1.1 Firmware ISPW file. It will install and error out at the end with a 1015 error. This is the expected outcome.
6. Kick the iPhone out of this mode by running jailbreak.jar and clicking Boot From Recovery (don't enable any other options)
7. Open safari on the iPhone and go to http://jailbreakme.com scroll down and run Install AppSnapp, safari will exit and download/install AppSnapp, unlock the iPhone and its jailbroken.
8. Launch Installer on iPhone and scroll down to Tweaks (1.1.1) in the install tab. Select OkToPrep and install
9. Click Check For Update in iTunes and it will download and install the 1.1.2 update
10. Quit iTunes, run jailbreak.jar and select jailbreak (and install SSH as well)

Enabling EDGE on O2 again
ssh root@ip_address_of_my_iphone
use either the password alpine or dottie or the password that you set on jailbreak (each line is one command, so 3 in total)

rm /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.carrier.plist

ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreTelephony.framework/Support/O2_UK.plist /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.carrier.plist

rm -f /var/root/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

Reboot the iPhone by switching off (hold the wake/sleep button and slide to power off) then starting it again.

Job Done!

Synergy Fix in Kubuntu

Synergy has a problem with displaying the @ symbol on a synergyc session, this is the necessary command to fix this (symptom is displaying OHM symbol instead of '@')
This needs done after every X restart.

echo keycode 24 = q Q at at at at | xmodmap -

AD Replication strangeness

Another very short note, after deploying 3 AD Servers, 1 as PDC and the others as BDCs, I couldnt get a BDC at another site to replicate the AD structures etc.
Tried all the troubleshooting on the MS site (couldn't understand a lot of it but that will come with time and more experience) but I did remember this one tip.
Whatever is the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

I had the subnet mask set incorrectly on the server that was causing the problem, a quick change of that to be 255.255.0.0 (rather than 255.0.0.0) and we were sorted and replicating happily.

Windows Installer

Is a lying bastard.

That is all.

Kill-9

This is a rap about kill -9 from a CS Student at Stanford U.

The full Lyrics can be got here and the audio track is found here

Cleaning macbook keys

Okay, first off, a bit of advice, DO NOT EAT A TOASTED CHEESE SANDWICH NEAR YOUR MACBOOK WHILST IT IS OPEN!
I simply cannot stress this point enough, if I had paid attention to this it would have made my life much less complicated.

Okay, so you have either a bit of hair, or a stringy bit of cheese under a keycap (in my case the 'B') the way to remove it is quite simple.
Tools required:

Mini swiss army knife (I used this one)
Pin (not needle, you need the enamel head)

Using the screwdriver blade, slide it under the keycap and prise it up very gently, not enough to remove it but enough to see the small scissor mechanism.
Use the tweezers or the toothpick to gently press in the scissor legs on the LEFT hand side of the key (on the edge facing you), it will move slightly and the key will pop up away from you, lift it up and slide it to the right to remove it from the clip.

Now clean out all the crap under the key, I had a bit of cheese (see above) and a hair.

Reinserting the key is a different story, its a hell of a lot more difficult! It took me a few goes at it before I had a brainwave. What you do is insert the pin between the legs of the scissor mechanism to prevent it closing. The head of the pin prevents it falling through so just let it sit whatever way it suits you.
Line up the right hand leg/clip thing and slot it in to the left, then just drop the key in place and then press on it gently, making sure that it is lined up. It should click into place and you are now done!

CFeclipse reporting Wrong J2SE Version

Having reinsatlled several machines I have come across a "feature" of the Oracle 9i Administrative Client, it does not play nice and adds its path variables to the start of the $PATH in windows.

This led to much frustration as I *knew* that I had the right version (j2sdk 1.4.2 r10) and it was reporting 1.3.1. CFEclipse would not start and would bomb out with an error reporting an unsuitable java version.

The simple fix to this was to simply add the correct JRE path before the Oracle JRE path. In the majority of my cases it was "C:\J2SDK1.4.2_13\jre\bin" then just run the CFEclipse.exe program and it works!

Resize NTFS Partitions

Go and get Gparted here and burn it out, its a linux LiveCD with the Gnome partition manager GParted so that you can resize NTFS partitions non-destructively!

DO IT NOW!