IPhone Cafe

If you have a Canon Rebel XT and want to capture digital images from your iPhone, here are some tips….

1. Get yourself a small table top tripod
2. Get a polarizing filter 
3. On the Canon, select “Program Mode”, click “Menu” and set ISO to 100 asa
4. Prop up the iPhone in an area with natural sunlight.  
5. Use the XT’s auto-timer to operate the shutter because at 100 asa, shutter speed is low and a hand held shot will  be blurry. 

I am by no means an expert on digital photography.  I’ve used a Canon digital Rebel XT for two years and never left the safety of full automatic mode which worked just fine for landscapes [here are some full automatic examples] but when I started shooting iPhone displays, initial results were just bad. 

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There are several image edit programs out there.  I use Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9 which isn’t the most highly rated, but is easy to use. One problem - my Canon creates large images which must be downsized to fit onto a web page. For some reason, downsizing distorts the picture. To get around this, I use the following steps: 

1. Plug the Canon XT memory card into a computer (or connect via the USB port) and copy images to the local hard drive.
2. Use “Windows Explorer” and “Windows Picture and Fax Viewer” to display a picture of interest.  Use Hypersnap to cut and paste a copy of the image into Digital Image Pro.
3. Size the picture down. For some reason, an image which is copied from Hypersnap doesn’t distort as it’s downsized.  
4. Save the image as a JPEG.  Use it on your favorite web site. 

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A sales associate at Talls Camera in Seattle answered my questions and help me better understand the process to capture images from my iPhone.  It didn’t cost much; just a small tripod and a polarizing filter. The steps listed above improved iPhone display quality.  Below is an example:

The other day I noticed an odd pattern in the access log file for my WordPress weblog.  The pattern went like this:

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87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:51:47 -0700] “HEAD /wpblog/wp-login.php?action=logout HTTP/1.0″ 302 0 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”
87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:51:47 -0700] “POST /wpblog/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 275 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”
87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:51:49 -0700] “GET /wpblog/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0″ 200 42 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”
87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:51:46 -0700] “HEAD /wpblog/wp-admin/ HTTP/1.0″ 302 0 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”
87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:51:50 -0700] “POST /wpblog/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0″ 200 774 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”
87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:51:52 -0700] “POST /wpblog/wp-trackback.php?tb_id=1 HTTP/1.0″ 200 464 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”
87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:51:52 -0700] “POST /wpblog/wp-trackback.php?tb_id=1 HTTP/1.0″ 200 141 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”
[repeat 50 times] 
87.118.110.20 - - [27/Mar/2008:14:52:34 -0700] “GET /wpblog/index.php?cat=999+UNION+SELECT+null,CONCAT(666,CHAR(58),user_pass,CHAR(58),666,CHAR(58)),null,null,null+FROM+wp_users+where+id=1/* HTTP/1.0″ 200 15947 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)” “core3.com”

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Googling on wp-trackback.php produced a list of matches including a page titled Wordpress WP-Trackback.PHP SQL Injection Vulnerability which describes a flaw in Wordpress 1.5 that allows SQL to be run against the MySQL database which drives Wordpress. 

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The last transaction of the block contained the following code which looks like a SQL query of passwords from the wp_users table where id is 1.

cat=999+UNION+SELECT+null,CONCAT(666,CHAR(58),user_pass,CHAR(58),666,CHAR(58)),null,null,null+FROM+wp_users+where+id=1 

Nice………  Does the “where id = 1″ mean someone was fishing for the admin password?

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Being curious, I googled 87.118.110.20 which is the originating IP address for the transactions. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. The IP address 87.118.110.20 appears on sites like www.gslzcmso.chinasafety.gov.cn/bguest.php,  www.winsuntex.com/bguest.php, www.zczj.gov.cn/bguest.php, and www.kaifaqu.gov.cn/com/xcliguang/bguest.php.

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What does it mean? Did someone from south east Asia get the admin password for iPhone Cafe?  You tell me. I’m running Wordpress version 2.0 which includes the fix for a SQL Injection Attack, so I guess iPhone Cafe is safe… for now….. 

The second beta release of iPhone’s SDK is now availible. This version includes compilers, frameworks, documentation, and tools like the Xcode IDE and an iPhone simulator supporting development of applications that run on the iPhone OS. The SDK works with Intel-based Macs running OS X v10.5.2 or later.  For more, go to Dev Center.

I only know one other person with an iPhone, and we were having dinner at a local restaurant tonight when the conversation turned to “The Simpsons”–specifically, the episode “Homer to the Max” where Homer changes his name to Max Power.  I insisted this episode occurred prior to Season 9; my friend was equally certain that it was after.  Naturally, since we both had iPhones, it became a competition to see who could look up the answer first.  That’s when I discovered that, even though we had the same phone, the same plan, and were in the same restaurant literally a foot apart, he was able get an Internet connection and I couldn’t.  It was totally unexplainable, and therefore that much more annoying.  I got home, did a little research, and still can’t figure out why my phone wouldn’t connect.  If anyone out there reads this and has any ideas, I’d be glad to hear them!

A page on Apple’s iPhone developer site describes how to set a style for drop down menu’s. Apple’s on-line CSS documentation mostly uses in-line style definitions. I’m accustomed to styles defined within a STYLE tag, so I took Apple’s recommendations for the iPhone and placed then into a style called iDD (short for “iPhone Drop Down”)

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In the snippet below, iDD is defined and then it’s used as the class attribute of the select tag.

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<style TYPE=”text/css”>
.iDD { background:brown;    border: 1px dashed purple;    -webkit-border-radius:10px; }
</style>
…
<select name=”city” class=’iDD’>
   <option>choose</option>
   <option>Seattle, Wa.</option>
   <option>Washington, Dc.</option>
   <option>Dallas, Tx.</option>
   <option>Chicago, Il.</option>
   <option>New York, Ny.</option>
   <option>Miami, Fl.</option>
   <option>Baltimore, Md.</option>
</select> 

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webkit-border-radius produces a drop down that displays with rounded corners on the iPhone.

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To see iDD in action, visit the Metro Brunch page. It’s not much, but it does show brunch locations in a couple of major cities using Google Maps as the source. Below is the brunch page after selecting the rounded drop down list box.  As with any drop down, iPhone displays it’s own drop down widget which is optmized for the iPhone  Safari web interface.

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For some reason, a search of brunch sites in New York city produces results that differ between the iPhone map and a desktop browser Google map.  Only New York behaves this way. Other cities produces pretty much the same results regardless of browser type.

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Searching for “brunch” in Dallas Tx. produces a map like this.

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For testing purposes, the brunch page has been loaded with the following cities: Seattle, Washington, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Miami, Portland, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Fransisco,  Oakland,  Cupertino, Memphis, Paris, London.

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The page uses a Google search parameter mrt=kmlkmz which includes User-Contributed ‘Community’ content collected from the GeoWeb

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April 17th, 2008 - Not sure why, but searching for “brunch” finds fewer locations when the search is run on an iPhone vs running on a desktop browser.  It may have something to do with user contributed content handling.  Here’s a link to another version which searches on “fine+dining”.  It seems to to a better job than the brunch search.

Fine Dining Search

I got a great question about the blank screen people find on their iPhone when they are rearranging icons on their home screen, and wanted to discuss it here.  The iPhone has seven (I think) screens that can be filled with shortcuts to web applications.  Using the Safari web search function on your iPhone, go to www.apple.com/webapps.  There you will see an extensive list of web applications.  Click on one that sounds interesting to try it out.  For instance, I am addicted to a web app game called iPipes. 

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To add an iPipes icon/shortcut to my home screen, I would first bring up the application on my phone.  At the bottom of the screen, there is the menu of icons (back and forward buttons, a plus sign, a book icon, and the pages icon).  Tap on the  plus sign and it will ask you if you want to add a bookmark, add to the home screen, mail a link to the page, or cancel.  Choose the “Add to Home Screen” button, and it will add the icon to your home screen.  

March 18 2008 - This is part one of a multi-part post about moving telephone contacts from a Motorola Rokker to the Apple iPhone using a SIM card reader to pull names and numbers from the cell phone.  This post describes installation of a Dekart SIM card reader on a Windows XP computer. The procedure here should work with any mobile phone using standard SIM cards to hold names and numbers.  It moves names and numbers from the old cell phone to the new iPhone. If your old cell contains more than 20 or 30 phone numbers, the procedure may be worth a look.

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This post uses Dekart SIM Card Reader and Dekart SIM Manager 2.1 to copy names and numbers from Rokker’s SIM card to the local PC.

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The Dekart card reader was ordered along with Dekart’s SIM manager v 2.1. After the card reader arrived, Dekart’s USB driver and their SIM Manager application were downloaded from Dekart’s web site.  As noted on their HowTo page, be sure to download a USB driver for card readers sold after November 2006. Install the USB driver and the SIM Manager before plugging the card reader into the USB port.

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On the Rokker, removing the SIM means pulling out the battery to expose the SIM card and a memory chip. The SIM card is larger than the memory chip. The picture shows the empty SIM card holder.

After downloading the USB driver and the SIM manager software, Windows Explorer showed the following icons. SIMReader2 is the USB driver. SIMManager_en is the user interface.

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While installing the USB driver, the following message appeared.

Clicking Continue Anyway finished the driver install and the system has been stable since the install (about 4 weeks ago).

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With the USB driver and the SIM manager installed, the SIM card is placed into the reader which is plugged into a USB port.  

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To read the SIM, select SIM –> Read Sim from the main menu of Sim manager.

After a bit, the navigator window displays a message like “Dekart Smart Card Reader 0″. Right click on “Dekart Smart Card Reader 0″ and select Read SIM from the pop up menu.

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Names and numbers from the SIM card should be displayed.

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As shown above, SIM Manager’s Read SIM option copies names and numbers from the SIM card. Next, the Save As option writes contact data to a file on the local PC.  Opening the file in a text editor shows names and phone numbers in the following format:

[6F3A]
n1=Eastman.Jake
t1=12065641865
n2=Brown.beth.c
t2=12065876430
n3=Mann.mark.wrk
t3=12123888893

To summarize, the steps presented in this post are:

1. Order the SIM card reader and software from Deckart
2. Retain the email containing the license code for the SIM Manager software. It will be needed when the card is delivered.
3. Download USB Driver software from Deckart
4. Download SIM Manager software from Deckart. Be sure to choose the driver for card readers sold after November 2006.
5. Install the USB Driver and the SIM Manager software
6. Copy/Paste the license code into the Sim Manager.
7. Remove SIM card from the mobile phone and plug into Dekart’s card reader
8. Plug the card reader into a USB port
9. Run SIM Manager
10. Select  SIM –> Read Sim
11. Right click on “Dekart Smart Card Reader 0″ and select “Read SIM”. Names and numbers from the SIM card are displayed.
12. Select File –> Save As and pick a location and file name.  The new file will have a .phn extention.

The next post will move names and numbers to a Google spreadsheet in preparation for synching with iTunes and the iPhone. 

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In case you were wondering, this post isn’t intended to endorse Dekart’s SIM card reader.  There may be other readers which perform the same function and maybe cost less and maybe provide more features.  I don’t know.  I wasn’t sure that Dekart’s reader was compatible with the SIM card in my Motorola.  However, since the reader and software cost less than $40, I figured it was worth a try. After installing the card and it’s software and seeing names and phone numbers from my Rokker sitting in a text file on my PC, I knew the card reader was doing it’s job. That’s when I wrote this post.

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I’m not exactly sure how to get names and numbers from the .phn file into the iPhone. However, it shouldn’t be too hard. It would be possible to manually copy/paste contacts from the .phn file into an Excel or Google spreadsheet and then export to .csv and then import into Yahoo Address book. For SIM cards with more than 20 or so contacts, manual copy/pasting could be tedious so a small Perl script might be in order to replace manual copy/pasting.  If you don’t have Perl, it can be downloaded from ActiveState. The standard downloaded distribution is all that’s needed.

Pictures in the sample link below show what can be done with iPhone’s 2 Megapixel  camera.

Sample pictures of George

For the first few months, I moved pictures from the phone to my PC using email.  This method seems to perform image compression. Lately, I learned how to move pictures to the PC when the iPhone is connected by USB port and this method doesn’t appear to compress images. Now, I’m a bit more impressed with the camera phone.  Even though it’s only 2 Megapixels, picture quality isn’t bad. The camera is versatle and can produce decent low light shots as long as the subject isn’t moving.

This post describes how to download files using Perl and FTP.

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An earlier post, Log Parsing III provided steps to scan web access logs in Perl and provided a sample script which scan’s a bunch of logs and then creates a web page of links to Google searches. Yet another Log Parsing Post, goes a step further and creates an iPhone formatted page of Google searches. Parsing for Google searches is just one of many, many things that can be done using access logs.

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Since my ISP is Yahoo and I’m not paying for their premium account,  I don’t have a Unix shell  to run perl scripts. Before scanning a log, it needs to be copied from Yahoo to my personal PC. FTP is used here.

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Perl makes it easy to copy, or download, files using FTP.

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To use FTP in Perl, first make sure the package Net::FTP is referenced in the script, usually at the top of the script in a use statement.  The Net::FTP package lets you create simple FTP clients which can login, change directorys, set transfer modes, download or upload files, and logout. 

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Below, the getFile() function wraps Net::FTP method calls into a subroutine that downloads access log files. You provide the user ID, password, hostname, and other parameters.  The function logs into the remote machine, changes to the target folder, and downloads files with names beginning with “access”. It returns a list of downloaded filenames. A regex skips files with names that don’t begin with “access”.
 

#—————————————————————–
# Function:  getFile
# Purpose:   Use ftp to copy log files from a remote machine to
#            the local machine.
#—————————————————————–
sub getFile
{
my $filename = shift;       # local filename (full path)
my $from_host = shift;      # To Host
my $from_folder = shift;    # To Folder
my $uid = shift;            # ftp login id
my $pwd = shift;            # ftp login password

my ($ftp);
my ($currentDir, $result);

$ftp = Net::FTP->new($from_host) or die “Can’t connect: $@\n”;

#— Login
$ftp->login($uid, $pwd ) or die “Can’t login with $uid and $pwd\n”;

#— get name of current directory
$currentDir = $ftp->pwd();

#— Change to the target directory
$ftp->cwd(”$from_folder”) or die “Can’t change directory\n”;

#— get name of current directory on remote machine
$currentDir = $ftp->pwd();

$ftp->ascii();  # set ascii transfer mode

#— print files in remote Dir
my @remotefiles;
my @localfiles;
undef @localfiles;
@remotefiles = $ftp->dir();
foreach my $longfilename (@remotefiles) {
   if ($longfilename =~ /access\w*\.log/) {
      $filename = $&;
      $filename =~ s/^\s+//g;
      print “\nGetting filename = [$filename] “;
      push(@localfiles, $filename);     
      }
   $ftp->get($filename);
   }

#— Disconnect
$ftp->quit() or warn “Couldn’t quit.  Oh well.\n”;

return @localfiles;
}

This function could be modified to move any file or combination of files.

See How to create iPhone icons and separate page icons for a method to create your own iPhone icons.

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Another potentially cool and useful page is a “comment” titled “iPhone Images Descriptions and Locations List” which provides a list of iPhone icon images and their associated folder paths.