IBM Software Portfolio – the big picture
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in IBM on 31/05/2012
Click to enlarge the picture 
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Participate to your business processes from your iPad
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in IBM, iPhone on 30/05/2012
BPM is a discipline that leverages software and services to provide total visibility into your organization. Discover, document, automate, and continuously improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
If you are new to the field, have a look at the “BPM for Dummies” mini ebook.
IBM offers a comprehensive set of solutions to document, execute, monitor your business processes :
- BlueWorks Live, an easy way to document and run processes in the cloud
- IBM Business Monitor, unites information, process, and people to provide a 360-degree view of case information and achieve optimized outcomes
- IBM Business Process Manager, a comprehensive BPM platform giving you visibility and insight to manage business processes.
- IBM Operational Decision Management, provides the power to intelligently automate a wide range of decisions across business processes and applications (formerly iLog)
IBM recently released IBM BPM v8.0 with many new, redesigned or improved capabilities, one of them kept my attention. There is an iOS application allowing users to collaborate on BPM, right from their mobile devices.
“The BPM app provides a single view that consolidates tasks from multiple IBM process sources. Built with ease of use and collaboration in mind, it allows users to interact with others to ensure that the right people are working on the right thing at the right time.”
The application is freely available on the Apple App Store (but requires a BPM backend)
Free, half day IBM Developer Conference @ Luxembourg
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in IBM, Java on 29/05/2012
On Wednesday, June 13rd, IBM Luxembourg invites you to a free technical conference for application developers.
The objective of this session is to provide participants an overview of the new lightweight tools IBM is providing to developers :
- the new WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile,
- the Eclipse based WAS Developer Tools
- Worklight, a cross platform development and deployment environment for mobile applications.
Agenda, venue and conference details is available in this invitation.
Interested, feel free to register by sending me an email at sebastien.stormacq at be.ibm.com Seating is limited – do not wait !
Required Packages to install after a Jailbreak
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in iPhone on 26/05/2012
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Here is a short list of packages I am installing after a jailbreak.
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Then connect to your phone using ssh (root/alpine) AND CHANGE THE ROOT PASSWORD !!
And because I care about security, I also apply the following :
- Create
.ssh/authorized_keys
to copy my public SSH key. This allows key based authentication
- Disable SSH’s password authentication in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PasswordAuthentication no PermitEmptyPasswords no
- Restart sshd dameon
iPhone:~ root# launchctl stop com.openssh.sshd iPhone:~ root# launchctl start com.openssh.sshd
Enjoy !
<UPDATE date=”23 September 2012″>
iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 owners can jailbreak iOS 6 in tethered mode (need a cable connection to boot the phone)
http://www.ijailbreak.com/jailbreak/how-to-jailbreak-ios-6-and-install-cydia-mac-os-x/
</UPDATE>
Using Apple’s XCode for open application development
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Apple, iPhone on 25/05/2012
When developing iOS application for jailbroken devices, you have to take care of many dirty details of application deployments on iOS. In particular, you have to take care of creating and registering your own development certificate, as detailed below.
This is where IOSOpenDev comes into the game, this packages a set of XCode plugins that automates most of this process. More than that : it also provides templates (aka empty project) to build your own Widgets, command line applications, SBSettings etc …
IOSOpenDev is a must use if you are serious about jailbroken app development on iOS.
But just for the sake of archiving – or if you want to do it manually, here is the process to code sign an application without using Apple’s provided certificate.
1/ generate self signed certificate using the Certificate Assistant in KeyChain Access application
2/ tell Xcode to use that identity
3/ change XCode signature method (and restart XCode)
marsu:Contents sst$ sudo cp Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist.orig
Password:
marsu:Contents sst$ sudo /usr/bin/sed -i .bak 's/XCiPhoneOSCodeSignContext/XCCodeSignContext/' Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist
marsu:Contents sst$ ls Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist*
Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist.orig
Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist.bak
scp -r MyApp.app root@ip_address:/Applications
Dreambox Second Stage Bootloader update
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Dreambox on 12/03/2012
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You might have notice issues when upgrading to recent Dreambox firmware since last September. This is because Dream Multimedia GmBH released a new Second Stage Boot Loader and new firmware are relying on it for their boot sequence. Without going into all the glory details, you have to know that most computers (yes your Dreambox is a computer) use a two stages boot system. First an initial boot loader is executed from internal memory at startup time. This boot loader usually executes some low level hardware sanity checks then look for a piece of software at a designated place, such as sector 0 of your primary hard drive or sector zero of your flash memory disk. This piece of software might be a full blown OS or a “second stage boot loader” which will allow you to select which OS to boot or to perform additional kernel tuning.At the time of this writing, latest Second Stage Boot Loader for Dreambox family is SSL 84 (and hacked version 84a and 84b have been created for Dreambox clones) |
How to check which second stage boot loader is installer ?Telnet to your dreambox (username is root, default password is dreambox – unless you changed it) and issue the following commands : Sebastiens-MacBook-Pro:~ sst$ telnet 192.168.0.96 Trying 192.168.0.96... Connected to dreambox800. Escape character is '^]'. OpenEmbedded Linux dm800 openpli 2.1 dm800 dm800 login: root Password: root@dm800:~# opkg list | grep secondstage dreambox-secondstage - 84-r0 - Dreambox second stage bootloader dreambox-secondstage-dev - 84-r0 - Dreambox second stage bootloader Then you know for sure your second stage boot loader version How to install a second stage boot loader ?Download the right second stage boot loader NFI file from http://www.dreamboxupdate.com (be sure to select the right file, depending on your dream box model) Links are within the Blue Rectangle text, starting with “05 September 2011 – Improved flash error correction” Once the NFI file is downloaded on your PC :
Disclaimer : these instructions are specific to original Dreamboxes, other methods are available for VU+ family of receivers. Enjoy ! |
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Using MacPorts with Xcode 4.3.x
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Apple, Mac OS X on 11/03/2012
If you recently updated to the MacAppStore distribution of Xcode, you certainly noticed that the /Developer directory is not used anymore. Xcode now lives in standard /Applications directory.
This confuses tools relying on Xcode, such as some MacPorts package relying on Xcode to compile code on your machine before installation.
For example :
---> Fetching archive for zlib ---> Attempting to fetch zlib-1.2.6_0.darwin_11.x86_64.tbz2 from http://packages.macports.org/zlib ---> Fetching zlib ---> Attempting to fetch zlib-1.2.6.tar.bz2 from http://lil.fr.distfiles.macports.org/zlib ---> Verifying checksum(s) for zlib ---> Extracting zlib Error: Couldn't determine your Xcode version (from '/usr/bin/xcodebuild -version').
(more line stripped for clarity)
This can be solved with a single command line terminal, to tell Xcode command line tools the new location of Xcode.
sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/
I am still unsure this an Apple bug or a MacPort bug … I am keen to read your opinion about this.
Enjoy !
Apple patches 3 years old bug
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Apple, Mac OS X on 01/03/2012
There are so many blogs written to criticize Apple, how big, arrogant and control freak they become over the last pas years (some will say they always have been control-freak…) that I wanted to write this post to actually say “Kudo Apple ! & Thank you”
I am using MacBookPro’s since the last 6-7 years or so. The last one I acquired is the Late 2008 model. This machine suffered from day #1 of a serious display issue : the upper part of the screen flickers under some load / heat condition.
Problem has been reported numerous times to Apple and the discussion about this issue on Apple’s Support Community forum contains more than 1500 messages posted and close to 190.000 views !
Yesterday, Apple quietly release an EFI firmware patch to address this issue. Yes, you read it right, Apple did release a firmware patch for a 4 years old machine. This is so unusual in (consumer) IT industry to mention.
I applied the patch yesterday after having spent an hour or so reading comments from early adopters and I have the pleasure to work on my machine since then without any single screen flickering.
Thank you Apple to take care of old customers, old machines and continue to improve your products.
Solving VMWare Crashes on Linux SMP Kernels
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Linux on 12/09/2011
I am writing this blog entry as a note to myself, to keep track of this issue and, more importantly, the solution I found.
Problem Statement:
When running VMWare Player or Workstation on a Linux host, with multiple processors (or cores), on a 64 bits kernel, VMWare Player and Workstation keep crashing with error
vcpu-0:ASSERT vmcore/vmm/main/irq.c:100 bugNr=2293
Root Cause:
After some Googling and searching VMWare’s Knowledge Base, I found this article referring to an issue with Non Maskable Interrupts (NMI) in Linux Kernels 2.4 and later.
It appears that Suse and RedHat Linux have this setting enabled by default, as shown by
$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog 1
Workaround:
Disable NMI watchdog.
At runtime, by typing (as root)
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog
At boot time, by modifying Grub configuration by adding
nmi_watchdog=0
to the
kernel
line in
/boot/grub/grub.conf
and reboot
Interesting side note : this also solves my problem of running these VMWare create virtual machines under VirtualBox
Enjoy !
MacPort on Mac OS X Lion
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Apple, Mac OS X on 21/07/2011
If you have performed a fresh install of Mac OS X Lion or if you plan to install MacPort after having installed Lion, you will soon realize that the MacPort team does not distribute (yet) a Lion installer. Snow Leopard installer will fail when detecting Lion.
Question is therefore : how to install MacPort on Lion ? Answer : install it from the sources.
It might be scarry, but it is very easy, here are the details.
Preriquisite : install Aple’s development tool XCode. It is freely available from the App Store (be patient it is a 3.5 Gb download)
- Open a terminal
- create a directory for the sources
mkdir macport.sources
- Fetch the sources
cd macport.sources
sudo svn checkout http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk
- Compile
cd trunk/base sudo ./configure --enable-readline sudo make install
- Install
sudo make distclean
- Change your profile to include MacPort in the PATH
vi $HOME/.profile
#!/usr/bin/bash # MacPort export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin
- Source your profile to include the changes
. $HOME/.profile
That’s it ! Easy as I promised.
You can now search for package with
sudo port list | grep <your search>
and install packages with
sudo port install <package name>
Enjoy !