Export your device UDIDs from your iPhone Provisioning Portal

Well, there is no built in way. I needed to copy a bunch of them from one provisioning portal to another without much grief (it was a client’s portal, and there was no offline list available). So here’s what I did. Using Safari on OS X:

1. Log in to your iPhone Provisioning Portal
2. Click on “Devices” in the left sidebar
3. Click on the “History” tab
4. Select all the items under the column headers, then “Copy” to your pasteboard
5. Launch “Microsoft Excel 2008″
6. Select cell “A1″
7. Paste the contents of the pasteboard in

Now all your UDIDs are properly formatted in columns!

Edit the ones you don’t need, etc, based on the “Description” column. To export the list for another portal, you will need to move the column “Device ID” so it is before “Device Name”, and remove the other columns. You will need the first row for the column names still (first row is ignored by the importer). Then export the spreadheet as a tab-delimited text file. Now the UDIDs are ready for import.

ProPlayer WordPress plugin HTML 5 video fallback patch

The <video> tag is great and all — but unfortunately fullscreen support is not ubiquitous yet, but support is in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.  It should have been supported when initially implemented (but you’ll have to trawl through the WHATWG mailing lists to see the arguments for and against).

No matter – fullscreen is an important feature, and in my work supporting a non-profit, they needed to have this feature for their members for viewing classes (which may run 1.5 to 2 hrs long), and the <video> tag in its current incarnation then with no fullscreen support just didn’t cut it.

Considering that most people don’t upgrade their browsers often, but have Flash installed already – we still needed a Flash based video player for fullscreen support. People understand most Flash video players with fullscreen buttons (thank YouTube for that), so it was not hard to educate them about this feature. The non-profit uses WordPress, so we settled on Isa Goksu’s ProPlayer [1][2] WordPress plugin which allows for customizability.

The problem was that recently, some students wanted iPhone / iPad video playback as well, and with the current Flash player, they were seeing no videos at all. We had already moved to h.264 movie file support in anticipation of this, since it is supported by the Flash player and most browser <video> tag implementations (save Firefox).

I modified the ProPlayer plugin to fallback to using the <video> tag, if Flash is not available. It works great on the iPad and the iPhone 3GS (iOS 4), but on the iPhone 3G (iOS 3.12) it cannot be played, I don’t know why [UPDATE: Looks like the video was encoded using a h.264 profile that the iPhone 3G didn't recognize. iPhone 3G supports h.264 Basic Profile 3.0, later iPhones support High Profile]

Download the patch here . The version of the plugin that was patched is 4.7.7 (pro-player.php file only).

Kernel Switcher for Mac OS X Snow Leopard

There are various command line ways to determine whether your machine running Snow Leopard is running the 64 or 32 bit kernel, and also the ability for you to switch kernels. I have gathered all those ways into this GUI utility that will show you what kernel you are currently running, and it will allow you to set what kernel you want to load at the next restart.

If your machine is not EFI64 capable, this utility will not work (it will check at startup). Even if your machine is EFI64 capable (some Mac Minis and MacBooks), the 64-bit kernel will not boot anyway (Apple restriction, apparently).

[UPDATE: Possible hack to get your non-sanctioned EFI64 capable machine to load K64, would be a good extension for my utility]

The utility will ask for admin privileges when you save your settings so it can set the boot arguments. To avoid any saving / admin prompts and to just close the window, just click on the red Close button on the window controls).

Download KernelSwitcher here. The full source is on Github with a MIT license.

Screenshot:

Open, edit and save Microsoft Open XML formats (docx, xlsx, pptx) in Office 2003 or Mac Office 2004

So you have Office 2003 installed in a zillion computers and you need to open those new .docx/.xlsx/.pptx  files? No need to buy Office 2007…

Microsoft has given you an “upgrade” path, for free:

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

For Mac Office 2004:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=155820

Technorati Tags: open docx xlsx pptx for free

git merge problems

When merging, ever get the error message: Error: Entry ‘foo’ is notuptodate. Cannot merge. Two possibilities:

1. You may have local changes that are not committed (so commit them!) or undo those changes.
2. You may have a file that has been modified, but the contents have not been changed. ie somehow the file was ‘touch’ed. Thus git thinks that the file has been modified because its modification date has changed, but then its hash is still the same because the content hasn’t changed, so I guess it gets confused. Doing this command below updates the file stats for your repo index to flush out this second possibility:

git update-index --refresh

Technorati Tags: git merge conflict