Cory's Cogitations

My thoughts on web development and design, programming, graphic design and the world.

Archive for the ‘Operating Systems’ category

Verizon XV6800 to get official GPS firmware upgrade?

December 15th, 2008

From time to time I search to see if Verizon has gotten the sand out of their vag when it comes to locking down the GPS features in their phones. They haven’t–or so I thought.

I did reread the threads on hacking GPS into your XV6800 and again decided against it because I’m too lazy.

Instead of giving up, I started up a chat session with Verizon’s online support to see if they had any answers. Well the planets must be aligned because it turns out they did.

This is probably old news to some, but I stopped checking after the first page of results for “xv6800 gps”.

According to Verizon’s online support, they will be unlocking GPS via a firmware update due out in January of 2009–so… next month! Woo.

Here is part of the transcript:

cory: I own the XV6800 and know that it contains some GPS functionality. Sprint has released a firmware update to enable this functionality. Does vzw have plans to open up GPS in the future? If so, when?
Latavious: Thanks for holding Cory. In January 2009 all window mobile phones will be entitled to the firmware. Including our choices of the window mobile phones.
cory: Does that mean the firmware will exist for all phones but vzw will choose which ones it wants to make available?
Latavious: Correct. The window mobile phones.

If this is true, I will be a much happier Verizon customer… which still isn’t very happy. Unlock my damn phone entirely you d-bags!

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Posted in Gadgets, Windows Mobile

Tags: gps htc mogul verizon xv6800

Google’s plans for world domination became clear to me today

December 10th, 2008

After reading Safer than ActiveX: a look at Google’s Native Client plugin from ArsTechnica I finally understand where Google is headed and how they plan on taking over the world.

From the article…

The Native Client framework consists of trusted and untrusted modules that run in their own individual processes and communicate through an RPC system. Third-party untrusted modules contain application-specific programming and leverage the Native Client container to interact with trusted modules that perform any activities which impact the underlying platform, including networking operations and file system access. The container will impose security constraints on the behavior of the third-party code and will also give users granular control over the permissions granted to third-party code.

[...]

Google supplies a customized GCC build toolchain that can be used to compile portable binaries that are compatible with the Native Client infrastructure. This makes it extremely easy to port existing code. As a test, Google ported an H.264 encoder that is about 11,000 lines of conventional C code. To get the encoder to compile and run in Native Client, they only had to add approximately 20 lines of code and modify the Makefile. The resulting binaries are completely portable and can run without requiring recompilation on any operating system supported by the Native Client.

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Posted in Internet, Operating Systems, Web Development

Tags: firefox google native client opera Safari web browser plugin

Just discovered a better/faster way to get the directory size on linux

August 28th, 2008

I’d always read that to get the total size of a directory (and everything below it) on linux you use du -ch | grep total

This works but gets slower the more files/folders a directory contains. Then I remembered the tail program and presto — my life just got easier. du -ch | tail -n 1 will give exactly the same output as grep total and takes no time.

I know a lot of people who find this will be like… duh! But oh well, I’m happy about my discovery and now feel like I’ve accomplished something today.