Category: Tech

Technical stuff, Gadets, Linux related things

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Removing iPhone or iPod Touch Calendar that wont disappear

I had a problem with my iPhone, i had previously added my google calendars to sync with iCal on the mac so they synced with my iPhone. THis was great except i couldn’t add things to them from the iPhone.

When Google allowed exchange access i just set that up and used it, problem was that I could no longer get rid of the old ones. I even set iTunes to sync NO calendars and deleted it all, and still i had a couple of these old calendars hanging about.
I figured since I had jail broken my iPhone i should be able to look around the filesystem and see what the problem was. Fairly quickly i found in the user ‘mobile’ home dir the files Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb (fullpath /private/var/mobile/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb ) .
I grabbed an sqllite editor from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/ , copied the file over to my local Linux machine.
Opened the file in sqllite editor, went to Browse Data’ then changed the dropdown to ‘Calendar’. Deleted the offending Calendars, saved and re-uploaded.
Make sure you change the ownership so the mobile user can write to it!
Hermes:/User/Library/Calendar root# chown mobile.mobile Calendar.sqlitedb

Now before you get cocky, make a backup before you overwrite the original eh? Just in case you bugger things up!

Command history

wishes@tulip:~$ scp root@192.168.0.28:/User/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb .
root@192.168.0.28’s password:
Calendar.sqlitedb 100% 716KB 716.0KB/s 00:01
wishes@tulip:~$ tar zvxf sqlitebrowser-1.3-i386.tar.gz
sqlitebrowser
wishes@tulip:~$ ./sqlitebrowser
wishes@tulip:~$ scp Calendar.sqlitedb root@192.168.0.28:/User/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb-new
root@192.168.0.28’s password:
Calendar.sqlitedb 100% 552KB 552.0KB/s 00:00
wishes@tulip:~$ ssh root@192.168.0.28
root@192.168.0.28’s password:
Hermes:~ root# cd /User/Library/Calendar/
Hermes:/User/Library/Calendar root# ls
Calendar.sqlitedb Calendar.sqlitedb-new
Hermes:/User/Library/Calendar root# mv Calendar.sqlitedb Calendar.sqlitedb-old
Hermes:/User/Library/Calendar root# mv Calendar.sqlitedb-new Calendar.sqlitedb
Hermes:/User/Library/Calendar root# chown mobile.mobile Calendar.sqlitedb
Hermes:/User/Library/Calendar root# logout
Connection to 192.168.0.28 closed.

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Hackers in the Media – Autovoting Polls etc

One little thing that REALLY bugs me, is the medias cluelessness about anything computer related at all. Often referring to ‘Hackers’ without a second thought at all.

A few months back a man was harassing another person on trademe, was blocked, and created another trademe account to harass them further. The media titled the article something akin to ‘man hacks trademe to abuse woman’. Hang on, wouldn’t that mean he did something illegal? or had some sort of computer skill? Are they seriously not aware that any old person who knows next too nothing about computers, can use a second email address signed up freely at gmail.com or hotmail.com, and sign up another trademe account?

This happens regularly, and today is no exception. In the media today i see this article. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10606941

Hackers force web poll to close after skewing results

4:00AM Tuesday Nov 03, 2009
By Beck Vass

Online polls on nzherald.co.nz have been pulled until further notice.

Online polls on the Herald’s website nzherald.co.nz have been pulled until further notice after hackers entered the system, skewing the results of three polls.

The polls – which included questions relating to whether people thought Destiny Church was a cult or a church, if people thought it was okay for MP Rodney Hide to take his girlfriend on tour at taxpayers’ expense and if people were sick of being told they were ruining the planet – were hacked late last week.

Jeremy Rees, nzherald.co.nz publisher, said a staff member was alerted to the hacking when, in the space of four hours last Thursday, the Destiny Church poll swung from 97 per cent of people saying it was a cult to 60 per cent saying it was a church, with an unusually high number of responses.

On Friday, the Rodney Hide Poll showed 90 per cent of people thought it was unacceptable that he took his girlfriend Louise Crome overseas, leaving taxpayers to foot the $25,163 bill. But that poll also swung rapidly, moving in favour of the MP.

The poll was pulled down and the one that replaced it asked if people were sick of being told they were ruining the planet and from 4pm it was noticed that the number of votes was unusually high for a Friday afternoon, with about 2000 votes an hour.

Mr Rees said IT specialists were looking into the problems and had identified internet protocol (IP) numbers 118.92.185.135, 118.90.40.97 and 203.109.154.13 as the source of the problems but polls had been stopped until issues were resolved.

While some people might think the poll hacking was a conspiracy from interested parties, that was often not the case, Mr Rees said.

“Often most likely it’s some kind of 18-year-old guy in a black T-shirt who’s bored from looking at the new Google wave [a type of software] product and has decided to take a hack.”

Now, seriously, men in black shirts? really? are we back in the 90s when most people on a computer had to be fairly technical to do such a thing, and usually teenagers ergo wearing black shirts?

I’ve been known to use autovoting a few times on various game websites for a little fun. Its not hacking, its skewing the results for sure, but these are not for a competition, they are not voting for a particular government party, and in fact if they were serious about wanting the results to be accurate they would enforce logins, and dynamic hidden fields to help control it.

I notice that they also have included the IP addresses of the computers that were doing the voting, hmm not such a good idea really to do so, however this illustrates  that these are not ‘hackers’ , they didnt even use an anonymous proxy.

liz@tulip:~$ host 118.92.185.135
135.185.92.118.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 118-92-185-135.dsl.dyn.ihug.co.nz.
liz@tulip:~$ host 118.90.40.97
97.40.90.118.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ip-118-90-40-97.xdsl.xnet.co.nz.
liz@tulip:~$ host 203.109.154.13
13.154.109.203.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer atm1-0-939.akl-grafton-car1.ihug.net.

They are using ihug, xnet and the last one looks much like router or business connection – clearly in Grafton Auckland.

Whilst they may have loaded up something simple like greasemonkey on firefox, then written a few lines of code, they more than likely just downloaded an application similar to those used for runescape to automate things.

So, lets get this straight, there is MUCH debate over what a hacker is, and the difference between a hacker, and a cracker. However, neither one covers whatever the heck the medias idea is. They are what’s generally referred to as a pain in the butt, and in any case, if you are one of the top websites in a country, you should have a LOT better security if you are worried about the validity of your poll data.

ps. I’m a female, and i rarely wear black shirts, i’m also nowhere near 18 , however my son is almost 18, who also doesn’t wear black shirts, and who also could easily ‘hack’ those polls.

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Everyones talking about it – the old man of IT?

So there is this article at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/small-business/news/article.cfm?c_id=85&objectid=10599533
Patrick Kershaw works in IT, and apparently believes that twitter is no good for marketing. Whilst im sure hes a nice person, and great at his job, i wonder if hes based his opinions on trial at all?

Whilst anyone who’s been on twitter realizes there are a couple of profiles about that tend to fit most businesses & people online.

The Talker

There are the celebrities who just post to raise profile and, according to Patrick “personalise”, and generally more often than not show fans they are just  normal people, in fact often small minded and somewhat clueless. I have to admit however, some celebs have actually proven they are better than i originally thought! More often than not they post and never reply to anyone. They may have over 1,000,000 watchers, but only watch 90 or so people themselves, proving in effect that a) they dont care much for your opinion anyway, and b) its really impossible to keep up with that many people!

Spammers

These are the people that just mass follow people, and spam their link any way they can. Often bots, but occasionally some person has it in their head and heard that twitter was good for marketing and just spams all their followers till they get blocked.

Normal People

These are your every day people, some get along, some don’t. They come to socialize and generally “hang out”

Pets

These are usually done by “Normal People” who just thought it would be funny to have a pet stream. Depending on how ‘funny’ they are is how many followers.

Legitimate Businesses

Now this is where we come down to the biggie. According to Patrick this just doesn’t make money and bring in people other than a particular market. Im confused where he gets his information here because i travelled from Cambridge to Auckland just to visit @thewinevault – and i dont even drink, I have however recommended him to many who do. I happen to know hes extremely well liked because hes NOT actively trying to spam his website and business all the time, but takes the time to talk to people as a normal person.

Ive seen @rgoodchild procure a lot of business and interesting ideas for her own businesses and her website http://www.askrachel.co.nz , ive seen a group of 20-30 people turn up at @giapo ice cream parlour on queen street because they talked regularly on twitter (and often im seeing people tweet about his ice cream!).

Then there is of course the bigger players, @vodafonenz who almost caused mutiny when they handed his twitter account over to marketing the 3g guy.   I firmly believe he fixes more problems on twitter than the customer support currently, and in 1/8th of the time. He’s the first place i go for support when i have a problem, and one of the best things vodafone ever did for company image.

Until recently i had never heard of idealog magazine ( @idealogmag & yes i dont get out much!), however having spoken to many of their employees online i even bought a copy recently.

If i ever need diet advice the first person i go to is @RealNutrition ( http://www.realnutrients.co.nz/ ) who is not only friendly, but not overly pushy about marketing.

And not to forget @THEFALLSNZ ( http://www.thefalls.co.nz/ ) who is hosting the next ‘tweetup’ and can pretty much guaruntee a party of at least 30 people or more! http://ow.ly/qaGW

@coupdemain from http://www.coupdemainmagazine.com say “we would be nothing without twitter. twitter is pretty much THE reason we had like 164,386 hits on our site last week.” (link)

So to most people on twitter, who move with the times. Patrick seems to sound somewhat like that proverbial old man down the road who lives in the dark ages, refusing to accept new technology.

Quick update note: Im a system administrator by trade, i run servers (web/mail/etc).  I dont have my own company but do web hosting for friends, and friends of friends. I’ve had more website hosting requests in the last 6 months than i can keep up with , and had to automate things as if i was a proper company. This is business purely based on twitter, my prices are nothing fancy, about the same as any other decent hosting company, and to be fair because im so busy im often slow on the update to respond to any requests. Most people see my twitter stream and realize that im actually busy not ignoring them, and dont appear to have a problem (though im trying to automate things to save the lagg!)