The 1.1.3 soft-upgrade is called a soft-upgrade because it won’t update your baseband firmware to the 1.1.3 software level (04.03.13_G). This was necessary because as of today there’s no anySIM hack for the new baseband.

Added 2008-2-23: You don’t need Singal.app if you run anySIM 1.1.3 on your IPSF iPhone. I just tested it today and it works!

Added 2008-2-29: Looking for 1.1.4? See here!  

If you own an iPhoneSimFree’ed (IPSF) 1.1.2 iPhone (or 1.1.1) with the 3.9 bootloader you’re able to fully upgrade to 1.1.3 including baseband! Why would you want the new baseband if you could run 1.1.3 with the older baseband firmware? I don’t really have an answer to that. I just wanted to make sure the software and the baseband firmware in my iPhone are on the same level as intended by Apple’s software engineers.

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Test your aluminum iMac if it has a good or bad display

Added 2008-4-1: Apple being sued over iMac display quality!

“Dazzling displays: Your photos, movies, and games will come to life in rich, vivid color thanks to the new glossy widescreen display on every iMac. …delivering greater performance for everything from enhancing photos to playing games and more.”

This is how Apple describes the displays in the new aluminum iMac. But there seems to be a vast difference between the marketing promises and reality. Users affected by bad iMac displays report their experiences as follows (these are just a few excerpts out of dozens of statements in Apple’s own discussion forum):

“I’m a PC-to-Mac switcher and purchased a 24” imac about a month ago and returned it for a full-refund due to the obvious gradient.”

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While the installation of the Linux binary for the Unreal Tournament 3 Server is dead simple, some very brave game server administrators apparently chose to run the server with root permissions because there’s no useful server start script. This usually is an exceptionally bad idea for everything that opens ports on an Internet server.

Here’s a very simple start script that starts the UT3 server with a different account which you have to create using the groupadd/useradd command. In my case I’m using user game in group game. The script will sudo to this less powerful account and then start a botless deathmatch UT3 server. The server will continue to run after you close your shell. Well, at least until the server crashes, which it does frequently. In its current form the script has to be put into the ut3-dedicated/Binaries directory. Read more »

One day I was looking for a fast and easy to use Java webservice implementation. I found XFire, the next gen java SOAP framework which is based on a low memory StAX model. There’s a FAQ on the XFire website about how to run XFire in a WebLogic environment. XFire requires a newer version of the javax.xml.namespace.QName than is included in weblogic.jar. Now, this cures the problem with the missing constructor. Depending on what exactly you do in your webservice other errors may occur. The most prominent exception being this one:

java.lang.LinkageError:
loader constraints violated when linking
javax/xml/namespace/QName

The problem occurs if there’s the combination of an older version of QName (being loaded from the application server at boot time) and a library which uses the 3-string constructor introduced in a later version of QName. This most likely is a class loading issue because the QName class in weblogic.jar is loaded earlier by the system classloader and can’t be “overridden” by the EAR/WAR classloader. But that’s just my best bet as I am not a classloader expert when it comes to WebLogic’s classloading mechanism.

This is neither an XFire-only problem nor is it a WebLogic-only problem! I read about XML libraries (eg. XMLBeans, Spring, Muse) having the same issues with QName if running in an application server environment (e.g. IBM Websphere). Read more »