My brothers bill is about ~$23 a month with regular usage and that is with a Samsung Galaxy SII with full messaging, data and voice minutes (you use more, you pay a bit more). Ting has a sweet ‘plan’ calculator you can check out.

That being the case, I had an ‘older’ Samsung Epic 4G Nexus S (SPH-D700) phone:

So my issue came into play because I wanted to test drive Ting, and this phone had an old OS, so I googled for alternative ROMs that I could enable and found that CyanogenMod supports it (I was overjoyed & very happy to learn this fact).  The original phone supported only the 2.3.x Gingerbread OS, which is ancient at this point.

CyanogenMod Download files:
http://download.cyanogenmod.com/?device=epicmtd

Since I updated the OS to the latest Android Jellybean release (supported by cyanogenmod) I found myself unable to do a carrier wipe, PRL update, or Profile update. So I kept on googling and found this awesome multi-boot solution for stock ROMs (without having to wipe your phone or do anything else to it). The neat thing about it is that one can simply add it to their SD card and ClockWorkMod ‘install from zip’ which results in booting from that ROM (without an install!).

So once you boot into the stock FC09 firmware, you are able to go through all of Ting’s requirements for setting up the phone on their network.

Ting Supported Devices:
https://help.ting.com/entries/22567167-Bring-Your-Sprint-Device-to-Ting-A-List-of-All-Supported-Devices

Ting instructions for SPH-D700:
https://help.ting.com/entries/22535762-configuring-mms-and-wimax-on-your-epic-4g-sph-d700

In closing, I’ve had a really good learning experience with doing this type of modding for getting a Sprint ‘locked’ phone onto Ting.  It was a bit challenging but it is all worth it when you realize you just brought back to life a phone that was lying in the corner unused.

Currently as I write this, my WD 750GB is sitting in the freezer, and waiting for another round of quick copying (frozen recovery? eh..). Maybe like you, I often wondered if putting your drive in the freezer actually help you with any sort of recovery, and having never tried it before, I thought “what the hell? why not, its pretty much dead anyways!?”.

Some background:

My WD750 hard drive suddenly died and took all my media with it (majority of it, that is personal like photos, music, and documents, I backed up regularly to my basement server), however a bunch of stuff was not backed up, so I was not pleased when the drive just ‘dropped’ out of windows. It wouldn’t show up in Windows 7 management, and most certainly not in ‘My computer’. But I did find that it would show up upon boot in BIOS. So with that shred of hope, I gave Ubuntu a try (to see if Linux would see the drive).

The plan:

With a dead drive, and very little hope, I quickly downloaded Ubuntu 12.10, and set it up on a spare USB drive. Rebooted my machine and tried out Ubuntu’s LIVE feature (basically full OS running off my spare USB pen drive). My plan to see if Linux would mount the drive and ultimately make it accessible.

The outcome:

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that INDEED Ubuntu (even off the live usb) was able to see my drive (as well as my other regular drives). This allowed me to try to get at the ‘failed’ hdd. But alas, I could only pull a couple gigs off the drive before it gave me I/O errors.
I ended up sticking the HDD into a zip-lock bag, and sticking it in the freezer for 20 min or so. After having the drive get ice cold, I would quickly run back to the machine, HOT SWAP it in (its a sata drive after all), and have it re-mount, which allowed me about ~10 min or 30gigs more of data transfer, before it would click or spin wildly (signaling its reheating).

I am not sure if the cold helped ‘harden’ the drives insides, or components, or maybe tighten up its lubrication, and I really don’t care! All I can tell you is that its a stupid thing, sticking your drive in the freezer, BUT it works!

So if you find yourself wishing you backed up that data sooner, and are about to take your anger out on a piece of metal (by tossing it out a window per say), freeze it first! You might just get a few more minutes of life to say “goodbye!”.

Happy recovery!

If you haven’t had any experience designing with Twitter Bootstrap, I would suggest you give it a look, as it is a sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development. I know personally it has saved me countless hours for personal projects.

A3M has been a long time running library (mind you with hands-free support) by @pengkong on , that I’ve tried to support. Finally I took it upon myself to gut the library and add new functionality as well as get rid of the modular approach the library initially held, which made sense architecturally but not from a site maintainers view, as you needed to dive into the module subfolder to edit minor things for account details and views.

Anyway, take a look at my ‘Bootstrapped’ version, fork it if you want to help out.

You can check it out here:
https://github.com/pengkong/A3M-for-CodeIgniter-2.0

Also, I will be updating the official A3M guide later (as its almost 3am as I write this).

Check it out, and enjoy. Feel free to fork and offer bugs, enhancements and suggestions to make it even better!

1802 - Unauthorized network card is plugged in - power off and remove the mini pci network card

Well this error is because IBM added a whitelist to its BIOS, which basically means you are limited to only a few authorized mini pci-e devices, so the moment you see this error it means you cannot get past it. The error simply halts the boot process and won’t let you proceed until you remove the ‘offending’ device from your laptop.

There are a number of ways to thwart this error, but the easiest that I’ve found is via this post:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/459591-t61-x61-sata-ii-1-5-gb-s-cap-willing-pay-solution-8.html#post6501443

I was able to quickly update my BIOS by using the modified BIOS v 2.29-1.08. Inside the archive (that you download) is an `.ISO` file that you want to burn (using a utility like IMGBURN) to a blank CD-R. Boot your laptop using this CD-R and then it will run the flash process and restart your machine (as always the necessary precautions are: grab the right bios file! I’m not responsible for you messing up your system). If you need a more hand holding approach to this, just follow the quick guide.

Once I flashed the BIOS, I was able to confirm that I was running 2.29-1.08 via the BIOS config (F1 on boot).

This allowed me to utilize a cheap Monoprice WIFI device for my hackintosh build (which worked great, altho the device shows up as an ETH2 device, and not wifi, but still works 100%). If you want to get the same device, here are the details. If you are also making a Hackintosh, you can grab the necessary files for this device from this thread: http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=42271.

Enjoy!

A typical ‘bad programmer’ will create a controller, which would just call a view:

function index()
{
	$this->load->view('process_something_page');
}

and then their view would be jam packed with business logic, database queries, and very much a glob of code that defeats the whole purpose of utilizing an MVC framework.

WAKE UP!

• Keep your Controllers skinny, and free of business logic
• Stick your business logic, into your MODELS
• Your VIEW should output results/output generated from your MODELS
• As a programmer, do it RIGHT from the START, don’t say “I’ll fix it later”, later never comes!
• If you don’t know where something should go, ask (StackOverflow is a great place to ask, make sure to properly define your question tho)

I’ve created a brief and somewhat comical view of what you should do to keep your MVC pattern clean. Just remember, don’t put it all in the VIEW, even if you are just doing a ‘test’, be smart about where you put things.

Controller

• Control the flow of logic, when business logic is needed, utilize a model, once output is gathered, call a view
• Don’t add business logic here that results in a if/else check and logic, leave that for the model, return the result to the controller
• Keep your controller skinny, if you are calculating something, it shouldn’t be in there.

Model

• Where your business logic goes, if you have conditions that need to be met, and data pulled on those conditions, let the model handle that lifting.
• Most people associate a model with a database interaction, while true, that’s not all its used for. Keep that in mind.
• Don’t format your data output for HTML, or anything specific, a models data object should be generic. Styling data should be done in the view.

View

• Free of logic, should not have any validation, error checking, or database queries.
• Focus on displaying data provided by the model, style the output here.
• A view should be flexible enough that output works for command line output, web app output, or mobile output without much work.

You might ask yourself, “Why does it matter that I use proper MVC patterns?”, and in truth, it doesn’t matter unless you work in a group, or if you are the type of person that wants to maintain code in the future. As always, if I misrepresented something, or am flat out wrong, let me know. Post your comments below.

Oh don’t worry it will still be painfully slow, and you will feel like you are driving a Chevette with a BMW logo on it. But thats how the marketing works these days, its a typical bait and switch.

But I guess you can see a screenshot to be sure:

The iPhone 4S supports HSPA+ networks up to 16 megabits per second, which is just enough to count as 4G in AT&T’s book as well as that of the FCC (even though HSPA+ is not technically a fourth-generation technology like LTE). When the iPhone 4S first launched in October, 2011, Apple revealed that it was working together with AT&T to make the 4G indicator show up.

Quote Source: http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/07/want-to-pretend-your-iphone-4s-is-4g-just-install-ios-5-1/

Personally, I think I am going to call up AT&T support, and demand a reduction in my monthly fee, if I am paying for 4G service and getting pitiful throughput in my area, which supposedly has `great` coverage. Yet another reason to love AT&T, now with more market speak.

Its just funny, that nothing improves for the throughput but they have reason enough to change the symbol to something that is INVALID.

“According to the latest EBITDA numbers from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, the subsidies they have to pay Apple in order to carry the iPhone are drastically reducing their profits. From the Article: ‘”A logical conclusion is that the iPhone is not good for wireless carriers,” says Mike McCormack, an analyst at Nomura Securities. “When we look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident.”‘ So one money sucking leech has attached itself to another money sucking leech?”

I love the last bit about one leech onto another leech

Somehow I have no pitty for the likes of AT&T & telco’s, for years they’ve f’d over customers, now they are getting burned on their bottom line, and they can’t seem to pass it on to consumers as they are being squeezed from both sides.

A few of them have problems creating a route to a controller folder structure (/application/controllers/folder/controller), but really it is the same as creating a custom route to a non ‘folder’ed’ controller, you just have to define the variable in the routing path.

Here is our scenario, I have a URL of http://example.com/account/manage/4123245/jakub

So if we analyze our URI, we have:
account – folder
manage – controller (with only an index class)
4123245 – a numeric value (input)
jakub – a string slug value (just extra input)

From that we need to make sure that codeigniter understands our URI (and it will not by default!).
so we edit our /application/config/routes.php

$route['account/manage/(:num)/(:any)'] 	= "account/manage/index/$1/$2";

Index is the key here, as we need to route to the class (which is the index), the values $1, $2 are just input (1st, 2nd respectively) to show it goes to the index class.

There you have it, no more route issues with folders in your controller structure.

Happy Code Igniting!

Well in a couple of my last projects I’ve ran smack into CSRF protection and how it impacts AJAX (as well as many other things like Paypal payment gateway responses, etc).

If you found this page when searching for Codeigniter CSRF Ajax, then you’re in luck, as here is the easiest way to add CSRF protection to your ajax calls:

$.ajax({
	type: 'POST',
	url: '/action/fetch_more_blog_posts',
	data: {
		type: 'news', limit: limit, offset: offset,
		<?php echo $this->security->get_csrf_token_name(); ?>: '<?php echo $this->security->get_csrf_hash(); ?>' },
	success: function(data) {
		$(data).appendTo('#more-entries');
		$('#older-posts').slideDown();
		offset += limit;
	}
});

The magic really here is the following entry in the data I am sending back to my controller:

<?php echo $this->security->get_csrf_token_name(); ?>: '<?php echo $this->security->get_csrf_hash(); ?>'

The `get_csrf_token_name()` gets you your token name from the security class (first set in your config), and the `get_csrf_hash();` simply outputs the secure hash from the security class. Simple enough.

If you have timeout issues (say your ajax page sits too long, you may increase the token a bit, test for best fit).