Praveen P.N

iPhone carrier settings update from Airtel

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Praveen

I got this dialogue box when I connected my iPhone to iTunes.

Clicking on “Learn More” tells me this is an update from my carrier(Airtel). But what does this update contain? … I don’t know(yet!).
The apple support page tells me it will be saved here:

/Users/[Username]/Library/iTunes/iPhone Carrier Support/

Fair enough. Let’s see what the update actually is.
I looked up twitter and saw that I am not the only one who got this and people have updated their setting without any issues. I clicked on Download and update.

The update file is named BhartiAirtel_in_iPhone.ipcc and is placed in the directory mentioned above.

Little bit of digging tells me .ipcc is a .zip renamed to .ipcc, great.
Renamed that file to .zip and extracted the contents. I’m left with a folder named Payload. Inside Payload is BhartiAirtel_in.bundle. Right click the .bundle file and select show Package contents.
This is what I have:

Both .png images are blank(I’m unable to see anything).
version.plist has the new version number(10.0 was the old one), it’s 10.1 now.
Double click the carrier.plist file and it will open up in plist editor. It’s a simple XML file(just like any other plist file).
My gut feeling is that they probably have updated the list of SupportedSIMs section and nothing great.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
	<string>40410</string>
	<string>40492</string>
	<string>40440</string>
	<string>40431</string>
	<string>40490</string>
	<string>40498</string>
	<string>40449</string>
	<string>40445</string>
	<string>40494</string>
	<string>40495</string>
	<string>40402</string>
	<string>40496</string>
	<string>40497</string>
	<string>40554</string>
	<string>40470</string>
	<string>40493</string>
	<string>40551</string>
	<string>40403</string>
	<string>40552</string>
	<string>40553</string>
	<string>40556</string>
	<string>40416</string>
	<string>40555</string>
</array>
</plist>

I’ll vote this as a safe update, don’t worry, go ahead and get the update. Everything should work as it was before.

Posted in Apple | Tagged airtel, apple, carrier, iphone, update | 14 Comments

Import contacts from Moto Rokr E6 to iPhone 4

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Praveen

What I am writing might not be useful for anyone, because I don’t think anyone out there will be having the phone I had(Moto Rokr E6) for so long & manage to keep it working.

I had a couple of options to transfer my contacts to the iPhone 4.
Option 1: The simpler option suggested by everyone – copy contacts to SIM card and then copy them over to the iPhone – Done.
It was doable, but I wanted it more systematic and some contacts had important information like city, email address and even postal addresses.

I looked up online for information on how to backup data from a Moto Rokr E6, and all I found were solutions using the Motorola Phone Tools software(This software comes with the phone in a CD).

Option 2: I tried searching for the Motorola Phone Tools(MPT) software online, found one link, but it said it will take me 4 days to download 80MB of data. I gave up on that. That’s when I remembered that I had the CD that came along with my phone somewhere at home.
Reached home, knew where to look for the CD and found it in no time. Next, find a Win Computer(That installer works only with Windows).
Went to my friends place with the CD and tried installing it on Windows 7. That software was written in 2006 and I had very less hope of it even installing, but guess what, it installed without any problems and ran also.

Problem 1: My phone wont get detected.
Tried connecting it using USB, and some other tricks. None of them worked. Then it came to my mind that this piece of software(MPT) was written back in the days of XP.
Right click -> Properties -> Changed compatibility to “XP Service Pack 2″ and ran it. Voila! It worked, my phone got detected.

Without wasting a minute, I hit the back-up/restore option in that tool. Connecting …. DONE. Backing up …. DONE.
At this point I was somewhat sure that my contacts are backed up and lying somewhere in the computer.

Problem 2: I didn’t know where the file was saved and in what format.
I had a tuff time finding this one(I haven’t used windows for 3-4 years now). Looked in Program files & every other place. Didn’t find anything related. Hidden files – yes, that option was enabled by default.
Changed those settings and I had a “Programs data” directory that appeared, digged a bit into it and found the MPT folder, it had two .mdb files, contacts.mdb and events.mdb. Microsoft Access? WTF! That’s what I said first, and since Microsoft Access was already installed on the computer I thought this would be a cake walk. But wait … the moment I opened it, it said – The software is expired and I can’t open the file.

I’ll summarize what happened here. I downloaded a free viewer from the internet and opened the file. Those files didn’t contain the data I was looking for – my contacts.

The search continues.

After looking around for a while, I fond another interesting folder – SyncML. Opened a bunch of random folders in it and there goes two text files – contacts.txt and events.txt, both files with file size > 0 KB. Phew!
This is how the contacts.txt file looked like:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N;CHARSET=UTF-8;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:;xxxx
TEL;VOICE;WORK;CHARSET=UTF-8;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:+012345678
X-MOT-CAT;CHARSET=UTF-8;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Phone
UID:00001
END:VCARD
BEGIN:VCARD
.
.
.
.
.

Ok. Now I have some data to play around with.

Emailed this file to my mail account and came back home.
1. Opened Gmail & created a new group in the contacts section.
2. Tried the import option and selected the contacts.txt file
3. It worked! All contacts were imported.
4. Export contacts in .vcf format.

Downloaded that file and imported it in Address Book. Done.

Never ever throw away the CD that came with your mobile Phone

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Velocity online conference – March 2011

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Praveen

I’ll try to summarize all the links and information shared in the conference last night.

1. Web Standards to Measure Real-world Performance [slides]
- by Tony Gentilcore (Google) & Anderson Quach (Microsoft)

They explained a bit about the Web Performance Working Group and jumped straight into the implementation of it in Chrome and IE9.
The three key things that will be available as per the spec are:

HTML document : Navigation Timing
HTML resources: Resource timing. e.g Images, audio, video, etc.
Interactive scenarios: clicking on links

Navigation timing[spec]:
The events that will be available as part of this spec are summarized in this image below:

Navigation timing overview

Demo
Security, performance constraints, determining apps in the background and change polling behavior are some other things they spoke about.

2. Above the Fold Time: Measuring Web Page Performance Visually[slides]
- by Jake Brutlag (Google)

This is a completely new area in performance for me and something very interesting. As Jake defines in his slide, ATF(Above the Fold Time) is “Time when content that stops changing and is above-the-fold reaches its final state.”

AFT brings a new set of metrics to look at and can take web page optimization to a whole new level. Imagine a site optimized for better AFT v/s a site optimized for better Page load time.
I wont go into the details of how the AFT is calculated, why 5 sec is taken as a cutoff time, etc. All those details and more are mentioned in his slides.
What I am excited about is that this feature is already available in WPT(http://www.webpagetest.org/). Go to the video tab and enable AFT.

Once the test is complete(it will take a min of 4 mins, so be patient), the AFT stats and images are available in the summary view. I ran a test on Y! search & here are the results. Go to the screen shot link on the top nav and see the AFT details image.
All of the AFT technology and implementation are part of webpagetest and is available to download at http://code.google.com/p/webpagetest/.

3. Introducing Next-gen YSlow [slides]
- by Betty Tso (Yahoo!) & Marcel Duran (Yahoo!)

Note: YSlow for Chrome is now available for download.
Marcel spent a few minutes on how the current YSlow is designed, and the MVC pieces of it. He also mentioned the limitations of the Chrome plugin sandbox architecture and how YSlow for chrome uses cross domain ajax.

The BIG announcement for the day was YSlow for all browsers(IE, Opera, Safari, etc.), including mobile and tablet browsers. It’s not an Add-in, it’s a Javascript bookmarklet.
This version of YSlow is powered by HTML, CSS & YUI for building the view. JS, HTTP headers and YQL is used for the controller. The bookmarklet opens an iframe and injects the HTML contents of the Doc into it. YQL is used to process component headers & generate results.

Note: This version of YSlow will be available in early April. (The attendees of the conf. had a sneak peek at this). As per Marcel, it works & works just like YSlow for Chrome.

The data generated by YSlow will be available in a YQL open table
A new Mobile friendly interface will be launched - powered by YUI
Jdrop integration (more about that later)
Will be Open sourced soon – on Git
Multi lingual support

If you have any question, ask them here at the exceptional-performance group.

In my opinion, stick to the Firefox version of YSlow, it gives the most accurate & correct value compared to other options.

4. Visibility into Mobile Performance [slides]
- by Steve Souders (Google)

Steve’s talk was more interesting as it contained demos, demos and demos.
1. Blaze.io (http://www.blaze.io/mobile/)
Blaze.io is for mobile browsers what webpagetest.org is for desktop browsers. Blaze.io has taken the webpagetest source code and modified it to run with iOS and Android browsers.
It let’s you view the HAR file of the transaction. Here’s a sample of Blaze.io run on Yahoo! mobile
Other than that, it even records a video of how the page renders & loads in the selected mobile browser. Now that is awesome.

Problems with this approach: It considers data: URIs as separate HTTP requests (as shown by Steve in his Demo)

II. pcapperf (http://pcapperf.appspot.com/)
Let’s you convert .pcap files to HAR files. He explained how we can get the waterfall chart for a mobile browser.
a. Set-up internet sharing on your mac (Ethernet to Wifi)
b. connect your mobile device to the computers Wifi hotspot
c. start network sniffing tool (wireshark or tcpdump) and capture traffic sent to the wireless interface.
d. save .pcap file and upload to URL mentioned above. That will give you a HAR file.

This procedure is explained in detail over here.

Limitations of this approach: This method wont consider the actual bandwidth of the mobile user, e.g 3G or edge(Since we are running a test using ethernet -> Wifi).
Also, it wont take into account changes done by providers to images and other elements of a page.

III. Jdrop (http://jdrop.org/)
Jdrop allows users to store JSON on the cloud. It was mainly built to store performance data gathered from mobile devices.
You need to sign in to Jdrop, get the bookmarket and visit any mobile page and run ‘DOM monster’(other applications will support Jdrop soon), DOM Monster will then let you export the data it generates to Jdrop, which can be viewed on a desktop. Steve has made some data public on Jdrop for others to view it. The data is organized with information like Browser type, Application that exported data & website. Jdrop also let’s you view and export the HAR file.

Get the mobile bookmarklet demoed by Steve from here.

Overall this was a great improvement compared to last years Velocity Online Conference. Kudos to the organizers for keeping it short and interesting.

Posted in Performance | Tagged AFT, blaze, Google, jdrop, microsoft, mobile, performance, w3c, wpt, Yahoo!, yslow | 7 Comments

Bangalore to Goa by Car

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Praveen

This new year was different because I had no plans of going to Goa by Bus or Air, instead, I decided to join my friends on a road trip to Goa. The first thing that came up during early discussion was “which is the best & shortest route to go to Goa by Car”. Since I haven’t gone by a car on this route, the first thing I did was look-up Team-BHP. There’s one thread that comes up when you search for Goa to Bangalore driving directions, but that thread had way too much of information & every person had a different opinion, basically too much of information can be tricky at times.

After a lot of so called research, we finalized the following:

Bangalore to Goa:
NH 4 -> NH 206 -> NH 17 route, that’s Bangalore -> Tumkur -> Shimoga -> Talaguppa -> Sirsi -> Karwar -> Panjim

link

What we thought was a good road was not so great to start with and took us about 15 hrs to reach Goa. I would not recommend this route to go to Goa, especially after what we discovered on our way back.

Goa to Bangalore:
This time one of our friends called up their driver who had gone from Goa to Bangalore few days before the new year. We inquired about the best route from Goa to Bangalore and I was a bit surprised when he told the route.

It was like, hit NH 17 -> NH 63 -> NH4, that’s Panjim -> Karwar -> Dharwad Bangalore By Pass -> Tumkur -> Bangalore.
At first it sounded like a round about, but we took his word and started our journey at 7am in the morning from Panjim.
Panjim to Karwar – There’s nothing much to write about the roads in Goa.
Karwar to Dharwad By Pass – Roads are good, but a a few small Ghats here and there. Overall I’ll rate it as a good road.
Dharwad By Pass to Tumkur – The best part of the trip. Awesome roads throughout.

We completed our return trip in just 11hrs including a 1hr break for lunch, fuel & tea. That’s just 10hrs of driving.

link

Conclusion:
Even though the NH 17 -> NH 63 -> NH 4 looks like a longer route, it can be covered much faster than the NH 206, simply because of the awesome roads. Don’t take the NH 206 to go or come back from Goa, try the NH 4 once and you’ll fall in love with that highway.

Vehicle details:
Number of vehicles – 3 (Swift – Petrol, i10 – Petrol, Punto – Diesel)

Happy New Year

Update from Arun(via comments):
Just returned from a road trip to Goa. Great roads until Hubli and then to South Goa via Karwar (again great roads). Thanks for your tip about NH 17 -> NH 63 -> NH 4 – absolutely the right thing to do. Watch out for some bad patches on the road from Hubli to Karwar. On the road to Hubli, and alhough the road is brilliant – do watch out for the speed breakers at junctions (no marking on these). 9 hours both ways with an 1.5 hour stop.

Posted in Travel | Tagged bangalore, car, directions, driving, goa, new, new year, vacation | 47 Comments

Google.cn and http headers

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Praveen

Google has shut down their Chinese site(http://google.cn). I saw something interesting while looking at the HTTP headers used by Google for the redirect.

Both the URLs google.com and google.com.cn use a 302 redirect to redirect traffic to Google HK and that’s perfectly fine. The redirected URL doesn’t look clean, not only is it NOT clean, I have a feeling they use URL GET parameters to keep track of some statistics.

Here’s how a sample header looked like:

URL: http://www.google.cn/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.cn
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: --removed for good--

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.com.hk/url?sa=p&cki=PREF%3DID%3D024bad9e5afabff3:U%3D957ffb38d60fef2f:FF%3D2:LD%3Dzh-CN:TM%3D1269345133:LM%3D1269345324:S%3DokxQi9JZRpNOay9b&q=http://www.google.com.hk/&ust=1269345354859186&usg=AFQjCNGD11Zf8ak_X-V_y6RPXiFMeHqUQg
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:55:24 GMT
Server: gws
Content-Length: 459
X-XSS-Protection: 0

Most of it is pretty boring stuff, but check the Location URL again. I tried hitting the URL a couple of times and it looks like Google is using a very lazy way to keep track of the users redirected from Google china to Google HK.

ust = User Stats?

Location: http://www.google.com.hk/url?sa=p&cki=PREF%3DID%3D024bad9e5afabff3:U%3D957ffb38d60fef2f:FF%3D2:LD%3Dzh-CN:TM%3D1269345133:LM%3D1269345324:S%3DokxQi9JZRpNOay9b&q=http://www.google.com.hk/&ust=1269345354859186&usg=AFQjCNGD11Zf8ak_X-V_y6RPXiFMeHqUQg

I looked at the traffic for a few minutes and here are the numbers I got. All of them in pretty sweet increasing order.

1269345163308698
1269345240966267
1269345306123236
1269345354859186
1269345574993411

This could be real or just something I got completely wrong