Backgrounder

Backgrounder is an extension that lets you run apps in the background. This was originally my only intent with jailbreaking. I often use Pocket Tunes Deluxe to stream local sports stations or Sirius radio, but having to quit the app every time I wanted to reply to an SMS message or check the twitters was pretty annoying.

Cycorder

Since I only an iPhone 3G, not the 3GS, I cannot record video on my device via the camera.  That is, until I installed this nifty app. The quality of the video it records is pretty nice.  Makes me wonder why Apple could not have extended this feature to those of us with our ancient year-old phones.

SBSettings

Invaluable method for quickly toggling all sorts of system properties with a simple screen swipe from anywhere.  Lets you toggle Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, view/kill processes, see available memory and disk space, etc.   Awesomeness.

Rotation Inhibitor

This lets me toggle auto-rotation from SBSettings. Personally, I find the rotation on this device to be mostly an annoyance. I’m used to the regular keyboard layout, and sometimes when I am ever laying down on my side or walking, the auto-rotation tends to get wonky. Presto, I can now turn it off (which I do.)

ScreenSplitr

ScreenSplitr actually has come in rather handy at work. This app will mirror your device screen onto a tv via a tv-out cable, or to a computer over wifi using an app called DemoGod. This is not really meant for, say, watching video on a big screen, but it is perfect for doing application demos to a larger audience.

SMS Helper

SMS Helper modifies the default SMS app to count characters when composing a new message.  This is very helpful if you would rather not have your text split into multiple messages on the recipient’s end, or for texting to twitter.

Mobile Terminal

Want to drop into a shell on your iPhone? Enter Mobile Terminal. Very useful if you ever need console access, especially considering things like wget, vim, etc have been ported to this platform.

If you run into these problems, there is a simple fix. Copy the conflicting jars into the endorsed directory:

cp -t $JBOSS_HOME/lib/endorsed $JBOSS_HOME/server/all/lib/jboss-jaxrpc.jar \
  $JBOSS_HOME/server/all/lib/jboss-saaj.jar

Fixing the wsdl soap address brokenness

Another problem you might run into is that the default wsdl generated will end up using whatever hostname JBoss thinks it is. This is not necessarily the hostname that is accessible remotely.

To get around this, modify:

$JBOSS_HOME/server/$instanceName/deploy/jbossws.sar/jbossws.beans/META-INF/jboss-beans.xml

By commenting out the webServiceHost property in WSServerConfig

jQuery’s Ajax/load request allows you load external html from a remote source and inject it into the DOM.  This means you can keep your javascript and my page layout completely separate. Combining the use of displaytag and ajax/load is a snap, and allowing the sorting & pagination to be ajax-driven rather than forcing page reloads is great.

In your jsp that renders the table (assuming you have an appropriately-scoped object called people available):

<s:url id="thisUrl"/>
<display:table class="people" id="peopleTable" name="${people}" requestURI="${thisUrl}" pagesize="5" sort="list">
  <display:column property="name" title="Name" class="name" sortable="true"/>
  <display:column property="birthday" title="Birthday" class="birthday"/>
</display:table>

And in your display page, from which you want to dynamically load this table and inject:

<script type="text/javascript">

  if (!com) var com = {};
  com.mudrick = {

    onPeopleTableLoad: function() {

      // Gets called when the data loads
      $("table#peopleTable th.sortable").each(function() {
        // Iterate over each column header containing the sortable class, so
        // we can setup overriding click handlers to load via ajax, rather than
        // allowing the browser to follow a normal link
        $(this).click(function() {
          // "this" is scoped as the sortable th element
          var link = $(this).find("a").attr("href");
          $("div#peopleData").load(link, {}, com.mudrick.onPeopleTableLoad);
          // Stop event propagation, i.e. tell browser not to follow the clicked link
          return false;
        });
      });

      $("div#peopleData .pagelinks a").each(function() {
        // Iterate over the pagination-generated links to override also
        $(this).click(function() {
          var link = $(this).attr("href");
          $("div#peopleData").load(link, {}, com.mudrick.onPeopleTableLoad);
          return false;
        });
      });
    }
  };

  $(document).ready(function() {
    // Load the initial rendering when the dom is ready.  Assuming you are injecting into a div
    // with id "peopleData" that exists in the page.
    $("div#peopleData").load("/remote/path/to/whatever/generates/table/above", {}, com.mudrick.onPeopleTableLoad);
  });

</script>

Presto! Pagination + sorting in an ajaxy way using displaytag out of the box with some simple jQuery code.

This guy figured out how to get similar behavior in Xcode.

In the event that the referenced blog entry ever goes away… You need to add an objc_exception_throw breakpoint to your global breakpoints.

Why this isn’t configured as such out of the box, I don’t know.

For instance, how else would I have http://host/a123 really be processed by http://host/MyApp/Processor.action?id=123?  I won’t get into the specifics of configuring tomcat valves or, in particular, this one, but I will briefly touch on something I previously thought was not possible:  Making changes to a running configuration without incurring the downtime of performing a jboss restart.

Assuming that your rewrite valve is configured in your jboss.web engine’s default hostname (i.e. the valve is configured in /Server/Engine/Host/ in $JBOSS_HOME/server/$INSTANCE/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/server.xml) you’d do the following.  I’m using JBoss 4.2.3GA btw.

$JBOSS_HOME/bin/twiddle.sh -s localhost:$JMX_PORT \
  set 'jboss.web:host=$ENGINE_HOST,name=RewriteValve,type=Valve' configuration \
  "$(cat $JBOSS_HOME/server/$INSTANCE/conf/jboss.web/$ENGINE_HOST/rewrite.properties)"

My variables:

JMX_PORT=1099
INSTANCE=default
ENGINE_HOST=localhost

You should then see the configuration print to STDOUT, and the changes will be active.

It would be great if you could do this from the JMX console.  Unfortunately, browsers hose the newlines in your rewrite rules (pretty important) and there’s a bug in the getter implementation of the RewriteValve that might mess things up.