obligatory obscure reference

We upgraded our Droids to 2.2 today, and while one upgrade went fine, the other went not so fine. As in, reboot loop hell not so fine.

While it was up and barely responsive I noticed that there was a message about an operation being performed on the SD card, so I pulled it out and restarted. Droid worked just fine without the SD Card — no lag, all the apps were there, no crashes/reboots, etc.

Put the SD card back in, original problems happen. Phone is completely unusable.

Ok, I figure I’ll just back up the SD card and format it then use it again in my Droid. I removed the SD card and mounted it on my Mac in a USB adapter, drug the folder over, then watched as the number of files that needed to be copied slowly crept into the 10s of thousands.

Which, as you might guess, ain’t right.

After a little exploring, I discovered that /DCIM/Camera contained a directory /DCIM/Camera/Camera which had the exact same files as /DCIM/Camera. Including a subdirectory named “Camera”. Turtles all the way down means the SD card check probably was consuming all ram/cpu on the Droid and causing the crash/reboot.

Luckily the fix is simple — copy everything *except* the Camera sub directory to another file system, delete /DCIM, and re-use the card.

That being said, it’s 2010, why do we still have trivial inode errors in *nix filesystems? (I’m looking at you, Rubin. Seriously, wtf?)

I pretty much agree with the entire daring fireball writeup except for one bit:

Admittedly, it would be very hard to get someone on the phone at Apple who would know what a device such as this one is. Apple, like most large companies, deliberately makes it difficult for consumers to reach (non-retail) employees. There is no lost prototype hotline.

True, there’s no “lost prototype hotline”, but it’s pretty easy to get ahold of Apple. I bet any one of these would have worked just fine:

• Walk into any Apple store and ask the manager how to get a lost prototype back to Cupertino.
• Post to twitter: “Hey Apple, I think I found a lost prototype. How do I return it to Cupertino?”
• Go to Apple’s website, click on the “Contact Us” link, scroll down to “Apple Public Relations”, dial the toll-free number and explain what you found.

It’s not rocket surgery, people.

Today I got an interesting screen on twitter:

Now stop for a second and think about this. Twitter won’t reveal my phone number, but they will let people search for me by my phone number.

So if I just search for all permutations of phone numbers for a given NPA (area code) and NXX (the first three digits of a phone number in the USA), I can make a list of twitter users in a given geographic area or at a specific business. NPA is often a geographically large area, but a given NPA/NXX pair can be very small — as small as a single company or small town.

Obviously you’d get caught trying to search for a bajillion contacts at once, but if I opened ~50 twitter accounts and added 10-20 numbers to each account per day, I could do 500-1000 lookups and cover a given NPA/NXX pair within a week or so.

Hey kids, remember what life was like before the web? Remember when VR was the future of computing?

Experience life before the InterWeb bubble! See geeks reverse engineer $200 toys because they can’t afford $20,000 peripherals! Thrill to 68HC11 assembly, state-of-the-art 386 coding, and Amiga parallel port interfaces!

In other words, I found my PowerGlove list backups.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Reality, Nintendo, PowerGlove, hacking