Helm's Technology Blog

After waiting and hitting the Check for Updates button over and over again – at 7pm BST it finally arrived.. queue the 200+ MB download and the wait…

Once downloaded the update I had to wait for it to transfer the files – then it rebooted – great stuff… until the emergency call slider appeared – hmm – nothing happened – left for 20 mins – nothing happened.  Odd..

Undock, redock – restart – still the same how odd. Time for the old fav – Turn off….. wait 5 mins….and turn on… and hey presto it worked.. So not the most smooth of updates – but nothing I am not used to.

Right first impressions.

It’s fast… Wayyyy fast, my Iphone is overloaded with apps – I mean really overloaded – we are talking 9 pages or so full of apps… and now it’s fast.

Switching between native things such as SMS , phone and dock is great – the hidden page to the left (spotlight) for searching is great… though maybe not too useful for me – I don’t store documents on the phone afterall.

MMS works with O2 and is brill about time – not got anyone to send me one yet – but me sending works – so that’s a big plus – suspect it costs me though, need to find out from O2.

Audio recording – brilliant, had an app to do it before – but this actually is higher quality – and the app tended to get confused if interrupted – this works in the background! so you can do things and it’s still recording – excellent!

Bluetooth pairing with headset – AT LAST – my old old phone could do this – and now my iphone can too – no more cables to listen to things I can wear my nice headphones and get the sound – the quality is good too – better than most pairings!

All in all brilliant – now all I need is the new apps (tom tom??) and video recording – which we know the phone can do if jailbroken – so come on – I don’t need high quality – I just need to be able to record my daughter playing sometimes!!

Oh and on itunes it looks like I can buy movies an series.. seems pretty good, what if my space is limited and the download time seems a bit excessive.. we will see.

I recently had a little problem when deleting a store of spam e-mails off one of my personal servers.

Basically entering the standard death defying command of “rm -Rfv *” while in a directory (this will delete everything recursively – have fun), the system responded “Argument list too long” – cue the first “huh?” moment – I’ve used the command for years and years, never had a problem.

I did “man rm” to check I hadn’t had a “moment” and forgotten how to use it – nope.. . A little trawling came up with several people with the same problem but no really practical solutions.  The problem occurs when you have too many files for the built in systems used by the rm command in the kernel – these are pretty old so have some limits that you don’t expect! – you can do this:

rm -Rfv a* then rm -Rfv A* –  these deletes all files starting with a or A etc.. – very long and rather silly – so after thinking and thinking and muttering an old command came to mind  using a combination of find and xargs you can pipe a file on at a time so here we go – my favoured solution:

find . -name * | xargs rm -fv

This works fine – I suspect it will have a limit somewhere, but my server hasn’t hit it yet!