The upgrade will work seamlessly with your current fmTuner design, but if you visit the fmTuner Settings page, you’ll see that you can now specify a link to a placeholder image, which will be used if Last.fm comes up short on album art. Leaving this field blank (the default) will simply skip tracks without artwork. If you want to get really fancy, there’s even a fmTuner tag that will print out the path to your current WordPress theme, if you’d like different album art placeholders for different themes.

(Comments are closed on this entry — any bugs or other issues should be reported on the original fmTuner page. Thanks!)

I know at some point I should attempt to merge my changes into the Firebug codebase and submit a patch (and stop this Firebug cat-and-mouse game), but my XUL knowledge is still fairly limited. If anyone would like to take on the challenge, though, I imagine your patch would be a welcome addition to Firebug’s core!

Find out who made the device
Figuring out which company made the device(s) in question is the first step towards getting it working. Start by opening the Windows Device Manager. My preferred quick way of doing this is clicking Start -> Run -> type “devmgmt.msc” -> press Enter. Once there, choose the device in question and right click it, and select Properties. Select the Details tab to see something like the view below:

Note the PCI “VEN” and “DEV” 4-character identifiers. PCI, USB, and many other system devices have Vendor and Device IDs. The Vendor ID is specific to the manufacturer, like Broadcom or nVIDIA. The Device ID is specific to the particular make or model of device you have. These are expressed in hexadecimal (0 through 9 plus A through F), so don’t be surprised to see letters there, as well. Some common Vendor IDs are 8080 and 8086 for Intel, 0A5C for Broadcom, 10DE for nVIDIA, 1002 for ATI, and many more.

Google it
A common way to express both the Vendor and Device IDs in a single string is 1022:2000, Vendor ID first. Combine your Vendor and Device IDs in this manner, and wrap it with quotes: “1022:2000″. Google that, and you should quickly figure out who made your “Unknown device” and what model it is. With this knowledge, you can either find the appropriate driver on your computer manufacturer’s website (Dell makes a good note of which manufacturer’s devices they use for a particular system), or you can visit the device manufacturer’s website directly.

I hope this information can help those looking to simply get their hardware working under Windows.

Sync Your Apps
Assuming you already have the target application on your iPhone or iPod Touch (just “iPhone” from this point forward for brevity’s sake), simply sync your iPhone with your Mac or PC. Doing so will backup your device and transfer any purchased applications in both directions. With the target application now on your computer, navigate to your iTunes “Mobile Applications” folder, where iTunes typically does its own file housekeeping. Under Mac OS X, the default location is:
/Users/yourname/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications

Break it Open
Copy your target .ipa-suffixed application to a different location, ensuring that the original stays in the Mobile Applications folder to keep iTunes happy. To get inside the application, rename its extension to .zip. Open the zip file, and you will have access to the guts of the app (except the source code, of course).

High-res App Artwork
Directly inside the unzipped application folder, you’ll find a file named “iTunesArtwork”, with no extension. A hex editor revealed that the file is typically a jpeg image, so rename it to include .jpg at the end, and you’ll end up with the same 512×512 pixel artwork displayed by iTunes when browsing downloaded Applications. Beauties include:

To get at other resources, open up the adjacent “Payload” folder, and you’ll find a .app file — the application bundle that runs on the iPhone. Right- or Control-click on the .app, and choose “Show Package Contents” to open up the bundle.

Sounds
Sounds are typically found among the many resources directly inside the application, as files with extensions like .mp3, .aif, .m4a. At this point, the organizational structure is up to the application’s developer, so you may need to look around a little. Leopard’s QuickLook feature is a boon in times like this, helping assess a file’s purpose without opening half a dozen applications.

Other Graphics
Also nestled inside iPhone applications are many of the graphics used throughout the app. It’s possible that some may be drawn by code, but complex graphics are generally stored as images. However, viewing the images isn’t as easy as renaming the files as before. This will be a bit trickier, as the iPhone works some magic on the images before finishing the app build process, leaving images in an iPhone-optimized state. Fortunately, the process can be reversed with a little bit of Terminal trickery.

1. Copy all .png images to a new folder elsewhere. Images of other formats (.jpg, .gif, etc.) should be readily viewable.
2. Download David Watanabe’s modified iPhonePNG command-line application, unzip the archive, and open up Terminal from your /Applications/Utilities folder.
3. Type cd (cd space), then drop the iPhonePNG folder into the Terminal, and tap Return to switch to that folder.
4. Type ./iPhonePNG , drop the folder of encoded images into the Terminal, and tap Return to decode the whole folder full of images.
5. The output folder sites beside iPhonePNG, so type open . and tap Return (open space dot) to open the current folder (a dot, in Unix terms) in the Finder. Open the decoded images folder and have a look around.

That’s the 10-cent tour of the inner parts of a downloaded iPhone application for those that are curious about what iTunes handles automatically!

Here’s what makes me wonder, though: Halo 3 has no programming interface for accomplishing this feat, nor does Bungie.net, or the Xbox 360 itself. Halo 3′s videos are completely walled off to other computers and automation, requiring button pressing and reading to navigate to videos in players’ shares. Josh Lowensohn over at Cnet talked with the creator and CEO of GameVee, and he was very secretive about the details of how their system works, which makes me all the more curious. While I have no further details on how GameVee manages to automate the Halo 3 video-capturing process, I have an idea as to how I’d go about it…

• Imaginary Setup
  It’s reasonable to expect that Grab isn’t doing something wildly complicated and impractical like capturing and decrypting Xbox Live packets and rendering videos on a computer other than an Xbox 360. Plus, the tail end of their captured videos also show the Halo video controller — a telltale sign that it’s just a computer capturing the video coming out of an Xbox. Starting with a regular desktop PC, a capture card or box would be required to get video input, and some kind of USB controller to send controls to the Xbox 360. Sending “spoofed” controller button-presses to an Xbox 360 console shouldn’t be terribly hard with a little USB controller work, but getting a computer to “understand” what’s happening in-game is a much larger hurdle.
• Software
  If Grab is in fact automated — it could very well just be some guy downloading and capturing videos all day long — the key piece is going to be the software that keeps track of what the Xbox is doing, when a video is done playing, how it’s responding to button presses, etc. Machine vision is a rather complicated endeavor for a project like Grab, but it’s certainly seems within the realm of possibility. Another tactic might be to process only the audio coming from the Xbox, and “listen” for responses to button presses in the menu interface, and to wait for game audio to subside to flag the end of a video. Both are rather fragile, though — any abnormality in the flow could completely confuse the software, leaving a capturing PC stuck until an operator can clear the problem and reset the software.

However GameVee designed Grab, it seems to be working fairly well for them. What are your thoughts on how they might have accomplished something of this magnitude?

A quick trip to the Console application in the Applications > Utilities folder reported dozens of instances of “USB caused wake event (EHCI)”, which gave me some initial Google hits. The obvious answer is that a USB device was waking up the computer, however I rarely had USB hardware plugged in when the random awakenings were occurring.

As it turns out, others have had this problem before. As indicated in the previous links, Mac OS X keeps its power schedule inside /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist, but this file didn’t exist for me, apparently “confusing” Mac OS X. Without it, it would exhibit the symptoms I was encountering.

Following suggestions, I opened System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule, where you can schedule system sleeps and wakes. By toggling on a scheduled wake, clicking OK, then disabling it, the com.apple.AutoWake.plist was re-created, and left with no scheduled sleeps or wakes. So far, this has cured my MacBook Pro’s insomnia!

Photoshop to Multiple .ico Files
The first step to branding a generic executable with your own icons is to get them out of the graphics program and into .ico format, which is the standard for Windows software icons and cursors. IcoFormat, a free Photoshop import/export plugin for handling .ico files, will easily handle the task. Once installed to your Photoshop plugins folder (and Photoshop subsequently restarted), you can save each of your icons as a .ico file using “Save As…”, and choosing ICO from the Format menu in the resulting dialog. Repeat for each icon size you wish to embed (or, if you’re ambitious, try recording a Photoshop action to automate the process).

Multiple .ico Files to One .ico File
To allow Windows to display the best size icon for the current folder view, it’s best to combine the desired .ico files into a single file. The free Icollator program will take in multiple icons and produce a single .ico file ready for embedding. You may need the Java Runtime Environment to run Icollator, if you don’t already have it. Like Icollator, JRE is also free download.

Embed the .ico File
The last step is to embed the single .ico file (containing two or more icons) into the .exe. Launch the freeware Resource Hacker utility, and Open the target .exe. Then select Action -> “Add a new Resource…”, and pick the combined .ico file you made in the previous step. Give the resource a simple name like “ICONS”, and click Add Resource. Save the changes to the .exe, and switch to Windows Explorer. You’ll notice that the .exe now has the embedded icon set, and Windows will show the correct size icon for the current view mode. Also, you’ll notice that Resource Hacker made a backup of the .exe before embedding, just for safe keeping.

Also potentially of interest: Getting application name and icon right with XULRunner from the AdBlock Plus blog

Along the same line, when developing a web application or just a simple page, HTML forms require that data be typed in and submitted. This process will repeat as the server-side code is refined, and typing the same data over and over gets old as soon as the second iteration. “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, or “DRY”, is a common philosophy for writing better code, and should extend to testing your forms, as well.

Save your typing for code.

Form Jig is a small Firefox extension for replicating HTML form data and server-side code. To use it, fill out a form on a page, click the red Capture button in your Firefox status bar, then submit the form. Upon returning for further testing, click the green Replay triangle to populate the form just as you left it. Form data is kept around until the current Firefox window is closed, and can be used between tabs.

Suggestions are welcomed, and bug reports will be attended to.

6/8/08 Update v1.0.1
Fixed a bug related to checkboxes and radio buttons. The updated plugin should appear on addons.mozilla.org shortly (linked via the above button), but still hasn’t passed Mozilla’s “nomination” for public consumption.

You can download the empty map file from my Bungie.net File Share (note the seamless “Download to Halo 3″ link), or by browsing my File Share under the Gamertag “Mac Minded”. Now go create and have fun!