Ramblings and other crap
JiveTalk is an instant messaging client for the BlackBerry that is head and shoulders above the competition. It provides data-based (as opposed to SMS based) instant message access that is fully functional. I’ve been using it for about a month now in closed testing, and it’s awesome. It provides access to AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and Google Talk. It’s the Adium of BlackBerry IM clients.
You can download it over the air from www.beejive.com.
This has made the rounds on the Internet today. It’s too good to not share.
This video is NSFW. Do not view this with sensitive ears. (language of a sexual nature. Video is just two people sitting on a stage talking)
Make sure you check out the related MetaFilter Thread
Twitter was having a bit of a fit this morning, and this is the error message I received. That’s the great thing about new small web companies: senses of humour.
I recently purchased a BlackBerry Pearl. I love it. It’s great. Maybe I’ll “review” it at some point in the future. But, I wanted to post an entry about working around a flaw in the way Mac OS X handles the BlackBerry.
By default, the BlackBerry and Mac won’t talk. They don’t know how to talk to each other. It would appear from some further research (and assumptions) that the BlackBerry presents itself as a “vendor specific” device in the USB handshake. Mac OS X spawns up the SmartCard daemon (pcscd) to attempt to load a SmartCard reader driver.1 However, instead of failing and exiting, it starts sucking 100% of the CPU. Oh, and as an added bonus, it won’t die when sending it a ‘kill -9′ as root. Plus, a standard shutdown or reboot will fail. The only solution is to hold down that power button. Not really something we want to do constantly.
To keep the SmartCard subsystem from trying to talk to the BlackBerry, you’ll need to edit the preference file for securityd as root. Using a text editor, most likely from command line,2 open the file /private/etc/mach_init.d/securityd.plist. Make the following change:
from:
<string>/usr/sbin/securityd</string>
to:
<string>/usr/sbin/securityd -s conservative</string>
Occasionally, pcscd still launches and does it’s thing. Since I don’t use smart cards, I went ahead and just disabled it totally.
<string>/usr/sbin/securityd -s off</string>
Reboot your system, and the change should take effect. No more system dying when plugging in your BlackBerry!
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