Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 180,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 8 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/
avr/bin/../lib/gcc/avr/4.3.2/../../../../avr/lib/avr5/crtm644p.o: (.init9+0x0): undefined reference to `main'

The sanguino folder does not include the main.cpp file. Instead it includes an identical file called main.cxx. The easiest way to fix this problem is to copy the file and rename the new copy to main.cpp.

I added a space after the .../tools/ in the path above so that the code would look better on the page.

In GarageBand select Podcast project, and from the Audio tab drag the m4a, then choose the Save Podcast to Disk from the GarageBand’s Share menu. There is no need to download, try or buy one of the countless audio converters that you may find on the web. GarageBand does a great job.

- (void)textFieldDidEndEditing:(UITextField *)textField
{
    [textField resignFirstResponder];
}

But this didn’t work. The method would get called, but the focus still remained in the UITextField. Instead, I chose to use the touches methods to dismiss the keyboard. This allows the user to touch anywhere outside of the text field to dismiss the keyboard. Here is a method that will dismiss the keyboard:

-(void)touchesBegan: (NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
       // do the following for all textfields in your current view
	[self.my_text_field_1 resignFirstResponder];
       // save the value of the textfield, ...
}

But first a few words on signal strength and its unit. The cellular signal strength is represented in -dBm: the power ratio in decibels of the measured power referenced to one milliwatt. The useful range is somewhere between -50dBm to -110dBm. The smaller the number the worse the signal. So -50dBm is much better than -110dBm. A 3 dB increase represents doubling the power. I’ve not researched if it is possible to get the the actual signal strength using the iPhone SDK. But I’ve been using the Tetlit cellular modems and there are a couple of AT commands that provide this information: MONI and CQS. The AT command MONI returns the received signal strength in dBM. Based on testing, I’ve seen MONI returning signal strength anywhere from -55dbM to -110dBm depending on location. At lower dbms, e.g., -109 or above, you can definitely still send SMS but the quality of reception is lower (more bit rate errors) and I’m not sure if you can hold a conversation at these dBm levels.

The AT command +CQS maps the signal strength into a signal quality number between 0 to 99 as shown in the table below:

AT&T converts the reception signal strength to a number between 0 to 5. The famous bars icons are used to denote this: 5 bars means excellent reception and 0 bars means almost no reception.

According to the CSQ command mapping -113 dBm maps to 0 and -51 is the best you can get. The difference between these two is about 62 dBm and if you divide 62 dBm range by 6 you get 10.3 dBm per step which must be more or less the dbM interval that AT&T uses to map the signal strength to bars. Based on this approach here is the rounded dBm table mapped to a number between 0 to 5.

But if you use this it is very rare to get 5 bars, so it is possible that most cell phones will reduce the dBm interval mapping to bars and increase the lower range so that -75dBm or greater maps to 5 bars and end up with something like this:

Using the project info dialog I was unable to set the compiler version to 4.2 (even though it was showing that it was set to 4.2). To make this change stick, don’t start changing environment variables and symbolic links to fool xcode to use gcc 4.2 instead of 4. Instead, in your project info dialog, select the Other… option for C/C++ compiler and simply enter 4.2. Now when you build your project the 4.2 version instead of 4.0 version of the compiler is used. This ought to get rid of those pesky compiler errors when the system tries to compile the prefix file, echoing syntax errors with UIView.h file.