OpenVPN Connect doesn’t work at all on iPad Air / new iPad Mini

Yeah this had me puzzled for a while. Basically, I configured the OpenVPN client correctly (I thought so anyway). When I attempted to connect to my server, both the in-App log window and the log of my server remained empty: From what I could tell, OpenVPN didn’t even try!

Well, it turns out that as of early December 2013, OpenVPN Connect does not work on 64bit architecture on an iPad or an iPhone. The developers expect an update in mid-2013 to fix this. So until then there is nothing that we can do about it. Too bad.

Update: Problem has been fixed in current versions of OpenVPN Connect.

Subversion: Dealing with Umlaute

I had a very annoying problem with my subversion today: A file had an ‘ö’ in it. I checked it in on Windows without noticing it, and when I checked the file out on my Mac it immediately caused a conflict:

A    Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/jeppe neu
C Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
A    Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/jeppefamily.backup.gramps.old

Updated to revision 41.
Summary of conflicts:
Tree conflicts: 1
Nilss-MacBook-Air:docs nils$ svn up
Updating ‘.’:
At revision 41.

I attempted to delete the file, and at first this seemed to work:

$ svn delete Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
D Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping

However, the conflict remained:

$ svn commit -m “Koeter”
svn: E155015: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: E155015: Aborting commit: ‘/Users/nils/Documents/svn/docs/Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’ remains in conflict

Interestingly, the file was now also missing on my local system. It may be my fault; but anyway, I was a bit lost.

In the end, the following worked:

$ svn remove –force ‘/Users/nils/Documents/svn/docs/Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’
$ svn resolve –accept=working ‘/Users/nils/Documents/svn/docs/Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’
Resolved conflicted state of ‘Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’

$ svn commit -m “Koeter”
Adding Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Koeter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
Deleting Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
Deleting Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
Transmitting file data …
Committed revision 42.

Notice the interesting double delete there…

Anyway, the moral of the story – as if I didn’t know already – avoid special characters like the plague they are.

ASUS P5QD Turbo Mainboard Not Recognizing USB Keyboard During Boot

Today I re-installed my old PC for my sister. First obstacle? I obviously had changed the boot order to put the CD Rom Drive after the harddrive, making booting from my Windows install DVD hard, to say the least. I couldn’t change it because, for some reason, the BIOS refused to recognize my USB keyboard. And unfortunately I seem to have no more PS/2 keyboards.

After a bit of trial and error, it seems that only one of the USB ports on the rear is recognized during POST. And on the Asus P5QD Turbo mainboard it’s the port directly next to the on board NIC port:

So if you have this issue with any Asus board, try that USB port first. Of course if you have a PS/2 keyboard handy, that’ll do the trick as well.

Subversion: Insufficient NODES rows Error

Trying to upgrade an svn repository, I got the the error:

vn: E155016: Insufficient NODES rows for

followed by the path to a file. This can be solved by deleting a certain file type:

Find them:

find . -name dir-prop-revert

To delete them:

find . -name dir-prop-revert -exec rm {} ;

If you’d like to make backups instead:

find . -name dir-prop-revert -exec mv {} {}.backup ;

Now try the upgrade again:

svn upgrade

No more error messages. 🙂

iPhone not recognized by iTunes – Can’t Sync

For a while now I’ve had the issue that, sometimes, my iPhone would not be recognized by iTunes and wouldn’t sync. Sometimes there  was an error message; sometimes not. Most recently, I would just get the Windows’ sound you get when you connect a USB device twice in a row. The iPhone then charged, but did not sync at all.

Last night it got to the point where it just simply did not work at all anymore, so I had to look into it. Much to my surprise, the relevant article on the Apple Support Site, iOS: “Device not recognized in iTunes for Windows”, actually helped. In my case, I had to remove and reinstall the Apple Mobile Device USB driver.

Specifically:

Reinstall the Apple Mobile Device Driver

  1. Right-click the Apple Mobile Device entry in Device Manager and choose Uninstall from the shortcut menu.
  2. When prompted, select the box “Delete the driver software for this device” and click OK.
  3. In the resulting dialog box, click OK.
  4. In the Device Manager window, right-click Universal Serial Bus controllers and choose Scan for hardware changes from the shortcut menu.

At this point, the Apple Mobile Device entry did not reappear. Checking in the “Computer” window – the one which has your drives listed – showed an “Apple iPhone” device. I found it in the Device Manager under “Portable Devices”. I had to then update the software:

  1. Right-click the Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, or Apple iPod entry in Device Manager and choose Update Driver from the shortcut menu.
  2. Click “Browse my computer for driver software.”
  3. Click “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.”
  4. Click the Have Disk button. (If the Have Disk option is not present, choose a device category such as Mobile Phone or Storage Device if listed, and click next. The Have Disk button should then appear.)
  5. In the “Install from Disk” dialog, click the Browse button.
  6. Use this window to navigate to the following folder: C:Program FilesCommon FilesAppleMobile Device SupportDrivers.
  7. Double-click the “usbaapl” file. (This file will be called “usbaapl64” if you have a 64-bit version of Windows. If you don’t see “usbaapl64” here, or if there is no Drivers folder, look in C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesAppleMobile Device SupportDrivers. instead).
  8. Click OK in the “Install from Disk” dialog.
  9. Click Next and finish the driver-installation steps. Open iTunes to verify that the device is recognized properly.

This worked – as soon as I clicked “next”, the iPhone’s screen lit up and it started synchronizing.

This was on Windows 7 64bit, do check the article for other versions and more detailed descriptions.