Well, I jumped the gun a bit and installed the iPhone 2.0 update.
Overall, I’m not super impressed … the incremental functionality improvements are rather limited.
Some of the applications look cool, but I’ve only played with a few of them.
What I’m really disappointed in is the lack of base functionality enhancements … things like ..
ZDNet UK has a great summary of some of the most annoying software products around.
I pretty much agree with them on all counts … although my personal annoyance with anything that tries to install the Yahoo tool bar goes way beyond what they indicate.
I also really dislike Java’s insistence on a background task that’s constantly checking for updates. Personally, I think that any stand alone product that requires Java should install it’s own copy. Updating Java without considering the requirements of the software that is dependent on it is asking for trouble.
We bit the bullet … we got iPhones. Our Verizon cell phone contract has been up for quite a while and they’ve been bugging us to re-up for a new two year contract … but I haven’t been super happy with the service and phones, so we started thinking about what other provider and phone’s would be a suitable substitute.
My co-worker Jerome has the iPhone and is very happy to show it off. Even on the first release I have to admit, it was pretty cool. The interface was nice, the features were nice, and the sound quality wasn’t bad at all.
The only things I really didn’t like at the get go was the fact that you were tied to AT&T and the battery wasn’t replaceable.
After mulling our alternatives, we decided to go for it. Both Ginny and I got the 8gb model. We were originally thinking about the 16gb model, but the Apple store didn’t have any in stock and we figured, since we only used a fraction of our 4gb iPods, it wasn’t that big a deal.
A few observations …
One annoyance, unrelated to the iPhone itself, was the fact that it seems kind of hard to find accessories at stores that don’t actually sell the iPhone. Woodfield mall, and the Apple store, were both very crowded … and both Ginny and I were in a hurry to escape (yeah, so we could play with the new toys) … so we skipped getting protective skins for the new phones. We stopped at Best Buy on the way home, but they only had 2 or 3 skins & cases for the iPhone. I’ll probably stop at Frys on my way home tomorrow to pick something up.
I’m kind of interested to see what the SDK is all about … I’ve got some ideas for apps that could be fun.
The Grey Ghost was slightly overdue for it’s 40K mile scheduled maintenance. So I took advantage of the downtime at work (yes, it’s Saturday … but I’m on a high profile, under-resourced, project with a tight deadline. I’ll be in tomorrow) to take my car in to the Food dealership and get the work done.
All that had to be done was an oil & filter change and tire rotation… so I had an hour to kill.
Obviously I took my laptop so I could kill the time (mostly playing solitaire, but checking some email using my phone’s network access).
There was another guy with a very similar Dell Latitude laptop … I casually asked him if there was any WiFi access. He indicated that he didn’t know … but he couldn’t use it anyways, because his wireless card wasn’t working.
I indicated that I was pretty handy with computers (especially the Dell Latitudes, since it was a similar model to mine) and offered to take a look. Turns out someone had disabled the wireless card in the device manager. I enabled the device and verified it was working by plugging in my portable access point just to see if the card could find a signal. I also showed him how to use the ‘WiFi Catcher‘ switch (when you push the switch, the a light will indicate if there is a Wireless signal in the area, without even having to turn on the computer).
Sadly, there was no WiFi access in the waiting area. I’m going to send an email to the Ford dealership to suggest they provide it. Sure would make waiting for your car a lot less boring.
I was just looking at my laptop (Dell Latitude D620) and wondered about a few things …
On a somewhat different, although related, topic … I really wish someone would make an inexpensive tablet computer. I have an idea for a nice little appliance application that would be perfectly suited to a tablet computer. All it would need is a 12″ display, 512mb of ram, 4gb to 8gb of flash disk, wifi, and Linux.
Yesterday I found that the RPM database on my Fedora Core 6 linux system’s were corrupted and that the regularly running update process was failing (without telling me, unfortunately).
After fixing the RPM database problem (rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.* && rpm -vv --rebuilddb) and running the update (yum update), I found that SpamAssassin’s update process wasn’t working anymore.
root@rivendell ~]# sa-update
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/Scalar/Util.pm line 30.
Apparently one of the updates that were applied in the mass update caused SpamAssassin to break.
The same problem occurred when I tried to test the SpamAssassin rules.
root@rivendell ~]# spamassassin --lint
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/Scalar/Util.pm line 30.
A bit of research turned up this link.
Luckily the fix was fairly easy … just update the Scalar-List-Utils CPAN package …
perl -MCPAN -e 'install "G/GB/GBARR/Scalar-List-Utils-1.18.tar.gz"
… and everything worked fine again.
I’ve been using Quicken for many years … and for the past 8 years or so I’ve had this annoying problem. Every time I would download transactions from my bank, I would get this dialog box popping up …
Of course Bank One had been bought out by Chase a few years ago, so the message was clearly wrong.
I finally got fed up with the annoyance and started searching for a solution … and I found one on the Quicken Community forums.
I’ve noticed something … in recent memory, I have not suffered one single hard drive failure.
I’ve only suffered multiple hard drive failures … all my drive failures seem to happen in batches.
Last weekend the refurbished Seagate hard drive in my laptop (Rohan) started generating errors. About the same time, the main drive in Gondor started to flake out.
My laptop had been recently backed up with ghost, so getting it restored , to a spare 100gb hard drive I had, wasn’t a problem. I did struggle a bit because there was a Linux partition on the replacement drive … that Ghost didn’t know how to delete.
The drive in Gondor was a bit more problematical … although Linux was reporting problems with the drive, the Dell hard drive diagnostics reported problems with the drive, when I ran Spinrite over it, no problems were reported.
I decided to let the drive sit and see if the problems came back.
Obviously they did … this time, however, when I ran Spinrite on the drive it found a bad cluster. Luckily it was able to recover the cluster. After Spinrite was done, I copied the old drive to a new 300gb drive. Now I just have to get Dell to send me a new drive. Not sure what I’m going to do with a spare 80gb SATA drive.
Of course, all these hard drive problems got me to thinking … why the heck don’t operating systems raise serious alerts when a drive failure is detected?
On Windows XP, the drive problem was silently being logged to the “System Event Log”. I think it should have popped up a warning message telling me that something was wrong.
On Linux, the drive problems were also being logged to syslog … but if you aren’t actively monitoring the systems logs, it’s easy to miss something like that. I’m going to investigate some system monitoring software (something like Nagios) to keep an eye on problems of this nature.
Have you ever wondered if Open Source software could be a factor in the success or failure of a political candidate?
Douglas Karr has an interesting political analysis on his blog … Which candidates are running which servers.
Here’s a quick breakdown …
Very interesting analysis … and it pretty much breaks down the way I would expect, and hope, it would.
My friend Steve showed me this picture today … at first I thought it was simply a ugly phone wiring job that he found at clients site.
Turns out it’s actually an ETHERNET connection … that’s currently carrying a gigabit signal. Apparently it’s been working fine for the past 5 years.
When Steve saw it … he shrieked out loud.
Suffice it to say, Steve is going to replace that ‘connection’ with proper CAT6 next week.
