Bygone days

Tuesday, 30th September, 2008

I’m having a surprisingly good day today. I’m stupidly busy with work at the moment, and have been pretty stressed, but today has been good for two reasons:

I’m sitting listening to the new Kings of Leon album on my iPhone on repeat, and hence not answering my (office) phone as I can’t hear it ringing (oops);
I just had stovies for lunch.

I’ve not had stovies for a long time, and they were fantastic. Reminds me of days long gone at my Granny’s house.

‘Mon the winter!

22

Sep

X marks the spot

Monday, 22nd September, 2008

We run a corporate intranet at my work, and I have a script that runs every hour that goes and gets the RSS feed from the BBC news website, so that on the front page of the intranet there are up to date headlines for people to be able to read.

On Friday of last week, mid-afternoon brought this little gem from the RSS feed:

Notice the second story here, with the well thought out and beautifully structured headline. Good, innit?

I clicked on the headline to read the full article, thinking that this would just be a mistake in the RSS feed, and surely the actual article that it linked to would be ok. No, this is the BBC. In actual fact, the linked article is worse: there is at least a bit of information about what this mysterious row of x characters is supposed to refer to in the RSS feed, there is nothing on the website.

Who’s doing this? What the fuck is going on at the BBC?

17

Sep

New wheels

Wednesday, 17th September, 2008

I have new wheels. That is to say, I have a new car, but indeed that also means I have new wheels. I had steel wheels on my last car, I now have alloys again.

I liked my last car. It was a Citroen C2 1.4 Diesel, and the fuel economy on it was simply superb. I could easily get 600 miles out of a full 40-litre tank. It was a quick wee car too; pulling away from junctions etc was very good, and I’d say that the initial pull-away speed of that car is easily quicker than anything else I’ve owned.

But, in November, the car will be three years old. It would also have done 60,000 miles. So I was faced with finding the money to:

a) put it through an MOT
b) put it through it’s 60,000 mile service

In addition, I needed tyres, I desperately needed brakes (including discs as I’d let the pads get so bad that the discs had become scored), and I had a leak somewhere in the coolant system. I estimated that getting all of this done in November would mean that I would have to find close to £700 from somewhere, which I don’t really have the means to do.

So, instead, I bought a new Mazda 2.

13

Sep

iPhone OS 2.1

Saturday, 13th September, 2008

Apple released version 2.1 of the OS for iPhone yesterday, which I duly installed last night. The update promised a LOT of bug fixes, and whilst I hadn’t been experiencing the behaviour that some users were complaining of (dropped calls for example), I did occasionally have some random crashes of third party applications, and very poor response when typing SMS messages (which is what I do 90% of the time with my phone).

After installing the update, there were three things that I noticed immediately:

it’s a lot “snappier” to use – the Contacts application now loads almost immediately (used to be a very noticeable time lag), and the poor response in the SMS application is gone, it’s very speedy when typing now;
syncing with my Mac is now a LOT quicker. Backing up the phone and syncing used to take about ten minutes or so, now it takes about two minutes;
notification of a new incoming text message has been changed (and in my opinion, not for the good)

Let me just expand on point three a bit more. Apple have altered two things about the way your phone tells you a new text message has been received. Previously, when a new text message arrived, your phone would play your selected alert sound, and would display a visual notification. You had two choices for visual notification display: display a preview of the message on screen (along with the name of the sender); or simply display the name of the sender and the line ‘Text Message’). This was fine. I can’t imagine many people were happy to have the preview of the message showing up on the screen of their phone, so most would have used the option to go into the settings and turn off the message preview.

Using this set up, if I got a text message, my phone would make the alert sound, and I could glance at the screen and see the alert which would say that I had just received a text message and who had sent it. I was then able to decide if that was a text I had to read right then, or if I could just ignore it and continue doing whatever it was I was doing.

Now, Apple have added a couple of changes. When a new text message is received, the phone plays the alert sound. If I do nothing about this (i.e. don’t read the message), after five minutes the phone plays the alert message again. And after a further five minutes, it plays it again! In addition to this, the first time the alert is played (when the message arrives) the on-screen notification appears. However, it now simply says ‘New Text Message’. It doesn’t tell me who sent it any more. For me to know who sent me a message, I would have to turn on the message preview, which is something I don’t want.

It seems to me that these new ‘features’ that have been added to the SMS application are missing some settings; we are able to turn off the message preview, so we should also be able to turn off the audio alert repeating nonsense. And if the message preview is off, we should be given the choice of still being able to display the name of the person sending the message on the alert screen.

One final ‘feature’ Apple has added in this update has me totally baffled. If you have turned on the Passcode feature of your phone, you have to enter this passcode every time you want to use the phone. This passcode is four digits long, and can be any four digits from 0000-9999, resulting in 10,000 possible numbers. Apple has added the ability to turn on an option that will erase the entire contents of the phone if the passcode is entered incorrectly ten times in a row.

So if you did lose your iPhone and it was passcode protected, the finder would have a 0.1% chance of guessing the correct pin code and getting access to your data. That’s a pretty slim chance.

So to me, this ‘feature’ is basically a way for me to grab some unsuspecting person’s iPhone (perhaps a work colleage) and to quickly tap ‘1111′ ten times in a row when it asks me for their passcode in the hope that they’ve been stupid enough to enable this feature, and then hand back their phone which is now without data.

Crazy feature. Who came up with that one?

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