Rich`s Other Blog

Recently, the 1TB LaCie Network Space drive, as ridiculed previously, vanished off the network.  The router wasn`t showing the port connected, and nmap-ping the LAN shows the device had vanished.  I did the usual routine of swapping Ethernet cables, trying another port in the router, etc. but no go.  Even after connecting the drive to the laptop over Ethernet, the beast had vanished.

I ripped the pathetic piece of pain out of its NAS enclosure and chucked it in a USB to see what Linux made of the situation.  The drive, and every one of the ext3/xfs partitions is healthy, yet the device is plopped.  Looks like the Ethernet port just gave up.  No offence, but that realllly shouldn`t happen with a silly little drive that just sits beside the router all day long.  Turns out the drive itself was a little Samsung 4200rpm model.  Which might explain why it was always shit slow.  I`d always assumed it was 7200rpm.  Hey ho.

LaCie – that`s the first and last time I`ll buy any of your products.  Awful.  2/10.  You lost another point thanks to Neil Poulton, whoever he is and your philosophy of design over reliability.  Perhaps his name is an anagram of “overpriced, underperforming, zero reliability”.

Back to the rsync scripts again – I`ve nuked the drive as NTFS and mounted it as the same drive letter on Windows, so the rsync scripts just work.  Probably the first time ever on Windows anything has ever “just worked”.

Tonight, I decided to restore my (jailbroken) iPhone.  A few of the bits and bobs I`d installed were slowing the phone down to the point of it being annoying.  I`d fairly recently encrypted the backups iTunes insists on taking everytime you plug the phone in, and … well, I forgot the sodding password.  Or so I thought.

So for the last 3 hours, I sat and worked with my “password generator” (i.e. brain) thinking through the various combinations of stuff I use to come up with passwords, and tried every combination possible.  Each time, I was told that the password was wrong.  I must have gone through variations of 40-50 passwords and nothing worked.  Incorrect password.  Does not compute.  Negatory.  Zero zero zero one one one zero.

I shut down iTunes after a while.. plonked about on other stuff, then thought I`d have another bash.  And suddenly the phone`s restoring itself with no input.

Yes folks.. there is a really nasty bug in there somewhere that means even valid passwords aren`t making it through.  If I haven`t made clear in previous posts, I think iTunes is a bloody awful piece of software.
Christ.

As for this new iPad Apple have released… I can`t help think they`ve missed a trick there by sticking the iPhone / iPod Touch OS on there.  Roll on the new devices from Acer and so on – I won`t mention Asus as my personal experience of their hardware has been absolutely shocking.  A bit of competition and maybe Apple will stop locking the hell out of their devices.  Even Microsoft dropped the idea of limiting the number of simultaneous applications running from their cutdown versions of Windows.

A few weeks back, I updated the iPhone software to version 3.1, a minor release apparently, and since then I`ve had little but random trouble with the beast.

It all started with the update, which failed, resulting in a bricked phone, and 4 attempts at a restore until the device came back to life. I applied the restore, and hoped all would be back to pre-3.1, but alas no. I`d lost all my apps, some settings, and was faced with the boring task of setting it all back up. I had to dig through e-mails from Apple listing everything I`d downloaded, manually download one-by-one all the apps, and re-set calendar syncing. I`d re-installed the laptop at this point, so the downloads weren`t just there to drag across. In the app store, some apps I had paid money for no longer existed. I contacted Apple as it became apparent that this was a little bit odd, and got nowhere apart from “that app is no longer available”. Thankfully I found an old copy of the download on a backup drive, and I`m very glad the app cost a quid and not ten pounds. Bad show, Apple.

The issue I`m now having is that every once in a while, when the phone is in standby mode, it just won`t wake up. It requires a full reboot, and as I`ve said before, this takes a pretty long time. With no progress meter. The longer I have the phone, the more shoddy the software seems.

It seems a lot of people have had similar problems, with the freezing, particularly on the iPhone 3G: http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/09/16/iphone-31-bugs-random-freeze-shut/
so roll on 2010 when my contract with O2 is up. I`d rather have a featureless but sturdy as a brick old school Nokia than a flashy nice but flakey as dandruff device.

Having had the iPhone for a few months now, I thought I`d add a few more peeves to the list.

1. Reliability – I have to say the phone, or more likely the applications, make the phone pretty flakey. It`s necessary to hard reset every 3-4 days due to some application or other hanging. The most annoying thing about this is that the phone takes minutes to start up again, with no progress indicator to show how long it`s likely to take.
2. Lack of tweakiness – in true Apple style, there are some things you`d like to tweak but just can`t. A specific example would be the Safari caching, which is hit and miss to say the least. Switch pages and back, and there`s a good chance the browser has been hit by severe amnesia and needs to reload the page. Even with all the scare stories over the number of times you can write to flash memory, surely allowing the user to up the cache a little would be a good idea?
3. Volume control – why are there two volume settings, one for ringer and one for iPod? Adjust the volume down, pop to iPod, with headphones on, and suddenly you`re at risk of blowing your ears off to the freshest beats of the day.
4. The phone features, or their quick-to-use-ness-ness – any telephone should be easy to use, yet Apple seems to have done everything possible to make it a pain in the arse. I certainly wouldn`t recommend the iPhone as an easy to use phone. Compare and contrast with any Nokia. That said, the voicemail is quite clever, although not instantly “ah yes- that’s how you do it”. Surely, as a phone, the dialler is likely to be the first thing you`re likely to use; why does it not appear first? Maybe I don`t make or receive enough calls.
5. Ipod controls- having owned an iPod for a few years, the iPhone`s controls are a bit pants. Ok, there`s no wheel as it`s all touch screen, but skipping forward and backward in videos is very hit and miss, especially if forwarding to the end of a video podcast. This seems to be the only way for the iPod to recognize that you`ve watched something. 2 seconds remaining and it`s listed with the half-watched icon. Try skipping to the very end, and you`re forced to watch the last 10 seconds or so. It may not be the end of the world, but it`s annoying. Also, the accelerometer integration goes a little bit mental when tilting and the phone needs the occasional twist-retwist in order to recognise its orientation. On the plus side, it`s possible to shuffle all songs by an artist, something my old video iPod wasn`t able to do.
6. Spell checker – this can be very hit and miss, and I find myself wondering if the old T9 method would have been more effective for some users. Also, when typing fairly quickly, it seems like soundex word matching kicks in, leaving your messages in a state that would have been likely employed by Lloyd and Croft when they scripted lines for Officer Crabtree in Allo Allo. Good moaning indeed.  And please, I know the difference between “its” and “it`s”, so don`t put “it`s” every sodding time – and “and” for that matter – don`t spell correct it to ANC.  Who types  “ANC” these days (although I`m not dissing South African politics, of which I know little)?
7. There`s no way back – receive an e-mail, open it, open a hyperlink; up flies Safari. When you`re done, what next? Gotta press the menu button, which brings you back to the menu. So you`ve to open your e-mail all over again. Why is the phone not clever enough to bring you back to where you were?