Additional iPhone Thoughts

Before I go into the imperfections of the iPhone, I must mention that the iPhone is one of the best (smart)phones I've had so far.....My (smartphone) references are the Nokia Communicator, Nokia E61i, Nokia N95. While the PDA experience comes from Psion (to bad that they are gone), and a boatload of crappy/unstable Windows CE/Mobile platforms over the last 10 years.

Every device had its limitations, but the iPhone clearly has the upperhand (at the moment). But there's always room for improvement :-)

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Initial Thoughts on the iPhone Friendliness

The next morning; The initial rush of a new iPhone is gone (not that much though). So it's time to look at the thing with a more open mind. After my earlier post I had some time to think about the features I stumbled upon. Especially the tethering and syncing problems I ran into.

At first the tethering; no idea why Apple stripped that one from the 3.1.2 update (when you're not having the correct carrier). Most countries allow (by law) the users to remove the SIMLOCK from the iPhone. This opens the iPhone for other carriers. But it seems that when you switch carriers you end up with a 'crippled' phone, since the tethering gets 'disabled'. Not having the visual voicemail with other carriers is only a nice-to-have gone away. But tethering is something more basic. Something you (I) cannot live without.
Every other phone I've owned in the last 5 years was able to 'tether' through either an USB cable or through Bluetooth. It's like stepping back in time with the iPhone.

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Buma/Stemra Changes Licensing Fees 2010

The all knowing, and all wise Dutch music copyright organisation BUMA/Stemra (BS, and yes, pun intended) decides to charge €130 (for copyright infringement) euros per embedded copyrighted file (do your own math). You are allowed 6 embedding violations/files for €130,00 (original pdf).
No need to mention that this caused a massive uproar in the (worldwide) blogosphere, news and politics.

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Apple Snow Leopard and Filevault

Ran into one of the most annoying bugs in OSX evah.... The earlier versions of OSX had a problem with Filevault and remembering certain default application preferences. This issue is resolved in Snow Leopard, but I ran into another (new) feature.

Whenever I put my MacBook to sleep it closes all running programs and documents (without any save option), and logs me off....
Waking the MacBook back up leaves me with the default log in screen. After the log in, it's like I rebooted the machine...

Need to remember to save before putting it to sleep, or to wander of for a couple of minutes.......

UPDATE: I fixed it. Yesterday I saw a flash of the error reporting tool of OSX while I opened the lid of my MacBook, and before it logged me out on the fly. This meant that there might be some info in the console application.
It turned out there were two applications generating lots of errors. Namely PGP and EyeConnect (some part of EyeTV). Somehow both had come over with the data migration.

After uninstalling PGP manually (because the regular interface didn't work any more) and removing all references to the EyeConnect application everything worked as it should (so far).

UPDATE 2: Never mind the previous cheerful update. LoginWindow keeps crashing. I even reinstalled the compleet OS on a seperate disk and with virtual no apps installed it keeps crashing. So the sleep mode is essentially unusable. I've been thinking of removing the Snow from the Leopard....

Photoshop CS4 and Snow Leopard

Photoshop CS4 was released as an Universal app (system requirements). So both PowerPC (PPC) and Intel support. Since it's an Universal app, you shouldn't need Rosetta on an Intel .
So upgrading to Snow Leopard shouldn't be a problem... Until you're gonna use the droplet functionality of Photoshop CS4. That piece of code still needs Rosetta to function.

So no way that CS4 is Universal. It's just another piece of buggy Adobe software.

What's next? An announcement that this crap won't be supported and that you can upgrade to the >1000USD Adobe CS5 suite next year?

Firefox indexes Fonts

While I was looking for a particular song I heard on the radio on several top-whatever websites I got this Firefox warning;

Firefox wants to use the font "HelveticaTStd-Roman" on the volume "xxx"

A couple of remarks;

• Why is Firefox indexing the fonts on my system? This particular font sits in a directory not used by my fontbook.
• Fail on the part of the top 40 website for using a very specific (and obviously) non-default font in their design.

PGP and Snow Leopard

It seems that the current versions of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) are NOT compatible with Snow Leopard. Incompatibilty issues are are something that mostly occurs on mayor OS upgrades. The upgrades that overhauls the entire OS. But Snow Leopard is merely a fancy service/feature pack. So I have no idea why this would cripple PGP.

The blogposting is of August 27th. 1 (ONE) day before the release of Snow Leopard. And according to the post they are still in some sort of beta stage in the Snow Leopard compatibility development. This raises the following question(s);

• Why aren't they further in the development?
• Have they missed the news that Snow Leopard was on its way (announced somewhere last year)?
• Don't they have access to the developer tools (and associated beta's of the OS)?
• Were they asleep the last couple of months?

Instead of patching the 'old' v9.x of PGP they will release a new (commercial) version 10 which will be compatible with Snow Leopard. This shows the 'real' commitment of supporting the current customers. I'll try to make a list of applications which were incompatible with the release of Snow Leopard, but are pathed for FREE. Just to show that real service still exists.

I'll be keeping my eyes in the mean time on the MacGPG pages (the free implementation of the opensource part of PGP).
No more PGP for me. I'll be heading towards S/MIME and Truecrypt for the time being.

Windows Vista x64 and Fujitsu Hardware

No x64 SupportOké. I have this Fujitsu Lifebook E8310 from work (we're not allowed to use Apple hardware :( ). This piece of hardware was released with an OEM version of Vista Business, but work-related circumstances forced me to install Windows XP at first. Now about 1.5 years later I wanted to try the included Vista Business version, and since I have 4GB RAM I installed the x64 version. What's the use of the additional RAM otherwise?

B.t.w., you may see this as an addition to this posting about Windows 7.

Installing Vista Business x64 isn't the problem (so this is no rant against Microsoft), but trying to get every piece of (integrated) hardware to function properly is something completely different. Vista is on the market for ages (or so it seems), and still NO decent driver and application support for the x64 versions (example 1, 2, 3 of an endless list). What the f#ck is wrong with hardware (and software) developers? 64bit (client) computing is available since the release of Windows XP. Every new piece of WINTEL hardware released in the last two years has (multiple) 64bit cores or CPU's.

x64 Operating Systems mean that you have more memory at your disposal to do bigger (memory consuming) tasks. Windows-based 32bit systems can only address up to  3.2GB of memory.

As long as this will continue to stay this way, I'll continue to rant about this, and personally not buying (or advice) any more WinTel hardware (or software).

The World Will End In Chaos

Microsoft Word 2007according to Microsoft lawyers. Dell, HP, and lots of other 'partners' would feel this in their wallets. Not to mention the consumer (who now can go and discover other means of writing a letter).

This is the responds to the court ruling that Microsoft offended a XML patent. The ruling states that Microsoft can't sell MS-Word in its current form, so that means MS Office without its flagship Word.

This case proves once again that software patents are killing business. Not that I favor Microsoft in this, but basically the software patents are nothing more than a (logical) way of solving problems (how to do this, how to do that, etc). In theory someone could have filed a patent on 'breathing' (a way to solve the possible problem of dying). But there's prior art on that one :).

Anyway, should the XML capable version of Word go away, you can always use OpenOffice to open those documents. In theory (!!!) that should work, but we all know about Microsoft and (open) standards.

Upgrading to OSX Snow Leopard

I tried to upgrade to OSX Snow Leopard today. 'Tried' is the keyword here. It seems though that the current installment of OSX (Leopard) is installed on a file system supposedly UNSUPPORTED by Apple OSX Snow Leopard.

NOTE: I have no way of knowing if the release I have is the final 'Gold Master'. So it could be that my findings are irrelevant for the actual (official) Snow Leopard OS.
I will however verify my findings when I have the actual 'Gold Master' in my possession.

When you run the installer from the OS (or by booting from the DVD) I get a error message saying that I need a GUID Partitione Table disk to install the new OS on. Somehow I use a different (and unsupported) partition scheme. And I thought that I selected all the best options during the clean install a while back......

There's no way of converting (using Disk Utility and/or Terminal commands) this to the appropriate settings without formatting your hard drive. So a normal upgrade is out of the question for me (or so it seems). And for many others I guess, since I won't be the only one with the 'wrong' partition table setup.

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