Monthly Archives: July 2008

Five Dice officially on the iPhone

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The main reason I had a jailbroken iPod Touch is because I really liked the game Five Dice.  Five Dice is an excellent version of the old dice game called Yahtzee.  I was hoping that the developer would bring it to the App store once version 2.0 of the software was out and they came through.

This is not the exact same game that was available for free if you were jailbroken.  This version has a lot more polish and the graphics are very professional.  The game play is very smooth and the little touches of animation are pretty slick.  Another big difference is that the game is no longer free – it costs $3.99.

I’m sure there will be people that enjoyed the jailbroken version complaining about the costs, but I think it is definitely worth the few bucks it costs.  The game is every bit as polished as any other professionally developed game and I see no issue with the developers getting paid for their work. 3.99 – what’s that – a cup of fancy coffee or a pack of cigarettes?

Hopefully they will make a ton of money from this little application and put some of it back in to the game to provide over the air multi player capability.  That would be pretty cool.

If you grew up playing the game Yahtzee you should take a chance and spend the few bucks it costs to try it out.  It’s definitely worth it.

Apple doing the right thing by communicating

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In infrastructure we face outages of systems at any time.  When people can’t get to their applications, data, or email one of the most important things we can do is to communicate openly and honestly with them until the issue is resolved.  People tend to be a little more understanding of the issue if they at least have some idea of what is going on.

Seeing Apple start to communicate on the recent MobileMe issues is a great start and I hope they start to be more open with any system issues they are facing to help keep everyone more current with information.

Resetting my expectations with the App store and syncing

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I realized a mistake I have been making with purchasing applications from the iTunes App store and the iPhone.  I thought it would work like this:

  • Purchase an application from iTunes and it would then sync with the phone – check.
  • Check for updates to purchased applications with iTunes and have those updated applications sync to the phone – check.
  • Purchase an application using the iPhone and have it sync back to iTunes – check.  Well, that’s how I thought it worked once.
At some point iTunes must have stopped asking me if I wanted to transfer purchases from the phone to the computer and I never noticed, so I kept expecting the apps I was downloading using the phone were getting back to the computer.  Whenever I would then check for updates to applications that I had read were updated, iTunes would never show that any updates were available, but those same applications would show available updates on the AppStore on the phone.  Weird.
Then it hit me, these apps aren’t copying successfully from phone to computer and I started looking around.  All I had to do was right click on the iPhone listed under the Devices section of iTunes and select transfer purchases and everything copied to the computer as expected.
Now that I understand that syncing may not transfer purchases I know how to handle this and figured there may be others out there that are seeing the same thing and wondered why things seem out of sync with application updates between iTunes and their iPhone or iPod Touch.

The unintentional iPhone 2.0 beta tester – part 2

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Continued from Part 1…

Thankfully I was able to get her phone operational again by holding down the button at the top edge of the phone until it asked me if I wanted to power it off.  I powered it off and back on again and all seemed fine, but I lost just a tiny bit of confidence at that point in time, kind of like when a car has an issue and you never quite trust it again.  It happened to me a few more times that night – some times it would let me power it off and some times I would have to hold that top button and the button on the front at the same time until the phone reset itself.  More recently none of those tricks seemed to work and I had to do the top and front button reset dance numerous times before the phone finally came to life.  That one was really scary.

I am not a stranger to computers and failure.  I am in my 22nd year in infrastructure and see bugs all of the time.  But this one hurt a little somewhere deep inside because, like many, I had fallen in to the fuzzy, happy world where Apple would never, ever make mistakes like this.  And this was just one little piece of the issues that would rock my happy little Apple world and slap me right back in to reality, where you remember that these are things engineered, designed, coded, and tested by humans.  Humans are imperfect and make mistakes, and now the entire world knows that Apple makes them as well – Activation, 2.0, MobileMe,  Welcome to the real world Apple.  That’s a lot of things happening at the same time that should have been avoided.  It will be interesting to see if Apple learns anything from this.  Scaling is hard.  Enterprises are hard.

The 2.0 software and the App store are an amazing example of systems and integration.  But they are not perfect.  I have applications crash on me all the time.  I actually blame Apple for most of these as I don’t believe any application’s crash should be able to take down the phone’s OS, but it sure seems like that happens a lot.  Those apps that just crash back to the icon screen I believe are probably the developer’s issue to resolve, but the rest should sit firmly on Apple’s shoulders.  If you are running applications from the App store I would encourage you to check for any updates daily.  The developers seem to be working hard to get any bugs eliminated and I have seen a ton of updates to applications over the last 2 weeks.

I don’t know if Apple has a beta program for these developers and their testers, but they need to get one in place if it doesn’t exist.  Right now we, the people, are Apple’s beta testers and that would bother me a little less if I hadn’t paid 10 bucks for that privilege on my Touch and if Apple would have just stated that initially.  Let’s be honest, Apple still would have picked up thousands and thousands of people that would be willing to test their software – and probably pay for the privilege.  But, no application crash should ever take down the entire phone.  Period.  

It’s probably a good thing that Apple is out of iPhones all over the country or this could be a bigger black eye than it already is.  It will be interesting to see how many people stay up late at night clicking that Check Now button in iTunes when the next release rolls around.  Apple, we need 2.0.1 or 2.1 or what ever you are going to call it, soon.

What do you think, will you be cautious the next time Apple releases something or will you move ahead as you normally do because it is the next great thing from Apple?

The unintentional iPhone 2.0 beta tester – part 1

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There is so much to catch up on since Apple released 2.0 for the iPhone and iPod Touch that it’s hard to figure out where to start.

On July 11, 2008, we were getting ready to leave for a vacation to Myrtle Beach when I noticed the 2.0 software release for the iPhone was out.  Since my wife has the original iPhone I decided to download 2.0 and apply it once we got to the beach.  2.0 downloaded so fast that I figured I might as well apply it before I got in the shower, so I did.  (By the way, this was less than 10 minutes after my wife begged me not to touch her phone before our trip as she likes to use it when we’re on the road.)  Hey, it’s Apple, and Apple has never let me down before.  What could happen?  Well, thousands of you probably know the rest – after the 2.0 update the phone reset itself and needed to communicate with Apple’s servers to activate.  Since those servers were totally overwhelmed, nothing was happening.  So I jumped in the shower and figured it would be done by the time we were ready to leave.  No such luck.  I checked the Apple forums and found I was definitely not alone, but we had to get on the road so I grabbed my wife’s iPhone, her laptop, my laptop, and my backpack and we headed out the door. 

She was not a happy camper.  No phone to play with on the road trip meant no Goggle Maps.  It doesn’t matter that the awesome Garmin Nuvi 350 was less than 5 feet from her head, it was not her phone and Google Maps.  So she asked to use my iPod Touch since it was jailbroken and had FiveDice on it.  Well, unfortunately I had restored it to factory default to get ready for the 2.0 software for the Touch, which didn’t come out for another 13 hours.  If the software had been available for the Touch I would have never touched her phone at all.  So, no FiveDice.  Strike 2.

Then it hit her that we packed the Nintendo DS and that would surely give her plenty to do for a while.  Except that it was packed in the trunk of the car, which was an amazing feat in itself as we were originally going to take the mini van but decided to take the car to get better gas mileage.  The DS was buried deep in the bottom of all the luggage, beach chairs, and body boards.  Strike 3.

I had no intention of taking her laptop to the beach that day, but I grabbed her PowerBook because I didn’t know if I would have to complete the activation process on the same computer that had started it on or if I could use my MacBook Pro.  Unfortunately I wasn’t smart enough to grab the power supply and the battery on her PowerBook has seen better days.  If we’re lucky we’ll get 30 minutes on a full charge.  So I turned on her PowerBook and killed every program that started up and launched iTunes.  I turned the screen down to 1 little bar and hoped I could find a wireless signal.  Thankfully the hotel we were in that night had wifi and the iPhone activated itself almost as quickly as I plugged it in to the PowerBook.  Success!  We can now use the iPhone as a phone.  ”Apple must have resolved their capacity issues.”  ”Hey, where’s all your data?”

Next came the fun of holding my breath through the longest initial restore of data to a device in my lifetime.  I would continually take the screen down to 0 bars, then back to 1 a little later to watch the restore progress.  The battery indicator was down to 14 minutes and had turned red.  Not good.  Turn the screen back off.  With just 7 minutes of reported battery life left the iPhone retuned to its glorious former self.  It was a phone with all the data she had on it previously.  Life was good.

“Hey Valerie, check out all these cool apps I loaded on here for you” I said with the joy of a child on Christmas morning.  ”Watch how…hey, why is it just a black screen with an Apple logo in the middle of it now?”  Uh oh.

That would not be the last time that I saw that black screen with the Apple logo.

To be continued…

WordPress on the iPhone

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I love WordPress. It’s an excellent blogging platform. I love my iPod Touch and my wife’s iPhone. Now I get to play with them together as WordPress has been released on the iTunes App store, and of course, it’s free.

I can’t see myself doing long posts with it as using the portrait keyboard on the Touch means I have to type one handed, but for shorter posts, like this one, it will come in handy, especially when not in front of a “real” computer.

Speaking of which, I’ll have to update on my first week with the new 2.0 software and the new apps that I have been using. I will say that I still have issues with AT&T and Apple, as I have already posted, but I underestimated the power of the App store and 3rd party apps. My Touch has taken on a fresh, new life – but that’s for another post; one that requires a real keyboard!

Thank you to the folks at WordPress for the iPhone/iTouch app. I’m using it to write this post and so far it looks like a winner. The only thing i could not see how to do was add an html link inside the post.

Are you backing up all of your data?

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I just spent the better part of the night trying to get data back from a friend’s MacBook that had a failed hard drive. Those of you that have had this happen while running Apple’s OS X may know the sickening feeling you get when all you see when you start up is an icon of a folder with a flashing question mark. Sometimes you can get lucky by resetting PRAM and telling the system what disk to boot from, but this was not the case with this MacBook. It was painful and took forever to get any data back at all.

Fortunately I had my MacBook Pro with me to help get through this. I had DiskWarrior on my MBP and figured I would just start up the MacBook in firewire target mode and let DiskWarrior have a look. (You do vacation with a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cable, don’t you? Yeah, me neither, but I was lucky enough to find one at a Best Buy in Myrtle Beach since everything else had just closed. Unfortunately I paid a premium for that cable from Best Buy, as you do with all cables you buy there, but I was in no position to complain and they were my last option for the night.)

Well, the MacBook had different ideas about how this was going to work and I could not see the hard drive regardless of what I did; hold down the Option key. Nothing. Hold down Shift. Nothing. Hold down Command-S. Nothing. Command-V. Nothing. Hold down C to boot from a Tiger install DVD I had in my bag. Nothing. Hold down T for firewire target mode. Nothing!

As a last ditch effort I decided to make sure I was doing things correctly and tried to put my MBP in target mode and bring up the MacBook using my MBP’s hard drive. It actually worked. I still could not see the local drive on the MacBook, but I was able to run DiskWarrior against the MacBook and it did find the hard drive and did it’s best to repair. But it couldn’t. It was pretty much beyond repair and DiskWarrior gave me one last chance to pull off all the data I could in preview mode, so I copied as much of her data as I could to my MBP hard drive and every USB key I could find. That got us most of the way there. Now she can deal with Apple since it is under Apple Care and they can replace the hard drive.  In the end I was able to salvage their pictures, documents, settings, and music.

So here is my simple recommendations for protecting your data relatively inexpensive while still getting backups done in a decent amount of time:

  • For email, either use a web browser to access your email at your ISP (or GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) or configure your mail client for IMAP so you always have a copy of your email at your mail provider. If you must do POP/POP3 configure the client to leave a copy of the messages on the server. This way you will not have to deal with email recovery in the event of a disaster.  If your ISP purges email from its servers every X amount of days – find another email provider.
  • Do yourself a favor so you never have to go through the recovery process I just went through – go buy an external USB drive and use it for backups. The performance will be fine and if you are running OS X Leopard it will immediately recognize the disk and ask you if you want to use it for Time Machine backups. Answer yes and move on with your life. I probably spent close to 12 hours trying to save the data because I knew very few others would even try to save her data at all. The drives work just as well with Windows. I probably wouldn’t waste my time with the backup software that comes with the drives, as the operating system will have something you can use that it probably better.

There are other backup utilities out there. Do some light reading on Google and see which one makes the most sense for you. It doesn’t matter to me if you are using 10,000 floppy disks, USB keys, USB hard drives, copying to other computers somewhere in your home, backing up to one of the hosted backup solutions, or using .Mac – just do something! As we put more and more data on our computers the problem just gets worse and worse.

Best Buy has the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External Hard Drive on sale for $99 right now. It has USB connectivity and should work very well for backups. I may buy 2. The price goes up if you need Firewire connectivity or more storage, but this looks like a decent size and fit for me. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is to check our backups. It’s such an easy thing to do and none of of do it like we should. None of us. It is not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, it is a matter of when. Good backups will lessen the pain when you have to rebuild that computer, or reload the hard drive from scratch.