July 2008

Jul 22 2008

First post! (again…)

WordPress 1.0 for the iPhone has been released, and I’m using it to write this post. It’s been a little time coming, but it looks pretty fully-featured.

More

By • , , 0

Jul 15 2008

PC Engines ALIX-based m0n0wall

I noticed recently that when certain house-mates turned on their computers, suddenly my internet connection would become very slow and highly unreliable – ah, the joys of Bittorrent and P2P traffic <sigh>

Rather than just trying to ban people from using these services (like that’d ever work… and anyway, BitTorrent has legitimate uses and they’re all paying towards the cost of the connection anyway, so it’s not my place to get all dictatorial) I decided to be a bit smarter: a packet-filtering system which can prioritise certain traffic whilst holding-back other types would not only allow people to run P2P software with abandon, but also keep everyone’s connection steaming along whilst hopefully improving subjective responsiveness.

More

By • , , 0

Jul 12 2008

Indistinguishable from magic…

Gareth has an iPod Touch, which he’s just updated to firmware 2.0 (at even more cost – and that he’s not best pleased about…), which adds many of the iPhone’s location-aware services. The Touch, of course, lacks any 3G/GSM circuitry and bluetooth – leaving only WiFi for position acquisition. Even though my name-server at home doesn’t contain any geographic records, his Touch was able to instantly plot the specific location we were.
More

By • , , , 0

Jul 11 2008

Breathtaking O2 incompetence reduces iPhone 3G launch to farce

Cambridge has one Apple Store (in the seemingly Bioshock-inspired Grand Arcade), one O2 shop, and two Carphone Warehouses.

Having decided that it’s finally time to replace my venerable Motorola RAZR V3, and never having been to an Apple product launch before* (albeit one at a local store) I decided to try my luck at the Apple Store itself – which turned out to have been a good idea for all of the wrong reasons…

More

By • , , , 4

Jul 9 2008

Server change

Perhaps WordPress has become slower in recent releases, perhaps I’ve broken something by running a non-prelinked system – but in any case, running this blog from my trustworthy SGI O2 was just getting too slow.

More

By • , , 0

Jul 7 2008

Basic English: O2 Fail

So this morning at about 7:30am, O2 sent out an email to what is probably millions of punters (judging by the fact that their pre-orders site has crashed and burned) with the headline:

iPhone 3G is here and its free*

Anyone spot the problem with this?

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about this:

ITS, it’s or its can mean:

  • “its”, the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun form of the personal pronoun it
  • “it’s”, a contraction of “it is” or “it has”
  • The “It’s” man, a man with torn clothes and unkempt beard who appeared at the beginning of episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus

It comes to something when a corporation the size of O2 can’t even be bothered (or doesn’t have the knowledge – a more worrying conclusion) to get basic grammar and punctuation correct on what is unquestionably its biggest launch of the year.

By • , 0