Random thought exchange

Back story: About 2-years ago I switched providers (from Bell to Rogers), so that I can get the iPhone 3G. I love it, but there are some downfalls to it. First would be the lack of video recording without any add-on apps. The second would be the basic capability that most phones have – voice recognition. My old Samsung A900 even had that.

So when iOS4 was released a few weeks back I did the upgrade right away. I enjoy testing out the latest hardware and software, so I figured what they heck… why not?

Within 2 hours I had it loaded, and all my music and apps synchronized back on to it.

I immediately set up folders for my apps.  For the past year I’ve had my “screens” setup so that all my apps were arranged logically. I had a screen for navigation/car items, a screen for utilities, a screen for social media, two screens for games, and a screen for web links. So setting up the folders was great for me, because now I don’t have to flick through all the screens to get to the last one. I have all my folders on one screen.

I then realized that my camera now has a zoom function.  Great!

That’s pretty much where the good ends.

Within 10-minutes of using the phone, I had at least 5 apps crash and quit on me. And yes, that even includes the Maps app and App store apps that Apple ships with the os and phone.

So I shut down the phone, boot it back up, and the same problems persist. So I load up iTunes, and make sure I have the latest version of the apps. Sure enough there are a few that have updates, and those say iOS4 tested. Wonderful.  I load those on, and they work well, but the App Store app still crashes intermittantly.

The following days and weeks – up until now – have had many app updates. I would imagine that nearly all the apps loaded on my phone are now updated. There are a few that aren’t, like iFuel Lite, but I would imagine the developers are working on that – at least I’m hoping they are.

So what’s my real gripe?

I’m annoyed at how slow and laggy the phone seems now. It’s just chugging along.

This past weekend, I was at the Toronto Eaton Centre, and I figured why not go in to the Apple Store and chat with a “genius”.

I make an appointment on their computer system, and wait about an hour.

They hook my phone up to their computer, and within a minute or two he tells me that the problem is with some of the apps. He says there are 8 apps that have “bad data” on the phone. I ask him if he can write them down for me so I can uninstall the apps and reload them. He tells me that what I need to do is restore the phone software, and set it up as a new phone. Then go in to the app store on the phone, and download all the apps again through the phone – not through iTunes.

He said that just wiping the app doesn’t remove the data files and preference files. For all I know, the problem lies in the apps that I don’t even have on the phone any more.

I thought that once you deleted an app from the phone, all the prefs would get wiped out with it. I’ve had experience where I decided to delete an app, and then a few days later load it back on, and I needed to setup all the preferences and settings again.

Anyways, I’m wondering if anyone knows what app Apple uses to diagnose iPhones? All I could find is the “secret” iPhone Configuration Utility on the Apple site. I have yet to run it, but I doubt that’s what they used.

I’m wondering if I should even bother restoring, since the rumor is that the iPhone 4 will be hitting the Canadian market on July 23, 2010, and I just so happen to have that day booked off work… so I think I might attempt to get one on launch day.

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Is this perhaps the worst leak out there? There’s a video on YouTube with what appears to be an Apple Tablet, despite the name on the top of it as TimeInc.

Perhaps this is one of the video demos from today’s Apple release?

You be the judge!

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I’ve been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks, and I’m just getting around to it.

I did something interesting with my website. I took a look at my stats, and created a neat-looking word cloud, based on the keywords that people enter in search engines to get to my website.

It’s quite interesting to see.

dmpP website word cloud for 2009

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As in the past, BestBuy Canada and FutureShop are starting their Boxing Day sales tonight at 8 p.m. EST.

Last year there was a serious flaw. Their websites, and I’m presuming their servers, were overloaded, slow, and crashed. It was an epic failure then, and I bet there are a lot of people who are hesitant to take part this year for fear that their abilities to just browse the site, let alone place items in their cart and place their orders.

Hopefully the BB and FS IT folks have learned from this, and are ramping up for tonight.

There’s a message on the BB and FS “view cart” pages that says all carts will be cleared to allow fair access for all customers. Take a look at the screen captures:

BestBuy view cart screen shot from 2009-12-24 at 2.45.49 PM

FutureShop view cart screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.46.08 PM

What’s interesting is that there’s a partial failure. When you click on the image with the text explaining the cleared carts on the BestBuy site, it takes you to their homepage. When you click on the one on the FutureShop site, it takes you to http://localhost/ Clearly someone’s brain is already on vacation. Why does the image need to click through to anything anyways? What’s even stranger, is that the FS site is pulling it in with jQuery and iFrames. Why?

Code view from FutureShop website - screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.56.09 PM

Also, according to the FS twitter account, the site is going to be closed at 3 to 6 p.m. EST and it will be open from 6 to 8 p.m. EST to browse before the sale starts. I wonder why they’re doing this? I don’t think it’s going to build up the anticipation. The flyers were leaked about 4 days ago. There isn’t anything that I’m hoping to score from FS. There are a couple of things I’m looking to get from BestBuy though.

Here’s my shopping list for this season:

• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand A
• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand B
• 2x NAS RAID array’s
• 2x 8GB SDHC class 6 cards
• 1x inexpensive laser printer – this isn’t for me

That’s it. Nothing all that special. HDD’s are on sale at NewEgg and TigerDirect, so I’m likely going to get them from there. Having said that, their prices are “Boxing week”, so I have plenty of time to get them.

I’ll let you all know how “well” I did once all the purchases are done.

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I’ve finally found a multiple IE installer.

It lets you run versions 1.0, 1.5, 2.01, 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, and 8.0

Kudos to the developer.

More details can be found at: Final Builds Site – IE Collection

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Have you seen it yet? If not, head over to www.dmpp.net and enjoy!

What do you think of it?

I think this is a keeper…  until I get bored of looking at it (again).

New web design is launched

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It seems that despite Rogers new website design, there are some serious coding flaws and database problems going on. Maybe one of their web developers was cleaning up files on the server and removed key includes? LOL

Perhaps they should get a ‘dev’ environment to work on.

Rogers staff – if you need help resolving the problem, let me know.  :-)

The errors are numerous!

broken website

Totally different section of the site - just as busted as the first!

Serious errors displayed to the public. Tsk tsk!

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