I don’t know if many people have reported this but upgrading your applications on the iPhone is a hit or miss procedure. Sure it is easy from an iTunes or a AppStore icon on the device. This isn’t the first time it has happened as some of the applications in question have had multiple updates. The main problem(s) I have seen are as follows:
- Loss of login information (FaceBook, NetNewsWire, Todo, WordPress)
- Loss of Data (Todo – I spent 30 minutes entering data and then noticed that an upgrade was available. You get the picture…)
Now the one thing I would like to see out of Apple is a way of backing up each individual application’s data independently so I don’t lose all my data again. At least with ToDo they sync with Toodledo so I can at least sync online so I was able to go back to a previous days entries.
Anyone else seeing similar issues?
Well it isn’t launch day but I have done it. I have two black iPhone 3G 16GB phones in hand.
Unlike last year, the lines were shorter, with good reason, the wait was much longer. I would say there were about 100 people in front of me and it took an estimated 4 hours to finally walk out of the store with the phone in hand. Last year I think there was at least 200-300 people in front of me and the wait was an hour less. But with that aside, once I got to the store the process was pretty straight forward. I was able to walk out of the store with a newly activated iPhone, and two unactivated iPhone 1.0s, unlike the ordeal I went through last year. ;)
One thing I though was pretty interesting was the psychology of people, me included, while waiting in line for something you really don’t know if you are going to get. First we started in the line and an Apple employee came out and said, no more Black 16GB phones. Then everyone around me in the line started rationalizing the White 16GB phone or got off. Then an hour later the same Apple employee came out and said no more 16GB phones period, now people had to make hard decisions, get off and throw away time spent or wait it out and get one 8GB version and come back another day for the 16GB…Well you know what I finally walked away with, but this was due to a UPS delivery and a subsequent FEDEX delivery between 11am and 12pm. After we were alerted to the restock of iPhones, everyone around me decided since they have been waiting four hours and that getting the top of the line iPhone 3G in Black with 16GB was in order. So my question Apple is, why no 32GB iPhones, I am sure you will have sold them all even at higher prices. ;)
My 3G impressions:
- Much better phone audio quality! The speaker and ear piece sounds much better and is louder.
- The same AT&T reception and audio issues
- 3G is much better than EDGE albeit shorter battery life (Although at home 3G reception isn’t there, no big deal as most people will use WIFI at home. The main problem with WIFI is that Exchange PUSH email doesn’t work over WIFI as there is no sleep option in the protocol and enabling it will dramatically reduce your battery life. I guess there is mobileme.)
- The curved shape is much more comfortable to hold.
- Not scientific but it seems overall battery life seems shorter that with iPhone 1.0
- Screen has yellowish tint in many circumstances (Not very good for showing off your photos)
- Phone seem lighter in the hand (Maybe this is due to shape since it is only .1 oz less, 4.7oz compared to the original 4.8 oz)
- Seems a bit faster overall, maybe due to the new 620MHz ARM processor
For the last year or so, I have been using my Laptop to allow me to connect to my server hosted in VM at my home.
I had to use port forwarding to forward 3389 to my machine but I was reasonably happy (not thrilled) with the performance over Verizon’s EVDO rev A broadband network.
I have been in a constant struggle of wanting a powerful laptop to host the 4-5 virtual machines on the road and portability. I could go out and get a T61P and load it up with 8GB of RAM. But, lately I have been thinking that I don’t want to carry my laptop around, I actually am thinking of something like the MSI Wind netbook to satisfy my need for always connected.
The other issue is that I now have an Amazon Kindle and I don’t want to carry anything big around anymore. The Kindle is a topic for another post.
So, enter RDP over HTTPS, sound familiar? Well it basically uses the RPC over HTTPS that Outlook 2007 uses and tunnels your Terminal Services connection. Cool right? Now you tunnel through your corporate firewall to your home machine.
First you need to use the RDC (Remote Desktop Client) 6.1 that comes with Vista, or you can download an update for Windows XP from Microsoft.
Notice on the advanced tab you can specify the Terminal Service Proxy server. This is usually the server that is Internet facing. (You only need to open port 443 SSL, Yippee!)
On your server you will need to install the Terminal Services Role and then select TS Gateway. I am not going to go through the whole setup, as there are many detailed guides on the net.
Sample Status screen
RDC Screenshot
So every solution has some issues, here are some that you may face.
1. TS Gateway doesn’t support RDC sessions within a session. Yes I know many people including myself like to RDP into a machine and then from that machine traverse the internal network.
2. You cannot connect to machines that are not in the domain that the TS Gateway is in. Sadly there is no way to connect to a machine in a workgroup with this method. Nor is there a way to connect to another group of machines in another domain if there is NO trust. I had a few development VMs so I had to enable a forest trust so I could authenticate to the machines.
Well it wasn’t meant to be. But anyway I went and saw Wall-e. Definitely another great movie from Pixar. The movie had a wonderful message and did a great job (without any dialog) of getting you to feel for Wall-e and Eve.
Unfortunately for a lot of people you either loved it or thought it ranked on the bottom of Pixar’s previous works.
Keep up the great work Pixar.
Now unfortunately the second part of the day wasn’t meant to be. No iPhone until July 11th. Lucky for us AT&T will allow us to get in on some iPhone 3G action at the subsidized price. However, next year I don’t think that they will be so generous when iPhone 4G comes out.
But by then we may have Google’s Android OS on some other smartphone and we will have forgotten how cool Google maps was on the iPhone.
Or maybe, a blackberry will port their software to Android and smartphones as we know it will never be the same…
Enough wishful thinking…
Well everyone is guessing when Apple will release the new iPhone. Well let me just take a guess. The date will be June 27. Last year Pixar released Ratatoullie on the same day as the iPhone, as mentioned in my blog post. The new Pixar movie, Wall-E is being release on June 27, so why should it be different this time.
I hope Mr. Jobs sticks to the plan so I can watch a good movie and pickup an iPhone 3G!
Well it amazed me that this is a typical issue. My Toshiba M400 the other day was running really warm during normal use, 60° C-70° C.
So of course I had to take the whole thing apart and inspect. The first thing I did was to clean out the FAN, again a big yuck! Then I took off the CPU fan and heat sink and removed all the old CPU paste. I then cleaned the surfaces with Isopropyl alcohol, re-applied some new thermal paste, making sure that it is evenly coating the CPU and then re-assembled the notebook.
So now my idle temperatures are more inline with when I got the notebook, 35° C-45° C.
Here is a good article I found on the topic.
Well it has been over a year since Vista has been released and I have been struggling with poor file copy performance between my Vista machines on a GB switch, since about December.
Poor Network Performance with Windows Vista (RTM)
Poor GB Network Performance on Vista back! =(
Poor Network Performance on Vista resolved?
I don't know how I missed the article about MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduler Service) but after reading into it, it seemed to fit my performance issue...my stability issues were due to old network drivers. If you have a Broadcom onboard nic, you should definitely upgrade the drivers.
Mark Russinovich uncovered that MMMCSS is hardcoded to throttle your network performance to 10,000 frames per second or about 15Mb/sec on standard ethernet with 1500 byte frames.
Here is the solution. I have disabled the MMCSS service, updated the registry to remove the Windows Audio dependency and network performance is back to where it should be! CPU utilization is a bit high, I will have to check to see if I disabled TCPChimney, RSS and TCPA (DMA)...Otherwise it looks good!
The other day I ran into an interesting problem with my ThinkPad T60. For some reason the machine would shut down after about 10-30 minutes. There were no indications to the cause from the error in the event logs in Vista, nor were there any obvious hardware sounds.
Lucky for me I had another laptop at my disposal where I could swap the hard disk out to rule out some Vista related bug.
By chance I noticed that the base of the machine was running very hot, the internal heat sink was running about 90° C (using my Fluke infra-red temperature sensor) around when the machine shutdown unexpectedly. So I suspected that the machine was going into thermal shutdown. The Core Duo CPU is rated at about 100° C, but other components on the system board may not be stable at such high temperatures.
So the first thing I did was clean all that dust out of the heat sink and fan, yuk... Then I fired up the laptop again. This time it took the machine significantly longer to shutdown but the problem was the same.
So instead of arguing with some support rep, I took matters into my own hands (literally). I busted open the laptop, took off the heat-sink and cleaned the old paste off. Lucky for me I still had some arctic silver CPU paste leftover from putting a monster of a head sink on my Q6600. Sorry forgot to take some gory ThinkPad T60 pictures. Maybe I will take some pictures when I change the processor to a 2GHz Core Duo that I removed from my Toshiba M400, that's a topic for another post.
Before I digress even more, I am glad to report, the problem is resolved. The machine not longer shuts down and I am a happy camper.
I wonder why Lenovo put so little CPU paste on the CPU.
I was always wondering how the Market hype actually affects the price at the pump. Here is what I was able to find out.
One barrel of crude oil makes about 19½ gallons of gasoline, 9 gallons of fuel oil, 4 gallons of jet fuel, and 11 gallons of other products, including lubricants, kerosene, asphalt, and petrochemical feedstocks to make plastics.
The current price at the pump is about $3…
At $3 per gallon * 19.5 gallons in one barrel = $58.50 per barrel. $100 per barrel - $60 actual cost or about $40 in market speculation…
In actuality the price per barrel is much lower considering the actual cost breakdown…
At $3 per gallon the raw cost is about $1.98 per gallon…
($3 * 66% = $1.98 per gallon (Actual cost of crude, 40% plus refining costs 13%, plus distribution 13%, excluding taxes)
The total cost is 19.5 * $1.98 = $38.61 per barrel raw costs.
Source:
http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html
Well that is not entirely true, I will by an ultra-portable notebook computer (< 4lbs) if it has the following characteristics (Yes I may be dreaming but by the EOY I think we might see such a beast):
- Core 2 Duo Processor (What is the deal with the LV and the ULV, they don't save that much power)
- 4 GB RAM (Do you really think 2GB is enough?)
- 1.8" SSD (>50MB/sec performance) or 2.5" 7200 rpm drive
- 64bit support (Must have support for x64 OS)
- LED backlit display
- Tablets should have dual touch screens
- The power adapter shouldn't weigh more that the notebook ;-)
- DVI/HDMI port
- 2-3x USB2 ports
- Express Card Slot
- Discrete graphics
- Price < $2000
All new notebooks are more than capable of running modern applications but the piece of technology that really needs to be left behind are the slow 1.8" 4200 rpm hard disks. I think we are at a point where the performance of ultra-portable notebooks doesn't have to suffer because of the small form factor. I think manufacturers should stop manufacturing these pathetically slow drives.
Fast SSDs from SanDisk and MTron will eventually come down in price where ultra-portables can really benefit from the performance previously only available to notebooks larger siblings...
Lately a few ultra-portable notebook PCs have gotten a lot of press, namely the Lenovo X300 and MacBook Air. I think the X300 has gotten it very close to right. I still would ditch the low voltage processor but for the most part this notebook has most of my criteria. From the many reviews, it looks like Lenovo didn't skimp on the performance of the SSD.
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