Tag: Technology

iOS Alarm Clock Bug

Nothing makes you feel quite as stupid as fucking up something you’ve done correct time and time again. That’s why I’m betting the iOS developers at Apple are feeling really stupid as they introduced another bug in something that’s been correctly done on almost every software platform on the planet, alarms.

The alarm on iOS apparently wouldn’t go off on January 1st and 2nd of this new year. How the Hell do you fuck up an alarm clock? We’ve been doing these in software since… well it’s been a long fucking time. Hell my first Palm PDA did alarms. Yet this is the second alarm clock bug found in iOS within a year (the last one dealt with time zones).

Internet at the Speed of Light

I found a rather interesting idea being implemented by city officers in St. Cloud. Apparently they’re installing ceiling lights that flicker faster than the human eye can see in order to transmit data. This supposedly will ease congestion on the wireless network but I really wonder why they don’t just install more access points if that’s their problem (seems the easier and cheaper solution). Still this type of data transmission should be interesting so long as everybody works with all the lights on (which often isn’t the case as many companies).

Personally I think it’s kind of a dumb idea just because it requires you to have your work environment setup in a specific way (namely lights on) in order to get Internet access. Wi-Fi is great because you just need to have an access point and a wireless card in your laptop without any specific changes to your work area.

Strange Android SMS Bug

Here’s an interesting short message service (SMS) Android bug that has been making some headlines today. I don’t believe I’ve ever head this happen on my phone but there apparently is a bug in Androids SMS’s application that can cause a text message to be sent to a random person on your contact list instead of the person it was intended to go to. You can imagine some embarrassment when a text message meant for your girlfriend ends up going to the phone of your mother or other such nonsense.

I find this bug interesting mainly because it seems like a rather difficult thing to screw up and honestly the consequences could be hilarious.

iPhone Thoughts

I’ve been running on my iPhone for roughly a month now so I figured I’d give a quick overview of my thoughts on the device.

Because I’m a cantankerous asshole I’ll start with the things I don’t like about it. Apple put some rather silly restrictions in place on the phone. There are obvious ones such as the fact you can only install applications that Apple has personally approved but there are also odd little ones that you look at and get a headache trying to wrap your brain around. One of these restrictions is the fact you can’t download anything through the iTunes or App Store applications over 3G if it’s larger than 10MB. I don’t get this at all. AT&T uses tiered data now meaning you get 2GB and then pay an additional $10 for ever gigabyte over that. How that data is used should be irrelevant. Hell since they’re charging for tiered data they should throw in tethering for free. It’s retarded. On the other hand third party applications aren’t restricted to this behavior which is a nice thing.

Another thing I don’t like about the iPhone 4 are the fact that signal does drop if you hold it in your left hand and the back is made out of glass. The antenna thing has been covered to death and frankly you all know what’s up with that. Likewise I’m sure you can determine why making the back out of glass is a bad idea on a device that is generally dropped at least once in it’s lifetime (I haven’t dropped a phone yet but my friends have dropped my phones, on the iPhone 4 that’s pretty much game over).

Of course there is AT&T. I’ve not had any major troubles with their network or customer service (which I haven’t had to contact) yet. Their coverage sucks and back in my hometown there is no signal to be had. Meanwhile my Sprint phone has no issue finding a signal almost anywhere except in some valleys back in my hometown area. AT&T’s data network also seems slower than Sprints (and I’m not even talking 4G here). And there is that whole tiered data thing that AT&T has going but it seems Verizon is looking to do exactly the same thing and T-Mobile already has something in place (when you go over 5GB of data on T-Mobile they throttle your speed down to below 3G). Sprint is the last network with unlimited data but I wonder how long that will last.

Do you like iTunes? If not you’re going to absolutely hate the fact that everything done on the iPhone has to go through iTunes. Loading music, pictures, apps, movies, anything is done via syncing with iTunes. Frankly this is complete shit compared to doing the same tasks on Android. On my Evo I just plug the phone into my computer via a standard USB cable, enable disk drive mode, and copy the files I want to put onto my phone over through the file browser on my computer. Simple, easy, and effective. I wish Apple would implement this but that would destroy their god-like powers over their device which I know won’t happen.

You know what sucks about my Evo? The battery life. You know what rules about my Evo? The fact that I can just carry a spare battery. The battery in the iPhone is fixed which is just fucking stupid. The device’s battery life is great but it would be even better if I could just drop in a different battery when the primary one dies. Just saying Apple it wouldn’t be hard to implemented an easily replaceable battery.

Now the things I like about the iPhone. The device itself just feels sturdy. There isn’t any plastic to be had on the outside casing meaning you don’t have any real “creak” factor when you try to flex the device. It’s not a big deal but it does make the phone feel well built.

I really like the fast app switching implemented on the iPhone. In order to switch between previously opened applications you double-click the home button and a bar appears with every applications currently residing in memory. It’s fast and extremely easy. The Android equivalent would be holding down the home button for a couple of seconds and having the list of the last eight applications you used appear. Although Android has a better multi-tasking system their interface for dealing with it needs a lot of work (they should really just up and copy WebOS here).

The entire phone interface feels polished and consistent. When you have complete control on what can and can’t be loaded onto your device you can enforce some measure of consistency. I would like to see such consistency come to Android in the future but I don’t think that it will happen anytime soon.

iOS actually syncs properly with my Exchange server at work. This is a huge plus in my book because my Evo has had endless troubles syncing with my calendar at work and when it can’t sync with the calendar it refuses to sync with e-mail as well. I can actually use my iPhone for work, it’s great.

Likewise unlike my Evo the iPhone doesn’t have any trouble using Pandora or Last.fm (Pandora problems have been mostly fixed on the Evo at this point but Last.fm is still unusable). Apple has a stable and well tested media layer that they seem to be content with leaving alone. I can’t say how much I appreciate this fact.

Apple also makes quite a few cool accessories for my iPhone. Although my Evo has an HDMI-out port on it it’s not really very useful. Apple has VGA, AV, and composite cable adapters for the iPhone (they also work on the iPad) that allow you to push any video you’re playing on the iPhone to a television or projector. The VGA adapter also allows you to use an iPad as a Keynote presentation tool.

Overall I’m rather happy with my iPhone so far. Although I like the freedom that Android gives my experience with my Evo has left me sour. I’m still pissed that Google lost all records of Market apps that I purchased for my phone. Between the iPhone and my Evo I’ll take the iPhone hands down even with all the stupid limitations Apple has put into place.

More Rail Gun Goodness

Rail guns are perhaps the most awesome advancement in the world of throwing projectiles at things. The Navy broke their own record a while ago by firing a rail gun that impacted its target with 33 megajoules of force. How can you make something that bad ass even more bad ass? How about if those projectiles happen to fire missiles? The Navy has successfully launched their first fighter jet using a rail gun.

Well technically it’s not really a rail gun but it runs off of the same principal. The electromagnetic launchers are being developed to replace the current steam catapults used on air craft carriers to fling fighter jets forward with enough velocity to attain flight on carriers’ short runways.

Why I Ban URL Shortened Service Links

It’s no secret to anybody who knows me but I absolutely hate URL shortening services. My problem with them stems from the fact when you click on a shortened URL you haven’t a clue where it will actually take you. This gives you a great vector for an attack by linking somebody to a bit.ly link which sends an unsuspecting user to a malicious website that uses a browser exploit to infect their machine.

What I never thought about was using a URL shortening service to perform distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Hit the link to details (which are actually pretty trivial).

Audio Streaming Can’t be This Hard

A new update was released for the Evo 4G last week which seemed to consist entirely of new bloatware applications. I didn’t install it on my phone because the update didn’t have any mention of fixing the audio issues I’ve had since the Evo went from Android 2.1 to 2.2. Well it’s a good thing I waited because instead of fixing the audio player the update went and introduced new streaming audio problems.

Basically streaming MP3s over HTTP protocol doesn’t work… at all. In an ironic twist of fate AAC audio works great (AAC audio sound quality was destroyed in the initial 2.2 update due to problems in the StageFright media framework used in Android 2.2).

Rant time. How fucking hard is it to test your fucking patches? Streaming audio isn’t exactly rocket science. All you need to do to test audio streaming is run some streams using several popular services such as Pandora and Last.fm. If streaming fails fix the problem and don’t release the Odin damned patch.

I’ve never in my life seen a single platform with some many damned problem related to media playing. Playing media isn’t difficult anymore, we’ve been doing it for quite some time. I understand if something like the 4G radio has problems because that’s new technology which is in no way mature. Media streaming on the other hand is old technology that’s been around, we know how to do it.

Is it really that much to ask for to have a phone that can properly play audio files? My fucking iPod from the 2003 could play audio files without an issue. My damned Treo 755p from 2007 running an operating system who’s last major version came out in 2002 could stream MP3s properly. The Evo 4G is a flagship product and can’t do the same things my old Palm Treo 755p could do three years ago.

Seriously, what in the fuck is going on over at HTC?

United Nations Looking to Regulation the Internet

The United Nations motto is, “There isn’t a human right we’ve seen that we like.” They multi-government organization loves to claim they are for human rights and then quickly turn around and regulated those rights away from the citizenry of the world. After the Wikileaks fallout they are now looking at regulating the Internet:

At a meeting in New York on Wednesday, representatives from Brazil called for an international body made up of Government representatives that would to attempt to create global standards for policing the internet – specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks.

That would be great, an inter-government body in charge of regulating the largest bastion of free speech in the world. What could go wrong? I mean it’s not like this is the same organization that put leaders of the Middle East in charge of womens’ rights or anything… oh wait they did (a representative from Saudi Arabia was seated). This is also the same organization that believes owning guns is a right only for governments and their thugs. I can’t wait to see what ideas they come up with for Internet regulations, I’m sure it’ll be very pro-government and very anti-peasanthuman rights.

You Just Don’t Get it Do You

Wikileaks wikileaks Wikileaks… did you hear about Wikileaks? The Air Force has decided that they will prove themselves to not be hypocrites and only block Wikileaks. Now they’re blocking several publications that released information on the leaked cables:

Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, “ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored,” according to a screen shot reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The notice warns that anyone who accesses unauthorized sites from military computers could be punished.

The Air Force said it had blocked more than 25 websites that contained the documents, originally obtained by the website WikiLeaks and published starting late last month, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems.

I don’t think the Air Force really gets it. Once something is online you can’t censor it, you can prevent people from seeing it by blocking a few sites, the information has spread out to more sites than you can ever hope to censor. Once information has his the Internet it’s game over as far as controlling it. The only real option available to the Air Force is the creation of a white list of sites that it’s employees can access as opposed to their current blacklist of sites you can’t access.