Thanks to the magic of salary sacrifice I’ve updated my late 2006 MacBook Pro to a shiny new 17″ Core i7 MacBook Pro.

The old machine has served me well these last three years but it has really started to show it’s age. Lately for work I have needed to spend more time working in a virtual machine, the 2GB of RAM and 140GB hard drive on the old machine were just not cutting it.

Specs for the new machine

• 2.66GHz Core i7
• 8GB RAM 1066MHz DDR3
• 17″ Anti-glare display (1920×1200)
• Intel HD Graphics 256MB DDR3 + GeForce GT330M 512MB DDR3
• 500GB 7200 RPM HDD

I haven’t had much time to play with it yet but it is certainly much snappier than the old one.

I ran GeekBench 32-bit on the new and old machines (the 64-bit version of GeekBench is paid only)

The GeekBench score shows a 58% increase in performance which will definitely make life easier for me.

On top of the obvious advantage of having a shiny new machine I will be passing the old MBP on to Viv so now I will actually be able to use my laptop at night when the kids are in bed

See below for the obligatory un-boxing photos, I apologise for the poor quality, my camera was out of juice so I took these with my iPhone 3G.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a crack had developed from the rear corner of the dock connector port on my black iPhone 3G running up the back for about an inch.

The crack did not affect the operation of the phone but it was sure bugging me every time I looked at it.

I looked around on the net and found that the white 3G iPhones were showing cracks like mine either at the dock connector or headphone socket so I thought, hey I’ll take it to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store (Chatswood) and see if they can help me.

I made an appointment and turned up on time earlier today. The “Genius” asked me a few questions and gave the phone a good look over, presumably looking for signs of rough handling. He then told me he will replace it for me at no cost.

I was once again blown away with the slick, professional an painless nature of the service…

I had a similar experience a few months back when I took my 17″ MBP in for a battery replacement.

Service matters every bit as much as product quality and if I have to pay a premium to be treated like a valuable customer then I’ll do it..

I stumbled across this blog post by Veronica Belmont (@Veronica on Twitter) about an awesome concept for iPhone App organizing.

I don’t know about you but I have 5, starting on 6, pages of apps on my iPhone and it’s a major pain in the ass to move them around into a sensible order.

Hey Apple, please think about implementing something like this….

This is the error message that has been plaguing me for a few days.

What triggered it was replacing my provisioning profiles and certificates.

Fortunately I found an answer in the following blog post

CodeSign error: a valid provisioning profile is required

I was struggling for some hours on an issue with an App I’m writing for the iPhone.

For some reason I could not get any of the views to rotate to landscape, the API docs suggested that this was trivial and only required implementing the method

(BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation

and always returning YES

The problem is that this doesn’t work if you are using a TabBarController created in Interface Builder. You can verify this by create a new project, specifying the type as “Tab Bar Application” and rotating the simulator…

I found a quick and easy solution to this problem in the following blog post

Change iPhone/iPod app orientation within a UITabBarController

I added maybe a dozen lines of code to my app and the problem is solved….

Thanks Arash…

After 38 years of living in what I believed to be a free country you can imagine my outrage when I came across stories about the Rudd government’s latest brainwave

Minister welcomes advances in internet filtering technology

(Computerworld have a good piece on it)

It would appear that like people in China, Burma and North Korea, we need to be protected from the big bad internet by means of ISP level OPT OUT filters!!!

Ahh, you say, you can Opt Out if you feel strongly about it, and yes we can… In theory…

There will be two blacklists

* Content unsafe for children (on by default)

* “Illegal” content (on for ALL with NO OPT OUT)

Now, I hear you ask “What’s wrong with blocking illegal content?”…

Well, that boils down to a question of who decides what is or isn’t legal in the context of the internet?

Should the government prevent me from researching nuclear energy? I could learn how to make a bomb… What about abortion? or Euthanasia? or making Gunpowder?

Is knowledge illegal or the improper use of it?

Mandatory filtering puts us on a very slippery slope indeed.

Even forgoing the illegal content blacklist, what about the “unsafe for children” blacklist, which children?

What if a child wants to learn about sexually transmitted diseases, is that bad? Time and time again attempts to generate blacklists have tended to block access to sites that are totally appropriate for children, often sites offering educational material for children on sexual health issues.

I am utterly against this kind of censorship and I feel it is totally inappropriate for the government to decide on my (and my children’s) behalf what I can and can’t be allowed to see. Bulk filtering of internet content is a total waste of time, money and energy, the “right” way to tackle this problem is to steer clear of the “quick fix” and fall back on Education.

Give people the information they need to understand the internet, and be able to make informed decisions on what they see or don’t see.

Let parents decide what is best for their children.

The dangers to children on the internet are not stumbling across porn, but rather chatting to the wrong people, giving out their personal details, etc
These are not the sorts of things that can be blocked with a filter.

In today’s society we always want to push responsibility (and blame) on to someone else, well it’s time to stand up and say NO….

Please visit the NoCleenFeed site setup by the EFA and take a stand, once something like this is in place it is hard to remove, your chance to nip it in the bud is now…….

With the last of our tax refund we bought the boys a sub-notebook to play with, the eeepc 4g from Asus.

The specs are as follows

Display: 7″
CPU: 900 MHz Celeron-M
Video: Intel GMA 900
OS: Linux
Colour: White
Network: 10/100MB Ethernet & 80211b/g wireless
Memory: 512MB DDR2
HDD: 4GB SSD
Webcam: 0.3 mega pixel
Audio: Stereo speakers & Microphone
Battery: 2.8-3.5 hours
Weight: 0.92 kg

It is a little corker, I’ve been listen to people rave about it on a number of Tech podcasts. The 4g is no longer the current model but it will do what we need and is affordable. We bought it online from the very nice folks at DealsDirect.com.au we’ve bought 5 items from them so far, everything has been exactly as advertised and the shipping has been prompt with the items ariving in good condition.

Seth calls it his “lappy” and has fallen instantly in love with it.

Inspired by my Texan colleague and enabled by my recent acquisition of a 3G iPhone I decided to have a crack at Geocaching.

For the uninitiated this involves trying to find a hidden cache of goodies based on GPS co-ordinates.

I checked out the definitive sight geocaching.com punched in the co-ordinates of my house and looked at the list of nearby caches.

Living out in the sticks as I do I expected their to be sod all choice, I was presently surprised to find one within 500m of my house!!!

I packed a little bag and Seth and I went to look for treasure….

I was pleasantly surprised with the ease of using the iPhone to find the cache, I added a bookmark on the phone at the GPS co-ordinates of the cache and just keep walking until the blue location dot meet the red map pin.

It actually took longer to find the cache once we got to ground zero than it did to walk from my place to the cache.

We ended up searching an area around 10m x 10m, it was off a trail in light bush so the GPS was struggling a little to keep a lock.

Sethy claimed a prize from the cache and we put something else in its place…

We are planning to check out another one next weekend about 1km in the other direction from our place.

If you are interested the cache we found is here…

We are thinking about hiding one of our own as well, watch this space…….

Sethy with his treasure

I decided to update my iPhone to the new 3G model for a number of reasons

* GPS

* 3G data

* A locally supported legit phone

So far I’m very happy with the upgrade, Viv has inherited my previous phone which I pwned and updated to 2.0 on the weekend.

I have definitely noticed a difference in battery life, on my 2G iPhone with a heavy day of surfing the web and reading emails the battery is at 75% by the end of the day, on the 3G it is a little under 50%

I used the GPS continuously for around 40 mins on Sunday and by the end of the day the battery was down to around 20%

Strangely I rarely use my Phone for actual calls, for me it’s more of a handheld computer than a phone.

I haven’t done the standard unboxing shots so I’m sure Steve is reserving a place for me in hell for blaspheming but I can live with that.

I did have one hiccup worth noting… I bought the phone on Thursday and found that on my was home on Thursday night it seemed to lose the ability to connect to the internet over the cell network. I would get a 3G or GPRS icon on the status bar as if it was connected but no internet apps would work.

I thought, damn I have to swap it for a new one after a couple of days but over the weekend I thought I would try a little poking around. I did a restore to the latest build of 2.0 (5A347), no luck… Then I thought, how about a fresh install and don’t restore settings from the last backup or sync contacts etc, ie fresh out of the box.

That did the trick of bringing it back to life, I can only imagine that some settings from the 2G backup messed it up. I’ve since synced the contacts etc back, the only things I lost were wi-fi & email settings, fav contacts in the “fav” phone page and sms history.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough for now, the upshot is I have a nice shiny new 3G phone and I’m happy with it, Apple haters please feel free to post comments to /dev/null

I wonder if I should start an iPhone category

I recently used the Pwn Project tools to make a custom 1.1.4 firmware that is activated, jailbroken etc, it all worked well and after restoring the firmware to my iPhone everything “Just Worked” except the Mail application.

I have seen this issue before where you start Mail and it immediately crashes, the only way I have fixed it in the past is to do another restore. This time I thought I’d poke around a little first.

I logged into my phone via SSH and found that I could start the Mail application as root with no problem, although it acted as though it was a new installation. Starting it as “mobile” caused the expected crash behavior.

Poking around in the filesystem I found that the directory that mail uses to store its preferences

/var/mobile/Library/Mail

was owned by root:wheel and had permissons that would not allow applications launched as the mobile user to write to it..

# ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 272 Apr 7 08:06 Mail

It seems that the only issues I have on my hacked iPhone relate to permissions problems so I changed the ownership of the directory (and it’s contents) to mobile:wheel

# chown -R mobile:wheel Mail

The ownership and permission should look like this.

# ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 mobile wheel 306 Apr 7 07:58 Mail

After that Mail worked as normal.