July, 2008

iPhone — No Comments
22
Jul 08

WordPress for iPhone review

Once again WordPress provides a first class blogging experience. I just downloaded the iPhone WordPress app and am writing this post using it.

Setup only requires your name and password and you are ready to post.

You can work on your post, save it as a local draft and post it whenever you are ready.

Pictures can be added from the iPhone library or from the camera.

Finally, you can see a preview of the page at any time.

That’s all the features. Simple, functional, and well done.

Highly recommended.

photo

Update:

On my blog the uploading of images doesn’t work quite right. It puts the picture in a different directory than it references it from.

Update 2:
This is a bug in the application. Basically it doesn’t respect the “Store uploads in this folder” parameter if you have changed it from the default. So if you are having a problem with the WordPress iPhone application and pictures showing up in your posts make sure that you have that set to the default setting (It can be found under Settings->Miscellaneous).

Technology — No Comments
19
Jul 08

Think Time Capsule is a piece of junk? Try forcing a reset.

My wife got me an Apple Time Capsule for father’s day.

The Time Capsule is a network device that is supposed to work in conjunction with Apple’s Time Machine backup software to backup your computer wirelessly on a regular basis. It also serves as a 802.11n access point that I’ve been using to provide access to our laptops.

Ever since I first installed it I’ve had problems with Time Machine not working very well. I hooked up my laptop via ethernet for the initial backup (which is large) and then switched to 802.11n for the incremental backups. However the incremental backups never seemed to be working correctly. It would spend hours just trying to start the backup (“Preparing” stage), and then an equally long time doing a relatively small backup.

Finally, yesterday my wife told me that that our slingplayer wasn’t working at all with her laptop in the bedroom.

Sure enough, despite having a strong wifi signal I was seeing a large number of packets dropped. In fact, I was seeing these when I was quite near the Time Capsule.

Could this be the problem with my Time Machine backups as well?

After a lot of troubleshooting I ended up doing a hard reset. (Unplug the power cable and plug it back in while holding down the reset button). This completely resets the firmware settings, but doesn’t affect the harddrive (or the backups on them).

I then reconfigured the Time Machine the way I needed it.

Since then it appears to be working much better. I’m not seeing packet loss, the backups seem to be working and the slingplayer is working.
Hopefully this does the trick.

Technology / iPhone — No Comments
19
Jul 08

iPhone 2.0

So iPhone 2.0 has been out for a week now.

What do you think?

There were three main reasons that I was anticipating the new firmware.
- Activesync for work.
- VPN for work
- App store so that I could finally transfer all my passwords from my Treo to my iPhone and get rid of the Treo

How have my expectations been met?

Activesync:
Mail works great. It does exactly what I would want. Give me easy access to my work mail without having to go through webmail. And you can even easily disable the mail syncing, so if you have days where you need to turn off work it’s not that hard to do.

Calendar and Contacts however are disappointing to me. I like to keep my work contacts and calendar separate from my personal contacts and calendar. As far as I can tell, you can’t do this. Bummer, because I really wanted easy access to my work calendar.’

VPN works great. Cisco IPSec with two factor authentication works exactly like I would expect.

Finally, the app store and a password application. I bough a program called SplashID. It could use some improvements in the interface department, but it does the job, so I’m fairly happy with this.

Biggest disappointment? The new long backup times (Which is apparently due to backing up applications)

Biggest positive surprise? The Apple remote application actually is useful for me.

iPhone — No Comments
19
Jul 08

Apple’s in your face advertising

Today I plugged my iPhone into my computer to make sure it was synchronized and all backed up nicely before I go on a business trip.

iTunes started up like normal, but for some reason it didn’t start the sync process. I clicked on the iPhone in iTunes and instead of showing the iPhone page it shows a full window advertisment for Apple’s MobileMe service.

Now I’m not against advertising. I think it’s a perfectly good way to help pay for products. However, when advertising completely interrupts the normal functionality of a device I think it’s gone too far. Often I will insert my iPhone for a sync and then walk away to do something else. Later I’ll come back, grab my iPhone and head out the door. If I had done that this time, my phone and data would not have been safely backed up like I would have expected.