Too busy to…

Wired has a fascinating article about the technology that could replace 35mm film [via Daring Fireball].

The first time you select the voicemail button your an iPhone, in typical Apple fashion, it offers to help you configure your voicemail. This was much nicer than the traditional voice prompts one normally has to navigate, but the final step (talking to the network) repeatedly failed for me. Google indicated that it might be necessary to manually activate the voicemail by calling 1750, but that did not work for me. O2 customer service suggested that turning the voicemail off then on again would help (1760 [send] then 1750 [send]) but the setup failed again.

The solution that eventually worked for me was to configure voicemail in the “old-fashioned” (”non-visual”?) manner by dialling 901 and then following the tedious voice prompts. Once this had completed, I retried the iPhone visual voicemail setup using the same PIN as I configured at the voice prompts, and it worked first time.

As revealed in my previous post, I recently purchased an iPhone. The reason for this is that the Internet stopped working on my old phone, and since I needed a new portable Internet device anyway and the web being the iPhone’s forté, it seemed like the best choice for my requirements.

But is it any good as a phone? The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it’s not “great”… yet, a few more software updates ought to fix that. Missing features that, upon reflection, I never used on my old phone include voice dialling (I’m sure voice recognition systems are not tested on west country accents!) and video calling. The one feature that is sorely missing is a character counter in the SMS application, a horrendous omission now there are call plans without unlimited text messaging. The other feature that people talk about is the keyboard which is a joy to use—last week’s Heathrow Express post was written and edited entirely on the iPhone.

While a Mac usually “Just Works”, when it does encounter an error situation, OS X often emits a a very vague message that can make debugging a long-winded process. For example, suppose you have recently brought home a shiny new iPhone and upon connecting it to iTunes you receive: “Could not connect to iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000001)”.

According to the web, it seems the most common cause of this is connecting the iPhone via a USB hub instead of directly to the computer, but I had no USB hub. Also, most people were experiencing this as a transient fault after regularly and successfully synchronising their iPhone for some months, while mine was a new connection—all very perplexing.

Fortunately, OS X is really UNIX in disguise, and so while the user interface tries to only display friendly messages, the technical details are being logged in the same way as any other UNIX system, hence I checked /var/log/system.log:

Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not mkdir /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown: Permission denied
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
store_dict_osx: Could not create /Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/
6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist: No such file or directory
Jul 16 12:45:05 yvaine [0x0-0x10010].com.apple.iTunesHelper[136]: MobileDevice:
AMDevicePair: Could not store pairing record at
/Users/ned21/Library/Lockdown/6b90d8c839e8ec9e74d2dffce9a2e111daf84f7b.plist

Aha!—a simple case of “permission denied”. (Which, lets be honest, to a non-techie person would be no less cryptic than the message that the GUI actually displays.) This did present another mystery though since permissions on ~/Library look normal:

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -ld Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

except for that little + sign at the end of the permissions string. A quick check on another mac indicates that this is in fact not normal, and means that the directory has an extended ACL (this is the same convention as in Linux) but unlike Linux, OS X does not have getfacl(1) and setfacl(1) commands for viewing and manipulating ACLs—use “ls -le” instead.

yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------+ 42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/
 0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
 1: group:everyone deny delete

I have no idea how these ACLs were added to my directory, but let’s wipe them out:

yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 1 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ chmod -a# 0 Library/
yvaine:~ ned21$ ls -lde Library/
drwx------  42 ned21  ned21  1428 22 Jun 10:34 Library/

And my iPhone worked like a charm.

Rant of the day:

1. The website indicates that rail cards are valid, but cannot be used with tickets bought online. Every other rail company manages it so why can’t you?

2. Rail cards can also not be used applied against tickets bought from the automatic ticket machines, one must join the long queue at the ticket office.

3. You finally board your train, and head to the front to have a quick exit at Paddington when you realise that hideous Muzak is piped into every carriage not designated “quiet”, thus all carriages are deserted except the quiet carriages which are full of noisy people.

While we were waiting for the waitress to take our order, I noticed a small group of chatting policemen in riot gear. Earlier at the airport we had heard rumours of a baggage handlers strike so we wondered if there if was some sort of demonstration or protest happening today. A few minutes later there was the sound of remarkably tuneful male singing, a football chant perhaps, but sadly the waitress had no idea what event was passing through the picturesque square where we were having a late lunch.

Just as I was finishing my cappuccino (Budapest has excellent coffee), the singing turned to shouting, followed by banging, and then suddenly the people who had been idling in the middle of the square were running, like a tide heading for the beach, towards the same corner past the policemen who were buckling on their helmets and making their way in the opposite direction.

With the trouble at the other end of the square, no one on the café’s idyllic terrace looked perturbed so we continued to enjoy our lunch. There were some more bangs from the centre of the square, and then another wave of people, this time in uniform black t-shirts, ran past our café towards the same exit to the square as the original wave of bystanders—it looked like the police had broken things up. Thinking the incident over, we were about to return to our previous conversation when the people in front of us started to hold their noses, seconds later we could also smell bleach, and people started to move towards the café’s interior. As my nose started to tingle and run, it became obvious this was not an over-zealous cleaner, but some chemical the police had used to disperse the troublemakers, and there was a full-scale dash for the inside. Fortunately the effects were dispensed with by a good nose blow, and by the time we stepped outside again 15 minutes later, the air was clear again and the café’s terrace refilling.

Lifehacker links to an article entitled, 100 Things to Do During a Money Free Weekend but it’s really a great list of things to do at the weekend or during holidays at home.

MacInTouch has an interesting review of Amazon’s electronic book reader, the Kindle. The review is based on long term usage of the device rather than the initial “test drive” articles which appear when a product is first released.

When the Kindle was launched, the Internet was alive with speculation as to whether this was an ipod-style revolution, or the sainted Amazon’s first mis-step. Since the release I have seen little press coverage, although as I learned from the review, the fact that the initial manufacturing run sold out in five hours and it has taken six months to come back into stock may have had something to do with it.

• BBC, Thursday — “financial crisis”
• Schneier, Friday — “…may close”
• Techworld, Friday — “The press has been a little over dramatic“.

Sadly the weather Gods decided not to smile on our trip to Dublin and
and the uniform grey backdrop did not inspire many photos except for a few snaps of the pretty parts of TCD:

Fortunately, the Guinness always tastes good in Ireland and we found some lovely pubs in which to shelter from the downpours.

• O’Neills is a huge sprawling labyrinth of a bar which meant that while it was buzzing with atmosphere, it was still possible to find a table.
• The Bank pub on College Green: Splendid 19th Century banking hall now turned into a classy bar and eatery. The food was good, the staff friendly, and the decor superlative; it also reminded me a lot The Treasury in Melbourne.
• The Stag’s Head: A cosy traditional pub that is just difficult enough to find that it’s not rammed with tourists. Too good to share.

TIm Bray observes that several previously stable technologies are currently in a state of flux, with many of them on the cusp of potentially changing the way that applications will be engineered in the future.

It’s a great survey of what’s hot right now, but I don’t think that this is a particularly unique situation within IT—there are always new technologies pushing the boundaries of current thinking—what makes this moment different is that several core technologies are moving simultaneously. What potential for a confluence?

Flying ten hours to a ski resort when there are so many within a couple of hours seems like a bit of an odd thing to do, but Whistler has something of a reputation for being superior to the best Europe can offer and I was keen to find out what all the fuss was about.

So was it worth the flight time? Undoubtedly the answer is “yes”, for many, many reasons. The first thing that strikes you that everything is incredibly well organised—from the hotel shuttle buses, to the lift queuing systems which all have dedicated lines for ski schools and single riders to ensure no seats go unused during busy times. The next thing you notice is that while the resort is pleasantly small—everything you need is within easy walking distance—the ski area is huge with nearly 200 varied trails including tree runs and glaciers. The runs are divided between two mountains (Whistler and Blackcomb) but both are accessible from Whistler village so transferring between the two is quick and easy; next year there will also be a gondola linking the two mountains.

Other highlights include the general friendliness and welcoming nature of everyone we met (although the majority of the resort staff seemed to be British or Australian, Canadians were a minority!), the free mountain tours (really useful given the sheer number of pistes!) and those of us taking lessons universally agreed that the ski instruction was superb. Although the brochure indicated that groups could be as big as 10 people during busy times, we were lucky enough to never be in a group of more than five, all of very similar ability. Highly recommended.

The National Theatre is one of those buildings on the South Bank which was erected in the 1960’s by people who though concrete was an attractive building material. The name also suggests a rather high-brow entertainment-offering, and consequently I have never really paid much attention to it. However I have learned that this ugly building hides in fact not one but three theatres, making an enquiry about returned tickets at its box office the ideal way to end a spontaneous afternoon visit to the South Bank.

My prejudice about boring and/or expensive “high brow” content was also allayed last night when I saw a new play called Happy Now, a black but razor-sharp comedy about modern life in the vein of Ayekbourn’s Absurd Person Singular. I thoroughly recommend it.

(Incidentally, the play’s haunting title music is Michelle Branch’s, Are you happy now? [itunes link].)

I recently picked up a Netgear DG834Gv3 wireless router and modem on ebay for a very reasonable price. In order to make iChat video conferences work seamlessly (i.e. without having to configure port forwarding) I had to:

1. Upgrade it to the latest firmware (V4.01.30).
2. Toggle UPnP off and on (twice according to some forums).
3. Disable port scan and DOS protection (Advanced WAN Setup).
4. Disable SIP ALG (Advanced WAN Setup).

Although my Macbook was now very happy, the Ubuntu box would not connect to the wireless network using WPA encryption: SoftMAC authentication would complete, but the wireless NIC could not see any packets. The web suggests that PS3 owners have also experienced problems after upgrading to 4.01.30 and the only answer is to downgrade, 4.01.20 being the last known “good” version. Sadly Netgear have removed all but the new broken and a very old versions of the firmware from their support page, but the source code is still available and the tar.bz2 contains a pre-built image so you don’t even need to compile it.

At this point I am back to square one since iChat will no longer receive incoming video requests from people behind NAT devices unless I use manual port forwarding.

London is a city of spectacles: the impressive buildings, changing of the guard, Speakers’ Corner and now pancake races!

(Yes, tomorrow is “pancake day”–hope you hadn’t forgotten!)