Those who have known me for a while know that I tend to favor Apple products. My primary laptop for the longest time was a PowerBook G4. I’ve used iPods since 2003 or thereabouts. My current cell phone is an iPhone 3G; I’ve actually had it probably longer than any other cell phone. The thing I like about Apple stuff is that it generally Just Works. If I have a problem with something, the Apple knowledge base articles are pretty concise and helpful. I’ve not had a real problem with figuring something out until today, and man, it was a doozy.

When I got into work this morning, the boss asked me as a favor if I could take his wife’s old first generation iPhone and turn it into an iPod Touch. In other words, he simply wanted to use the iPhone without the cellular capability. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, but he had wiped the iPhone and now it needed to be activated through iTunes. What worried us was whether activating through iTunes would disable his wife’s new iPhone. So, I did some research, and came across this Apple knowledge base article that said what we wanted to do is easily done, and that iTunes would happily activate the phone with the invalid SIM for use as an iPhone without cell service.

Sounds simple, right? It wasn’t.

Once I plugged the iPhone into my laptop and iTunes came up, it asked to activate through AT&T. Confused and unwilling to continue lest I mess up Kendra’s phone, I called AT&T for assistance. After explaining the situation to the tech support specialist, I got the tech support equivalent of a blank stare. She ended up transferring me to Apple, where the support tech there knew what I was asking for but didn’t have the right information for me. After talking to a supervisor, he told me I needed to talk to AT&T regarding the SIM card still in the phone (as the phone will not activate without a SIM card). After getting off the phone with him, I called AT&T back and got another tech on the phone. I explained the situation to her, but she told me that what the Apple tech said wouldn’t work. We tried going through the different options on the iTunes activation, but every route we took led to the same result: we would be deactivating the cellular service on Kendra’s phone and activating it on this one.

The AT&T tech eventually got another Apple tech on the line, and we tried different options, including even trying to activate it with MY iPhone’s SIM card in it. The iTunes activation wouldn’t even allow it to proceed on mine. Finally, the Apple tech suggested asking an AT&T store person, and the AT&T tech called the nearest store to me and found a employee who could do what I asked. I thanked them for their help, got off the phone with them, and headed over to the AT&T store. The problem would soon be dealt with.

… or so I thought. As soon as I walked in the door and handed the guy the phone, he looked at it and said, “The tech told me it was an iPhone 3G.” I said no, that I had quite clearly told her it was a firstgen one. As the tech explained, for some reason it was not possible to activate the original iPhone for non-cellular use. Only the 3G and the 3GS could be activated that way.

So, I took the phone back to the office and told the boss the sad truth: the only way we were going to be able to unlock the phone for his daughter’s use was to jailbreak it. We had wanted to do it via an “authorized” method, but that had been closed off to us. Fortunately, a quick word with a friend of mine who had more iPhone knowledge than me pointed me in the direction of blackra1n, a quick and easy jailbreak tool for the iPhone. Once the phone was successfully jailbroken, it was available for use. The boss checked it over, made sure everything was available that his daughter would need, and thanked me profusely for getting it running.

If you were to ask me where the failure here was… while I’d lay it at both Apple’s and AT&T’s feet, I’d probably lay it more at AT&T than at Apple. I don’t know how Apple looks up SIM numbers for activation, but I’m willing to bet that whenever an AT&T SIM card is entered in, it automatically tries to sell cellular service as opposed to giving the option of activating without cellular service. Apple’s blame comes from the fact that their knowledge base article didn’t make ANY mention of problems with activating without cellular service if it was formerly used on AT&T and had an AT&T SIM.

In any event, the iPhone is now operational without cellular service. Jailbreaking was a last resort as the boss and I are both people who like to stay as official with software as possible (even though I have no problems with others jailbreaking), but in the end it was the route we needed to take to get the phone up and running where the boss’s daughter could use it. Now, if only Apple and AT&T hadn’t made the process so painful in the first place…

One of the tech websites I visit on a regular basis is the Daily WTF. It’s a collection of stories regarding ineptitude, cluelessness, failures, and even sometimes malevolence in the IT world, especially when it comes to development. Two days ago they posted a story that I figured I should share…

One thing that people generally ask me is whether I’m afraid that my job would be outsourced to somewhere like India. The answer I give is most often “no”; over the years, it’s become plainly obvious that while it’s cheaper to send tech support and development to such countries, the cost savings are undone by the language barriers, quality of work, time zone differences, and even possible corruption. Plus, with them being overseas, there’s little chance of them being called on whatever they do.

Anyway, this story, called “Maybe I Needing Later”, should serve as a very precautionary tale about hiring a developer in this manner. While this is one of the worst examples I’ve ever seen, it also doesn’t surprise me one iota. I figure this guy is not the first to be burned in this way.

How bad is it? Well, I’ll just quote one line that says it all…

“If you don’t paying, then I delete files that I send you,” he responded, “I don’t want deleting your web, but it is not fair for me. I know you changing my password and I can’t logging on, but I don’t needing SQL or server password to delete.”

You can read the rest of the story here.

I used to have a high amount of respect for Palm. These days… not so much.

Doubtless people have been seeing ads for the Palm Pre all over the place. The Pre is their biggest phone release since the Treo, really. It boasts a brand new OS (WebOS) and is supposed to be the most advanced of the Palm phones. Normally I would be interested from the get go, but there were two things standing in the Pre’s way from my standpoint. The first was that, of course, I’m kind of attached to my iPhone. The second is that the Pre is exclusive to Sprint.

Now, however, there’ve been two missteps on Palm’s end that completely destroyed any desire for me to use the Pre. The blatant dishonesty and… well, laziness, for lack of a better word shown by Palm has been mind-boggling.

The first misstep involves the Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes. Now, to go about it the right way, one either develops a third-party utility that references the iTunes library database file (like Blackberry does), or one does a deal with Apple. What Palm ended up doing was spoofing the USB identifier of the iPod, thus making iTunes think that the Pre was in fact an iPod. Apple worked to block the Pre, and Palm ended up reporting Apple to the USB Implementers Forum, the organization that maintains standards, compliance, and vendor IDs for USB. Palm claimed that Apple was using the USB identifier in such a way that it blocked interoperation of devices, something that was against the membership agreement for USB-IF. Unfortunately, not only did USB-IF say that Apple’s use of the USB identifier was completely fine, they stated that Palm was completely in the wrong for using Apple’s identifier. iTunes 9 finally broke syncing with the Pre.

Now, there’s word that another of Pre’s applications is a source of trouble. The Pre uses a piece of software called muPDF for its PDF reading functionality. The developers of muPDF, Artifex Software, released muPDF under the GPL (quick summary: you can distribute the software as you see fit, but any changes you make to the source code must be distributed as well). They also state that if someone were to include muPDF as part of an application, either the new software needs to be distributed as GPL, or a commercial license from Artifex is required. Well, Artifex has sued Palm, stating that while muPDF is included in the Pre, they neither purchased a commercial license nor have they released the modified program’s source code.

The Palm Pre might be a wonderful device. I personally haven’t tried it, as I don’t know anyone who has one. Still, considering these two blatant legal issues that Palm are embroiled in right now due to trying to take a shortcut, it makes me wonder how many other problems the device has, legal or otherwise. They’ve already been shown to cut corners in licensing and development. It’s a shame, really… my first PDAs were Palms and Handsprings. Now, though, given everything that’s happening… I’ll stick with Apple, HTC, or Nokia, thank you very much.

I have to say, I wasn’t quite expecting me to be on the personal use virtualization bandwagon… at least, not so soon, and not where family is concerned. Granted, we use VMware fairly heavily at the office, but I didn’t expect to start making it available for a family member.

Perhaps I should explain a little. For the past several years, my father has been addicted to a PC game called Re-Volt. It’s a racing game with RC vehicles, and the RC vehicles have toy weapons they can use. Almost every single night, Dad would be at his laptop, playing Re-Volt. However, a few months back the video chipset on his laptop corrupted itself, making it almost impossible to use. With few other options, Dad picked up a new laptop. The problem was that the new laptop runs Windows Vista, so Dad couldn’t get Re-Volt to work properly. In addition, a few other applications of Dad’s wouldn’t run. He wasn’t happy, but he eventually learned to deal with it.

Or at least, he did until this past Friday, when Jennifer and I were at Dave & Buster’s. While there, we encountered a Re-Volt arcade machine, which I took a picture of and emailed to my folks. Unfortunately, that only set off Dad wanting to play the game again. I sighed, and over the weekend I looked into installing it on his laptop. I couldn’t get it to work, so I decided to look into the next best thing: virtualization.

Fortunately, virtualizing XP is relatively easy, as I have a spare license of Windows XP Home Edition on hand. The big question became, “What software do I use?” I could have always used VMware, but I didn’t know whether VMware Player supported 3D accelerated graphics or not, and I wanted to keep to a free solution. I looked at Microsoft’s Virtual PC, but it didn’t support 3D accelerated graphics at all. So, I decided to go with Sun’s xVM VirtualBox, which I know has support for 3D accelerated graphics.

Actually, in retrospect, it’s kind of a good thing Dad decided not to go with Windows 7 after all. He mainly bought it for Windows XP Mode, and I know Re-Volt was one of the items he planned on using with it. Windows XP Mode works in such a way that 3D accelerated graphics don’t work with it either. I’m glad he didn’t find out about that one the hard way…

So, right now, I’ve got XP loaded onto the virtual machine and am doing updates to it, including DirectX and Microsoft Security Essentials. Of course, once this is done, the fun part will be copying the entire machine over to Dad’s laptop, installing VirtualBox on it, and teaching Dad how to use the damned thing. While I should be finished with the virtual machine by the end of the evening, I’ll probably wait until I’m back from New Orleans before I actually install it on his laptop. After all, I know he’ll end up having a ton of questions about it that I won’t want to answer while I’m on vacation.

In any event, like I said, this is the best solution I could come up with for his compatibility issue. I hadn’t thought I would ever need to set up virtual machines for the folks, but Dad wants his programs to run, so virtualization is the way to go. It should be amusing to see how it all works out in the end.