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.

Some time ago, I had written about using IM applications on my iPhone. I tend to do quite a bit of IMing when out on the road; unlike the AT&T Tilt I previously used, the iPhone didn’t come with an IM program of its own. Over time, I installed the official AIM and Yahoo apps, and they worked fine for what I did (the Yahoo one much better than the AIM one). While there were multi-protocol clients out for the iPhone, I was a bit leery about trying most of them. I had heard Trillian had been planning on releasing an iPhone app for a while, so I decided to wait and see what that one would be like. Well, a few days back, my friend Patrick McCarron informed me it had been released, so I went ahead and picked it up.

I have to say, I was rather impressed right off the bat. If you have a Trillian Astra account, it automatically populates your mobile Trillian with the saved IM accounts and asks which ones to load on launch. From there, it signs the user in, and IM works right away. Typing in messages is easy and auto-caps and spell-check works fine. One might not think that would be such a big deal on iPhone, but the AIM app never really supported auto-caps. Push notifications come through fine as well. I actually spent from Friday evening to Saturday evening signed into Trillian on iPhone (as I was away from a PC most of that time), and it worked pretty much flawlessly.

Now, there are disadvantages. Apparently Facebook and Twitter support isn’t in place, which is really fine by me because I prefer using the official Facebook app and Twitterrific for those. There isn’t Skype support either, but then again the Windows Trillian app only acts as a frontend for an existing Skype install. Landscape keyboard support isn’t available, which may be a deal breaker for some; for me, it doesn’t really matter as I rarely use landscape keyboard. The final quibble I’ve heard some complain about is the fact that push notifications are only available for 24 hours between program sign-ons. Again, this doesn’t concern me much as I change my status and availability more often than that, especially if I’m going to bed and don’t want to be woken by incoming messages. :-)

All in all, though, Trillian for iPhone is a rather solid app. I’ve gone ahead and deleted the AIM app for iPhone (which I still consider junk), but I’m keeping the Yahoo app for those times where I just want to sign in to Yahoo to talk to Jennifer while on lunch or something. For $5, it’s hardly the most expensive app out there, and so far has worked out pretty nicely for me. I’ll likely be giving it even more use while in New Orleans later this week as well. If anything changes there, I’ll post about it later. For now, though, it’s a welcome addition to my iPhone app library.

Last night, I accompanied Jennifer to DSW so she could buy shoes for our trip this week. While she shopped, I took some time and played a new game I had gotten for my iPhone recently: Canabalt.

Canabalt has something of an interesting premise: you play a character who is escaping from some kind of city-wide attack, jumping from building to building as you run, and avoiding obstacles along the way. The game is deceptively simple, as the only real control in the game is to tap the screen, which causes your character to jump. How long you hold the tap down for controls how high/far your character jumps. As he runs, he has to avoid boxes (which merely slow him down) dropped weapon turrets (which turn him into “a fine mist” when he hits them), and correctly judge the correct power of each jump on the fly. I’ve lost several times when I’ve hit the jump button too hard on reflex, realizing too late that my character was supposed to be jumping through a window and instead smacking against the wall above the window.

The graphics are relatively simple 8-bit-type graphics in black and white, but still impressive. As I’ve played I pay little attention to the environment as a whole, merely concentrating on getting my character past obstacles, determining whether a building is about the collapse (such buildings are riddled with cracks), and making sure I judge each jump correctly. In the background, though, you can see a wrecked city, with alien(?) walkers walking back and forth, using either a projected energy weapon or a spotlight. Every so often, a plane flies overhead close to the action, but in my experience it’s not possible to die by hitting one of the planes.

If you ever feel like bragging about the distance you’ve run before losing, the game offers you the option to automatically post about it on Twitter. I’m not one to brag, or else I would have tried this functionality by now. It might also have something to do with the fact that I’m pretty sure my scores are pretty lame compared to others out there…

I’ve been playing Canabalt for a week or two now, and it’s currently my favorite “time-waster” game, for when I have a few minutes to kill. It costs $2.99 over at the iTunes Store, which to me was well worth it. Don’t take my word for it, though; the developer (Semi-Secret Software) actually developed a free Flash-based version before porting it to the iPhone/iPod Touch. You can play it at its website, located here.

A few days ago, I posted a quick blurb to my Twitter that said, “On mature reflection, it’s become clear to me that the Yahoo Messenger app for the iPhone is better than the AIM app.” I didn’t expect anything to come of it, really… but then Yahoo’s official Twitter re-tweeted my post, followed by a couple of other people.

As I ended up posting, “Disclaimer: despite the retweet by @yahoo, my personal opinion should not be confused with that of any professional reviewer. :-)”

Seriously, though, it’s my experience that the Yahoo app is just a better program. Both do instant messaging, of course, and allow you to set your custom status message. AIM also has the ability to use something called “Lifestream” to allow you to get updates from supported social networking sites, which I suppose is kind of cool. (I haven’t used it, myself, as I prefer using the official Facebook app and Twitterrific.) Both apps are iPhone OS 3.0 capable, and support notifications.

As far as actual messaging goes, though, I find the Yahoo program to be superior. AIM only allows for text messaging. Yahoo will allow you to send photos as well. AIM seems to have performance issues as well, or at least it does on my iPhone 3G. Switching from the buddy list or active IMs list to an actual conversation lags, as does switching between conversations. When an IM is sent or received, the app “freezes” while processing the request; if you’re typing while a message comes in, nothing appears on the screen until the message is displayed, at which point everything you typed all appears at once. By contrast, the Yahoo app is quick and responsive, and I never have any lag times switching between lists and/or conversations, nor when I am sending/receiving IMs.

Now, technically AIM has one advantage over Yahoo: you can be signed in via two locations at once on AIM, and the one that is set available as opposed to away is considered primary. (If both are set available or set away, IMs go to both.) However, on the iPhone app, this isn’t handled properly. I have myself added as a buddy in AIM so that I can see what it sets my status as to everyone else. When I load AIM on the phone, I typically set the same status message as I do on the PC, except replacing “Call/SMS the cell if needed” with “I will answer messages as able”. By all rights, I should then appear as available on AIM with that message. (I never set myself away on mobile AIM.) Instead, I still appear as away, except my status message is now erased. It kind of defeats the purpose of telling people I’m available, you know? At least while Yahoo signs me off the PC when I log in via the iPhone app, it at least gives the correct status message… and I can always sign back in at the PC when I get back to it.

As it stands, I’m finding myself the Yahoo Messenger app more than I do the AIM app anyway, as I’m finding more people I talk to on it regularly than on AIM. However, considering I do have friends and family who use AIM only, it would help if I had a properly working AIM app for the iPhone. The sad thing is that it didn’t use to be this way; as I recall, the above mentioned problems only started happening some time around the free version becoming available. Here’s hoping AOL gets their act together and releases a version that fixes the bugs and performance issues…