Life is grand

Real World Software Development has a decent list on managing developers. Most of it you should know already. One item though made me choke on my tea:

“Hi Sean, I have noticed an increase in help desk call volumes, and the help desk does not seem to be finding any patterns or rhyme or reason as to why. I’d love it if you could take help desk calls next week, to help me find patterns and ultimately come up with a solution to why the spike in volumes!”

If Hollywood movies reflect reality then this may work in the United States but from my little experience no Irish, British, French, German, Scottish, South African or Australian developer is going to be duped by that. It is condescending and falsely enthusiastic (getting excited about answering help-desk calls is just crazy.)

Only get enthusiastic about something that really is cool. Don’t fake it, developers aren’t stupid.

You have just got to love solutions to problems that require no new code. They just needed a bit of left-field thinking. Khoi Vihn figured out that the iPhone photo gallery system is nearly perfect for displaying the New York subway map. Import segments of the map in as individual photos and they line up neatly. Click a photo and it zooms in, as if it were a live map.

Most of us techies would have made a complex application or tried to fit something into the Google Maps app. Khoi Vihn figured the photo gallery app. worked just fine. Wonderful!

Hopefully this will be one of my last iPhone hack posts, they are rather dull. Engadget is reporting that a bunch of hackers have created a software based SIM hack for the iPhone. It lets you use your iPhone on any mobile network with your SIM. No TurboSIM required, no soldering or fiddling about inside your iPhone. Just use the software and use your normal SIM.

The software isn’t released yet.

I could hardly agree more with Jon Udell on Lifebits. Your blog posts, your emails, your IMs, your Twitters, your photos, your comments, your Amazon purchases, your link blogs, your tags, your calendar events, your browsing history, your music and your videos. It’s all data and it is all yours. It isn’t Facebooks data or Flickrs data or even Windows or Mac OS X data. It is yours to keep for life, the digital wake you leave.

And it is separate from your blog template or the JS/CSS slideshow gizmo you use for photos. Separate from presentation, even separate from function.

Atomic data on the end of a URL.

Call me one of many duped by corporate strategy but I really do like the Coca-Cola ad where you see inside a vending machine and spy the entire world that exists within. It is warm and bubbly, just lovely. I imagine the people who did the advert have a quirky, fun and loving attitude to life, independent of the Coca Cola corporate juggernaut.

So Veerle’s post is really interesting. It has the ad, a documentary of the characters and other bits and bobs. Wonderful to see the process, time and love people put into 30 second TV spots.

Noah Brier has some thoughts on Facebook and it has prompted me to speak of mine.

In my opinion Facebook is Yet Another Social Network whose only redeeming value has been its college-roots birth. Of all the social networks I belong to, Facebook has by far the highest ratio of “real people.” People I have been to school with, worked with and met in the flesh. At first this made it more interesting than other social networks which consisted of many good friends but many of whom I have never met “in the flesh.”

After awhile though, probably around the 50th Daily Dragon and 60th Fortune Cookie request, I realised there was a reason I hadn’t stayed in contact with these people. They aren’t bad people, they aren’t even dull or boring people, and neither am I. We just went our separate ways after school or work and, well, went our separate ways. Trying to force us all back together again because we shared school years has short-term value. Some fun catch-up stories, some not so fun news (”she died”, “he killed himself” etc.) and then a 60 cycle hum of silence as you realise you have nothing left to talk about.

It shouldn’t take a social network site to stay in touch with friends. If it does then you might want to reconsider the word “friend.”

It is powerful though. Many people find school reunions important and fascinating. They put value in catching up and comparing success. I’m not one of those people so Facebook isn’t for me.

Still, I persist in dissecting it.

It offers photos. Already got that in Flickr, and a much more powerful system at that. It offers “status updates”, which Twitter or Pownce does better. You can email friends. Except they aren’t really emails, you just get a “Bob sent you a message, click here to spend 5 minutes logging in and reading it on Facebook.” I find that very annoying. Why email me through Facebook and force me to visit Facebook when you can just email me on my email address? Or IM me. Please.

And it offers those mini-apps, of which I have found none of real use. Cute, fun, kitten-in-a-jar kind of thing. Folks, I am 27, I have an attention span longer than a mini-skirt, please send me something interesting.

This is my hope and my belief; people will get bored with Facebook and move on.

Just to preempt any misquotes or misunderstandings attributed to me around the iPhone (I was mentioned in an Irish Times piece today and was contacted by two other journalists):

• Jason Madigan hacked his iPhone before me. He is the only other person in Ireland that I know of who has done so. I doubt we are the only two though, there are likely others.
• I know of confirmed network hacks in the UK which preceded Jason’s hack. There are likely others in other countries.
• I followed the various guides which are freely available on the web. The tools are freely available too. I know very little about the inner workings of the hacks. Anyone could follow the guides and do it but it may seem daunting to non-technical people.
• I bought a TurboSIM to enable the network hack. I don’t have any more.
• I know very little about the legality of the hack. O2 Ireland are fine with it as they don’t restrict what devices can use their network. Apple are “no comment.” AT&T are “no comment.” Many other phones have been broken on many networks before the iPhone emerged.
• My iPhone was brought over from the USA by a friend and was not activated in the USA. I have no call plan with AT&T.
• Yes, if you phone my number listed on this blog you are talking to me on an iPhone.

Also this has nothing to do with my employers. These are my personal views and actions.

Terms and conditions apply. Part of the Irish Financial Regulatory Commission. Offer ends yesterday. You may loose your house, and some pets. Goldfish excluded. Love your neighbours.

Reading the @media Ajax home page left me ambivalent. It sounded like one more conference cashing in on Ajax, Web 2.0 and all the gravy train words.

Then I read Dan Webb’s description and got a completely different picture of the conference. Now I want to go.

Interesting how the professional marketing verbage was trounced by an, admittedly very smart, chap from his “bedroom.”

Firstly; Don’t sign up for Zyb using your iPhone number. It sent me an SMS which crashes the iPhone SMS app. I cannot read any other SMS either, the iPhone SMS app. simply crashes everytime it starts up. Very annoying.

Now this solution isn’t for everyone but I found that I can SSH into the iPhone and rm the /var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db file. That nukes all SMS but the SMS app. recreates the file and starts working again.

Interestingly I see it uses SQLite for its format. So one could possibly load it locally and remove just the offending SMS leaving the others intact.

With Jason Madigan’s helpful guide and a very generous donation of a spare TurboSIM (which are as rare as hen teeth thanks to the demand) I’ve hacked my work iPhone and it is now running on the O2 Ireland network. Voice calls, SMS, GPRS/EDGE and all of that good stuff. Thank you Jason.

I first used Macworld’s jailbreak guide, then iActivator and finally Jason’s guide to the TurboSIM.

I also got the GPRS/EDGE settings for O2 Ireland off of here. I should mention that my SIM is a bog standard O2 Pre-Pay SIM. GPRS works fine on it though, just pricey. Jason has the O2 3G flat-rate data package and that works too. Now that I have a mobile device that actually merits using the web I’ll finally upgrade to a decent mobile package.

If you follow the instructions it should work fine. I had to jiggle my O2 SIM around a few times to get it to work but other than that it was pretty easy. It helps to be on Mac OS X and know the terminal (any *nix user will be fine.)

It did take about 2 and a half hours though and much to my amusement Jason tells me there is likely a full software-only hack coming out tonight in a weeks time.

Anyway. I can finally use the phone bits on my work iPhone. Brilliant.