Ian Winter

Overall: Must try harder.

I have an original 2G iPhone and now have a 3G iPhone with work. I've been comparing the two and have some initial thoughts on what needs to get sorted.

The signal strength on the 3G phone is worse than the 2G one, but, only with 3G turned on. If you turn 3G off on O2's UK network the signal strength goes back to full. Also the 3G data speeds are seemingly only slightly faster than EDGE which is a disappointment.

Neither the 2G or 3G phones map "locate me" function works anymore and with the 3G iPhone I can't any sign that GPS exists at all again with this being one of the key new features and potential sell points for me to upgrade mine, a disappointment.

In both the Settings > Phone menu and the contact list on the 2G phone "My number" is displayed at the top which is quite handy, on the 3G phone there's no sign of that. It may be something I've not setup right but in side by side comparisons of menu's etc I can't spot it.

The screen on the 3G is definitely brighter and as reviews suggest slightly more yellow, doesn't really matter though as I think it looks better. Also the sound quality on the 3G is superior both in ear sound quality and volume and the speaker quality and volume.

Apple are in beta for 2.1 which I hope fixes these niggly things. Locate me not working and crappy 3G pick up could be O2's fault, but, it could be hardware or software. I'd lean to software and Apple as on the 2G with 1.1.4 locate me worked just fine.

As for MobileMe, well, after by 99 remaining days are up thanks to Apple for 2 lots of extra 30 days, I think I'll be ditching it. SpanningSync 2.0 is looking like the main contender at the moment.

Thanks to Tim for an interesting article he found over on The Register. Good to see HP caring for the environment!

Setting up a staging server environment which will run 3 instances of CF and looking to alter the init scripts so it fires them all up on boot. Took a look at the one the installer creates and thought simple enough to just put multiple calls in for each server instance. Oh no.

On our RHES4 platform we have CF starting up as the apache user, but, running the script causes a "This account is currently not available." error to be thrown because it has no shell and it's locked. After looking at another server running a server install I notice the issue is down to the su command issued.

JRun

su $RUNTIME_USER -c "$CF_DIR/bin/jrun -stop cfusion"
su $RUNTIME_USER -c "$CF_DIR/bin/jrun -start cfusion >& $CF_DIR/logs/cfusion-event.log &"

Server Install

su -s /bin/sh $RUNTIME_USER -c "export PATH=$PATH:$CF_DIR/runtime/bin; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
; cd $CF_DIR/runtime/bin; nohup $CF_DIR/runtime/bin/cfmx7 -jar jrun.jar -autorestart -start coldfusion &"

Key difference is the "-s /bin/sh" part. Altering my script to the following makes it work. Yay. Not sure if this a known bug of something funky in our setup, but, as it's a vanilla OS install I don't see what it could be.

su -s /bin/sh $RUNTIME_USER -c "$CF_DIR/bin/jrun -stop cfusion"
su -s /bin/sh $RUNTIME_USER -c "$CF_DIR/bin/jrun -start cfusion >& $CF_DIR/logs/cfusion-event.log &"

According to the O2 store selected retail stores are getting limited stock tomorrow (Wednesday 16th July) and more by Friday 25th. I wonder how long the queue in Reading is already?

Whilst having the 3G and the ability to find myself, geographically speaking, I'm not it's worth it just yet. I might wait 6 months and see what Apple do.

When O2 said limited supply they really weren't kidding. If Apple seriously did under estimate demand they need to take a look at how they market. Spending a whole month saying, "the one you've been waiting for" and "it's coming, July 11" what did they really think would happen?

Anyway, I've got iPhone 2.0 firmware running on my 1st gen iPhone and it's nice. The apps are cool and the calendar changes along with multiple delete/move in email is really handy. The battery life is less with MobileMe running push hourly.

A couple of good, in depth reviews have now popped up. arstechnica.com and iLounge are the two best I've read.

I have to say I'm now not sure about it now. I was all for it, but, will Apple release another one in 6-9 months? Maybe.

Will I upgrade? Watch this space.

Been looking a lot lately at various email related projects. One of the issues I noticed as part of this work is that if you send a mail with cfmail to a gmail account that only has a cfmailpart text/plain gmail won't render it.

If you send both, it works fine.

Plain
Strong HTML

So, if you're sending plain only, don't put it in a cfmailpart. Probably shouldn't have been in the first place, but, issue now solved.

One word. Why?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/7467474.stm

Been using FF3 now and all seems to be fine and dandy. It's got some nice little additions and new features in which in my mind make it much better than IE.

Some of the more comedy items you may or may not have seen.

Type in the address bar "about:robots" to be find our some information about robots visiting us in goodwill and "about:config" to to be warned "Here be dragons!" and confirmation buttons of "I'll be careful, I promise!".

It's comedy touches like that which just make it good. Though, I could just be sad or geeky. Ah well :)

Launch day for FF3 is coming up today (well US time today), more information is available. Been running FF3 on my Macbook Air and on my PC at work and have to say so far it looks really nice. Go Mozilla!

The latest update to ColdFusion has been released in the form of 8.0.1 which will let you have a painless install on Leopard and on 64 bit OS'

Full details on the Adobe site.

A lot of other tweaks and bug fixes as well including new FCKEditor and changes to the attributeCollection stuff.