jbablog.com

the personal blog of John BouAntoun

iPhone Support Service Better than Mobile Service

Title says it all.

Rocked up on Friday to the Apple store expecting an hour of arguing about why the phone was so shit as a phone. Mostly I felt like this because the guy at the Optus store said it would take 2 weeks to get fixed.

Was forced to book an appointment at the “Genius Bar”. Didn’t bode well for the support experience initially, but I made an appointment and came back then.

What I got was an absolute surprise. Went up the tech, explained the problem and he walked away and came back with a new phone, which he swapped for my phone. He then printed a service receipt and I was done and walking out the door with a hopefully better working new iPhone.

So far it seems to drop less calls, which is a good thing, but that may be because I don’t use it as much as I was last week. Also to it’s benefit the 3G internet definitely seems much better than the one I had before.

Time to send my iPhone in for a tune-up

So my iPhone’s been dropping or scrambling every 3rd or 4th call since I got it. Not a real useful trait in a full time mobile phone. That and the bit about barely getting a 12 hour day out of an all night charge and I was starting to think that maybe my phone was sick.

So today I’m browsing the interwebs and I get this optus page that tells me my prepaid wireless broadband account needs re-charging. WTF? I don’t have a prepaid account.

Anyhow, long-story-short I need to find my proof of purchase and take the phone in for a “repair” tomorrow.

Not happy Jan.

100% Managed command prompt library

Miguel from the mono project does it again: A 100% managed command prompt library to help us build windows console apps that behave almost as well as those in the unix world.

Useable google reader on a sub 1024×768 screen

I’ve slowly moved all my RSS feeds into google reader and have been using it quite extensively lately. I’ve even gotten to enjoy the custom UI they built for reader on the iPhone.

Anyhow was catching up on my news the other day on my crappy M700 and found myself thinking, “I wish I could just have a reader UI with a subscription tree and viewing pain”. 2 minutes of googling later and I gound this on userstyles.org.

It uses the stylish add-on for Firefox as well, and was exactly what I wanted. Love these geeky lazy-web satisfied moments.

iPhone 2.0.2 update ends in almost dead machine

So I tried to update my iPhone software on friday to get better 3G, at the end of the update the machine wouldn’t start again or activate.

Cue 20 minutes of “oh shit”. A restore from the pre-update backup meant a working 2.0.2 iPhone though, but that’s no way for a “polished” system upgrade to work.

Nokia beta labs

First spotted on mobile crunch a few days ago, Nokia has an email client for it’s S60 OS in what they call their beta labs. Didn’t know about this before, but seems like it will be a cool place to get your S60 bleeding edge wares.

It doesn’t support corporate email systems yet, so I don’t think push calendar is available yet.

Wanted: Decent iPhone 2.0 IM client

So one thing that’s been most disappointing about my recent move to iPhone world has been the lack of decent software tools. It seems that most of the app devs have not had enough time to port their apps over to the 2.0 version of the iPhone OS.

I can’t find a decent multi-protocol IM client in either App Store or other sources that doesn’t require me to give up all my IM credentials to another 3rd party. And in case you didn’t get that part, this means Parlingo and Meebo are out of the question. I’d rather keep my passwords to myself thank you very much.

Update: It looks like fring may be the one. Can’t get it on the iphone 3G yet so will have to wait and see.

First impressions on iPhone

As a pda with voice call capabilities it’s an incredible device, mainly due to the UI.

As a phone with convergence capabilities, it’s bordering on crap.

I’m already pretty sick of Apple’s walled garden approach to the device. Why can’t I use it as a mass storage device?

So I iPhoned

I caved and got one. Will give it a few months before I consider going back to a more fuller featured phone.

The first app I installed was the worspress app that this post was made from.

How to use Log4net in a performance clustered environment

Dear Lazyweb,

We use log4net as a logging mechanism for a high performance transactional system extensively, but the problem we’ve been having lately is that the log files are often spread accross multiple clustered machines.

Is there a simple way to get performant centralized logging using log4net accross a clustered web server environment?

Update: Not sure if it’s quite a simple way to go, but this has definitely already been done using a RemotingAppender and corresponding sink.