On Friday, I was in town and walking past the Apple Store I couldn’t resist a play with the fattened up iPhone.  As you would expect it looked fantastic as most Apple products do.  Looking at photos was great being able to quickly view what was inside of a folder and the speed between loading of photos was a joy.  The example iPad had a copy of the FT App which is a very well thought out app, fitting nicely to the screen size and turning the pages was great by just moving your hand across the screen.  Sadly it looked like the facebook app did not have an iPad big brother because the screen looked stretched and pixalated.  I loved that the Flight Control App had been updated for the iPad allowing to people to play at once.

So would I want one?  Well I am a geek by trade and they do look shiny and new.  I can certainly see a use for them in meetings across the world, instead of turning up with pen and paper you could use your iPad instead.  Access to email on the move around a workplace would be good as well.  The problem at the moment is they are alittle bit too expensive for what they do.  I will be interested to see if anyone comes up with a stylus and writing app so you can take notes on the iPad easier than using the touch screen keyboard.  The keyboard is good but I suspect its not as good as a nomal computer keyboard over time.  Knowing new gadgets I think waiting a few months while the leading edge people find all the nasty bugs with it and app come out with iPad 2.0 or what every they call it.

I think it might definitely be on my shopping list in the not too distant future.  Plus some of the adds on like the camera card reader are a great idea.  The iPad case that Apple sell as well looks to be well thought out and a decent price as well (£19).

This made a difference for a while but it turns out that there is another thing that will really help with windows startup.  Something that I really really cannot believe, it turns out that on startup Windows looks through all your files and folders on your Desktop.  So if you have loads of files and lots of folders (with files within them) then windows spends most of its time looking at them.

So my question is Why?  So far I’ve not come up with an answer that I can think of to why this is a good idea.  So to everyone out there with slow machines at startup, please please check what you have on your desktop!

So cheers to the pint I say

Within 24 hours of its release the security had been break and online was pictures of a jail broken iPad!  Which is pretty good going to create a hack that quickly and display the iPad being connected to through telnet / ssh.  Have a look at theregister.co.uk review of this break and the pictures.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/06/ipad_security/

Following the jailbreak a couple of days later came the full information about what was under the hood of the iPad thanks to iFixit and there iPad Teardown.  I would highly recommend reading the article that they have published because its really interesting how apple manage to fit everything inside such a small case.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1

The CPU was also xray’d after ifixit managed to get it out of the ipad.

Sadly the week ended with alot of complaints coming in from the leading edge users with them having problems connecting to there wireless networks.  Unfortunately that was the end of the complaints, there was rumours that the ipad if left on running would run ok but over time slow down to a complete stop which does not sound good.  The final reported problems were problems sync with iTunes.

As a software tester by day its amazing that some of these faults have got out, but I can certainly understand how it happens.  Fingers crossed Apple will be on the ball and get all these problems sorted out, because the iPad does look like a great product.  Do I want one…. I think the jury is still out yet.  Will have to go to an apple store and have a play with one and see how good it is.  The iPhone has been a great product and just gets better with more apps, however there are still some things that I do not like about the way apple have stopped non-apple auth’d apps onto it.

So after a quick google and a few tries of expression tests I found this one from RegexPlant, which was really simple to use and gave great output to understand what was going on and within a few minutes I’d found the regression expression that worked.  So thanks to regexplant for a great testing tooling.

http://www.regexplanet.com/simple/index.html

I found out the problem out when I was trying to connect a friends laptop onto my local network.  Quick reboot and low and behold the DHCP server was back up and running and dynamic IP address allocation was back working .

After doing all the things I could think of I turned to the old friend google.  Searching for the error message that ipconfig returned I got hundreds and thousands of hits, sounds positive I thought.  So after reading a number they were all pointing to it being the TCPIP stack had become corrupt (now maybe I’m mad or something but how on earth can the IP stack become corrupt! anyway…).  So after running through the netsh commands that are within Windows XP SP2 I rebooted.  Thinking that was an easy job now where is the beer, sadly I was mistaken up came the computer still not working.  Ok I thought maybe there is another magic command to run that I could reset the ip stack or even better just reinstall the TCPIP Protocol.

Well after about an hour of trying a number of different “solutions” I gave in, I had a spare network card and through well maybe just putting in another card would spring it into life.  So I unscrewed the case and got the network card installed and rebooted thinking job done… again I had failed the same error message was returned by windows.  I spent another fustrating hour trying to fix the problem but to no avail.

It looks like another windows reinstall which seems abit over the top to what appears on the outset to be such a simple problem.

There are days where sometimes I hate computers.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/16/noughties_review/

So now I’m thinking well this isn’t much good being unable to use my iPhone when its cold outside! Ah but wait where there is a will there is a way, now you can get eTip Gloves (isnt it great that everything either comes with an e or i infront of it these days).  You might be wondering what are eTip gloves well basically they allow current this current change to happen on the screen allowing you to have warm fingers and a working phone .

Google Product Search shows that North Face are the people that make most of them:

http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=etip+gloves&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=xyBLS5TMBpTz_AbuzKiWAg&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQrQQwAA

Millennium Bug!

Looks like the Millennium bug hit 10 years later than expected… after thinking about it last year I thought the next one was going to be a long way off but turns out it was 2009 -> 2010.  Looks like a number of companies and countries have been effected by problems when everyone was shouting happy new year this time around.  The register has a number of articles now on the problems:

• Y2.01K bug trips up Symantec – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/symantec_y2k10_bug/
• 2016 Bug Hits Windows Phones – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/windows_mobe_bug/
• Oz Bank thinks its 2016 – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/04/bank_queensland/