iPhone: What’s Missing (3): Change Red Numbers From “Unseen” To “Not Replied”

 iPhone  No Responses »
Oct 032009
 

It might be a little too much to expect, but it would be nice if there were an option to change the meaning of the little red numbers that show up on the Mail icon, the Messages icon (and other messaging apps) from “unseen” to “not replied”.

I often quickly visit a message to see if it’s something that needs dealing with straight away, and go away if it is not that important. But as soon as I do, I lose the little number that reminds me there’s a message to deal with. The whole concept of changing an icon with a little number to show how many messages there are is brilliant.

And undoubtedly for many more organised people knowing how many new messages there are is just what they need. But some of us would like to know how many messages have not been replied to or dealt with in some other way.

Alan Turing Gets An Apology At Last!

 Computing, General, History  No Responses »
Sep 112009
 

Alan Turing was a computer scientist and a homosexual at the very dawn of electronic computing, and contributed enormously to the winning of World War II by being one of those behind the code breaking efforts at Bletchley Park. When you consider his contributions to the war effort and his contributions to the new field of computer science, his sexual orientation was the least important part of him. Yet because of his sexuality, he was prosecuted, lost his security clearance (which was particularly devastating because of the lack of other places he could make his contributions), and harassed by the British security services.

Eventually he committed suicide; almost certainly because of his harassment by society that couldn’t see past his sexuality and see his vast contributions and potential.

There are those who say he shouldn’t be forgiven because he was a homosexual and that is forbidden by god. That position is contemptible and not worth commenting on.

There are those who say he shouldn’t be forgiven because he broke the law of the time. Well the law was immoral and wrong. In many ways we are obligated to break laws that are immoral.

There are those who say he shouldn’t be forgiven because there were many other men persecuted because of their sexual orientation. Perhaps 100,000 men, or even more (oddly enough homosexual women were not persecuted to quite the same extent (although I’d welcome pointers to prove me wrong … well sort of)). There is a point to that objection, but forgiving a particularly shining example of such harassment is the first step on the path of getting all those persecuted men pardoned.

And Alan Turing is a good start to that process because even those who do not like homosexuality can be brought around to believing that Alan at least deserves to be forgiven because of his immense contributions.

But most of all he should be pardoned because he didn’t really do anything wrong, and honoured because of his contributions.

Exploding Batteries – Getting More Dangerous

 Computing, General, iPhone  No Responses »
Sep 042009
 

If you are as old as I am, you will recall that batteries have always had problems – a small percentage “deteriorate” and overheat. Although this applies to any batteries, I am thinking mostly of the kind that are found in laptops, media players, phones and the like – not the old cylinder ones used in torches.

In the past, batteries did not contain as much power as they do now – it is something that is gradually increasing over time, and of course we want more power in our batteries so that our gadgets run for longer. Or do we ?

In the past battery problems would do things like melt the case of a mobile phone, but now we hear of laptops bursting into flames, and media players exploding. Seems that the effects of a problem are getting worse at the same time that batteries are holding more power.

Of course this makes sense – the more powerful the battery, the more powerful the effect when it “lets go”. So what happens when batteries become yet more powerful ? What happens when such a battery fault occurs in a large electric vehicle ?

Solaris Zone Descriptions In Zone Configuration

 Computing  No Responses »
Jul 272009
 

I am a big fan of ‘self-documenting’ systems where the system has enough ‘comments’ to describe how it is configured and what things are doing. Unfortunately Solaris zones (or containers if you are so inclined to use the marketing name) lack one feature that would assist this :-

# zoneadm list -d
global
black                  Stealth Secondary DNS
grey                   Webserver for project X
white                  Mailbox server for project Y
blue                   Oracle DBMS for project X
puce                   MySQL DBMS for project X

It would seem that project Y hasn’t gotten beyond the talking stage 🙂

Yes, you’ve guessed it. Solaris zones could do with a “description” attribute to assist in documentation.

iPhone: What’s Missing (2): Where’s The Keyboard ?

 Computing, iPhone  No Responses »
Jul 122009
 

I’m very fussy about keyboards; perhaps ridiculously so. But I cannot understand the criticism of the virtual keyboard that comes with the iPhone. It takes some getting used to, and the auto correct feature whilst very useful can also be very irritating. Enough so that Apple should probably have a keyboard button marked “turn off auto correct for a while”. But it is perfectly adequate for what it is  – something to do a little text entry from time to time.

So why am I complaining about the lack of a decent keyboard ? Because quite simply if I’m doing any writing (and I don’t at present) on the iPhone, I would like to be able to type at full speed – which for me requires a decent clicky keyboard so I can get up to a reasonable speed (apparently about 120wpm!).

Adding bluetooth drivers to the iPhone should be pretty trivial for Apple after all there are already OSX bluetooth keyboard drivers available, and the iPhone operating system is OSX. So why does Apple not include one ? Sure there’s an excuse for the first release not to include one – Apple wanted to make sure that the phone was rock solid in a totally new market to them. But now?

Surely it cannot be because they feel that releasing such a driver would be an admission that the virtual keyboard is no good. After all, I’m not exactly an enemy of the virtual keyboard, but I want a real keyboard interface for those occasions when one would be useful.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries