Fast, slow, fast, slow... (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Obviously our lives have changed a lot now that Dana's here and with all of the changes our professional lives have gone through. After seven weeks it seems that things are finally starting to ebb out though and there's a semblence of routine to our days. Unfortunately one part of said routine is that I spend way less time on the web and thus my journal gets neglected a little bit. So here's another bulk update :)

Last Friday was killer =_= I'd been making a few overhours left and right all week, but I'd decided to compensate these hours on Friday since we had some visitors coming over to our house. Of course it's obvious that the one day I have an appointment that things get hectic at the office. Out of the five people supporting BoKS there were only two in and one of them (not me) was set to get on his plane to Spain. Of course we just -had- to get a nasty production issue that had me home by 1700 instead of 1400 :/ Mind you, I'm not complaining about the work itself, it's just that life sometimes sends you these planning curve balls.

In contrast the weekend was both relaxed and veeery slow. Saturday we took care of the house and went shopping in Amersfoort. Since we had a little bit of leeway in our spending money we could afford to get Marli a substantial renewal of her post-pregnancy wardrobe. I also got an awesome new coat from Scotch & Soda. I just noticed that S&S; has an outlet store in Batavia Stad, so maybe I ought to visit that place sometime soon :)

Sunday was the "slooow" part. Half of the day was spent watching the Spongebob marathon on Nickelodeon, with the other half being spent on the search for a new house. We're looking for a more modern streethouse, as opposed to the aging apartment we're living in. Almere may be Squaresville, but there's some affordable yet goodlooking houses over there.

Posted in: busy , home , update , weekend , work

? iPhone 2.2 Update Brings Street View, OTA Podcast Downloads (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

New IPhone 2.2: The iPhone OS 2.2 Rumor Round Up

OK, so we all knew that the iPhone 2.2 update was bringing Google Maps Street View and walking directions (about time, too). But Gizmodo says it will also include over-the-air podcast downloads. First I’ve heard of this, but a welcome feature that people like me and Dave Winer have been clamoring for from the beginning.

And it suddenly makes a lot more sense why Apple rejected the “Podcaster” app (which downloads over the air, too) for “duplicating iTunes functionality”. At the time, we scratched our heads, because the iPhone had no such capability.

Posted in: google , iphone , linky , maps , os , podcasting , podcasts , software , streetview , update

Busy, busy, busy! What have we been up to? (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Things have been pretty frantic the past week! I've been so busy I couldn't even post a quick blurb to my journal ;_; So, let's quickly run the list of things that have happened before I have to run to a meeting.

As I mentioned before, Dana has changed her daily routines. She's sleeping less and she's crying and sulking more at night. She's also changed her feeding habits which has confused the both of us to no end. Of course Dana's only been with us for six weeks, but it's very easy to lose confidence. Seriously, how the heck do you know if you're baby's fine if you haven't even gotten to know what each mode of crying means? *sigh* Of course it's all a learning experience, but it can sure get exasperating at times.

The household is running fine, though I've cut myself a little slack. With Marli still recuperating from her surgery and me back at work I'm not -that- keen on running a perfect household anymore. Sure, the first three weeks were fun, living in a spick&span; house but these days that's just not a realistic goal anymore. Once Marli's recuperated things should start looking up again.

Work has been very busy. Last week I finally got access to our ticket system, only to stumble on a queue of over a hundred and thirty (>130!!!) tickets. Ouch. It doesn't help that there's only two of us working this queue and that the other queue (we use two ticket systems) has a comparable amount either. The good thing about this is that I haven't been bored for one minute, simply because there's just so much to do ^_^ The work's interesting and challenging, the people are nice and diverse and I'm just enjoying the heck out of myself :D

Finally, I've started the BoKS Access Control users group on LinkedIn.com. I'm trying to build a global network of BoKS admins, users and developpers so we can finally start sharing some information. Until now it'd been very hard to get answers to your questions, which will hopefully get easier from now on :)

Posted in: baby , busy , household , update , work

Status update: how's the daughter doing? (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Dana's three weeks old now, tho it seems like two months. I may have spent each day since her birth at home, but "well rested" is not a term that I'd use to describe my current situation :)

So far Dana is behaving quite nicely! She's grown about five centimeters and has also surpassed her birth weight. She sleeps a lot and doesn't give us too much grief during the nights. On average she'll have one night a week that she refuses to sleep and just goes on crying, but all the other nights she'll allow us around five hours of uninterrupted sleep. Of course, this may change at any given moment given the fickle nature of a newborn baby.

Unfortunately the head cold that I caught last week has gone around the house, passing to Dana and Marlijne. Dana'd been snotty and coughy all day yesterday, but one of Gramma's traditional remedies(tm) helped tremendously! Just cut an onion in half and leave it near her bed. The slime cleared right up!

So yeah! So far we're a happy, healthy (enough) family ^_^

Posted in: dana , daughter , growth , health , update

Small update on the mommy-baby situation (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

So far things look alright. The bleeding has gone down to a trickle and this morning's test with the heart monitor also proved that the baby was alright. The doc had a rather intrusive test planned for this afternoon, which got rescheduled to this evening and then till tomorrow.

Since Marli really hates the test and since she's feeling awfully alone in the hospital I've taken tomorrow off from work. Instead I'll be with her in the hospital, helping her through the day. With any luck she can come home tomorrow. *crosses fingers*

Posted in: baby , mommy , scare , situation , update

History of Software on the iPhone - A Prelude (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

My iPhone is now an iBrick. Here’s how it happened, what I learned, how it felt, and what you might be able to learn from the whole thing. I’ll write up the details of that story in a separate post. This one is for background.

I am a HUGE iPhone fan. I camped out on release day to be number one in line. I’ve used the heck out of my iPhone every single day since I got it. I’ve taught other people how great they are, answered countless questions about it, and generally been a huge fan.

I have had many, many mobile devices, and understand that since the operating system for most devices resides in flash ROM, and isn’t meant to be readily modified, you can’t expect the device manufacturer to help you fix problems you run into with a modified device. This hasn’t prevented lively developer communities from springing up around popular devices - like XDA-Developers, etc. - to help power users get even more functionality and fun from their devices.

Soon after the iPhone was launched on June 29, 2007, such a developer community popped up around it. Even though Apple made it very clear that they didn’t intend to support iPhone developers at all. “Make web applications. That’s good enough.” was the edict from Cupertino. Most people I know, from real developers to regular old users were miffed that Apple wasn’t releasing a Software Development Kit (SDK) to make applications for the iPhone. So the development community took matters into its own hands.

It ranged from people like Joe Hewitt (of Firebug and now Facebook fame - he’s the guy that wrote Facebook’s iPhone UI, which has been featured in Steve Jobs keynotes) engineering and releasing tools like iUI to make better web applications to the dedicated hackers who figured out how to get your own applications to install and run on the iPhone. Following best practices from the Linux world, they gave people how were willing to “jailbreak” their iPhone the ability to run Nullriver’s AppTapp Installer.app - a package manager that opened the door to browse and install dozens of iPhone applications.

There was an uneasy stalemate between Apple and the iPhone developers. Apple openly admitted that they weren’t going to support these 3rd party developers, but they weren’t going to try to stop them, either. On September 11, 2007, Gearlog published this quote from an interview with Greg Joswiak, VP of Hardware Product Marketing at Apple:

I asked him about independent, native software development for the iPhone. He said Apple doesn’t oppose native application development, which was new to me. Rather, Apple takes a neutral stance - they’re not going to stop anyone from writing apps, and they’re not going to maliciously design software updates to break the native apps, but they’re not going to care if their software updates accidentally break the native apps either.

In other words, iPhone “hacking” would follow the same path as other mobile devices, like Windows Mobile, iPods, etc. No one expected Apple to help customers make 3rd party applications work. Everyone knew that the most you could expect from Apple was a complete wipe and restore back to factory new settings. In fact, when iPhone updates 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 were released, this is exactly what happened. If you had “jailbroken” your iPhone and installed 3rd party apps, the device was wiped and restored to Apple’s known good “clean” state. No more than two weeks later, Apple radically reversed its position on this issue.

Then came the seemingly similar activity of “unlocking” iPhones to work on cellular carriers other than AT&T. The iPhone is a unique device in that it’s extraordinarily locked down, meant only to work if you have a valid account with AT&T. Without active AT&T service, you couldn’t use any of the other features of the iPhone. No wifi web browsing, no iPod media playback, nothing. So the people outside of AT&T service area (the whole world outside the United States), and people who couldn’t or didn’t want to switch to AT&T could never have an iPhone, under Apple and AT&Ts rules. Many people felt this was unfair and dictatorial, and It’s interesting to note that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires U.S. cell phone carriers to SIM unlock customers’ phones upon request, for overseas travel, or any other reason.

So the development community set to work on a “SIM unlock” for the iPhone, which modified the radio/baseband part of the iPhone firmware to allow it to use ANY SIM card from ANY carrier. The unlocking apps were released. The world rejoiced. And no one expected Apple to support iPhones that weren’t on the AT&T network. Just like installing 3rd party applications, the most you could expect Apple to do would be to wipe and restore your iPhone to its original state.

An application called anySIM was the first free version of these unlocking apps. It was made available through the popular and simple Installer.app package system (it was pulled a few hours later). During the time it was available, I downloaded it. I didn’t need or want to unlock my iPhone - I’m happy with AT&T’s service (we have two lines of service in our family), and I didn’t even have a non-AT&T SIM card that I could use to test and see if the unlock worked. But I’m a geek and an enthusiast and a blogger, so I ran the unlock software, if only to document the process, just like all the other 3rd party software installations I had done.

And that’s where all the trouble started…

(Click here to read the next part of the saga: I admit it - I ran anySIM to unlock my iPhone (a photo story))

Posted in: 1.1.1 , apple , at&t , blog , firmware , hacking , ibrick , iphone , itunes , sim card , software , unlock , update

long catchup (Never melts (meef)) by jen

I've fallen off the writing again. A lot of little things have happened, a lot of little things floating around, bits and pieces of things that amuse, annoy and have me thinking. The boy hit his peak with the screaming and abuse on Tuesday. Tuesday we also had swimming for him. Amusingly I thought I would be gleeful about shoving his cranky ass in a wetsuit and making him go in the water. He Posted in: kids , update

On XBox, Dashboards and Background Downloading (The Dave Today (Albino Eatpod)) by Dave Starling

Finally the ability to run background downloading and download queues on the 360 is here. This had to be my number one complaint with the 360's otherwise excellent Dashboard/Blade system.

Other improvements include the option to always boot to the dashboard, improved DVD and music playback, as well as a ton of minor bug fixes.

Posted in: 360 , dashboard , gaming , update , xbox