The Firehouse

Just check out this page, which lists device & software manufacturers who have licensed Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync protocol (starting at a measly $100.000 a year!). Surprisingly, they don’t list Apple or the iPhone / iPod Touch. The last update on the page is March 2007, so it’s about time they check it over.

Last night the most annoying thing happened – two of the four drives I have in my Mac Pro failed, within 30 minutes of each other. What is even more annoying is that they are two Western Digital WD RE2 WD5000YS, supposedly server-grade drives particularly suited for continuous duty and RAID use. Well, I had the two 500GB drives partitioned in two volumes, and one volume on each drive setup as a slice in a RAID 1 soft array. First, one of the slices failed. When I tried to rebuild from the second slice, it failed too. Finally, the two ‘normal’ volumes remaining on each drive also failed. Disk tools reports the drives, and the partitions, it even tells me the space used correctly, and Finder will even show the folders when you connect the drives – but there is no way to access the data.

These drives carry a five-year warranty, and they were just under one year old, so I guess WD will replace them with new ones. I’m going to send them to a recovery lab to see if they can pull any of the data. Most of what I don’t have backups of are ripped movies, which would be annoying to have to re-rip again.

Last time I had something like this happen was when the desktop and laptop’s drives failed within two hours of each other. In those days I was keeping crossed-backups, so after the event my paranoia level increased a few notches.

If anyone knows exactly what the “network settings” are, feel free to comment. This was pushed to my iPhone by iTunes a few minutes ago, without further explanation.

Today I finally managed to get my hands on a 16GB black iPhone 3G. It almost didn’t happen, and the story is long, so maybe I’ll write another post about it – but suffice to say that it has been yet another day of missinformation, lack of professionalism, and general crappy image given by Telefonica Movistar.

To be honest, the thing that had me intrigued was how much one would have to pay were the contract terminated before the 24-month commitment was over. It turns out that it’s 400 Euros if you have the 20 + 15 contract, and pay 200 Euros for the iPhone at the store. So, for 600 Euros you should get an unlocked iPhone 3G. I think by law operators are forced to unlock your phone if you pay the termination fee, but I am unsure about this – anyone know for sure?

TrunkSniffer is an application I wrote a few years ago, which allows you to track MPT-1327 trunked radio networks using nothing more than a radio receiver and a soundcard. I managed to make the decoding algorithms the best in the industry – they would take any kind of audio, even noisy speaker audio from distant control channels, and successfully decode it. It was initially released as a commercial product, and amongst my clients were nationwide trunked network operators and military intelligence agencies from several countries.

Analog radio networks have slowly been replaced by digital ones, such as TETRA, and tracking MPT-1327 is not the fun it used to be, unless taxi firm traffic is your thing. There are still several interesting networks out there to track, and thus I have decided to re-release TrunkSniffer as freeware. Simply visit the TrunkSniffer page, where you can read a lot more about it, and what it can do, and download the installer plus the unlocked executable file that will allow you to run it unrestricted. Enjoy!

Just got off the phone with OtterBox, who confirm that they don’t have plans to make an Armor case, the fully waterproof case for iPhone 2G, in a version compatible with the iPhone 3G. This is sad news, as I was looking forward to taking my iPhone with me while on watch, but it’s looking like I will have to look for alternatives. Nothing would have looked better than a ruggerized iPhone in the middle of a big fire.

To this guy it seemed the logical thing to do. “Hey, my car is on fire…and look, there’s a gas station, where they have plenty of those huge fire extinguishers on wheels, I’m saved!”.

A buddy from our firehouse and I were stopped at a gas station filling up the car doubling the car’s value by filling its tank, when we suddenly spot a flaming vehicle approaching fast. The reaction from everyone at the station was the same – we got the hell out of there as fast as we could! Once it looked like nothing was going to catch fire, and with the driver safely out of the vehicle, we put it out with a couple of powder and CO2 extinguishers. A CO2 extinguisher will do little to put out a car, but it can drive the flames down enough to stop some of the radiated heat, allowing a second person to unload a foam or powder extinguisher closer to the fire. Sometimes you gotta do with what you have on hand!

Extra points for spotting what’s wrong with the picture above. If you don’t know, watch this video:

and remember it the next time you respond to a vehicle fire. The guy in the video wasn’t wearing full PPE either.

I have been reviewing Telefonica Movistar’s iPhone page, where they list the various pricing plans available. The short version: cheapest iPhone you can own, having to stick to a two-year commitment is 845 Euros, if you switch to Movistar from another mobile operator, such as Orange or Vodafone. This is the 8GB version, with a base price of 299 Euros, and a monthly minimum bill of 24 Euros. If you opt for the 16GB version and the most expensive plan, which will set you back a whooping 115 Euros a month, you can have the iPhone for zero Euros…but you will have paid 2.760 Euros after two years!!!

There is no word on the legal terms regarding contract switching, so it’s unclear if once you pick a plan, you have to stick with it for the two years. Both data plans feature unlimited data on both the 2G/3G network, and Telefonica’s WiFi hotspots, but the cheaper plans drop in speed once you have used 200MB of data, versus 1GB for the most expensive versions.

What is very interesting to compare is the percentage difference in purchase price versus the total cost of ownership (TCO). The cheapest 16GB iPhone is 20% more expensive to purchase than the 8GB version, but at the end of the contract, it has only been 7% more expensive to purchase. It’s even more shocking that the 16GB iPhone purchase price for the third cheapest voice+data plan (55 Euro/month) is 122% more expensive, but the TCO difference is only 4.4%!

The bottom line of all this is – buy the 16GB version, you’re only paying at most 7% more, and you can fit twice as many songs and movies. For those of you wanting to pore over the charts, here they are:

My headline was going to be ‘completely fucks up’, but it seemed a bit too harsh for a title. The current timeline for the launch train wreck of the iPhone 3G in Barcelona has been:

10:20am: Visited El Corte Ingles, one of Movistar’s major distributors. They have received exactly zero iPhones. The queue is thus of exactly zero people.

10:25am: Passed this queue in Telefonica’s main Barcelona store, in the centric Plaça Catalunya:

I decided to skip this and go to the second main Movistar store in Barcelona.

10:32am: Arrived to the queue, much shorter this time, in the Ronda de Sant Pere store. People leaving the store with a very pissed off look, saying things like “and they didn’t see this coming?”.

10:35am: Confirmation that they had a total of seven (yes, 7) iPhones shipped to them, and they have all been sold. The queue is to sign up to a waiting list, WTF!!!

10:36am: I leave the store, and call one of Barcelona’s main Apple distributors, who was on the official retailers list that would have iPhones.

10:37am: The first time I get a 302 redirect over the phone. They confirm that they will receive one iPhone for display purposes today, but they have put up a website one can use to sign up…for a waiting list.

11:15am: Telefonica PR is saying that they could not have anticipated this level of public response, and are overwhelmed.

Now…they have been hyping July 11th for months now, and even setup a site one could sign up to be sent iPhone news – which by July 6th had over 140.000 signups! This is total incompetence, however you may want to make it look.

So today Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch App Store went up on iTunes, and the blogs have been on fire about it. All kinds of reviews of apps, the interface, what’s there and what isn’t…but in the midst of all this noise, I noticed two apps that give you access to Flickr, one of which is free (Exposure), the other costs $2.99 (Mobile Flickr). Both have more or less the same functionality – upload, browse and share photos on Flickr through your iPhone or iPod. Why would anyone pay even $2.99 when there is a free alternative? Only if the paid version offered either greater stability, or more attractive features, would paying be worth it.

My take on this is that smart developers will wait to see what comes out and becomes popular, and then write and release alternatives that will knock down the competition. Otherwise, it’s a crapshoot.