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Answer : Turn off 3G.

After the first few days of using my iphone 3G, I was rather disappointed to see that the battery would hardly last through a couple of days (with usage limited to a phone call or two, and listening to podcasts). This was a clear regression from my first iphone. Well, it seems that you can revert back to having the same battery life by turning off 3G in the settings (which is annoying but tolerable, given that I rarely access the Net from the outside, in which case I can turn it back on).

[EDIT: Firmware upgrade to 2.1 does indeed solve this problem ]

Two days ago, my office mate received his Openmoko-based mobile phone. First thing he told me about it was that is wasn’t quite ready for the general public : “yeah, you need to run the ‘date’ command from the console to set its internal clock”. At first, all you have is the ability to make and receive phone calls and… a console. And apparently that’s about it. After about an hour he said “ok, it’s finally connected to the guest WiFi, I can ssh to it now”. At the same time, by some strange coincidence, I came across this blog post linked from the Linux Hater’s Blog (which I wholeheartedly recommend – so far I’ve yet to find a single article which I couldn’t link to my own experience with Linux). I read the first few lines of the post to my office mate and he agreed : “yeah, I figure it will take me about a week to set it up completely”.

When Time Machine appeared on OS X, it was met with a collective shrug among the Linux community : “It’s just a good-looking backup system, anyone can do the same with a cron/bash/rsync”. This is wrong and here’s why, in pictures.

When you activate Time Machine from the Finder, you get this :

But here’s what you get when you activate Time Machine from Mail :

Yes, you stay in Mail. You do the lookup within Mail. You don’t have to drop into Mail’s guts and how it stores messages to restore one. The backup system is fully integrated in the applications it backs up. 

Same from the Address Book :

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like this for all Apple applications yet (for instance ical or iphoto don’t support this at the moment, which is too bad since they’d be good candidates). Nevertheless, you can see that the intent goes way beyond providing a backup system with a fancy UI. The level of integration in the OS is unprecedented. Good luck ever implementing that on Linux.

Right now the only serious competition the iPhone has is Google’s android platform. As with desktop OSes, what makes the winner is the available applications. Well, while the echoes from the iphone developers are, shall we say, rather positive, it seems the Android folks are having some tough time. Now let’s see, “Software providers finding it difficult to develop programs on a platform still going through revisions”, “Handset (i.e. hardware) manufacturers having a tough time integrating that software into their devices”… now where have I seen something like this already ?

So here’s a cheap prediction : android and the iphone will replicate the same pattern as linux and os/x, for the exact same reasons : unfocused bazaar community on one side, singled-minded well organised one on the other. Yes, android will likely go into a myriad of unexpected directions, appearing richer than the iphone.  But it will never be able to achieve the same level of quality as the iphone, and will be just as confusing an offer as Linux.

Two things I’ve come to realize after leaving the Linux community :

• it’s actually very small
• if you left out of disillusion, you’re not alone

The guy’s spot-on almost every time. In particular, his rants on how to write a Gnome app and its obligatory counterpart, how to write a KDE app, are real gems.

By now you’ve probably already seen this leaked video from Microsoft, apparently an internal “motivating” video from the Vista sales department, about SP1.

Microsoft claims it’s actually a spoof, but I have a hard time believing it. I’ve seen my share of sales droids making complete fool of themselves in trying to be “cool”, embarrassing their audience to the point of physical discomfort. And for a spoof to be this long and so dull, it’s just not convincing at all.

At least when geeks behave in a ridiculous fashion, like when they go to a Sci-Fi convention wearing appalling costumes, they have the excuse of being out of touch with reality. That’s part of the definition. But sales people ? These ones are supposed to be very much in the real world, aren’t they ?

May be not so after all .

A while ago I read this post (linked from here) which tells about how Gerald Buckley had successfully used his iphone to display his boarding pass and get the barcode scanned at the boarding desk.

Well, I just tried that this morning, and… it worked, much to the amazement of the guy at the desk. Reading the comments on both posts, it seems there’s nothing new to it though, people have been doing this for ages, even on other devices.

So today I finally made official my move away from Linux, through a post on the rosegarden-devel mailing list : I’m an ex-free software Linux developer, aiming to be a free software OS X developer. My only use of Linux is now on my home server (except at work where I still write Java on Linux). It’s been 13 years since my first Slackware install, with kernel v1.2.8 back in 1995 on a 90MHz pentium with, at the time, 16Mb of RAM and 512Mb HD.

The first reply I got was a “me too” from an other user, who had made the same switch for the same reasons. He also mentionned that sound on OS X wasn’t that rosy either : USB peripherals recognition problems, stability issues with Logic Audio… However these problems are on a higher level than those on Linux. Actually, I wish Linux had this kind of problems, but instead we have to deal with the most basic “can’t hear anything” issues (or similar basic stuff like my mouse’s tilt wheel being broken by a kernel update). And I’m just so f*cking tired of this.

Plus there’s the fact that writing a music editor for an OS which already has the equivalent of alsa, jackd, qsynth and our own RG sequencer in it is somewhat more motivating than endlessly trying to debug random sound setup problems.

To tell the truth, even though I did gain a lot through these years, had I known that Linux would still be in such a state after all this time, I would have had jumped ship two or three years ago already, when OS X was starting to look welcoming enough. Core Audio might not have been as mature as it is now, though.

One thing which I’ve long wanted to do with my ipod was to easily keep it filled with a random selection of albums. Not songs. I don’t like listening to songs at random, likewise my squeezebox is most often used in “random mix album” mode (the only caveat being with albums fitting on two CDs – there’s an option to tell it to collapse multi-CDs albums in a single one, but while you want this for a concert spread on two CDs, it’s less useful on a boxed-set of 10).

So I wanted to have the same thing for my ipod, and the solution is simply a playlist which randomly selects albums. It’s actually very easy though not quite obvious.

As a digression, I was also looking for a way to automatically expire old mail in some folders under Mail.app. Again, no specific feature for this, but it’s very easily done with filtering rules. The common point in this is that a UI is kept simple by making some of its features powerful enough that they can serve other purposes, rather than adding more features which would be rarely used. It’s a hard balance to strike, though.