Lee Packham

This week has been another long week – but quite a productive one… or at least I would like to think so!

• Carrying on with my URL shortener and vanity ‘via’ links on Twitter, I downloaded the Adium source code and started tinkering with adding a few more custom features to it. My aim is to allow anyone to use the 1.4.x version of Adium to manage their own vanity applications. I’ll post a proper summary of URL shortening and business uses (still writing it!) very soon.
• I got to do some C++ work for a client this week. It was fun to open the bonnet on some code I wrote a few years ago to tweak/fix it.
• I popped a Three SIM card into a spare iPhone. Discovered it’s just Vodafone and O2 that can’t penetrate my apartment. The downside of Three is their customer support not being in the UK – something that is very important to me. So I’ll have to think long and hard about that one. Vodafone’s reception and service in central London has been awful of late… hence the consideration of leaving.
• Upgraded the version of Cyanogen on my mobile to 6.0.0 RC2 and then promptly hacked up the build.prop file to enable HSUPA – result… around 3-4Mbps downlink connection on my mobile phone. That’s quite nice.
• Picked up one of the new Magic Trackpads from Apple. They are fairly cool. Overall I’m not that sure about it if I am honest. I find myself reaching for my mouse still and that sort of sucks.
• Fixed up my Android development environment again. It’s quite hard to keep that all in order if I’m honest.
• Had a look at the new Android Market Licensing that Google have release for Android. It’s about time they did something about .apk file piracy… so many sites are out there offering subscriptions to effectively pirate games and utilities. Amusingly, this new library makes piracy harder on Android than it is on iPhone/iPad (where it is insanely easy) – let’s hope it attracts more developers.

And that’s it! Yay! Another weekly update post done and dusted.

Let’s get straight to it…

• .co domains came out this week. I managed to grab leepa.co and turned it into a URL shortener. I used some code I found on Github, changed it to use my down and deployed it up on Google App Engine and tada, job done…
• I then made my own Twitter Tools extension to make shortened URLs using it when things were posted…
• And I made a custom @Anywhere application that is called Lee Packham and points to this blog!
• Started work on a massive overhaul of my online presence to actually perk potential client’s interests rather than just be a.n.other blog on the internet.
• I may have bought a couple more .co domains – but more on what they are for another time!
• Life’s been busy at Green Man Gaming – the work on the component being ported to Node.js is coming along very well. Hoping to finish it in the next week.
• Had to deploy mod_security to a client’s server this week. It’s grown into quite the beast – and is actually quite useful. I was surprised.
• I got anther damned text about my mobile data usage from Vodafone. I KNOW I WENT OVER 500MB THIS MONTH – NO NEED TO REPEAT IT.
• Last week I was tempted to root my N1 – this week I did it. Running Cyanogen 6.0.0 RC1, very cool. Wish I had done it earlier.

Bit shorter this week – but I’m really keen to get back to the website update!

This video is just a nice cartoon of Darth Vader calling up Apple about the problems with his new iPhone. It’s rather comical.

Today I switched off ‘frodo’ – my old VPS server with Slicehost. With it goes my Quakenet bouncer, which I have decided not to install at the new host. Goodbye Quakenet – it’s been a good run.

I’m getting good at this! Not at writing – I still suck at that – but at posting a weekly update:

• My pull requests get ignored on Github it seems. Actually that’s not true – I recently contributed a makensis formula for mxcl/homebrew. I do have my leepa/cradle which allows cradle for Node.js to actually talk using POST on views – that hasn’t been pulled. This allows one to query multiple keys out of a view at once without any API changes to library itself. It hasn’t been pulled back – but then I haven’t heard from the author at all.
• I had forked visionmedia/express – but that has since undergone a major rewrite to use express/connect. It didn’t take long to migrate code from the old version to the new one. The author has also dropped the handy wrapper for the Node.js HTTP client – I have kept it around though. It has a couple of useful fixes – the main one being that it doesn’t cause an unhandled exception in the case it can’t talk to the server though. You can check it out on Gist if you’re bored enough.
• Vodafone irritated me by sending me a text about my mobile data usage. I have already blogged about it though – so just read down the blog for details. The ‘tldr’ version – they have done a stirling job of talking through the problem with me.
• I got my new stack of business cards! Had to get two sets made up, on for the “IT consultancy” and one for “Mobile Application Developer”. Yes, I am looking for more mobile development work. So now I can use these at networking events and see what happens.
• I rooted my wife’s HTC Magic (32B) and installed the latest stable (so Eclair) Cyanogen Mod. It was very easy to do and took around 30 minutes end to end to sort it. It’s a shame that HTC haven’t released the more recent OS’s for the phone as Christy really needed multiple Google account support to be able to actually buy stuff in Google Market. Job done though! Makes rooting my N1 all the more tempting, but I’ll wait until the Froyo version is at least stable.
• I was impressed with Apple’s response to the antenna problems. That was an awkward PR problem and they dealt with it well. The free rubber bumper solution was by far the best one. Especially so because the number of affected users is a very small subset of iPhone 4 owners. Will that make me pick up one… dunno. We’ll see. I am still advising clients to develop directly for the 3G. I still see a lot of iPhone 2G phones around and to maximise one’s app distribution, the 3G is the best one to target. You have the faster network, but the same CPU/RAM limitations of the original phone.
• I upgraded my local CouchDB install to the newly released 1.0.0. It’s… fast. Really really fast. I tip my hat to all the contributors.
• This blog is now on a UK server! Got a 1GB Linode instance. They are ace, this is ace. Do check them out. It’s been a long time since I had a server in the same country as myself – it’s nice to be back.

Right – time to get back to my weekend.

As mentioned previously, I got a text message telling me I hit 500MB of Mobile Data usage on my phone this month. I was bored in hospital, hence the usage. I tweeted and blogged about it… and today it resulted in a phone call from Sukhi on the Web Relations Team at Vodafone UK.

We did the usual going over the complaint and a few important things came out:

• Vodafone did have a communications plan for the change. However, it centred around an insert to go in with the bills. Which, as I’m not on paper billing I didn’t get. Therefore, I had zero communication of the change. Sukhi agreed with me that it wasn’t acceptable that I had to go find out on a forum that the Twitter guys linked me to just to find out the detail of the change. I should of got a formal communication.
• There is a training issue around how customer services deal with people calling up after receiving these text messages and she will notify the relevant managers to get that addressed.
• There ‘was’ an iPhone app – it’s still in development which allows iPhone customers to get details of their data usage. There are no current plans of an Android app. However, I have now found an app called NetCounter which appears to do at least a rough estimate of usage.
• Sukhi was able to tell me how much usage I had. However agreed with me that there is no way to easily find out as a customer. She actually logged in to see her own unbilled usage to verify that it not possible to get a summary – which it isn’t.
• A request to get the data usage added to the unbilled summary has been put forward and we’ll see where that goes. At least they’re trying – I know it’s hard for a large corporate to move forward on this sort of stuff.
• I will NOT be billed for this extra usage. The text message is the beginning of a 3 month process of warnings which ends up leading to being charged when you go over the 500MB.

Overall I felt it was a productive call. Vodafone, or at least their web relations team, are happy to admit where there are failings. That’s one up on a lot of companies – like Orange UK – who will just tell customers they are wrong.

Sukhi followed up with an e-mail after the call. A nice professional touch that. She, after the call, found that you can CSV export your unbilled usage. With a bit of macro trickery in Excel, it would be feasible to get one’s total usage. Still not ideal – but hey, it shows initiative on her part and thus was appreciated.

Griping on Twitter DOES work. Vodafone is one of a growing number of customers that actually has a social media plan that isn’t centred around making money but more about improving themselves. They should, seriously, be congratulated on that.

Today I got a nice text message from Vodafone (see inset). As followers will know, I was in hospital for a week this month. As such, my mobile data usage would have been a lot higher than usual. When I signed up for Vodafone 5 years ago, Mobile Data was ‘unlimited’ – apparently that is no longer the case – they never actually gave me notice of my contract randomly changing… common with mobile phone companies, so we’ll ignore that point.

However, I go over this new ‘limit’ for the first time ever. I think – alright, I’ll give them a call and explain the situation and I’m sure it’ll all be fine.

I call up.

Sit in the queue for 10 minutes (I don’t mind that to be fair).

The person I get through to is confused. I have three phones on my contract with Vodafone and she can’t even work out what device I’m on about after giving the number over… twice.

Once she works out what device I’m on about, I’m put on hold…

Apparently the message I got is a warning and I have nothing to worry about. If I go over next month I’ll be charged 50p per 25MB over the 500MB data limit that was never in my contract in the first place.

That’s not really fair now, is it? If it wasn’t for the SureSignal (I live in a metal lined building and thus get zero reception inside), I would be seriously considering leaving Vodafone and pulling all my devices with me.

It’s not the random contract change. I understand that mobile data costs a lot of money and that’s just fine – I’ve never gone over 100-200MB, even on my iPhones – so to be honest that isn’t a problem. It’s not even the fact that I’ll be charged if I go over next month. It’s the fact that the text message doesn’t cover that at all!

The call ended with me being told I can check my usage online… Err, don’t know what planet she lives on, but the Vodafone eBilling site gives no summary of Internet usage and mixes in the itemisation with text messages. As such, I have no idea how much data I have used – at all.

All in all, bit of a poor experience.

They claim it’s a software problem – but lab testing has proved that the phone really does have an antenna problem:

I’m sorry Apple, but this isn’t good enough. The release of this phone was premature and the significant lack of QA is really quite concerning. At least you can’t delete my blog post like you can all the forum posts on your own forums detailing the problem. The pending software fix will make it look like you have more bars. You’ll still drop calls though – so don’t believe the fix is a proper fix. Also – if a case fixes the problem I reckon Apple should provide them free of charge. Consumers in the UK have the right to have bought a working product after all.

Really, at the moment, it is just an expensive iPod with a great screen. I mean that, the device is stunning to hold and use… it just needs a serious defect addressing.

Yay, I’m no longer in hospital… So let’s crack on:

• Got out of hospital on Tuesday – yay!
• While I’m a big fan of using ZSH (apparently some people are still using bash… really? really!?)  - I have now switch from zshkit to oh-my-zsh. I made my own fork of it at leepa/oh-my-zsh which includes some EDITOR env tweaks and has mercurial prompting. This makes for, at least for me, a much nicer zsh setup.
• Started the work to migrate Green Man Gaming‘s couchdb database from one structure to a simpler one. Basically, the benefit of hindsight means that it needs to move forward to a new structure so that some new features can be implemented.
• Forked the node.js visionmedia/express framework into leepa/express to add a quick fix for HTTPS support in it’s HTTP Client wrapper. Very simple two line fix, but allows me to talk to REST services that are on HTTPS.
• The new version of Tube Notify is now out on the App Store. In essence the only change is the addition of iAd – which is apparently working. Although I saw a crash on a friend’s phone. Thankfully iTunes Connect proves crash reports… oh wait, that doesn’t work. Thanks Apple.
• I ended up installing GitX and MacHg. Not because I will use them lots, but having a decent visualisation of a Git repo is actually really helpful sometimes.
• I installed hg-git and cloned some of my projects that are on Git into it. This is just because I want to learn Mercurial rather than switch to it. I last used it a long time ago – be interesting to see how it’s changed.

Cool – this weekly update stuff is going quite well for actually updating the blog

This week has been another interesting week – so here’s the update:

• Boring non-tech bit first again. Was admitted to hospital late on Tuesday night. I’m still in hospital (see post below).
• Loving my iPad and Nexus One a lot more when I don’t have a laptop. I do now – but still – they are my best friends.
• Discovered that a custom version of fstream in the Windows SDK means you can easily leak file handles. This leads to a lot of problems. If you create and fstream from an already open FILE handle, make sure you fclose after destruction – the fstream will not do it for you.
• Node.js is still taking up a bit of my time. I started fixing node-s3 to work on recent builds and then ended up starting to work on my own version instead. Really liking how packages work with it and how using git submodule just became great with it.
• My update to TubeNotify was rejected in true Apple style. Turns out they want iAd done a specific way – the way Interface Builder lets you do it isn’t actually right. Great! The example they give you to hide the advert on failure is also useless too. Happy days. Fixed now though – If I get time I’ll do a post with what I did.

And that is it – bit short – but then I’ve been in hospital most of the week so it is to be expected.