I told myself initially that I wouldn’t write a post about my impressions of the iPhone, but after having used it for now approaching 20 hours and having done some investigatory work on some network service of the phone, I thought I would at least write something, albeit short.
Commercials don’t do this thing justice. It is just simply fun to use. I haven’t really found a single glitch so far. The notes and calculator applications are a little ugly and look rushed, but I imagine in time these will be fixed or people will get used to them. Their functionality isn’t bad … just a little ugly. I could also use some more information about the phone. I, like many people, filter connections to my wireless access points and I needed to know it’s MAC address. That information wasn’t available, so I had to put it on another hub and arp the thing, which was a little annoying.
It does, however, work flawlessly as advertised. Interestingly though, I started doing some traffic dumps from the WiFi interface of the phone, and found that all of those network applications actually get all their data from Apple, not Yahoo (weather) or Google (maps). In fact all application data comes from wu.apple.com. Based on it’s IP it appears to actually be an Apple machine. So … am I to understand that all Google’s map data is specifically reorganized for Apple and sent to them? Can the application actually interpret the raw data from Google’s machines, or are there a fair number of processing steps between Google’s data and the device data? A simple scan of the device from another machine on my local network indicates that it’s pretty locked down. Nothing is open. On another note: EDGE is surprisingly zippy on this device … it certainly was NOT on my last EDGE device. I don’t know if this is from the rumored EDGE network upgrades or the iPhone itself. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with this thing.
Cheers.
Like many people I have been consistently frustrated with the last of Flash support on AMD64/X64. I’m no Flash fan, and if I had my way about it we would just eliminate it entirely from all aspects of the web. But unfortunately I don’t have that option. The vast majority of solutions to this problem involve running a chroot-ed X86 environment within your AMD64 build in order to get Flash to play. Yes, major system overhaul for a simple plugin … seems a bit much. But today I found a good solution that actually works (OK Miriam found it and told me). This is a simple nspluginwrapper issue. In whatever your distro, install nspluginwrapper and then go download the 32 bit version of Flash 9. Extract the libflashplayer.xpt file and the libflashplayer.so file and put them in the appropriate location (in my case /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/). Then, just run,
nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
which will create the file npwrapper.libflashplayer.so in that plugins directory. That’s it. You’re done. Flash 9 works. Brilliant. Now I can waste away time watching YouTube at work, which is really all I was looking for anyway.
“The most hyped electronic product of all time.” That was an actual quote I read somewhere, although for the life of me I can’t now find the reference. I’ll tell you all that I have ever intention of getting an iPhone when it’s released on Friday, though I’m not getting my hopes up. Why? Because of people like this guy. OK, so fine, I suppose that is to be expected in New York or in other very large cities. However today I went to an AT&T store here in West Lafayette, IN (population 28,778) to inquire as to whether the rumors of a waiting list for the phone were true. Not suprisingly they were not: there are no waiting lists. Then I asked, “when do I have to be here to get one?” She replies, “I really have no idea … there are already people here asking to camp out on the lawn on Thursday night.” Are you kidding me? In West Lafayette, IN there are going to be people camping out? That’s just simply absurd.
So anyway my point is if you are a halfway reasonable human being who just simply want’s to get the phone on Friday, good luck. It seems that the only way to guarentee it is to be there the night before or early in the morning. Cheers.
I imagine most of you that know me well know that I prefer the vi/vim editing environment more than any other. I’ve never personally enjoyed emacs (though I do love the auctex plugins to emacs, but only with the viper extensions to give emacs vi keybindings). Point being I am always searching for new ways to integrate vim keybindings into my life. And luckily for me I’ve found the next new thing: VIMPERATOR. Now, granted, it’s by no means perfect: there are certain things about web browsing that don’t lend itself too easily to the vim world. That being said this thing goes a long way to make up for those issues. It’s invented a number of things that are very vim-like to compensate. I highly recommend it … check it out. Cheers.