Typing this on my phone, so I’ll keep it short.
A followup to my previous post. I noticed that speed has been consistent throughout the day, and no 302 errors yet. I think they may have fixed the issue on the carrier end, at least in the Calgary area. Keeping my fingers crossed it stays fast, but as with anything on a wireless carrier, I won’t be surprised if things go south.
Now I can divert my attention to iPhone development. yeah!
It’s been a couple weeks since the new iPhone 3G has arrived worldwide. I for one was excited, hell, I stood outside for a few hours before the store opened (with my Project Manager no less!) to wait.
I would say the wait was worth it, not having to use a patched firmware every time a new version came out is a definite plus. Sure, there is still issues with official application stability on 2.0, MobileMe is sometime sketchy (I’ve had pretty good luck since launch, colleagues not so much). and bugs in the firmware itself where kind of downers.
All is not rosy in the land of iPhone in Canada, and from the reading and conversations I’ve had, I’m not alone. Many on Rogers and Fido have probably experienced this when using Safari or other apps that use the data network:
Right when the phone launched, everything was gravy, pages loaded fast (far faster than when I was on Edge on my old phone), and everything was awesome in the land of iPhone. After a week or so, I started to get “kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302″ every so often, I ignored it as I see that happen in Safari when I’m browsing on Macs. Just refresh once or twice and it will usually load the page.
It started to happen more often, so I decided to do some Googling. Lo and behold, stuff popped up on Howard Forums, a gigantic cellular enthusiasts site. Others have reported the same problem, and Rogers support has tried to give solutions.
Doing some further experimenting, I’m pretty sure it’s not the phone that’s the problem. Every other person that I work with in Calgary that I’ve talked to so far is experiencing the same issue. Add to that I did some tests throughout the day, around 5:30AM MST on the way to work, no problems. Pages load up snappy, no issues with timeouts. Midday and on the way home, it pop’s up one in every two tries to request a page. This leads me to believe it’s a traffic congestion issue on Roger’s end of things.
Fingers crossed this gets fixed soon, if it is indeed an issue of network congestion, it’s pretty obvious that it should have been addressed
In any case I’ll do more Googling to see what I can find, just logging my progress.
Got everything set up. As for the very first thing you do in any language, a modern Hello World:
Blog going through some updates on back and front end. I should have it all smooth soon. I’m looking forward to posting some info on a new iphone app idea being tossed around by one of my colleagues.
Ps. This wordpress app on the iPhone is rad.
Haven’t kept up with my own promise to myself to post regularly on my own blog. I’ll do  WordPress updates tomorrow and type a little something up afterwords 
I have tons in my head that needs to be typed up.
Finally finished COD4’s campaign mode on the Xbox last night. I thought I was up to the challenge of going through it on Veteran difficulty, and it turned out I was. It wasn’t difficult, it was severe punishment. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game. From the intro boat scene to putting the final bullet in the terrorist leader, it was an amazing, cinematic experience. It’s extremely linear, to be more precise it’s an FPS on a rail. A very, very beautiful rail.
I think the hardest difficulty exposes the (few) weak points in the game’s design. The most obvious one is the few places where there is infinite respawns of enemies in combination with the pretty obvious “tripwire” triggering of new waves of enemies. I thought this was pretty obvious fault in COD3 (nothing more awesome than watching a NPC pop into existence), which was considered a low point in the franchise. It’s not too noticeable on default difficulty, which I’m guessing Joe Gamer will be playing on, since you would move through levels fairly consistently, minimizing the number of respawned waves of enemies.
The tripwire triggering of infinite waves in a few places in combination with the increased difficulty (you only take 2-3 shots before dieing in Veteran, plus everyone has superhuman sharpshooting skills) makes it some of these sections incredibly tough. In a couple cases I think it came down to luck more than anything that allowed me to survive. Add the sometimes microscopic Checkpoint triggering, you can make your way pretty far into a firefight and completely miss checkpoints.
On the flip side, I can also easily argue against the above. With percise enough timing between waves, you could make it through the infinite respawn area with quick enough shooting and sprinting to the next checkpoint. The only problem with that is you aren’t really taking a moment to really admire the world that Infinity Ward built.
All things considered, it is a well crafted experience, and I’m saying that after hours of swearing at the TV after dieing for the 50th time in the same place. Now, tonight, I subject myself to the hell that is known as the Epilogue mission on Veteran.
Hopefully this is positive news. This morning in my usual digg skimming before I start my day of work, I came across a post linking to MacScoop about the latest 10.5.2 developer seed issues fixed list. There was a couple things that stood out that where identified. First was network sharing of optical drives. That’s a given considering the MacBook Air’s quickly approaching release. The other discovered feature is the ability to use network volumes as a Time Machine backup device. By no means is this confirmed in the final build, Apple has pulled undocumented features last minute before on OS updates, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
If that feature makes it into final release, but you can’t use the afp share on the AirDisk, you can mount it as a regular Samba share and go about backups that way.
full list at MacScoop.com
“The” Steve Jobs had his keynote at Macworld yesterday, along with bringing a few new Apple branded goodies to the table. The biggest of which is the new MacBook Air. All I can say is this, Hotness. I couldn’t bring myself to buying one to replace my still going strong MacBook Pro (albeit it’s on it’s third battery in less than two years.), I still ordered one on behalf of my sister, as she was holding out for something thin and lightweight. I know she’s pumped to get it, and I’m pumped to get a chance to play with it before she gets it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Well, I haven’t really posted anything on here in a while, super busy with work and all. Now that work has settled down somewhat in terms of workload, I can finally make regular updates to the blog again.First thing is first, what was I working on since the last post? Well, I was put on the tea that was tasked to do the Rolex Mentor and Protege redesign. We launched the English version a couple weeks ago, and just today launched the Spanish and French versions of the website!  Mad props to everyone involved, I really dig the design, it’s so sharp to look at. Check it out if you get a chance! With that launch done, I can finally concentrate on starting to build my own website. Bizarre I know. What kind of web developer doesn’t have his own real website. As with most things, I’m really big nitpick, unless it’s done completely and properly, there is very little reason to put it online. I have a couple 99% complete templates built, just have to finish the one I want off and go with that.This is perfect timing, since I’ll be able to monkey around with Prototype JS 1.6 that was just recently released. All the new features and speed optimizations have got me interested, I want to try my hand at building some cool things. For the Mentor and Protege site I got to do a bit of work with Prototype 1.5, since that was the latest stable at the beginning of the technical implementation. It has definitely gotten my attention though, it has alot of pretty cool convenience features that help speed up the development process of building new functionality.Moar posts, I promise!.Â