July 2007 Archives

Nice timing. I have a couple of projects going that are extensively using the Yahoo User Interface Library, including some of the "beta components". I went to lookup some documentation on their site and found that they just released v2.3.0.

In one project we've been talking about using something like the JSAN loader to manage dependencies. The new YUILoader looks like a much better fit.

Also new and noteworthy: Base CSS (Vani was working on something like it; we love how Yahoo keeps doing the grunt-work here!), the Test Utility and the Rich Text Editor.

When Tim made the first bits of the new Gofer system in DBI work I put together a Gearman "transport" for it.

A few people have asked for it (maybe since Brad has mentioned it in a bunch of talks), so during OSCON - during Tims talk about Gofer actually :-) - I took a little time to make it work again.

I didn't get around to making the configuration easily, uh, configurable yet or make a neat wrapper script for the worker, but the basically working code is in Subversion.

I always forget the parameters for this and have to look them up in the man page, so enough of that:

 tcpdump -nnXSs 0 'port 80'

• "-nn" makes it not lookup hostnames in DNS and service names (in /etc/services) for respectively faster and cleaner output.
• "-X" makes it print each packet in hex and ascii; that's really the useful bit for tracking headers and such
• "-S" print absolute rather than relative TCP sequence numbers - If I remember right this is so you can compare tcpdump outputs from multiple users doing this at once
• "-s 0" by default tcpdump will only capture the beginning of each packet, using 0 here will make it capture the full packets. We are debugging, right?

Instead of "port 80" you can make more complicated rules like "port 80 and host 10.50.33.10".

Seems like I broke the iPhone already.

"iTunes could not sync mail accounts to the iPhone [my phone] because an error occurred while mingling data". Uh-oh.

update: Seems like deselecting the mail accounts to be synced, syncing and then checking them off again and syncing again fixed it.

Ah, of course. I caved in. Since Friday evening I've been iPhoneified.

It took a bit of hassle with AT&T to get our account changed to a FamilyTalk plan (iTunes said we needed to do it first, AT&T said sign up separately first). Apparently the confusion came from the iPhone Activation Support department being closed. Or something like that. They were all perfectly polite and trying to help though (and eventually did).

The really brief review is: UI rocks. Software is a bit of "work in progress". Typical examples: MobileMail can read Word Docs, but not mails forwarded as an attachment or vCard files. The Contact manager is all spiffy with maps integration, but there's no way to send a vCard. No "highlight to quote" feature in the mail application.

If you've read anything about the iPhone you've heard about the lack of cut'n'paste, too. I imagine they didn't implement it because it's going to be hard to get right and slightly tricky to use almost no matter what they do. Better keep it simple for the initial reviews. My Treo 650 got a few software updates, but they "only" fixed some regular crashes - no significant feature improvements. I am confident that the iPhone software will get better fast.

We were having lunch with Emad when he went off to the AT&T store to grab an iPhone from their just arrived batch.

After several seconds of deliberation Vani thought she should go get one, too. Off we went to see if they had more. When buying hers they told us that was number six out of the ten they got 45 minutes earlier.

I was (am?!) planning to keep my (completely falling apart) Treo until one or more of the following happened:

• iPhone Revision 2 (with whatever)
• Better email client (highlight to quote, etc)
• Jabber client

But my wife the enabler helped me decide that I should get one too while I had the chance rather than decide tomorrow and have them be sold out again.

So, now I have this box and can't decide if I should transfer my T-Mobile number to AT&T. The T-Mobile unlimited data plan is also $20/month (but allows using the phone as a modem) so the monthly cost will be about the same. Hmn, decisions decisions...

Apparently they don't even have third party widgets yet (which is good in a way, hopefully we can get our internal YellowBot dashboard widget polished up and ready for the iPhone before they do).

If I had more time it'd be fun to make a web-based jabber client that worked well with the iPhone, but I don't quite have time for Yet Another Project just now.

Anyway, I'll probably open it tomorrow ... Or sell it the highest bidder and try waiting again. Hmn.