A Rather Shocking iPhone Usage Incident.

I don't know if anyone has noticed this, because it's not something that has been advertised on the 'net. But I have more than noticed something rather shocking about my iPhone 3G (it's the 16 GB model of last year.)

Yes, my iPhone has given my hand a mild electric shock! Serious!

I was surfing the 'net over 3G whilst riding home on the bus this afternoon. My bus ride takes me through several suburbs, as it takes about an hour (a bus can travel great distances in an hour). In that hour, and through those suburbs, my phone has passed through a number of mobile phone towers, and there was one time -- the only time I have surfed the 'net on an iPhone during my bus trip home -- when my phone lost its 3G signal, and seemingly tried to reconnect... to GPRS.

"Great!" I say, "my network connection just got demoted!"

But that wasn't the shocker. Mobile phones are known to try and renegotiate with mobile phone towers at full power in order to re-establish a mobile network connection, and I have a very strong suspicion that it was during this time that my iPhone applied a small level of pain to my left hand... enough for me to think that this actually hurts, and that I should put the phone down somewhere, fast!

I do remember that in Apple's WWDC'07 Keynote presentation when the first-generation iPhone was first released in the United States, Steve Jobs did mention where on the phone's exterior the aerials were for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and, of course, cellular: the Wi-Fi aerial is internal, the Bluetooth aerial surrounds the camera at the rear of the phone, and the cellular network aerial is... guess where... around the glass face of the phone! The phone's aerial is that metal trim around the front facia panel of the phone!

Exactly what my left palm had been touching when the pain triggered one of my senses, rather uncomfortably!

How is it that a mobile phone that has the potential to shock people be allowed to be sold on the open market like this? Didn't anyone at Apple think that maybe this cellular network aerial ought to be covered?!

This has been the only time when my phone has literally shocked me, in the 6 months or so I have owned it. I suppose I could ask whether my phone is actually faulty or something, or whether I should be brave and try again on the same bus route some other time to cop the same electric shock from the phone's aerial.

In either case, I'm not looking forward to my future with the phone.

—tonza

... And My Personal Favourite Windows 7 Twitter Comment...

... only because I want to do this myself at some stage, is...

I must admit, I do have Windows Vista Business on my Mac. While I am not going all the way to put Windows 7 Ultimate on my Mac to replace it, I may update to Windows 7 myself if Vista doesn't offer something I absolutely cannot do without.

What made me smile about this post is that Microsoft doesn't seem to mind the fact that people who own Macintoshes are putting Windows on their machines. Perhaps Microsoft can do one better and actually support Windows 7 on Apple computers, something they seem not too keen on doing.

To be fair, Microsoft seem to only support Windows to PC manufacturers who:

• provide drivers to Microsoft for inclusion in their operating system distribution, whether on the disc or on-line, and/or
• sell their PC systems with Windows pre-installed.

And because Apple don't do either, Microsoft probably don't reciprocate.

—tonza

Microsoft Should Proofread Their Users' Comments!

It's interesting to see what appears on Microsoft's Web site regarding what people say about Windows 7, particularly when what could be construed as unfavourable comments appear as an endorsement to the product they are expected to promote.

In one case, you have:

which, to me, doesn't sound like a very good comment to make about Windows 7! If this is someone's idea of a gag, it's impressed me, because it tells me that (s)he says Windows 7 is as mesmerising and irresistible as the substance being referred to, while being dangerous and untrustworthy at the same time. Or, taken as a verb, is as clumsy as it is stupid.

My apologies if this is not the intent of the 5-word comment, and that there's more to it than I realise.

And this one doesn't sound confident either, although it's much more subtle:

What do you mean, "Hate to say it..."? Don't you mean well of the company that brought you your favourite operating system?

Getting back to the interesting issue, are Microsoft taking Twitter comments sent to them and, without proofreading, actually throwing them up onto their home page for all the world to see?

Sometimes, Microsoft come up with some of the funniest things!

—tonza

OpenID-Savvy Users Can Now Comment

I have waited a while to allow people other than those I know to comment on this blog because of the simple fact that I don't blog much... until I realised that, well, this thought-dumping thing is in a one-way street.

Until now. I have decided to relax the restrictions a bit to allow OpenID registered users to post comments on tonzaThought. Now you can vent your spleen all you like... at me (but, please do it nicely!).

I am interested in hearing your comments on any articles I write. Don't want to be anti-social or anything, but hopefully, some feedback will help entice me to blog more.

Look forward to hearing from you... now that I let (some of) you in!

Cheers!

—tonza

When a S.M.A.R.T. Status Means Nothing

You'd think a hard drive with S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) would be able to reliably tell you whether it is about to die or not. Well, for a Hitachi IC25N040ATMR04-0 40 GB hard drive in a PowerBook G4, this is not the case. Disk Utility (a tool for managing hard disks in Mac OS X) produces a S.M.A.R.T. Status for this drive as "verified", but the hard disk itself suffers badly from I/O errors. In short, the drive is unreliable, and S.M.A.R.T. has proven itself to be too dumb to be useful.

And what does "verified" mean, exactly? Does it mean, "the hard drive has been verified to be good", or does it mean, "the status of the hard drive has been verified with some other component of the system", but doesn't actually tell you what this verified status is? Because in this case for this poor, little laptop, "verified" doesn't mean what I think it is intended to mean.

I am still pondering whether to replace this laptop's hard disk drive in this 6 year old machine. The machine is too slow for casual Internet use, thanks to the demands of Adobe Flash and the countless Web sites that use this antiquated, grossly inefficient technology, so perhaps replacing the laptop itself is a better option. And since this laptop can't run Mac OS 9 without the help of Classic, I can't use it for nostalgic reasons.

So, getting back to the topic, how useful is this S.M.A.R.T. indicator? Well... here's something for me to ponder on, what if it is actually correct in that nothing is going wrong with the hard disk drive? What if it is some other component in the laptop? Well, that would make replacing the hard drive pointless, because if this problem continues even with a new hard drive, then I would have just blown some $300.00 on nothing that solves the problem. A counter argument is that it must be the hard disk, because attaching an external hard disk drive to the laptop (thus making the laptop permanently chained to a desk) allows the laptop to run fine without any I/O problems to speak of. That says I should try replacing the machine's internal hard disk drive since that has problems and everything else about the machine doesn't.

Which doesn't make me trust S.M.A.R.T. indicators, since this one just lied to me.

—tonza

Time Machine Event Store UUID Issue

I've been looking long and hard on an issue which was causing me some grief in relation to backing up my computer system using Time Machine on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and I think I have nailed it!

Stating the specifics of my predicament, I am not using Time Capsule to back up to... rather, I am using locally attached external hard drives. Also, I am backing up an external hard drive onto one of the external backup drives. This second point is important, because it is the one important factor for allowing the UUID Issue to appear in the first place—if all you're doing is backing up your computer's internal drive(s), this issue should never occur.

So what's the "UUID issue"? Well, it is when backupd(1) reports that "Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: <volume>". This rather minimally-descript error message is met with Time Machine starting a new backup cycle on the affected volume, backing up the entire volume again and wasting space on the backup drives. This affects the ability for Time Machine to back up your drives with a decent backup history, because in the best case scenario, Time Machine discards older backups to make room for the new, redundant backup; in the worst case scenario, Time Machine will complain that your backup disk is full, and ask that you attach yet another disk drive for it to use! Meanwhile, backups may fail due to lack of space on the backup drives Time Machine has assigned itself.

What I have found out as to the cause of this issue happening, is that if Time Machine starts a backup session whilst an external volume you have backed up previously is not mounted, this causes Time Machine to complain with this event store UUID mismatch. This in turn causes Time Machine not to trust the contents of the volume to be backed up, and start a new backup cycle for the volume.

I would have thought that Time Machine should scour the contents of the hard drive to determine if it is one that it has backed up before, but if you think about the fact that more than one HFS Plus volume having the same name can be mounted on the Finder desktop at the same time, this makes the event store UUID the only identifier that uniquely describes each and every volume that Time Machine backs up. Missing a backup schedule means an opportunity for a volume to be switched with another of the same name, and if Time Machine tries to back up that other volume to the backup disks as if it is the original volume, it could lead to a corrupted volume snapshot (ie., two volumes appear to have been destructively merged in the backup disks). This could make restoration of the affected volume unacceptable since data could have been lost during the backup. This is why event store UUIDs are used to track volumes which may have the same names, so that backups don't get clobbered like this!

So... why doesn't Time Machine trust its own event store UUIDs?! And, why aren't backups named by event store UUID, rather than by volume name?! If you look at a Time Machine backup disk's contents, the backup repository describes its backup sessions as follows:

• volume name of the backup volume
• Backups.backupdb
• hostname of the machine doing the backup
• backup date and time
• volume names of the volumes backed up
• contents of the backup

Now, you'd think that the volume names of the volumes backed up ought to be event store UUIDs! Well, they aren't, and it's probably the reason why Time Machine doesn't trust them when a backup series with any one volume breaks.

The solution to this problem is a bit tedious, but as far as I can tell, the only reliable one thus far:

• ensure that all of your locally mountable volumes that Time Machine can back up are indeed mounted when you use your computer, so that when Time Machine schedules a backup, the volumes to be backed up are present, otherwise
• if you cannot have a backed up volume mounted, disable Time Machine in the System Preferences, and only re-enable Time Machine when you can mount that volume again.

—tonza

Lots of Blank Discs!

I have lots of blank media. CDs, ZIP disks, floppies... they are now hardly ever used to store the masses of data I have on my sizable home network.

But let's fact it... using CDs and DVDs, ZIP disks and floppies to back up data is just painfully slow and involves me sitting in front of the computers just swapping media around periodically, and that straps me to my desk more often than I would like. So to save myself from the trauma of backing up, I have bought a few external hard drives, and either got .Mac Backup 3 or Time Machine on Mac OS X Leopard to do the backing up for me (or, for Windows Vista, I just the standard Windows Backup and Restore tools that come with Windows Vista Business). So far so good!

Before the arrival of Mac OS X Leopard, Backup 3 was all the tool that I had to back up my data. The good thing about Backup 3 is that it can span backups across multiple CDs or DVDs, for which no other Apple-provided backup solution offered.

I still use Backup 3 for that very reason... to copy items from my systems onto [multiple] CDs. It has become a way to actually offload my data so as to conserve hard drive space for the stuff I no longer want lying around.

Time Machine has now taken over most of the backup chores. But for the moment, it only serves to back up one of a number of machines on my home network, because none of the external disks I have are Time Capsules, and Time Machine does not support backing up to other kinds of remote disks; the other machines network to my machine that is backed up by Time Machine in order to do what they have to do on a daily basis.

Which has introduced a new problem... I have managed to collect a stash of blank rewritable CDs and DVDs, ZIP disks and floppies! What do I do with all these discs?!

The ZIP and floppy disks are not so much of a problem, because I still have an old-enough machine that can use these disks for when I want to back up or offload data to them. The veteran Power Macintosh 7500 running Mac OS 9 is not a machine that sees daily use, so regularly backing up is of no concern.

But as for the CDs and DVDs, the hard disks I bought for my workhorse computer system have taken over the role of backup repository, making these blank discs more worthless than I ever anticipated.

The only thing I can think of as a reason to keep these discs is as a backup scenario for when a hard drive dies. But more likely, these discs will end up becoming unusable before such time comes, since optical discs don't keep forever in storage.

—tonza

I Once Said...

... that:

"We'll see how this [blog] goes. If it works, great! If not, well, I lost next to nothing."

about me dumping my thoughts onto this blog. Well, it wasn't happening for over 2 years!

Time to change that! All too often, I get some ideas, peeves, suggestions and other stray thoughts which ought to be jotted down, just in case anyone out there does a Google search and has a tendency to stop by and read about something they happen to take an interest in, despite the fact that it isn't actually something they have been looking for. So, if you have such a tendency to do just that, these partial brain dumps are for you!

Because I haven't been writing, some topics of discussion have been lost into irrelevance and are probably not worth resurrecting, although I often feel that they still ought to be considered due to the very fact that they have been forgotten and ought to be retold (I'll set up useful contexts for them if I have to!).

Another reason why I have not been writing is because my fingers caress computer keyboards more than anything else. Writing is now a skill I actually have trouble with since typing is the means I exclusively use to transcribe words onto paper for the last 20 or so years! Inkwell (and Newton) has been one way I have forced myself to write with something that resembles a pen, but granted, l can still write faster with a pen on paper... but with a computer and a graphics tablet, l actually have a better chance of writing text that others can actually read! To have Inkwell itself be able to read my utterly messy handwriting is actually impressive, despite the fact that I often have to re-write some small or obscure words to get it right. On the other hand, it is immensely gratifying, often essential, to have a means of correcting your handwriting as easily as you can edit typewritten text in a word processor. This is the best reason to write using a computing device like a Nintendo DS, one of a vast number of personal digital assistants, or even a Mac or a tablet PC. And to have text that is actually searchable after you have written it... that's progress in itself over the traditional pen and paper! Another benefit of writing over typing on a computing device is that you do not need to worry about what keyboard settings your computer is configured with (QWERTY, Dvorak, or an international keyboard setting) and depending on the capabilities of the handwriting recognition system, you can even mix multiple languages in a piece of hand written text, saving from having to tell the computer what language you are actually writing in! And obviously, using a tablet—whatever size—saves you a USB port or Bluetooth bandwidth because the one device can be used to point, write and draw; you don't need two or more devices to offer a complement of input capabilities. And the iPhone demonstrates that you can even dispense with a separate graphics tablet; all you need is your finger (or if you really need to, you can probably use an electrostatic pen to draw on your screen with).

On that note, this is the first blog entry I have ever made entirely written on computer. I hope to continue doing so, which does say something about my interest in promoting lesser-used, perhaps more advanced human interface technologies. So far, my application of Inkwell on Web browsers on the Mac is adequate for literally writing into this blog, but there are some other problems that ought to be investigated with other applications I use on a daily basis; for example, most applications on the Mac will need to be modified to work adequately with Inkwell. The only application I see where writing on a computer may never make sense is when cutting code. I'll have to insist on a keyboard and mouse when it comes to working with that!

So here marks the end of my first brain dump in over 29 months! Hope it doesn't take that long to post another blog!

Cheers!

—tonza