So I caved in and bought an iPhone today. So far I'm quite enjoying it. It's very responsive, the UI has been superbly designed for usability and feedback. My only problems with it are that it's locked in to a contract with no hope of unlocking it through O2 (only hacks will be available) and there is no way of making third-party apps for it (yet!). Apparently an SDK is coming in Jan/Feb.

I spent about 2 hours trying to purchase the device from The Carphone Warehouse - forget it. The salesman there was a downright liar and con artist. The guy's name was "Izzy" from the Harlow, Howard Way store. He suggested I get their insurance for 40 GBP quarterly because it covers "everything" and that O2's insurance at 7.50 GP per month wouldn't. I checked the O2 website and it had exactly the same coverage. There's lie #1. The guy even said he was calling his "friend at O2" to compare insurance coverage, I'm fairly sure O2 said they had the same coverage, at which point he hung up and told me they did not. Lie #2.

I asked him if there was an O2 shop nearby so that I could compare insurance myself (I knew there was), he said no. Lie #3. He also said all O2 shops would be sold out, again he had no way of knowing this for sure.

He then told me I needed to give him my bank details so that he could run a credit check when there is absolutely no need for him to do this as it is done entirely by O2 and Apple via iTunes. I was told by him that O2 cross-check what I enter when I activate the iPhone with what he enters whilst I am purchasing the phone - lie #4. I eventually gave in but then found out he was doing it so that he could charge me for the insurance. He then told me "Because it's an iPhone, the insurance is mandatory"- lie #5. He then told me I would not be able to get insurance from anywhere else after buyng it - lie #6. He told me that if I bought the iPhone from Apple directly that they would force me to buy the extended warranty - lie #7. After telling him I'd walk out if he didn't stop harassing me over the insurance he eventually gave in and tried putting the payment through for just the phone... their systems crashed. I waited for another 30 minutes whilst he promised that he was doing everything he could to bring the system back online, but after being in the store for 1.5 to 2 hours, enough was enough. I asked for my card back and told him to tear up all of the paperwork that I had signed. I then drove the 5 minutes to the O2 store that didn't exist and was in and out of the store within 10 minutes, new iPhone in hand, 5.83 GBP per month better off and no hassle of "cross-checking" my bank details - all I did was pay for the phone with a credit card, nothing more.

Apparently I'm not the only person this has happened to, see here, here, here or just Google it.

Lesson: Never shop at The Carphone Warehouse.

I've forwarded this complaint to the BBC Watchdog. If anyone else has had a similar experience, I strongly urge you to do the same!

Yesterday I bought an Apple Airport Extreme base station (read: a wireless router) to replace my current router, which has a failing WiFi card in it. I figured it'd be nice having a small, neat package that does everything my current Linux router box does. The first minor annoyance was that it only allows you to maintain a class C (/24 - 192.168.1.x) network. I like to use class B (/16 - 192.168.x.y) to partition all of the networked devices in my house nicely. After devising a new class C network, I then found out it wasn't possible to assign names to systems so that I could address systems by name rather than IP. To get around this I had to add a new zone to my BIND server to and make all computers search this "local" zone when resolving names, which didn't work very well. Further to this, you can reserve IPs on the DHCP table for MAC addresses within the Airport Extreme setup program, but when configuring NAT forwarding you have to use the IP address rather than the name which means despite naming machines, you still need to recall their IP addresses in order to setup NAT.

To top everything off, the Airport Extreme does not allow you to forward port 53 via NAT (thanks to a bug in the software, which Apple is aware of but has not yet fixed). This makes it totally impossible to host DNS behind the Airport Extreme! I've had to put my old router above it in the network and use the Airport Extreme as a wireless bridge only. I would probably have been better off just buying a new WiFi card!

I'm typing this from the airport. For the next 3 or so days, I'll be in Washington D.C.

I've accepted a job today at Sagentia as a software engineer. Unfortunately this meant turning down a dream job at Last.FM simply because it would have required a 1.5 hour commute each way. I'm confident that I'll be just as happy at Sagentia, though!

It's been a while since I messed around with .NET (probably over a year now). I figured I'd been messing around with Java quite a lot and should broaden my skills so I decided to make a quick application in C# to get my AudioScrobbler information and display it (nothing too complex). The result can be seen here. However, I'm a Mac user so I figured I'd try the application running under Mono on OSX. I hadn't really used Mono before but I assumed it wouldn't have a System.Windows.Forms implementation, I was wrong! As you can see here, it's not perfect by a long short, but it's definitely working!

This is fairly exciting because, in some ways, C# is a more powerful language than Java (it has delegates, properties and "out" variables). However, I think these could easily be abused to make bad OO software. With Java you are forced to design your software in a more OO style. E.g. if you need to return multiple results from a method, you'd make an encapsulating method. With C#, you could be lazy and use multiple "out" variables. I'm also not sure I like the ability to alias namespaces in C#, you could alias "System.Console" as "pinecone", then your code could be filled with "pinecone.WriteLine(...)", which could be pretty confusing. C# also does not force filenames and filesystem structures based on class names and namespaces, which could lead to messy organisation of code. Anyway, I'm still learning the ins and outs of .NET and for now it's quite exciting.

I came across this link in an IRC chat room... and I've got to say, it's absolutely spot on. While I really do like Linux and use it as the operating system of choice on my servers and router... I cannot stand it when I see people "defending" Linux in this way. Linux is definitely not suited to all applications - I personally wont use it as a desktop operating system because it requires too much playing about with X configurations and kernel drivers and the likes.

There is the other side of the argument that people will badmouth Linux because they are unwilling to read some documentation on how to get something working, which can be annoying to see. Maybe a little more effort from people trying Linux for the first time, and a little more understanding from people who are seasoned Linux users is in order.

This is something I found quite funny. Watch this YTMND animation (100% safe for work, though you might want to turn down your speakers as it has stupid, yet sfw, music in the background). Anyway, the contest that it mentions is over. On the Spicegirl's website there is this quote:

"...since we launched there have been literally millions of votes for us to play in hundreds of cities including places like Rio, Chicago, Melbourne, Manchester, Paris, Alice Springs, Baghdad, and Diss (in Norfolk England)!"

So it was obviously working! I bet Baghdad actually won and they fiddled with the results, oh well ;)

The last thing remaining on my ToDo list (which had been there for a considerable amount of time as a low-priority task) was to implement GZipping in SlXHTTPd. Well, it only took about 9 minutes in total (a fairly easy task!)... This is quite an important task for me as during my time at Jagex, the company CTO refused to let me implement GZip even though it would have reduced their bandwidth usage by an incredibly large amount (his excuse was that it would be slow despite me putting together tests proving otherwise). Anyway, during my testing for SlXHTTPd it's pretty amusing to see that it managed to GZip a 1.48MiB directory listing down to 30KiB! I've added limits so that it won't try GZipping anything other than text and it won't GZip files over 5MiB in size (as this would take a long time to do).

I've been busy adding more monitors to things (I can now tell how many SlX Scripts have been compiled, their compile times, what they compiled to etc). I randomly did a code line count and believe it or not.. it ended up as this:

slx@mini ~ $ find | grep .java | xargs wc -l
...
50000 total
slx@mini ~ $ find | grep .java | wc -l
183

Thats 50,000 lines EXACTLY in 183 files for all of my Java work over the past 3 months.

Continuing on the theme of monitoring... I decided to add monitoring/ stats to SlXHTTPd. After about 8 hours of solid coding here is what I have to show for it:

Hit stats, User-Agent stats, Referer stats and my favourite: Transfer stats. All are persistable (transfer stats only works with persistence enabled).

Another addition to SlXStorageMonitor is the FileMonitor which allows you to monitor the size of files. It can be seen Here. The front-end to SlXStorageMonitor currently looks like this.