Reuters:

“Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network,” Britain-based Vodafone said in a statement.

The plans for the iPhone in Australia will be very interesting – mobile internet is ridiculously expensive there at the moment and the iPhone is basically dependant on an unlimited data plan. While I was over in Australia recently with data roaming turned off my iPhone was pretty much reduced to a big, somewhat ineffective phone rather than a mobile internet sensation…

Business Week on the increasing number of companies that have at least some Macs:

In a survey of 250 diverse companies that has yet to be released, the market research firm Yankee Group found that 87% now have at least some Apple computers in their offices, up from 48% two years ago.

What’s interesting about this is that it’s one of the few surveys I’ve seen that doesn’t focus on raw market share. While hardware manufacturers might be interested to know that Apple has X% of the total market, software developers shouldn’t care.

It’s been echoing all over the blogosphere today that NYTimes.com “hand codes everything” instead of using a WYSIWYG editor. It all extrapolates from a fairly offhand reference by the design director, Khoi Vinh:

It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

Something I’m sure I’ll want to find again in the future: the OmniGroup provide statistics from their update app showing what OS, CPU, Graphics and various other hardware stats their user base has. Very useful for getting a rough guide of adoption rates.

Automator is a cool little app that comes with OS X that makes it much, much easier to programmatically control the various applications on your computer (all the good ones anyway). It’s all done by dragging and dropping actions into a workflow – the output of one leads to the input of the next. In Leopard, Automator got a big upgrade so it can now handle loops and variables but most of the time you don’t need them.

The server migration to a new data center last night went horribly wrong when the new IP didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a reverse DNS lookup. Sadly that means the secondary DNS where all the actual requests go to refused to pull the updates and the site was effectively down.

I think I’ve managed to sort out the DNS issues for all the domains hosted here now by making one of the secondary DNS’s the primary DNS and generally juggling things around. This is probably a smarter set up anyway so I’ll probably leave it this way in future. Still, annoying….

Arrived safely in the UK early this morning with no hassles from customs thanks to my shiny new visa. Somewhat ironically I also got my first serendipitous travel event from Drupal:

The problem of course being that this was my reminder to change my home location from Brisbane to London so I actually miss Andrew by a week. Never mind, he’s heading over here next anyway.

I woke up this morning to discover that I can no longer access my GMail account (using Google apps for your domain) via IMAP. It just returns an error saying that IMAP is not enabled for your account. The IMAP option has even disappeared from the web interface, now only allowing you to enable POP access. The same is true for a second Google Apps for your domain account that work uses.

Symptoms

• You have a NetGear FVS124G router providing VPN.
• You use IPSecuritas to let Mac users log into that VPN.
• VPN has worked in the past.
• VPN is no longer working and you haven’t changed any settings (in our case there was a power outage and the modem configuration didn’t come back as expected initially then was fixed so all the settings were the same as they used to be).
• In the IPSecuritas log you get a message stating “inappropriate sadb message passed.” and  Phase 1 never actually connects (thus Phase 2 times out because of a lack of Phase 1 connection).

Solution

1. Log into the admin interface of the NetGear router and go to Management->Settings Backup.
2. Click “Back Up” and save the backed up settings file to your local hard drive.
3. Under “Restore saved settings from file” click “Choose file…” and select the file you just downloaded.
4. Click Restore.

If you’re having the same problem I was, your VPN will now work.

I had a very interesting conversation with our product manager yesterday centred around ensuring the development team is always working on the highest value functionality for our clients (and thus the business). One of the key messages I took away from the conversation was the distinction between estimates of cost for development work and estimates of value.

So what exactly do I mean by cost and value? Cost is generally fairly simple to measure, it’s the amount you have to pay for the resources used to actually develop a function. That includes developer time, office space for those developers, hardware and software etc etc. There’s a lot involved to get an accurate assessment of the cost but it’s fairly straight forward to measure it as you spend. Just ask accounts for the figures. It only gets difficult once you start taking into account opportunity cost which is generally ignored anyway.

I’ve recently noticed that having auto-save functionality no longer makes me feel “safe”. Previously, if a program automatically saved every 5 minutes or so I was completely confident that I could never lose more than 5 minutes work which seemed good enough. Now however, I want more than auto-save, I want version history.

If I can’t go back and find a previous version then I can’t be confident that the next time I save it won’t corrupt things and I’ll lose everything. Odd really.

Daniel Jalkut has an interesting piece on the perception people have that simple software should be free. It’s a perception that I actually share – it annoys me when people ask for money in exchange for really simple applications. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort that goes into software, it’s just that I’m a make the world a better place kind of guy. I believe simple things, which cost effectively nothing to reproduce, should be released for free on the basis that you both give and take from such a system.