July 7, 2008
Apple, Opinion, Rant, Rogers, iPhone
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Why I won’t be getting an iPhone on July 11th or anytime in the near future?
Well, it’s simple. Blame Rogers.
Being a webmaster, I would love to get an iPhone. The internet access that it provides gives me a lot of convenience with regards to checking the health status of my servers and other internet related stuff.
When the iPhone’s arrival in Canada was finally announced by Apple and Rogers, I was very excited, although, not exactly hopeful.
See, I’ve been dealing with Rogers for a long, long, long time. I knew their philosophy. Rogers philosophy has been very consistent and simple: Let’s see how much we can screw our customers.
With that knowledge, I had predicted (in a comment posting on another blog) that Rogers’ iPhone plans would give something like 200 MB of internet bandwidth for $60. I was a bit off and fairly surprised that they provided double that bandwidth for that $60.
However, when the official plans were revealed I got to read the fine print, my suspicions were confirmed. Rogers had created awesome f*%k-the-customer plans.
See, to get that 400 MB for $60 plan with reasonable features, you actually have to pay:
- $60 for the plan
- $15 for “iPhone value pack”
(who would use their cell phone without call display?)
- $6.95 ‘System access fee’
(a bogus fee that they used to make people believe it was a government thing.)
- $0.50 for mandatory 911 access
(why is this not buried in the price to begin with?)
And everything is taxed at 13% (in Ontario).
($60 + $15 + $6.95 + $0.50) * 1.13 = $93.17
$93.17 For basic iPhone service that includes a measly 400 MB of data access with a paltry 150 anytime-minutes. If this is not a f*%k the customer plan, I don’t know what is.
$40 (+taxes) more per month gets you 2 GB of data and 800 anytime-minutes.
The kicker is that these plans come only with a three years contract. So Rogers gets to screw you harder for much longer.
$93 per month won’t bankrupt me, but I have this thing called principle: I refuse to get screwed willingly by a monopoly.
I survived without an iPhone so far and I will continue to do so.
I have five friends and we were set to get an iPhone each, but with these ridiculous cost plans, our minds have been changed. Well, except maybe one of us who is more of an attention whore than the rest - he would pay that ridiculous price just to say ‘hey look at me, I have an iPhone’. So right here, Apple has lost 5 (maybe 6) potential iPhone sales.
Today, around the web, there are plenty of articles about how Apple is reprimanding/punishing Rogers for those atrocious plans by reducing the iPhone shipments to Canada.
I don’t think it is punishment nor retribution. Apple is a business and they must have realized that Rogers would never sell that many iPhones with those rates, so they redirected those phones to places that are more likely to sell them than Rogers.
So the question at the end of my previous article ‘Apple’s iPhone coming to Canada’ has been answered:
The answer is a big fat “NO”.
The predictions that I made in my other article about the reasonableness of Rogers upcoming plans in my other article ‘Has Apple met its match in Rogers?’ have come true.
Sometime I hate being right.
Yes, Rogers sucks.
May 4, 2008
Apple, Leopard, Rant, Tips, Troubleshooting
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One of the best features of Mac OS X is a feature called ‘Folder Actions’. What this feature allows the power user to do is to watch a folder on the computer and whenever that folder receives a file, folder action kicks in and runs a script of the user’s choosing.
I’ve used this feature for a long, long time. I use it among other things to archive all the files submitted to my main site into a folder tree organized by date. For example a story submitted on April 20th, 2008 will end up in:
/SubmissionArchives/2008/04/20/
I’ve been doing this for years. So long ago that I can’t recall when I started doing it that way; it may have started on Mac OS 9. So needless to say, it’s very useful.
I have few other folder actions set up to do various routine tasks.
But it all came to a halt with my upgrade to Leopard or Mac OS X 10.5.
In Leopard, I couldn’t get folder actions to work with more than one active folder action. If I set up 2 of them, only the second one will work. If I set up three, the third will work and the system will completely ignore the first two. I’ve filed bug reports with Apple, and now at 10.5.2 the problem persists.
This weekend, I’ve had to do something that I rarely do, which is to archive a massive number of files; around 27,000 files at the same time. So what better need for an automated thing other than a massive job?
Well, as it turned out, a massive job is what you don’t want to handle with the current version of Folder Actions.
As soon as I dumped the 27,000 files into the watched folder, my computer (a 2.8 Ghz iMac) slowed down to a crawl. A quick check in the terminal showed that the Folder Actions daemon consuming 100% of one CPU core and the Finder was consuming the remaining 80% of the other core. The funny part is that no files were being moved. After 30 minutes, files started moving at the speed of 1 file every 4 seconds. At that rate, the job would take 30 hours to finish.
But the kicker is that the Finder kept crashing and throwing a dialog about an invalid connection and requiring me to click ‘OK’ in order for it to proceed. So even if I were willing to wait, without constant clicking OK, the job wouldn’t proceed at all.
I worked around the problem by creating a new script that reads the list of files from a flat text file that I created by selecting all the files in the Finder and copying and then pasting into a BBEdit document. So the script reads that text file, line by line and hands the file’s path to the finder and the finder moves it to its destination.
It’s slow, it’s doing about 2 files per second as I write this, so theoretically it should be done in like three hours or so.
I wish I knew more about shell scripting. I’m sure such a job for a good shell scripter would take no time to set up and few minutes at the most to execute. I guess that’s something that I need to add to my arsenal of tools.
And here’s a free tip: In AppleScript’s date function, if you want the number of the month do it like this:
set theMonth to the month of theDate as integer
if you don’t add that ‘as integer’ bit, you always get the name of the month and that bit is not documented anywhere that I could find. I stumbled on it by sheer dumb luck. Page 88 of AppleScript’s language guide gives you this:
month
Access: read/write
Class: constant (page 86)
Specifies the month of the year of a date object, with one of the constants January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, or December.
But if you you try this:
set theMonth to July as integer
You get 7 back.
Talk about counterintuitive.
February 4, 2008
Apple, Opinion, Rant, Rogers, iPhone
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It’s now February 4th, 2008 and the iPhone has been out in the US for more than seven months already.
Here in Canada, there is no mention of it yet. Not even rumours that it could be coming any time soon. I believe it will be a very long time before Canadians could buy an iPhone legitimately and use it in Canada.
This is due to the nature of the Rogers company in Canada.
For those outside of Canada, Rogers is one of the telecom giants in this country. It is a cable and cellular provider and it is the only cellular provider in Canada using the GSM system. So that makes it the only company that can have the iPhone on its network.
And for those fortunate enough to never have had to deal with Rogers, Rogers is one of the worst companies here in this country. When they were my cable providers, they had the worst service, worst customer service and they jacked up their prices regularly. It’s hard to believe, but when I was with them, they jacked up the price of the good channels package by $1 every four months. The package was basically any channel other than the local ones and it started at $8.95. Four years later the price for the package had reached $21.
I had vowed to never deal with them and I changed from their cable service to Bell’s satellite service, which while isn’t the greatest, is still better than Rogers. However, Rogers went and bought my cellular provider Fido, the only other cellular provider here with GSM. So now, I’m back with Rogers involuntarily. Bell’s cellular service sucks, so it’s not even a choice.
So now with Rogers the only cellular provider able to carry the iPhone, the chances of the iPhone coming to Canada, on any reasonable terms, are almost slim to none. Rogers doesn’t have any incentive to give Apple any good deal and doesn’t have any incentive to give its own customers a reasonable deal on its data plans.
Why would it want to? Nobody else can have the iPhone currently and Apple can’t offer the iPhone advantage to anybody else in the country at this time. So Rogers can take their sweet time to get the deal that serves them best.
However, if Rogers stay stubborn, they may lose big time.
I heard whispers that Telus (the third cellular provider in the country) is in the early stages of switching from CDMA to GSM; mostly to get the iPhone.
Let’s hope that this rumour is true and that it happens fast enough to get the second generation iPhone. It would be sweet. It would allow me to get an iPhone (without having to buy one and crack it) and move away from Rogers at the same time.
November 2, 2007
Leopard, Rant, Software Review
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Yet another useful feature has been eliminated in Leopard.
The audio controller that the Finder’s column view had for the preview pane when previewing audio files has been eliminated. Why? I don’t know. No logical explanation can come to mind.
In Tiger, if you set your window’s view to the column view and point it to a folder that has MP3 files, when you select one of those files, the right-most column shows a controller that allows you to play the audio file, select the point where you want the play head to be and control the playback’s volume. Leopard: NO MORE!
What you get in Leopard is a silly, YouTube-like preview square with a big ‘play’ button in its middle. No volume control and no skipping ahead. You can always hit the space bar to get a big window showing iTunes like display, and you can skip ahead, but you still can’t control the volume.
Somebody should tell Apple’s engineers that an UPGRADE is when you make things better, not worse.
October 29, 2007
Leopard, Rant, Tips, how-to
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One of the ugly new interface “features” of Leopard is its translucent menu bar. In my opinion it’s ugly, distracting and serves absolutely no useful purpose. I have no clue why any sane person at Apple would want to implement it.
There have been many complaints about it on the internet since Leopard reached people’s hands; and unlike the shiny Dock, so far, the menu bar has no workaround to fix the problem and make it opaque.
However, I found a very simple solution after two minutes of looking at this annoying eye sore.
It’s simple. Open your desktop picture in any image editor and fill the top 22 pixels with white. Now because the system caches the desktop image, the change won’t appear until you log out, or simply go to the System Preferences and through the Desktop & Screen Saver panel, select a different picture for your desktop and then select your original white top image again and done. You’ll have a white menu bar without the visual clutter.
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