Steve's Ramblings

Was trying to check a problem with Canalplan AC today and as its sitting on the server in the living room I thought I should try it “remotely” rather than access off the local network.

So I got the O2 broadband dongle and powered it up and connected, and couldn’t reproduce the error… Oh well, thats how things go, especially when you are talking about IE8.

So whilst I was connected I thought I’d just hop onto this blog site and check a couple of things.

Sorry – No Can Do! Not Possible. Kept telling me the site was not available.

But it sits on the same server as Canalplan AC. It sits on blogs.canalplan.org.uk when Canalplan is on www.canalplan.org.uk.

So if one responds, then the other other should. Right?

Well you are wrong:

Here is the output of a ping command:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\steve>ping www.canalplan.org.uk

Pinging www.canalplan.org.uk [212.159.61.36] with 32 bytes of data:

So that’s good – its getting the IP address. It wont ever respond to pings because the router dumps them.

So lets try for the blogs:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\steve>ping blogs.canalplan.org.uk
Ping request could not find host blogs.canalplan.org.uk. Please check the name and try again.

Nope – its not there.

The DNS servers for O2 don’t recognise it as a valid host name.

Tosspots.

OR rather its their Windows software that is screwy. If I power up under Linux then it works fine!

Things move fast in the IT world:  Oracle spit out a new version of their database every couple of years, Microsoft keep…. well actually the less said about Microsoft the better to be honest, and as for Apple……

I’ve been coding away on my Wordbooker Plugin since the tail end of last year. I had great plans for version 1.8.  I was going to add internationalisation and completely rebuild comment handling from the ground up as its not really working properly.. Hey I coded it in a day and bolted it onto the existing code so what else would you expect…

So I’d got all these plans worked out in my head and then along came Facebook and their developer conference (F8) who shoved a huge great spanner into the works.

Now for those who have never tried programming against the Facebook API you wont know just how annoying it is. It is rather like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling : Facebook quite happily change the API on the live site without telling anyone which breaks things. Go on.. how many times have you seen the “Oops, something seems to have gone wrong” message? Well developers get that too – or rather they get calls that suddenly return no data, or incorrect and incomplete data, or error codes they’ve never seen before.

People file bug reports and Facebook go and change the documentation and then deny its an error. Or Facebook fix the bug and everything is fine for a few weeks then it re-occurs which suggests a lack of a proper test and release process. The worst one I’ve seen is a bug which apparently “fixed” itself with Facebook representatives saying they did not know what had caused the problem or why it was now working again. The PHP files they provide don’t even have version IDs in them so you can’t tell if you’ve got the latest version, or worse still : you can’t determine the version of the files that another WordPress plugin might have installed – so your code doesn’t work because the version of the Facebook files they have installed doesn’t have the function, or class, you need for your code to work.

So any way, along comes F8 and a whole new way of interfacing with Facebook : The Graph API, and along with that came a new data model and a new data permissions dialogue, and a new Data policy. Everything new and shiny and the statement that “On June 1, 2010, we’ll automatically transition all Facebook Platform applications and websites who have not yet migrated.”

Sounds good doesn’t it. Apart from the fact that no-one at Facebook has explained how you can use the new Data permissions dialogue with the “old” API, and everything I’ve tried simply comes back with meaningless errors, and from what I’ve read other developers have experienced the same problems.

So I guess I could just convert my application over to the new API couldn’t I, that would make things easier wouldn’t it? Ahhh…………..actually I can’t because Facebook haven’t actually written the PHP API libraries yet – well not to the point of supporting “offline” access, which is what my application relies on. Actually that last bit says a lot about Facebook : They announce a whole new API and a whole new data structure, but the only way to access it is hand crafting your own CURL statements and running a “live” Facebook session. Talk about the right hand not knowing what the left is doing….

Madness

I quite like my G1, and now I’ve got TasKiller it’s battery life is almost reasonable.

One of the big features of the G1 is that when you set it up you have to tie it to a Google Account. This gives you access to email and also synchronises your contacts and your calendar on the phone with your Google Account.

This gives you a lot of extra functionality. Rather than maintaining your contacts on your phone on its internal screen you can sit at your computer and login to your Google account and do all the work there and then synchronise it, and you can also do work on your email (like delete messages in bulk and move them round) from your computer which is a lot easier.

This breaks the traditional link between phone and SIM and contacts/numbers. In the past you saved numbers in the phone or on your SIM. Move phone or move provider and you’ve got fun and games getting all your contacts synced up in one place. With the G1 they are in your Google account. So change your phone to another Android phone, or change provider (which at the moment you can’t)  and everything simply moves with you. Brilliant – and the G1 even allows you to import contacts from your SIM.

But what happens when your phone goes wrong? Well I found out.

The keyboard on my G1 has gone faulty with the P key and the backspace key going a bit odd and not working about 70% of the times you press them, and anyone who knows my typing will know that I use the backspace key a lot.  So I phoned T-Mobile and they said “Take it to your local T-Mobile store and they’ll send it away for repair”, and so I did and yes they did.

T-Mobile gave me a loan phone, a phone that looks like it crawled out from the primordial soup, no internet, no 3G, no nothing, but most importantly : NO CONTACTS.

Where are my contacts? That’s right, they’re sitting on a Google server somewhere and the phone cannot get to them.

Now I fully understand that T-Mobile can’t keep a pile of G1s in stock as loan phones, but now with things like the G1 blurring the line between phone and internet, especially when it comes to contacts etc. I think that maybe they need to look at their loan phone policy.

As for getting my G1 back? It could be 10-15 working days. So I’m stuck in the technological backwater until I get it back, unless I can work out how to use the Viewty. The only good thing you can say about the Viewty is that Linux just works with the on-board 3G modem.