A lot of Apple haters have been rubbing their tiny hands with glee recently after news reports of a security flaw in the iPhone OS 3.0 that could allow hackers to "Hijack every iPhone in the world". Many were quick to point out how slow Apple were for not releasing a patch, and many simply made it a soap box for "iPhone sucks, use Android" rants.

However, on July 31st, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1, with a patch for this SMS issue. It installs easily enough, job done. Of course, not being privy to such information as how to hack my own phone with this exploit, I can't check if it does the job. Either way, there it is. A fix. More detail on the OS 3.0.1 release notes.

Last weekend, the company that host this blog (4Uhosting) had a major meltdown, along with several other companies using the same datacentre. The UKGrid Greenheys DC had a major power outage, taking out many servers entirely and effectively causing many hosts to drop off the 'net completely.

A news update on the support page at 4uhosting.co.uk had the following to say:

"We would like to make it very clear that this incident occured through no fault of ours. It could happen at any facility at any time. We rent floor space in UK datacentres to run our business and we do not expect this kind of thing to happen. Unfortunately, from time to time it does and we can neither predict, or prevent such problems."

For some reason, several places on the web with streaming video (e.g. ITV player) have gone with Microsoft's Silverlight for the interface. I have no idea what Silverlight is like as a platform, but I do know that it's a really bad choice for streaming video.

The main problem I have with it is that, on a 6MB/s ADSL connection, I get skip free performance from the likes of youtube and the BBC iplayer. Silverlight players, not so much. 0% left in the buffer every 30 seconds or so for even small videos, and there is no apparent way to change the buffer settings.

If anyone knows how I can make Silverlight less crappy, please to be posting comments!

Some many moons ago now, I had a little rant about a new scourge on the internets ... the beast that is Twitter. In it, I said that I can understand the draw of social messaging (I use IRC and IM, so the concept is not alien to me) but that I can't understand the point of sending out details of the minutiae of your life to complete strangers. However, a long time has passed since I wrote that post, so I thought it time to revisit. Why? Well, simply because I've been actively using Twitter for a while now. Yes, I have been sucked in. Bugger.

So I was passed a URL today. This one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm

Have a look, then come back. Done? OK. Are you laughing? I know I am.

So they think that accessing illegal content is worthy of a complete internet ban. Well, let's face it, the punishment must fit the crime. Knocking off an 11 quid CD is surely worth a lifetime being left out of the digital revolution, yes? I thought so.

So hyperbole aside, how many of those people who would be kicked off do they think are current or future IT professionals? I'd wager "a lot", or a figure thereabouts. So when the nation's IT workforce isn't allowed to use the internet any more, and the digital dark age upon us, surely we can reflect on that and say "verily and thus, we may be in the digital equivalent of skid row, but at least we have properly recompensed record label execs ... I mean ... artists."

And aside from the ludicrous idea behind it, let's not forget the lack of any method of enforcing such a thing. If a residence gets cut off, can they sign up for another? Does it somehow stick to the individual and follow them around? What about mobile data plans, public WiFi, pay-for WiFi, hotels and the like? Libraries? Companies?

OK, maybe it wasn't worth a whole blog post to rant about this thing because, realistically, there's no way it could ever be enforced. It did give me the best laugh I've had all day, though.

As I have previously mentioned on this blog, I have a Nokia 770 internet tablet to replace my old Palm T3. While the 802.11g WiFi, bluetooth, hi resolution screen and full screen thumb-board are all welcome, it does have a lack of PDA functionality. Fortunately for me, this can easily be added with GPE. There is an address book, task manager, calendar and other goodies available in Maemo form on maemo.org.

So now I have a calendar on my N770. It's not as polished as the Palm calendar, and there are some niggling rendering bugs, but it works and does the job. Most importantly, though, it does something the Palm never could: synchronise easily with Google Calendar.

Thanks to the wonderful Erminig application, I can synchronise multiple calendars (e.g. my calendar, my friends' calendars, bank holidays) into separate GPE calendars that I can enable and disable at will, but all visible in the same calendar interface distinguished by colour. This all happens straight from the N770, so no PC sync is required as it is with the Palm devices.

So far it's worked flawlessly. It's really easy to use, and it's made synchronisation of calendars a useful tool to me, rather than just a means of backing up my portable device.

In recent weeks there has been a sort of micro-backlash against Firefox and AdBlock+ by the sorts of people who believe it is their right to force advertisements down your throat. The responses have been many and various, but usually with the gist of "If you can't support your business model without invasive advertising, maybe it's your business model that's the problem."

Like many people, I like to dial up using my mobile phone when I'm out and about. I only have GPRS, after my 3G phone got on my nerves with its rubbish battery when using CDMA and silly camera lens cover. That doesn't mean it has its uses though. For SSH and image-free browsing it's great, and as other posts suggest it works nicely with the Nokia 770.

Unfortunately OS X is a little less friendly than the Nokia device when it comes to talking to your favourite bluetooth modem. It insists that you manually specify the correct Modem Script to get it all going, and if you can't see yours then you're pretty much stuffed. Well, that's what I thought.

It turns out that a chap called Ross Barkman has made a massive collection of dialup modem scripts for all kinds of phones and other devices, including some generic ones that I eventually used to get the X820 working. The collection is all here, with instructions on what to do.

Oh, and a word from the not-so-wise; when it asks you the phone number for GPRS, make sure you enter the GRPS APN into the field, and not the strange *9***1# nonsense that other devices ask you for. It's just something to be wary of, although Ross's scripts to include a file telling you that.

In the interests of something to do, I thought it'd be interesting to see what the current top site is for each letter of the alphabet. To achieve this rather nonsensical goal I enlisted the help of the Firefox Google toolbar, which handily recommends search terms as you type. I simply entered each letter, searched for the first suggestion and clicked the first link. This is what I found:

This post is a bit of a cathartic rant, but in as polite a way as possible. Please bear with me.

There have been a few micro-revolutions on the internet of late regarding software development. Not all of them are sane, some are outright bizarre and one or two are just rehashes of very, very old concepts. For example, functional languages are popular on reddit.com, and dynamically typed languages are popular with the web crowd on dzone.com.

One of the most common dynamically typed languages around at the moment in Javascript. It's a strange thing; not in the slightest object oriented, but has a concept of objects. Instead, people seem intent on recreating OO like behaviour using what passes for a Javascript object and piles upon piles of closures and anonymous functions. While this is certainly a step in a pragmatic direction, it seems that this particular paradigm shift sometimes brings with it a bit too much cleverness, and not quite enough sensibility.

Javascript is a bit of a mad beast; classes are defined as closures that are somehow instantiated. Methods are declared as closures within the closure that is the class. It's all a bit mad. This mass of closures within closures within closures is overshadowed by that most heinous of things; mutable types. Heinous? Surely no! I'll have the dynamic language fanbois all over testiculating about the superiority of such things. However, I do have reasons.