I appear to have a working iPhone 3G, to replace my aging (not always working) Samsung SGH-X100.

My first impressions are quite good – the phone does a lot of useful things that my old didn’t. It really is nice having a phone that doesn’t crash 6 seconds into a phone call, has Internet access, and is generally nice to use.

Having used it for a few days, there are only a few annoyances. The lack of copy and paste has been fairly widely reported, and it generally hasn’t been an issue for me, until I wanted to track an order on the City-Link website, when I had the tracking number in an email and SMS.

The other annoyance has been the thing that replaces what you have just written with what it thought you were writing. One thing it likes changing in particular is dro to fro, making my email address much harder to type. Having said that though, I am writing this on the phone (using the WordPress application) and the text replacing makes writing large bodies of text much much easier. Maybe just working out how to add “dro” to the dictionary would be enough.

It claims to have what is basically a built in iPod, but I have to say that the sound quality really isn’t as good as some other manufacturers – in particular Creative as I was comparing it to their Zen V (using the same headphones to make it a fair test). Also, the headphones that come with the iPhone are not at all comfortable and an annoying shade of white.

To conclude, the iPhone in general seems really nice, with just a few fairly minor things letting it down. Writing this took longer than it would have on a computer, but was quite a nice experience and is certainly up to the job for dealing with emails and fairly simple web browsing. Now I just need a case for it…

As mentioned in my previous post, MyFC has undergone many changes over the past month.  We are on to version 4 of the site, which involves mostly similar functionality to v3, with the addition of groups.  It also includes a new design, and numerous existing pieces of functionality being redeveloped to fit in to a more widgetized design, while also cleaning up the code for them significantly.  The biggest change in that respect was the messaging system, where the code was just becoming exceptionally hard to work with due to the complexity of it, and the various design changes it has seen.

The other major change, from a user’s point of view, was the addition of moderation for new topics on the forums.  It was getting to the stage where you couldn’t read anything on the forums without finding something exceptionally negative to do with MyFC – lots of criticism but almost none of it constructive.  By moderating it, the most provocative threads now don’t make it through, meaning our lives are easier and hopefully encourage more people to use the forums.  Along with that, we removed post counts and the rating system for posts, which caused so many problems and arguments.

And after that we carried on developing various new pieces of functionality.  Nothing really to say here.

That brings us to the past week.  About a week ago I worked out that the entire site has in the region of 170,000 lines of code.  this is a massive amount (less than I expected, but still massive), and so I started trying to clean it up – there are many files that were used in previous versions and aren’t any more – and also fix various bugs or errors that have popped up.  This is something I will carry on with next week, along with (hopefully) making some significant changes to the forum, which have the honour of being the second worst part of the site from a code perspective.  Seriously, are over 100 queries needed on each page load?

The past month has been stupidly busy.  Aside from working for MyFC, with many major changes going live including version 4 of the website, I have also had to contend with writing a report about the placement I did at blubolt, as well as sorting out various other requirements for the placement.

I did most of the placement stuff in the past week, and as I am on my way to hand in about 64 pages of stuff, you can probably imagine how much I wanted to write anything at all, which hopefully explains why this hasn’t appeared for a while.

As I am writing this, I am on the train to Bath to hand the report in.  First chance I have had to do anything in a while.

Parts of the report and related documentation were exceptionally hard to write because they are really tedious and just generally a waste of time, meaning that after almost every sentence written I got distracted by something.  This wasn’t helped by my plans to buy both an iPhone (or similar) and a new computer.  (Some sections of it I could see a valid reason for having, but the others were irrelevant to my placement).

There are two companies I don’t like.  Microsoft and Apple.  Between them they have popularised computers so much that there is at least one in almost every home, but the products they make are insanely expensive, and with Apple their practices with regard to replacing parts, etc is just shocking.  That makes me reluctant to buy an iPhone, but having had a look around, there is simply not other phone at the same stage with regard to usability, functionality and availability, meaning if I want the features (which I do), I will have to pay over the odds for it.  At least it is possible to jailbreak it, meaning I can use a modification of debian’s package manager with it.

As an aside, the company behind ubuntu have said that OS X, although widely regarded to have the best user interface (which I disagree with – never liked the thing), is starting to lag behind, and so within the next two years, ubuntu should have a much better user interface than any other operating system on the market.  I can’t wait.

The computer I want will naturally be ordered in parts and assembled by me, but so far I keep changing my mind with a number of components on it.  I am happy with the case I have picked (Thermaltake Armor Jr.), CPU (Intel Core 2 Quad 6600), memory (4 gb of decent Corsair stuff), and I know that I don’t want a graphics card as I have one already.  That just leaves PSU and motherboard (CPU Cooler is a fairly simple choice, HDDs depend on prices at the time of purchase).  So far I have switched between the Asus PQ5 Pro, PQ5-E and a Gigabyte one (they have really weird naming schemes for their products, so I can’t remember what it is at all while on the train).  Hopefully I will order that all within the next few days, along with some software to test the system (Guitar Hero 3).

This post seems have become fairly long.  I was going to write about MyFC in it as well, but I can see that being a similar length, so probably best to leave that for another post.