Archive for July, 2008

Downloaded and compiled the source for the WordPress for IPhone application. Running it in the simulator. We’ll see if this post works!

Next weekend is iPhoneDevCamp, hosted at the Adobe offices on Townsend. It should be really cool, certain other issues notwithstanding. If you are as annoyed as I am about that, you will also enjoy this.

Someone actually stopped me this morning to say that I was “an inspiration” for walking all the time. Apparently he’s seen me every day for a long time and was impressed that I’ve kept it up. Wild. I guess I can hope it will inspire him to not drive to work every day, stopping at Starbucks on the way. (I walk past four Starbucks outlets every day, which by itself is a little disturbing.)

Normally the people I run into as I get close to Caltrain (this is before 7 am mind you) are either bleary-eyed Adobe employees or whacked-out homeless.

blah blah blah

So apparently Apple is giving MobileMe subscribers an I’m-Sorry present for putting up with the launch mess, a 30 day extension. I haven’t seen an email myself yet, but people have reported getting a message saying as much. This knowledge base article confirms it.

I’m supposed to be eligible, as I signed up before the 15th.

I got some paper spam the other day, an advertisement for a fancy hotel chain showing an assortment of people in what is presumed to be a hotel lobby. It immediately struck me as familiar, and although it took me a few minutes to recall the details of the original piece I recognized the source immediately. Raphael’s The School of Athens. This work, a fresco, is by far the best known from the Room of the Segnatura, commissioned by Julius II for his private library at the Vatican.

Here’s the original, from wikipedia:

The School of Athens

And here’s the one from the advertisement:

There are so many things here that mimic the original, from Diogenes sitting on the steps to the tile pattern on the floor. Is the dark-haired woman with the violin case to the left representing Hypatia? Euclid and his pupils appear to be replaced by a pair who look to be perusing a map of for all we know is Hollywood Homes of the Stars. Who knows. I would hope this would suggest that somewhere there is an advertising agency that employs those with an actual knowledge of classical antiquity and Renaissance art. Of course, they did leave out Plato and Aristotle.

I’ve gotten the home laptops set up and talking to MobileMe, as well as the phone. Aside from sometimes slow web stuff, the biggest problem I’ve had was in getting my address book correct. I tried to import a bunch of vcards from the web interface, expecting it to prompt me to resolve duplicates like AddressBook does. Wrong.

I had to sync the mess back to a laptop and fix all the dups by hand from the actual application. (I think the only remaining oops is where I accidentally merged cards for two people with the same name. Will clean that up Monday by getting fresh copies from the office.)

There is a bit of weirdness in that the mail application, when I set up my me.com account, insists there is a mac.com account. I don’t have a mac.com address, so when I tried to send a message with the incorrect smtp settings it balked. I see there is a new MobileMe software update waiting for me, so presumably that will fix a couple of things. (Like how System Preferences doesn’t actually seem to know about MobileMe yet, although it still works as .mac.)

http://www.google.com/search?q=mobileme+fail

The general consensus online is Epic FAIL.

Well, sorta.

I was able to use the .mac key just fine, basically MobileMe is .mac with some new chrome. I wasn’t able to get a .mac address as well but now I have my spiffy new me.com address. What I’m going to do with it, I haven’t decided. I’m doing this for the other sync stuff right now, with the option to use their IMAP if getting ours set up continues to be a headache.

But boy is webmail slow. Response on all the web stuff is sluggish at best, and I’m talking from my computer. I haven’t even tried setting up my phone yet.

I went by the Apple Store last night, having heard that Mobile Me was up and running. They told me no retail packages would be available until Friday. Well, since the .mac transition page said that I could still activate with a .mac code, I got one of those instead. I had to ask for it, but they had them.

I don’t really like going to the Apple Store, the downtown San Francisco store is a tourist destination so it’s always packed. But for small things it’s cheaper and faster to just go there. I walk past all the time anyway.

So now I have a .mac box (unopened) and the service is still down, even this morning. It appears I could sign up for a free trial of Mobile Me, but I really don’t care about free or not. I can always take the package back and swap it out, but I was hoping to avoid a second trip to the store.