frankly at a glance.

Just got my iPhone last week and I thought I’d share my thoughts and experience with it.

Antennagate
The story of “antennagate” has died down ever since Apple’s press conference where CEO Steve Jobs acknowledged the iPhone 4′s alleged weak spots in its antenna system.

The myth of “antennagate” states that when you touch the bottom left side of the phone, especially where the black strip is… your signal goes way down and may cause you to drop a call. The science behind it is that the human body is a natural conductor, and once you bridge the two pieces of the antennas (as separated by the black plastic strip) you effectively change the length of the antenna. That length is crucial when you are trying to receive a specific wavelength of energy. People also found by putting a layer of insulation over the antenna joint will ease the problem. Therefore, cases and the so-called “Antenna-aid” methods came to play, and eventually forced Apple into giving out free cases to all iPhone 4 users.

I got my iPhone 4 on August 13th, and went home and began testing these myths of “antennagate”. I found some very interesting results that I would like to share.

1. “antennagate” certainly exists in Canada as well, despite other reports.
2. One may lose 2-3 bars in an area with mediocre signal strength by bridging the antennas.
3. A simple tape or band-aid does not solve the problem. Only a case can effectively eliminate it.
4. Myths about Apple applying a non-conductive coating to the phone to solve the problem is bogus.
5. I have yet to drop a single call despite numerous attempts to “death-grip” my phone.
6. While calls did not drop… 3G data throughput did die.
7. I was getting 2-3 bars with my iPhone 3G in this area, but now with the iPhone 4 I get 3-4 bars. The new antenna really is better than the old generation… well when it works.

Continue reading →

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Here is my story of the day… I woke up at 4:30 am and arrived at the Fairview Apple Store at 5:20 am hoping to get a good position in line for the iPhone 4. People gradually started showing up after 6:30 am and lined up neatly in front of the storefront. With great anticipation, we were greeted by an Apple Store manager but was told that they did NOT have stock and did NOT know if they will be coming in today. This is a typical icebreaker managers use to “comfort” the fellow fanboys/gals… Not a big deal! Now let the clock tick!

Around 11:30 am, we saw a few shipments arriving at the store… but was again told by store officials that the delivery did not contain any iPhone 4… so time continued to tick. Around 12:45 pm people started to get excited because a few large boxes showed up! But again… NO IPHONE 4s! The good thing was… time knows no limits… and either did any of our fellow fanboys/gals! Therefore, another 3 hours flew us by… but the only thing it left everyone with was the ultimate truth – THE STORE WILL NOT BE GETTING ANY IPHONES TODAY!

People looked at each other in dismay… How could an Apple Store be out of iPhones and not know when the next shipment is coming in… but only to drop a definitive nuke after making people age while standing in front of the store? This just does not make sense! Why couldn’t the manager get this information sooner? Knowing that the information could be obtained… but only to tell customers that they have wasted their life waiting! I think the answer to this has something to do with the discussed “antennagate” problem. Continue reading →

Popularity: 3% [?]

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On July 30th, the iPhone 4 was officially released in Canada! I know many friends of mine actually drove down to the US to buy an unlocked phone… Either way, the country is filled with anticipation for the new iPhone and its allegedly crippled antenna system. I called many stores only to find out the phone was sold-out after a few hours it was put on the shelves.

I came home to check people’s feedback on RedFladDeals, only to find many people selling their newly purchased iPhone 4s for twice as much as Apple is! Also, users confirmed that the “death grip” exist in Canada as well. Clearly, Apple did not make any hardware revisions to address the issue, at least not for this batch of phones. People were also concerned about the long wait to activate their phones on Rogers/Fido system. Their service kept crashing and people reported line-ups and wait times of 10 hours + at Apple Stores. Apple online store has a 3 week ETA for order and finally to make the situation worse, Fido and Rogers are directing people to local stores to buy the phone. They are not willing to take order over the phone anymore… Continue reading →

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Just like I was, a lot people have been seeking around the web for an easy way of invoking a lightbox as a page loads.

Examples including http://www.bram.us/demo/projects/autofirelightbox/ uses javascript to trigger the lightbox. However, scripts like this one does not work with Drupal’s Lightbox 2 module.

Here is what I used to accomplish this in Drupal, by using  JQuery’s triggerHandler function to invoke the click. Hope this will help others who need an auto lightbox pop-up.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

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iOS 4
Apple recently released its latest build of iOS (formerly iPhoneOS) version 4. This is perhaps the most significantly improved iOS version to date. It adds multi-tasking, Folders, Spell check, enhanced Spotlight search, enhanced Mail app (multiple Exchange accounts and unified inbox), enhanced Contacts app and the ability to edit Playlists in iPod.
Here is a full list of new features by Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5513121/the-hidden-secrets-of-iphone-os-4/
My personal favourite on iOS 4 is the Orientation Lock. You double press the Home button, swipe to the right (go to the very left), and tap on the round arrow to lock or unlock your screen orientation. It is a bit pathetic to think that Apple gave us this after 3 major releases of the OS… but it is there now.

Version 4 at first glance gives you a very refreshed feel to it. I think it’s mainly because the icons were made to be brighter, and the default screen brightness was a bit higher than my original… but none the less I liked it. The responsiveness of the OS also improved quite a bit over OS 3.x. This is especially evidential on older hardware like my iPhone 3G. The homescreen transitions are smoother, and icon animations are silkier. All of my apps from iOS 3.x worked flawlessly and games ran as they should. Continue reading →

Popularity: 16% [?]

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It has been about a month since my last post, but the site is getting some real nice traffic since the posts about my “Drobo Alternative“. So thank you all for the support.

I’ve been working my rear off these days… apart from my day job I am working on two other sites. Both are e-commerce oriented sites based on Drupal.
While Drupal may not be particularly popular among e-commerce ventures, I am here to tell you that it has some serious e-com muscle and potential.

The particular module is called Ubercart. It is a full featured e-commerce Drupal module that handles the frontend store, as well as inventory and payment processing. What is even more important is that since this is a Drupal module, it can take advantage of the various existing Drupal modules to function. Thus, allowing the developers to make Ubercart great at what it does.

The folks over at TopNotchThemes developed an amazing sample theme that supports Ubercart out of the box. This is the Acquia Prosper. I use as a foundation for all of my Drupal e-commerce projects. It is built on the Fusion themeing framework and highly customizable.

All you need to do is download and install these on your box… hook it up with a PayPal account and you are good to go.

Coming from OScommerce, developing on Drupal is much more organized as long as you stay within the scope of the Drupal API. The API is comprehensive but it is quite the beast to master. It is nothing like writing your normal PHP app, and it makes you feel like you are developing in another language.

Having said that, Drupal + Ubercart is years ahead of OScommerce in every way. I love the modular design that makes Drupal what it is, and the enormous dev support i has behind it.

I’m going to try and write my magazine subscription app as a Ubercart add-on this summer.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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I apologize to everyone for the looooonnnggg wait for this post. I have swapped out a few hardware components as well as OS for this NAS build. It wasn’t all pretty… and at times it felt frustrating… However, my NAS box and I have lived to tell the story.
In this post I will walk you through each step of the building process, so you won’t make the same mistakes I did. I have written two other posts detailing the thought-process on some of the choices, but for your convenience I’ll sum everything up in this one post.

The Goal
The story here is simple – we are building a DIY storage appliance that is not only FASTER but CHEAPER than the Drobo. I have owned a 2nd generation Drobo for about 8 months. For the most part, it did its job. However, all the weakness of the device surfaced when I dug into the world of Network Attached Storage or simply NAS. I have written about my attempts to put the Drobo on my LAN …   http://frankleng.me/2010/02/11/droboshare-alternatives-tonidoplug-gigabit-switch/ I did not want to spend another $200 for the Droboshare! That setup worked for the most part, but performance was not even close to production-worthy.
I mean try to live with a 4TB NAS that transferred at 3-5MB/s… which is actually on par with Droboshare’s throughput… need I say more?

What I needed was:

1. Energy efficient, lower powered machine. (It’s a NAS after all, not a media center)
2. Able to let me swap a drive when it fails, and not lose data.
3. Able to expand, swapped out the smallest drive and replace with a larger drive.
4. Costs a lot less than $350USD. (that’s the price of the Drobo, not including drives)
5. Easily manageable, settings can be tweaked and system status can be monitored.
6. Speed, Speed, Speed. Must be able to sustain Gigabit throughput, even for larger files.

The Facts
Most BYOD (Bring Your Own Drives) storage devices on the market today do NOT offer the features that the Drobo does. The Drobo was never designed as a NAS, but rather a DAS (Directly Attached Storage), and it did that job fairly well. So if you are an average user who favour ease-of-use than anything else… then read no more… you are better off with the Drobo. However, if you are like me and you want that blazing fast performance for the smallest price tag… you have found the right place. =)

NAS devices are computers too. The basic rules do apply – the faster the chipset the faster the throughput; the more RAM the better, etc.

Lastly, and most importantly NAS devices’ throughput depend largely on caching and the CPU’s ability to translate between different storage and communication protocols.

Continue reading →

Popularity: 100% [?]

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