The Gmail iOS app doesn’t allow saving of attachments

A email client that doesn’t let you save attachments. #fail

Version: 1.1.1

Why does iTunes need my password so often?

I’ve never used a service which forces me to enter my password as many times as Apple does my AppleID for iTunes and iOS.

Sure, if I’m buying a $100 app, or maybe even a $1 app I could expect it. But for free apps, free updates, and simply accessing my iTunes match account it seems excessive that I need to enter my password so frequently (currently 2-3 times per day).

On Android, I can even buy apps without entering my password. To use that feature, you must have a passcode lock on the phone, which is fine as pattern unlocks are easy to use anyway.

What’s worst is that apple sometimes wants my password for actions I didn’t initiate. On Monday I was watching a TV show with VLC. Despite being in full screen, iTunes starts bouncing forcing me to click on it only to tell me that it wants my password for iTunes match again (can’t it wait?). Stupid.

To pour salt on the wound, I don’t enter the password, and a day later go to update my Mac which forces reboot. Somehow iTunes with this dialog still showing prevents that action as well.

JIRA OnDemand: Not quite ready for prime time

Update 2012-05-12: from the comments today on JST-5677, the exporter option is currently in a closed beta test.  That’s good news – however, until it’s live for everyone, I believe my assertion of “not ready for prime time” stands.

A week ago, I embarked on a quest to improve my bug tracking setup. I had been using Github for a few projects, and Mantis for some others. Both are terrible bug trackers.

OK, GitHub is pretty decent, it’s charm is its simplicity, but that’s it’s fault as well. Bugs have just 2 states (Open, and Closed), you can’t add attachments, and everyone who can log bugs can access your entire codebase.  If those are not dealbreakers, then it’s pretty awesome. For a closed-source project with more than a few people, it probably will be. Mantis is ugly, and people always log bugs against the wrong project. I think it’s a UI flaw.  It’s free, so I can’t and shouldn’t complain but that’s just the way it is.

I wanted to use SaaS (I spend enough time making software, I don’t want to spend any time anymore mucking around with server configurations of my tools), and found two offerings that looked promising: FogBugz and JIRA OnDemand.  FogBugz was too damn expensive, so I gave JIRA a try.  It’s pretty good. I know a lot of people who use and recommend JIRA so it seemed like a good fit.

Here’s why I think JIRA OnDemand (as opposed to JIRA stand-alone) isn’t ready for prime time:

• One can’t modify the robots.txt file. [JST-5915]  Come on, really?  I have zero control over how crawlers will see my bug tracker?  All you need to do is let me edit 1 file and I would have all the power in the world to do this.  A pathetic limitation.
• One can’t export data out of JIRA OnDemand.  [JST-5677] Yes, you can’t. I just assumed you could, and found this out later.  Well there is a manual export process, only available if you pay (not during the trial), and will take up to 2 weeks. I don’t know what you’re meant to do in those two weeks while you’re “between bugtrackers”, maybe send the entire company on vacation or something?  You can’t even export your data to a stand-alone JIRA instance automatically.  I spent about 16 hours getting data from 7 different projects (in 2 different systems) in to JIRA OnDemand, and now it’s stuck there, even if I wanted to switch to JIRA stand-alone.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like JIRA, and the JIRA OnDemand service. And now all my data is there with no export option I’m kinda stuck until this that implemented.  I’m not planning to move away anyway, and I guess the price I pay for SaaS and not having to worry about managing my own server (in addition to the monthly fee), is I am then completely beholden to Atlassian and their implementation schedule for these features.

I hope this trend doesn’t continue

Perhaps the next generation can be thinner and lighter?

Updated China Unicom 3G Activation Process

Buying and setting up a 3G SIM card is getting better and better. No longer do you have to wait to activate your package, and you can even change your package via SMS.

You can buy a SIM card for Â¥150, which includes Â¥100 credit.  To activate it you can simply call any number.  For Data, you will certainly want to activate a plan. I recommend the ‘A’ range which offer more data than the B & C ranges for the same price (the latter offer you more phone calls).

To activate the 66Â¥ package, including 300MB of data, I was instructed by the staff at 10010 to SMS 3GXS66L to 10011.  The activation will happen almost immediately. After your package is activated, you can change it but it will only take affect next month.

Once your package is activated, the excess data rates are dirt cheap (0.3Â¥ for 1MB), so there is no need to buy a package with some extra buffer room like you would normally do say in Australia. NB. before your package is activated, data rates are pretty expensive.

Creating a Windows7 Installation Bootable USB Key

How to create a Windows7 installation bootable USB key, after all, who wants to carry around DVD’s anymore (and does your computer even have one)?

Distilled from this post.

1. Fired up my bootcamp partition in Parallels
2. Connected Window7 ISO to virtualiser via Devices -> CD/DVD -> Connect Image [Alternatively, if you're running Windows natively you could mount the image some other way]
3. In windows, open an Administrator command prompt (by typing ‘cmd’ in the run dialog, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter)
4. [NB. I followed the above guide for this, but I'm not convinced it was actually nessesary – you can probably just skip this step and go right to reformatting the USB Key to NTFS. If you do take this step, be careful with these commands and make sure you know what you are doing because it's really easy to nuke an entire HDD if you get it wrong.] Re-partition the USB key with diskpart:

   diskpart
   list disk
   select disk X  # where X is your USB key – don't get this wrong!!!!!
   clean
   create partition primary
   select partition 1
   active   # this mounts the device

5. Format the USB key drive to NTFS, I used Windows to do this (right click -> Format), not diskpart
6. Select the Windows7 CD, e.g. e:.  And run:

   e: # where e: is your Windows DVD
   cd boot
   bootsect.exe /nt60 h:  # where h: is your USB key
   # now it should be bootable

7. Then copy everything over, e.g.
   xcopy /e d: f:

Done. I was able to boot this installation USB device on a 2008-era BenQ joyboook.

Buying an Air Filter for China

The air quality here has finally got to me. I had a sinus infection on some travels recently (cured now, thanks modern medicine), but when I returned to Shanghai the pollutants in the air have caused some allergic reactions, exacerbated by that problem, or so I’m told. Apart from anything – long term exposure to the air of a polluted city like Shanghai is something that needs to be researched more, but most people agree probably isn’t exactly a good thing.

I decided to get a Philips – they have some good models, for $450-$550 and it’s a brand I know & trust. The only question is, which one? They have the AC4072, AC4074 and AC4076 all which are pretty similar in style and function. After scrutinising the docs trying to find the differences, these are my conclusions:

It turns out the AC4072 and AC4074 are almost identical. The difference is that the AC4074 comes with a Formaldehyde (CH₂O) filter, and the AC4072 a “multi-care filter” whatever the hell that does. When replacing the filters on each model, you can choose between these two filters. The AC4074 also had a “fan speed indicator”, which seems of little importance. Apparently formaldehyde is one of the big components of smog (what I’m battling in Shanghai), and a strong lung irritant, not to mention something that is a possible carcinogen. So that choice is easy. Now do you get the AC4074 or AC4076? The latter is dubbed the ‘New Home’ filter, designed to rid new homes of dangerous gasses like formaldehyde. But I’m not in a new home so which is best for me? Well in the end I decided to get the AC4076 – it advertises better formaldehyde removal than the 74 (99% compared to 96%), and I’m thinking that the smog in Shanghai contains a large amount of these ‘new home’ gasses. As far as I can tell it also filters everything the 74 does – but it’s dust filter is better as well (0.1 microns compared to 0.3). It has only 1 filter to replace, not 3 (but the cost is greater than those 3 combined), I have no idea which is the better approach (is it like colored ink?) certainly only replacing one is simpler to purchase and install.

So there you have it, that’s my research maybe you can find it useful too. I’ll say one thing it was bloody hard to compare these models and they were all from the same brand. Companies need to do a better job of presenting the differences within their own ranges. About 95% of the marketing copy is identical between all three versions.

Thoughts on ‘Gatekeeper’

I don’t care.

So on Mountain Lion you can’t install unsigned apps, unless you disable the setting, or override on a case-by-case basis. That sounds like just the approach I’m happy to see imposed on the average user (especially the half dozen who are going to come crying to me when something breaks), in much the same way you need to enter your password to change system settings.

Of course, they can take my right to install unsigned apps from my cold dead hands, but as long as we have this right, a little sandboxing for the common user seems fine to me.

The concerns that Apple will gradually restrict what we can do are valid, and I hope they don’t go down this path.

iOS Notifications

are scheduled in the same thread they are posted from. Be aware of that, and plan accordingly.

Allowing developers to add notes on resolved issues in Mantis

By default, it seems Mantis doesn’t allow developers to add notes on resolved issues. I don’t understand why.

Here’s how you can change that, add this to your config:

	/**
	 * Threshold needed to update readonly bugs.  Readonly bugs are identified via
	 * $g_bug_readonly_status_threshold.
	 * @global int $g_update_readonly_bug_threshold
	 */
	$g_update_readonly_bug_threshold = DEVELOPER;

This grants additional permissions than just note-adding, but if you can’t trust your developers anyway…

On a side note, I’m becoming a huge fan of SaaS.