iDude.org

Google released their new Chrome web browser shortly before the end of a video announcement about it at 11am PST.  I had the download page ready at the beginning of the video (http://www.google.com/chrome) and was only getting a “404 - not found” error.  At around 11:45a I hit refresh on it and there it was.  

The install was amazingly fast and simple.  Didn’t even require a file that needed downloaded to my HDD and run from there.  The install launched directly out of my Firefox and was done in less than 1 minute. 

It is very heavily based on Apple’s Safari Webkit engine.  Here is the HTTP_USER_AGENT from a test PHP page I made:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Overall, I’ve always sort of liked Safari, but always had issues with minor glitches and random lagginess.  I’ve not encountered any issues at all with Chrome so far.  Google has probably done massive internal testing to insure that there are no obvious glitches and/or bugs.  The GUI is very simple and seems fully functional and the memory usage is EXCELLENT compared to Firefox.  

I’ve had Firefox take up to 400-500mb RAM without much even going on.  Even just after starting Firefox is the Google homepage, it takes up 62mb RAM.  On my system, Chrome only consumed around 25mb.  

The only thing I’ve run into when it comes to rendering is my company’s Intranet.  It is only optimized for IE and Firefox and looks pretty bad with Chrome/Safari but is still usable.

All other sites I frequent are just fine, loading faster than ever.

UPDATE 5pm EST:

After running some memory tests, I opened up 4 tabs in Firefox, IE8, Chrome, Safari and Opera, which included logging into 2 of the sites and just displaying two others.

Tab 1: My company’s ticketing system
Tab 2: My personal GMail (Google Apps for Domains)
Tab 3: This blog’s admin section login page only
Tab 4: MSN Money Stock quotes with 6 stocks on it

Firefox 3.0.1: 124.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Firefox loaded everything pretty well, was a bit sluggish on GMail tab.

IE8 (version 8.0.6001.17184): 95.5mb RAM (2 threads)
IE8 loaded everything that it loaded pretty quick too, but completely failed to load GMail, getting stuck on the loading <Email adress> progress meter…  Rendering on the front page of my company’s site was screwed up, but was fine in all other browsers tested.

Chrome: 112.5mb RAM (6 threads)
Perfect loading of all tabs, very fast, no issues.

Safari 3.1.2 (Windows): 98mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, a bit sluggish, but not as bad as Firefox. 

Opera 9.52: 75.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, little slow on GMail, but it came up. All other sites where just as fast as Chrome.

In conclusion, I like the feel of Chrome the best.  Very simple and easy to use, I really like the multiple thread/tab paradigm.  Safari has that nice “Appley” interface I like.  Opera is Ok, but does have more rendering problems, on sites not tested above, than the others.  IE8… Bleh… no comment…  

And as for Firefox, and I thought I’d never say it, it falling behind on both memory usage and speed.  I’ve also encountered quite a few Firefox crashes when shutting down the browser.  This is happening occasionally on all my machines on all operating systems I use, Mac, Linux and Windows.

Later today Google is expected to release a new web browser based on Webkit (what Safari uses) and Firefox.   I feel that it will be a welcome addition to the browser wars.

I used Firefox, but have notice a lot more browser crashes with 3.x than previous versions and it feels quite laggy sometimes even on a Quad processor machine with 3gb RAM.  It gets to the point sometimes where I just load up Safari or Opera to surf sometimes.

IE just sucks.  I ONLY use IE for site testing during web development and for the “best” experience accessing my day job’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) for email.  Other than that, IE is not a part of my day to day browser use.

If this Google takes the best of Webkit and Firefox and makes it “better, faster, stronger”, then I will use it.  Of course I will be frank on my review of it and will do my best not to be biased since I use Google almost exclusive for my search needs, Email (Google Apps for Domains), Analytics for stats, etc.

I will post up a review once I get my hands on it and can put it through it’s paces.

I think Google will have more downloads of this browser in the first 24 hours than Firefox did on it’s 3.0 launch day if it posts up something on the front page of Google.  This could be huge.

What a complainer… Sure, there are going to be bugs, lots of them sometimes in the case of a new product of this type… People should almost expect them.

We all knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time. A lawsuit has been filed against Apple over what the plaintiff is referring to as the “Defective iPhone 3G,” which she hopes will become a class-action complaint. Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith filed the complaint yesterday against the iPhone maker, alleging that the new iPhone’s 3G performance and reliability has been subpar, despite the claims made by Apple’s aggressive marketing campaign. Considering that a true fix has yet to be issued for users’ 3G problems, this could just be the tip of the iPhone lawsuit iceberg. More >>

But now, this woman wants to file a class action lawsuit against Apple due to 3G not living up to her expectations.  Even though the Infineon 3G chipset may be a bit flawed, it’s still not completely Apple’s fault.  AT&T is the provider and that can cause the dropcalls, coverage (or lack of) issues and so on.

I live in Kentucky and don’t even have 3G where I live, so I cannot really vouche for the quality, but I did get a chance to travel to Lexington KY this past week and had NO problems whatsoever… Actually my 3G was much faster on my phone that one of my friend’s tethered BlackBerry.  I brought up pages much faster on my phone than he did on his laptop.

Some people just don’t have anything better to do… Just ask for a refund and get a different phone… geesh.

I got my new 3G today after waiting for two weeks for Apple to get more in.  Went down to the AT&T Store and sat there and waited while the silly customer service reps sat there and explained EVERY little feature of the phones to the customers… Geeesh.  Took about 25 minutes for just one person ahead of me in at each of the 3 reps… Amazing.

Finally, I got to the desk and the girl went back and got it for me and started chatting up a storm about it… I told her I already had the 2G and already knew everything about it, if I don’t, I’ll read the manual.  I also voiced my disappointment with having to pay $10 more for 3G in an area that doesn’t even have 3G service.  Isn’t that “illegal” to charge more for a service that isn’t even offered?   They tried saying, and it must be the official AT&T stance, that the higher price was to be “more competitive with the other data plans”, not because of the faster 3G speeds.  Competitive?  By raising the price higher towards the crackberry plan?  COME ON!  I’ll admit that I knew I would have to pay $10 more a month, so I didn’t make that big of a stink.

THEN, she asked if I wanted SMS messaging…  Prior to ordering, I didn’t realize they stripped out the 200 SMS messages that came with the 2G plan… This is getting silly.  Apple and AT&T are really letting this iPhone thing go to their heads. So I had to pay $5/mo for just 200 SMS messages.

So basically, due to the lack of my area’s 3G coverage, I am paying $15/mo more just to have the same level of service that I had on my 2G.  They better be investing on getting 3G in my area and loosen up on the SMS.  SMS is probably the most efficient use of the network and they charge the MOST for it!  COME ON!

I ended up calling and making a stink about the SMS and got 5 free months of SMS + 1000 extra rollover, which I’ll never use.

They activated it in the store and synced up my contacts with MobileME via WiFi before leaving.  Once I got home, this is where the waiting started…

Syncing with iTunes took about 60 minutes.

It had to:

1. Restore from yesterday’s backup of my 2G. (20 minutes)
2. Backup the new 3G config. (20 minutes)
3. Then it did some iTune maintenance (5 minutes)
4. Then proceeded to sync up my measly 3.5gb of music and apps. (15 minutes)

The backup thing runs like ALL the time now instead of being manual and although I appreciate the backups, I don’t feel like I need it EVERY time I add or change something.  Especially when it takes as long as it does.  The other day, after not syncing for a week or so, it took 30 minutes or so to just do the backup.

THEN, I couldn’t use any of the 3 cradles that I have for my phone due to the physical differences between 2G and 3G… A Dremel tool easily solved this, but again… This is a negative for Apple.  At least they didn’t decide to change the actual connection layout of the plug.

Overall, the audio is much better in the earpiece, the external speaker is louder… Some things seem a bit zippier and the keyboard seems a bit “tappier” and faster to type on.  Maybe it’s the more comfortable feel, I dunno.

I am going to do my best to get this “$15/mo more for nothing” thing remedied, but most likely, I’ll just have to eat it.

I’m actually what you could consider a recent Apple “fanboy” but I am starting to feel the euphoria I felt about Apple for the last few years starting to fade.  If they get any worse, they are going to lose me and my evangelism about Apple and surely, I am not alone in these feelings.

I had a HDD crash back in 2005 and was fortunate enough to run across QueTek File Scavenger and was able to recover most everything.

Well, last night, my Western Digital MyBook 500gb drive went kablooey right in the middle of watching a movie off of it.  This drive was hooked to my Mac file storage machine and was idle most of the time, so I was curious as to why it would die all of a sudden.  I felt the drive and it was quite warm to the touch, and my office is quite warm to boot, so I am going to attribute this problem to heat. It was also on the bottom of the stack of 2 other WD MyBook 500gb drives.

Everytime I tried restarting the bad drive, it reported itself as a 1.6TB partition and was not able to be read.  I tried a few misc utilities on it, but none could read or recover anything.  This drive ONCE was a part of a three drive RAID-0 (stripped) and I think somehow it went back to thinking it was since the partition name was “disk3″. Weird…

I ran across one called Nucleus Kernel Macintosh for HFS & HFS+ (Mac) formats, and thought I’d give it a try.  It was able to immediately and quickly scan the drive and I could see all the files that were “lost”… I called up a buddy of mine who is a BIG mac guru and he happened to have a full copy of it, so he brought it over and it is recovering now.  (The demo version cannot recover much)

It should be finished sometime tomorrow and I’ll be sure to make duplicates in the future.  I should have learned my lesson by now.

I may end up getting a true RAID SAN/NAS device that has total failover in case of single drive failure.  There’s no feeling worse than thinking you lost years of work due to a stupid hard drive crapping out on you.

The new Apple iPhone 3G was announced today (6/9/2009) at WWDC 2008 in San Francisco. The new price is only $199 (8gb) and $299 (16gb) due to carrier subsidies. It has tons of new features built into it, notably GPS and 3G (of course) and will definitely make inroads not only into the corporate market with the new MS Exchange functionality, but also into the more frugal consumer market. $199 makes this phone very competitive with the higher end blackberries and cheaper than most of the Microsoft Smartphones.

Most of the base features are the same, like the flash storage capacity, but Apple did take suggestions from the community and improve the design, such as making the headphone jack flush as to not require a special adaptor to use non-Apple headphones.

The 16GB model also has a white backed version as well as the new Black backed and the front of the phone is wholly unchanged…

Included accessories, everything is pretty much the same:

• iPhone 3G
• Stereo Headset with mic
• Dock Connector to USB Cable
• SB Power Adapter (A bit smaller now)
• Documentation
• Cleaning/polishing cloth
• SIM ejector tool (a paperclip!)

Look for the new iPhone to reach stores around July 11th. Hopefully supply will be able to hit the demand that I anticipate. I plan on getting ahold of one for myself.

Today, Steve Jobs announced at an Apple Event that the iPhone will, by summertime, get a full version update to 2.x… The 2.0 update will provide ActivSync Microsoft Exchange capabilities including full PUSH email, calendar and contact syncing… The new 2.0 will also provide the framework for the next level of iPhone/Touch apps. Click the image above to see more.

This is very exciting news and is going to usher in the next stage of smartphone domination by the Apple iPhone.

My next main hope is at the release date, Apple will release an 3G iPhone as well as additional improvements, perhaps even a slightly larger screened enhanced phone/PDA more geared towards Fanboy/Power Users that will be more multimedia oriented and perhaps even be able to stream video and interface with the movie element of iTunes, but I’m just dreaming here.

I still think a tablet type Mac that is small, very portable, priced competitively and powerful enough to provide a desktop level experience would be really cool. Then add a docking station that can hook it up to a mouse/monitor/keyboard. If I could have something like this that could be everything for me, I would get one in a heartbeat. PC, Cellphone, VoIP phone, PDA, mobile computing platform, etc.

The Axiotron Mac OSX unofficial Mac Tablet is good, but still a bit larger and more expensive than what I describe above.

Apple has filed patents for something of this sort (the docking station concept), perhaps someday it will leave the vaporware stage.

I got home this evening and docked my iPhone to get the 1.1.4 update… The docking started up iTunes and notified me that the update was available, so I went ahead and started it.

The normal upgrade procedure started and I went about my browsing during the install.  It seemed to take a bit longer (probably adding the framework for the SDK) and it rebooted as usual.

I noticed the signal was low when I unlocked the keypad and the signal didn’t get better (I usually have 3 bars or so).   So I went ahead and rebooted the phone again and it came up to this screen…

I went ahead and connected it, it synced successfully, but STILL came back to this screen every time.  Then I took out and reseated the SIM card…………… Nothing.

CONCLUSION:

I was getting ready to call Apple Support, then I realized that before I started the update,  the Apple Update asked me to update iTunes and a Leopard Graphics fix… After updating iTunes, rebooting, then syncing the phone with the NEW version, it kicked right in and activated it.

MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE iTUNES TO THE LATEST BEFORE UPDATING TO 1.1.4!

Disclaimer:  I did originally have a Jailbroken 1.1.1 then went to 1.1.3, before reverting back to 1.1.2 (Jailbroken) and then back to 1.1.3 full to get the new features.  So, I’m not sure if this could have caused any of this.  Since it is fixed now, I figured it was NOT the cause. 

Over the last month or so that I’ve had the iPhone, I have enjoyed just the original base features included with it. But, being the geek that I am, I had to extend it further… Much further.

A week or so ago, I went ahead and decided to do my “first” hacking of the iPhone. I went to the JailBreakMe.com website and followed the simple instructions and the Installer.app which is basically a “one touch” utility to install 3rd party apps and Linux ports such as PICO and a terminal program.

I was a bit surprised to find a port of Apache 1.3.37 and PHP 5.2.3 in the repository, so I went ahead, installed them both and with a little configuration using PICO (after installing and logging in through SSH), got a functional webserver with PHP support.

I created a PHPINFO() page which shows the extensions that are activated by default, which are pretty much just the core PHP functions and started thinking what to do with it…

Of course I could use it for impromptu testing of code from anywhere, showing simple mockups offline to clients one-on-one, and other things like that, but it wasn’t enough for me…

I put the thoughts on the backburner for a few days, last night I figured I’d try something new.

Here goes…

Apache/PHP was working so I decided to go ahead and copy a full PHP site with full graphics and a PHPMail script on it.

To get this all over to the phone, I TARred up just the most necessary files, filtering out anything not directly referenced (limited amount of memory on the phone for this type of stuff).

Then I FTP’ed, using NCFTP installed from the Installer.App repository, into the machine that had the TAR, downloaded and unTARred it into Apache’s document folder (/Library/WebServer/Documents).

At that point, once all the files were in the correct place and so forth, I hit the website directly on the phone (http://127.0.0.1) and it came right up and was rather speedy. I then hit it from a workstation on the same WiFi network using the DHCP assigned IP and it came up perfectly.

Ok, so far so good, the website comes up just fine locally and remotely, lets take it a few steps further.

I decided to, from work today, to VPN using PPTP built into the iPhone into my DD-WRT router at home (It has a static IP) and then proceed to port forward port 80 from the external IP to the Internally assigned VPN IP of the iPhone. Then I proceed to add a DNS entry for it…

I also VPNed into the DD-WRT over EDGE and it worked just fine as well. Of course it was MUCH slower, but still worked fine.

It really was this easy to do something that I don’t think has ever been done before with a cellphone.

NOTE: Apache was setup to just start 1 httpd instance and I believe a max of 7, which slowed stuff down a lot with a graphical site, so I set it from 1 to 10.

If anyone has questions, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

I figured, since my Apple (AAPL) stock has done so well in the last few months, that I would go ahead and buy myself an iPhone. (Actually it is, according to my wife, my Birthday and Christmas present)

I stopped by the local AT&T Store and picked it up. They did the credit pre-approval in the store and had the number printed on my receipt for use at home once I started the activation. This helped prevent any delays that could have been caused by online credit checks, especially since I have a Credit Guard thing on my bureau accounts.

The activation was totally painless. The number porting was the only part that took a little while. I could call out on the iPhone, but it took about 2 hours for incoming to work. I guess that isn’t bad considering my previous service was through a small regional provider.

It was very easy to connect to WiFi both at home (Non-WEP Meraki Units) and at work (MID-Level CISCO AP w/ WEP). It seems to remember the APs really well and connects to them immediately without asking after the initial connection. WiFi is the only way to go if you plan on using it for major emailing and/or Web surfing, etc.

At home, I can’t get any AT&T Towers, but I roam through CellularOne and their EDGE Network is slower than a quadriplegic, blind, geriatric turtle with a full hip replacement. I was able to only get between 9-15k average. On AT&T’s network from work, I have received between 80-180k… Much more like true EDGE speeds. For these tests, I used the iPhone Network Test page. From what I’ve heard, AT&T recently bought the local CellularOne (Dobson) here in my region, so hopefully they’ll upgrade the old equipment when they go into the towers for initial maintenance.

Here is a brief feature rundown:

• The Interface is fast and beautiful
• Mail is sufficient for reading and replying
• Google Maps is excellent, even on only EDGE in “MAP” mode. On WiFi, it’s lightning fast
• YouTube is flawless and works best on WiFi, otherwise it scales the resolution and compresses it more on slow connections (although I have yet to connect through EDGE)
• The iPod option turns it into a killer iPod
• The iTunes store is great, previews start instantly, no buffering time on WiFi. Doesn’t work on EDGE.
• SMS worked well between my iPhone and my brother’s BlackBerry 7130 on AT&T
• Calendar is functional and provides all the basic options for setting up calendar items
• The camera is nothing amazing, but is better than virtually 99% of most other cell phone cameras (quality wise).
• The widgets (Stocks & Weather) are excellent and look just as good as their desktop counterparts.
• The Clock, Calculator & Notes are fine too.

Probably the most extensive test I did of Safari was to load up an ArcGIS Web Mapping page. I loaded it up, it all rendered correctly and even some of the mapping tools like the Information (I) tool worked although map navigation was impossible since it depends on a mouse.The Interface is very intuitive and it even passed my “Dad Test”. If he can figure it out, anyone can.

Battery life is excellent so far and seems to be lasting longer today than it did yesterday after it’s first full charge.

The only thing I wish there was more of were normal “ring-like” ringtones instead of silly duck and dog sounds. And the maximum speaker volume isn’t really loud enough for either the ringtones or the speakerphone, even after the 1.1.1 upgrade.

There really isn’t much more to tell. The iPhone, for me, has work as advertised. I haven’t had any trouble to speak of besides AT&T having some EDGE problems yesterday (10/8/7) and couldn’t get to it all day.