iPad crashing

Since the 4.3 upgrade I had been getting lots of app crashes, especially with Pulse and Twitter, and Safari. Since the upgrade to 4.3.1 I haven't experienced a single crash.

Plus on syncing I noticed there was only 0.5 gig of space left, I've now ensured there is 2.5 gig of free space. This could have been causing memory issues, and leading to app crashes.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK

Trouble with photo syncing repeatedly on iPad

A strange problem happened, when I did a sync with iTunes, all the photos seemed to be re-optimised and copied again and again, repeatedly. 3000 initially, then once finished it did it again with 2100, then again and again, the number dropping each time, until finally it had 8 to do. Then it went up massively to 3000+.

I think they've tweaked the sync process and it tries to copy and optimise, and by optimising it finds it has more room for photos, and tries to do more, to fill the space.

I found a post that said turn on and off include video (on the photos tab) that plus selecting just a subset of events - leaving 2gig of space seemed to do the trick. It then synced the photos once and I was done.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK

Parallels 4 performance issues

Running Parallels on my MacBook Pro has become unbareably slow, like these people on the parallels forum forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?s=be01229582a6a121cf2505e10038b3d7&t=32334&page=2 i did two things which has resolved the issue;

1) Turn off Smartmount kb.parallels.com/en/5778

2) Restart windows - there were 82 updates, so having only suspended and not restarted the vm for a long time, could have something to do with it.


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Location:UK

Outsourcing fail

We are currently feeling the pain of offshoring policy where I work, its good to know we're not alone. Here are some articles that make interesting reading on this topic

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/painful-lessons-it-outsourcing-gone-bad-032?page=0,1

"The desire to save big bucks so blinded the executives that they didn't realize they were replacing a group of people experienced with using a product to a group of people who were looking at it for the first time. "We underestimated the loss of knowledge that would take place during the transition,""

This one is a short article with some very true points;
http://www.colosseumbuilders.com/wharton2004.htm

"But keep in mind lower paid programmers do not mean cheaper software development"

"Third, you have to specify down to the smallest detail. What you put down on paper is what you get. If companies created project specifications with enough detail to offshore to begin with, they wouldn't be having the problem of runaway project costs."

This article is more focused on dba's, but has many relevant points;
http://www.dba-oracle.com/n_2010_offshoring_oracle_disaster.htm

"Offshoring is re-shored back to America: A qualified coder can create system 20 times faster than a under-trained offshore developer, and many IT managers misunderstand that offshoring does not necessarily mean that the work is done in a low-cost country."

And someone asks can you do agile with an offshoring policy.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/agile-development-offshore-jobs-recipe-disaster-307
Answer is; don't do agile and offshoring


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Location:UK

Dreamweaver bug

A dreamweaver bug when you set up an FTP site gives an error that it cannot connect. Even though checking on an external FTP client it works. Well I found all you need to do is put in the ip address of the server instead of the hostname. I needn't add port numbers, I turned off "use FTP performance" under "server compatibility" which may help if the above item didn't help.

There was no need to enter the host directory; just leave that blank.

Using a dataflame account, when creating an FTP account, remember to take off the username at the end to leave public_html as the folder you are granting access.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK

I've written my first app - iPhone development

So I've embarked on the endeavour to write an iPhone app. Well just over a week of effort and I'm done! I feel very excited, though its not really finished until it gets released in the App Store.

So steps to go are;
1. Sign up for the Apple Development Programme.
2. Get the app running on my iPhone
3. Fix the memory management - I bet I've got memory leaks
4. Upgrade dev tools to latest OS and upgrade the code for the latest OS
5. Fully test on iPhone
6. Go through Apple Approval process - hope this goes well!
7. Update webpage with details of app

Oh yeah and I'll probably get some friends to give some feedback on it. And I'll probably optimise for the retina display too.

Tonight was awesome, I implemented a splash screen, did all the artwork, created an information page, setup an email address and webpage, and got the info page to open a new mail or open the webpage.

Yeah looking at that list above, I'm not finished yet :-)


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK

Windows 7 upgrade went well

I upgraded an aging Windows Vista running Samsung laptop to Windows 7 and it went well.

Don't waste your time sorting out any Windows Vista issues, like trying to fix the antivirus (Norton 360) or increase the size of the disk partition. It all kind of went wrong and required a system restore, undoing hours of work :-(

Compatiblity check told me perhaps not enough harddrive space and not enough Ram (only 1GB). However deleting some old files, and a google for performance with this size of Ram gave me confidence to go for it.

So I took the plunge and went for it. Choose the custom install; this does a full clean install moving the old windows and programs folders into a Windows old folder.

It went in almost painlessly. Only issue was Wifi was not working afterwards, but then I noticed it had stopped working for all other wifi devices in the house, so I suspect maybe an ip conflict had caused problems perhaps? Anyway a router reboot fixed that issue.

I remembered that I needed to do a system restore (Control Panel Instructions to create a Windows Restore point) and expanded the size of the partition by using the built in partitioning software (Contol Panel, search for partition). To expand my C partiton I had to delete the next partiton, expand C and then create the 2nd partiton a new.

Having upgraded, none of the previous software was installed, so this needed doing, the advantage here is that all the Samsung crapware is now gone. Unfortunately Norton 360 wasn't installed anymore. First step was to download the free trial from the Norton site. Annoyingly mynortonaccount wouldn't let me download it so I had to put my bank details in again...

However after installing, it seemed to activate it against my existing Norton subscription(s), so that was relatively painless.

The laptop is largely used for viewing the internet and iPlayer, and that it does amazingly well compared to Windows Vista, and that's with just 1GB of RAM. Overall the upgrade went really well and I'm most pleased.


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Location:UK