Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘broken’

Horrible Documentation == Source of Frustration

Today i was working on some things for my AdRotate plugin. Then a sudden lack of documentation hit me. People on IRC who know nothing. And endless, not working, examples from a million websites made me get highly annoyed, frustrated and very unmotivated to do anything with WordPress.

As so often with WordPress the documentation was lacking. It gave so pointers and an example. Vague explanations as to what the variables to call this or that function could be. Right below the example there was a note that this example was just that and that it should not be used for a real website. Yay! Useless example! No clue as to how it should be done otherwise then!

Soooo, fuck php and WordPress for now! Enough useless non-productive evenings for the time being. Staring at a blank wall would get me further in life i’m sure.

If anyone knows how to properly implement a function (or bunch thereof) to make custom rewrite rules work in WordPress, let me know.
I want to use the $wp_rewrite class of which WP provides an API for plugins.

In the meantime…

*Resumes playing games and doing things that work! Like reading a book.*

Sturdy little bastards!

For a marketing experiment we needed some broken products at work. So we peeled apart an LCD in a macbook to make it appear broken. We destroyed software on a harddisk. And a few other things. We also tried to break the digitizer of an iPhone. And we succeeded eventually…

Since a broken digitizer (the glass front and touch screen) of iPhones is the most popular repair here we decided we needed a broken iPhone. We had some old devices lying around and thought to simply smash the screen in and be done with it. As the most likely cause for it to break was to simply throw it to the ground we tried that. It didn’t really work. We then tried hitting it to the narrow end of a steel pole. All we accomplished was a small budge and a scratch.

A colleague then thought to use a alarm hammer, used to break car windows with minimum force. Basically what this thing does is shoot out a steel pin shattering any glass it touches. Not so for the iPhone. It didn’t even get scratched. When we tried it on the steel pole a big budge was there. So the hammer indeed worked. Just not for the iPhone.

We ended up using a wrench. Simply beating on it would destroy the iPhone too much we thought so we took it apart by removing the actual phone and LCD. So we would just break the glass.

And break it did:

And we used this tool:

It took some effort but the digitizer was thoroughly broken. Too much really. Since the touchscreen stopped working also. Which is part of the glass. But for our experiment we needed it to work. We destroyed 2 digitizers with the wrench and they both broke too much.
Finally we just took a used digitizer and smashed it’s edge to the table’s edge… The table is damaged now, but so is the digitizer. A neat little crack. Just enough to justify the need to repair it.

I wonder how all those people break their phones. Since, if they’re to be believed they dropped from a table or from their pockets… We dropped a fully assembled iPhone from 2 meters high and it didn’t even scratch!

Is it fixed now? Dammit!

Today, our modem signal again crapped it’s pants.
And i’ve had enough, so i went down there to replace the modem and some cables.

Turns out the spare modem i “borrowed” from our previous ISP doesn’t work with this one. It gets the signal and stuff right but doesn’t actually connect. I bet they locked the Mac address or something. Anyway, without a spoofing option to try that out i moved back to the original modem.

Next i swapped out all cabling. Some were a bit knackered, not sure how that happened. And the Ethernet cable promptly was stuck in it’s port. I had to pull hard to get it loose and in that process break the ethernet port on the router. Luckily no contacts were shorted just the locking clip broke off. So i can just use another port on the modem/router, it’s not mine so no need to replace it.

Let’s see how this works, all coax cabling is now replaced, new ethernet from the modem to the Airport… The modem shows a better signal/noise ratio. But i’m not sure if that was the problem. We’ll see.

iPad vs. iPod Touch

The iPad is a lie! It’s not a tablet pc. And especially not the tablet pc everyone wants. It’s more like they designed a new iPod touch and forgot to shrink it to a handheld format.

Note that the iPad is a better device specs-wise, but that’s what you would expect in a new iPod Touch.

The lack of multitasking and the “feature” of iPhone OS makes it a bit of a useless thing. Nice for in and around the house. But imagine you sitting in a bus or train with it. Playing some game or whatever. Try it… Take a paper and fold it to a A4 sized slab and see how it not fits with your environment because it’s too big.

The lack of a real OS makes it an iPod. Simple as that. If it has OS X and a desktop it would be a real computer that could replace something. Now it’s just something that adds to what you already have. But at the same time you just know it’s a bit useless because it lacks the software you need.

No iBooks outside the US? What the hell! Is this gonna be like the video store Apple is so happy about but never leaves the States? Damn Apple! Fix that stuff or do not present it as if it’s the greatest thing ever. If i, we in Europe, cannot use it. It’s as good as useless.

The, for me, actual dealbreaker; No multitasking. How can you even try to justify that. A device that you claim will compete with Netbooks but cannot open multiple apps at the same time. Insane! It’s not even a standalone computer. Yeah, it syncs with iTunes. Like your iPhone and iPod.

No file access, if only… only, they had given us a browsable home folder. You know. A place to store and access files outside the app you run at that moment. It is so very simple and obvious. This folder should be shared by default via Wifi and have the subfolders like your mac has. Images, Videos, Music, Documents. Etc. But no. iPhone OS cannot do that. You have to open the Images app to see your images. And you have to open Pages to see your documents. But only the ones Apple supports.

It’s failboat! A big huge failboat!

However, most of it is fixable with software i’m sure. And i hope Apple will, because i want an iPad. Just not this one! For now my iPhone can do more and is more useful.

SVN where art thou!

SVN, why do people bother. It’s too fragile, too crappy and it’s slow too. Did i say fragile yet?
Half of the time when i release an update to a plugin or try to commit some changes to my own SVN server i have to spend like 30 minutes fixing shit that shouldn’t break!

Where the idea is that you save your file, press commit and type your small comment on what you did to those files. I often am bashing commands in terminal to fix SVN before it even acknowledges the server and can find the path. But only after i fix the local repository which has been corrupted for unknown reasons. Then i ‘simply’ have to add the files again occasionally loosing my new version which leaves me with an older version and i have to redo the update i made.

SVN is failboat! Drown in poo you hideous incarnation of blah! GRRR!