My iPhone 4 now reports 4-5 bars at my apt with AT&T. I suppose I should have been more suspicious. Could Apple really have improved the antenna that much? In comparison, at work, a good coverage area, I have yet to be able to get the bars to disappear. Sometimes, they don’t even drop at all, even with the phone crammed in my left palm.

Anyway, Apple’s comments also seems to fall in line with Anandtech’s comprehensive review (dB measurements and all), which notes that the 5th bar represents a disproportionately wide range of signal. So basically, it’s showing that you have 5 bars, when you don’t. Either Apple just made an innocent mistake, or they were trying to be sneaky and fake a much larger improvement in antenna design than there actually was. For the Apple haters, the latter should do nicely.

In any case, it’s not exactly long term yet, but to follow up on my other post, I’ve had the phone for over a week now, and I’m quite happy with it. With the Speed Test app I’ve been able to pull 2 megabit, and push 1.2 megabit (all dependent on ATT’s coverage of course, but the new iPhone supposedly has an improved chip for faster uploads). Battery life has been much, much better than expected. I used to keep my 3G on 66% brightness, and with normal use, the phone would last about 1.5 days. But I don’t even bother with the 4 – 100% brightness all the way. And it still lasts longer than the 3G did. I haven’t run it dry yet, but based on the battery indicator, it looks like the 4 should last at least 50% longer than my 3G. The Anandtech review shows some impressive benchmarks for more info on that.

It happens on other phones but it definitely is accentuated on the new iPhone if you bridge the two antennas on the left. Merely contacting the two antennas at the same time isn’t enough – I tried putting my fingers on the two antennas as close as possible without covering the gap, and the connectivity sustained. You have to cover the gap. I suspect it will only strongly affect left handed folks who choose not to get a case.

Still, a pretty big design flaw. I get the feeling someone overrode the engineers and made an artistic design decision, because it seems like a fairly trivial issue to overcome. Cover the gap in plastic or glass? It would have messed with the clean design, but eh, people eat up some ugly android phone designs, so I doubt people would have given too much of a damn about an extra panel of glass or plastic.

I predict next year’s phone will have some kind of cover over the gaps.

I told myself if the antenna issue was major, I’d just return the thing, but given that I’m right handed, I suspect it won’t affect me too much. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.

On another note, I’m pretty happy with the phone. My coworker showed me Family Guy Blue Harvest on his, and it looked amazing. Video call, while gimmicky, was still quite cool.

For example, last week I went to the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, CA. I knew it was in the desert somewhere, and didn’t have the full address, so I put in Indian Wells, CA. Google then assumed I meant the significantly further, unincorporated community between Sequoia National Forest and Edwards Air Force Base, and gave me directions based on that, rather than the much, much closer Indian Wells by Palm Springs. Thankfully we only drove the wrong way for about 5-10 miles before we realized what was happening.

Here is what you get if you search for Indian Wells, CA with Google maps on the iPhone or at google.com: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Indian+Wells,+CA&sll=33.688907,-117.832607&sspn=0.008659,0.013754&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Indian+Wells,+Kern,+California&ll=35.771029,-117.957458&spn=1.080783,1.760559&z=9. Or just try the search yourself. Today is March 21, 2010, btw, just in case this behavior becomes obsolete one day.

This is what you get when you search at bing: http://www.bing.com/maps/#JnE9eXAuSW5kaWFuK1dlbGxzJTJjK0NBJTdlc3N0LjAlN2VwZy4xJmJiPTQ5Ljk3MjM3Mjc0NjEyOCU3ZS04OC4wNjM3NTEyMjElN2UxMy41Mjg0NDQ0MTkzNjAxJTdlLTE0Ny4xMjYyNTEyMjE=. Bing nicely points out that there are two possibilities.

So now I suddenly remembered how I was unable to find another address several weeks ago. My aunt invited me to a dumpling-making party in celebration of Chinese New Years. In an email, she gave me the address as “412 Broadway, Anaheim, CA 92805.” Much, much more complete than “Indian Wells, Ca.” We never found the place however. Fast forward to today. I found a paper invite, with an even more complete version of the address. “412 EAST Broadway, Anaheim, CA 92805.” Oh, damn. Again, if you dump “412 Broadway, Anaheim, CA 92805″ in Google, it will spit out one location. Bing will point out that there are two.

I’m starting to wish Apple would decouple the iPhone from Google maps and allow the user to specify a different map app (is there a way that I don’t know of?). But the Google maps integration is so good. All your contacts show up as bookmarks in your google maps if you have addresses listed for them, and you can access their phone number straight from the maps app, too. Handy if you’re about to arrive and need to call.

The story, which was picked up by national news outlets including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, detailed the accounts of local business owners who said that sales reps at the popular user-generated review site offered to move negative reviews of their businesses if they advertised.

Anyway, today, my friend told me about how one of his (very legitimate) reviews got removed:

A:
oh hey apparently yelp is like, fuckin 1984 shit
maybe that’s not the right analogy
they went all china censor on me
back in august 07 i went to this bed and breakfast in monterey bay, and it was dirty and filthy and had clogged plumbing and no toilet paper and BEBBUGS IN ALL THE BEDS
woke up in the middle of the night like omfg wtf and just left
so i wrote this harsh ass review of it on yelp, and posted pics of bedbugs

Ron Hsu
they deleted the review?

A
and a few weeks ago
i got an email
from “Frank @ yelp hq” saying they were removing my pics from that business because they “fall outside our local business photo guidelines”
a couple of days ago, i got a personal message on yelp from the owner of the business offering a free night’s stay at his business (which, since I went there, has apparently undergone new ownership and a total renovation) so that i might have a better experience and change my rating
i wrote him back saying thanks, if i ever go to monterey again maybe i’ll take you up on your offer
and for now i’ll add a line to the beginning of my old review saying “note: i haven’t been back, but apparently there is new ownership and the place has been renovated”
and today, i got a message from “Casper @ Yelp HQ” telling me that one of my reviews was deleted “because it lacks a first-hand experience of the business”
and i was like what the fuuuuuck how was my review not a first hand experience of hte business
it was ANYTHING but secondhand
smells like BS to me
i suspect you can pay off yelp or bitch to them or do something shady to delete bad reviews
which, of course, defeats the purpose of yelp in the first place

http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-inn-at-del-monte-beach-monterey-2

check it
only 5 reviews
used to be 6
mine got killed
they have to be a yelp sponsor of some sort to be able to list that “grand opening! rates start at 79!” ad rectangle right?
the only review from the last two years is from someone with 2 reviews, who just started yelping in january 2010
fiiiiishy fiiiiishy
yeah yelp sold out or something, cus that is bullshiiiiiit
i sent a message to that hazel q chick, yelp oc community organizer or whatever, no response
dunno if she has any power or say in the first place
but yeah, bullllshiiiit
“your review was deleted because it lacks a first-hand experience of the business,” LOL

Ron Hsu
actually i had just read an article about something like your experience a few days ago

The only legitimate rationale I can think of is the new ownership angle, and thus, perhaps, my friend’s review no longer counts since he hasn’t been to the “new and improved” version.

SQL Server Management Studio 2005 forgets password

As does the 2008 version. I ran into this issue and was (not) surprised to find that the bug dating back to version 2005 had still not been fixed.  Hey, at least you can delete some files to fix it though.

Edit: Just to make it more clear, from Voot’s post in the link above, you need to go to C:\Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Shell

and delete SqlStudio.bin.

Make sure SSMS is not running when you delete it. Fire up SSMS again. All your credentials will be gone, so you’ll need to reenter them, but it should remember them from here on out. I have no idea what causes it to initially mess up.

On another note, it’s not often you see a woman write something like the following (what can I say, there’s not that many women in my field):

It doesn’t take too long to set up a tool to monitor a file or directory – you can download FileMon from:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Filemon.mspx

The Connect to Server dialog can pop up in different situations where there is no security context for the connection to use. If you use registered servers (and save the password there) when you view the registered servers, select a server in the Registered Servers task pane and then click New Query on the toolbar or Right Click, Connect, Object Explorer or New Query which will result in connecting under the security context you used when registering the server. If a server isn’t selected, there is no security context available so the Connect to Server dialog pops up. I haven’t heard of passwords  being “lost” or “forgotten” using the registered servers task pane and saving registration information there.

Good info.

As of 8/18/09,

Quest

I thought I had accounted for such a scenario with proper checks, but it looks like I made some false assumptions about how things are cast in Objective-C. Guess I should have read the documentation more thoroughly. I wonder if this is true with C as well. I admit, I haven’t coded in C in a long time.

Anyway, player “ma” got an exorbitant score as you can see. To computer science folks, his particular score number, 2147483647, should immediately pop out.  That happens to be the maximum value for a signed integer.  So I figured he must have lowered his score into the negative, and at some point, my program attempted to assign a negative value to a variable that only accepts positive values. When that happens, the number will wrap around to the other side. So assigning -1 to a positive-only variable will jump the number around to the highest value.

Anyway, as I said, I thought I had accounted for that, by doing something like:

if ( ( NSInteger ) score + ( pointValue * multiplier ) ) > 0 )

but I guess that wasn’t enough. I did some testing (I’ve renamed some stuff to make it a little more readable):

1. NSUInteger uStartValue = 0;
2. NSInteger sPointValue = -1000; //signed value
3. NSUInteger uMultiplier = 10; //unsigned value
4. NSInteger sMultiTest = sPointValue * uMultiplier; //-10000
5. BOOL test = NO;
6. test = (sPointValue * multiplier) > 0; // YES…whut?
7. NSUInteger unsignedTest = (sPointValue * uMultiplier); //4294957296

So this is interesting. So 7 shows the overflow in action. 6 seems to show that if a mixed-type operation isn’t assigned to a value, then it will default to type NSUInteger, if the operation contains an NSUInteger. But if you explicitly assign it, as in 4, then it’ll work fine.

It’s my first game I’ve ever made, and I’m happy with how it turned out. Looking forward to making a second project soon!

Thanks to all those that helped:
TOKiMONSTA with music and character designs- I really felt the need to get the game more polished once she agreed to help, ’cause she is truly one of those talented artist types. So, to get the game more shiny, I found…

Chris Kawagiwa – very skilled illustrator, and he did indeed make the game look much, much more shiny! All final art was drawn by Chris: monsters, characters, backgrounds, everything.

Abel Stearns – gave me lots of cool sound effects!

Jason Su – helped me out with some alpha art and other miscellaneous stuff, much appreciated.

OK maybe not. I’ve always been a TaxCut guy. I don’t know when H&R Block got me, but when they did, I just stuck with them. Maybe their boxes and packaging looked a little more professional. Green geometric shapes on a white box. Huzzuh! Meanwhile, TurboTax just seemed like the ghetto alternative. Some gaudy red with some reflective logo on a white box (I’m going off fuzzy memory here). It reminded me of cheap shareware. Ghettoware. But I guess H&R fooled me, like Netgear and their product designs (I hold Netgear products with special contempt).

This year, I tried to do my taxes online through H&R Block’s site. And it kept giving me a stupid error. Four to be exact. Instead of taking me to the precise problem(s), it just continually dumped me somewhere else. Hence, I could never find the cause. The problem seemed unsolvable. Impatient and not wanting to pay $10 to get help, I tried out TurboTax, which is also available online. Now I could pit the two head to head!

In the end, they both refunded the same amount, but TurboTax was far, far more user friendly. Maybe Intuit added some pwn to it when they bought TurboTax. Even with the base filing bundle, everything was very clearly explained. It’s also highly integrated with payroll companies, so if your company signed up for it, you can import your W2 straight through TurboTax’s site. You can do the same for your stocks if your broker is listed.

Speaking of stocks, if you happen to use Scottrade, sign into your Scottrade account, and you’ll be treated to a link offering 30% off all TurboTax federal filing packages. GOGOGO! If you do not use Scottrade, and would like to, let me know. We all get free trades if I refer you.

If you don’t have Scottrade, TurboTax is a little bit more expensive than TaxCut, but from what I’ve seen of both, the premium seems worth it.