I’ve upgraded this site to the latest version of Wordpress, and in typical Ross-tradition, didn’t do it properly and as such have broken some pages and lost all the comments… ah well… will try and restore them in the not too distant future

Seriously Apple, you can do better than this.

Having tried to upgrade my .mac account to a MobileMe Family Pack account I noticed this rather unusual error at the top of the page… “Server Error: CreditCard Auth Successful” - how can a Successful auth be an error?

Contacted my bank and sure enough, Apple have taken the payment, but not provided anything in exchange for it - seems that many more people have had the same problem (and have tried repeatedly or with multiple cards without noticing this Auth Successful message at the top)

First the £121 free trial and now this, it’s ridiculous!!

I suppose we should be at least mildly grateful that Apple’s app designers were kind enough to put a sensible error message up (with a status explaination rather than just “Try again later”) as at least it gave me enough information not to try and pay twice!!!!

Apple - It’s bad enough that you broke .mac for everyone in the changeover to MobileMe but the amount of billing errors (and the sheer scale of them!) is unacceptable.

It seems that O2’s legacy MMS platform doesn’t implement even the basic security my own service did… use of security through obscurity techniques surely is not an appropriate way to protect private images sent to O2 customers by MMS.

Ironically, my own o2mms webapp thrown together in a week or so was more secure in most respects than the solution built by the multi-national O2.

As soon as O2 relaunch the service with improved security I will restore my service, although no doubt this will take some time.

More information on the outage;

• http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/19/o2-allows-mms-pictures-seen
• http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/20/o2-responds-mms-leak
• http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209101313

MobileMe is an excellent service, but has been criticised by a few for not implementing true ‘push’ functionality when you make changes on your mac … e.g. if you add a new appointment in iCal, it could take up to 15 mins to update your MobileMe account (and therefore your iPhone)

The following is a (not particularly ideal, just a quick hack) bash script that provides a quick workaround and allows my phone to stay up to date almost instantly

#!/bin/bash

OLD=`ls -laR ~/Library/Calendars/ | md5`;

while [ 1 == 1 ]; do
	COMPARE=`ls -laR ~/Library/Calendars/ | md5`;
	if [ $OLD != $COMPARE ]; then
		/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DotMacSyncManager.framework/Resources/dotmacsyncclient --sync com.apple.DotMacSync --entitynames com.apple.calendars.Attendee,com.apple.calendars.AudioAlarm,com.apple.calendars.CalDAVAccount,com.apple.calendars.Calendar,com.apple.calendars.CalendarOrder,com.apple.calendars.DisplayAlarm,com.apple.calendars.Event,com.apple.calendars.MailAlarm,com.apple.calendars.Organizer,com.apple.calendars.Recurrence,com.apple.calendars.Task,com.apple.contacts.CalendarURI,com.apple.ical.calendars.DotMacPublisher,com.apple.ical.calendars.Invitation,com.apple.ical.calendars.Node,com.apple.ical.calendars.ProcAlarm,com.apple.ical.calendars.RootNode,com.apple.ical.calendars.TaskOrder,com.apple.ical.calendars.URLPublisher;
	OLD=$COMPARE;
	fi;
	sleep 10;
done

Edit: let me stress this is FAR from ideal, calling the md5 function every 10 seconds has to be one of the daftest ways to implement this but it *does* work and for the use i needed it for the additional load is irrelevant

Well the iPhone 3G is here, as is version 2.0 of the iPhone firmware in the hands of the masses.

At the moment my popular O2MMS application is still a web-app with no immediate plans to bring it to the app store until it can offer something that the web app currently cant (sending MMS for instance!)

However, I was looking forward to improving the web application with a number of features that Apple have touted as being great for web developers in the new iPhone - namely fullscreen mode (which allows the app to run without the safari navigation and address bar - making it feel far more like a native app) and client-side storage (which theoretically would allow the app to store your MMS messages so they could be viewed without a network connection)

Unfortunately, Apple have not included this functionality in the currently shipping version of iPhone OS 2.0

Really annoying that Apple have promoted the way of making fullscreen apps, then not actually put it in the firmware!!
<meta name="apple-touch-fullscreen"
content="YES (but it might as well say no for now)" />

Firstly, sorry for the lack of updates … been busy

Secondly if you normally use my mac.com address to contact me it currently does not work as (a) it has expired, (b) due to Apple’s ‘migration’ to MobileMe I appear to be completely unable to renew it!!!

I was asked recently by someone to investigate the security offered by obfuscation scripts such as the one at http://www.rightscripts.com/phpencode (also available as a paid-for download)

Obviously anything which relies on PHP itself to ‘encode’ the script, must have the means of decryption built into the script - if it doesn’t then it wouldn’t run.

Around 5 lines of code later, and you have this … http://www.iross.net/phpdecode … a simple proof of concept which reverses the code generated by http://www.rightscripts.com/phpencode (and one or two other sites that work in a similar way)

So is there any way to really secure your PHP code? Yes, systems such as IonCube or the ByteCode encoder which require a ‘loader’ to be installed on the server are substantially more secure as the code is compiled rather than just obfuscated - these provide a secure option

Of course, all my own freelance web development clients get the source code without any sort of obfuscation - since they have paid for it!

It’s been almost three months since the O2 MMS iPhone application moved to donation-ware.

I must say the outcome has slightly restored my faith in the shareware model

As of now there are 2,015 registered users of which 470 have donated, a 23% conversion rate.

The O2 MMS application has handled an incredible 12,700 MMS messages since launch

I gather anonymous statistics only (and obviously don’t go reading peoples MMS messages!) but one thing that I did implement out of curiosity was a checksum to see how many images were identical (e.g. forwarded MMS messages) - interestingly one image has recurred over 73 times around Christmas. Sadly, unless someone sends it to *me* i’ll never know what it was

Before anyone’s concerned that this actually compares their photos - it doesnt! - The checksum is based on MD5 so it is impossible to reconstruct original images from the 32 character string it generates, it’s just very unlikely that two images could generate the same checksum so it’s good for random facts like that

Hmm… really should update this more often, not that many people care I imagine… so this is yet another pointless insight into my mind and my life at the moment.

Not much has happened, hence the lack of updates… Alfie’s growing bigger by the day (and eating more by the day too!!) - loads of photos of him here of course

My three rants at the moment are both traffic related;

Firstly the “A77 Safety Group” summed up very well by morph - her rant about the non-sensical 50mph limit on the A77 Dual Carriageway (it’s always good to mention the ABD who have sensible policies and ideas!!) - loads more people agree that this is another stupid decision by the A77 Safety Group

Secondly, the introduction of completely pointless double yellow lines ACROSS THE FRONT OF OUR DRIVEWAY which are unenforceable (yet) anyway and look unsightly!

Lastly, the governments continuing obsession that cars are the cause of global warming… as an excuse to get us all to pay more tax… Sheep are a bigger problem than cars !!

Cars are responsible for 16% of UK carbon dioxide emissions, which are 2% of total international emissions, and overall mankind is responsible for 3.4% of total annually cycled carbon dioxide (according to the IPCC). So cars are responsible for only 0.01% of emissions

Despite calling on drivers to adopt ’smarter driving techniques’, the Department for Transport seems to be doing exactly the opposite when it comes to roads:

• Speed humps and traffic calming obstructions increase emissions due to the constant decelerate/accelerate process.
• Traffic lights on some roundabouts operate 24 hours a day, even in the middle of the night when there is virtually no traffic. This both wastes electricity, and increases fuel consumption due to drivers having to stop, wait, and accelerate away, even when there is no other traffic about.

Both of the above from the excellent Act on CO2 pages

Ah well… end of rant… can’t think of much else so I wont bother, we have a week off work ahead though - yay

It’s been roughly 24 hours since donations became required in order to continue to enjoy the full functionality of my O2 MMS application… and remarkably of the 300 unique users who have used the service in the last 24 hours, 31 of them have donated something (either by PayPal or Reverse Billed SMS) - a 10% conversion rate of users from a free service to an essentially paid-for service.

I am quite impressed with this, and by the generosity of one or two users in particular - it is very much appreciated and somewhat restores faith in the old concept of Shareware software.