[Update: 3G Service was restored in Glasgow at mid-day on Monday... two and a half days after it failed]

It would appear that O2 is struggling to cope with the iPhone 3G.

Their, less than excellent at the best of times, 3G data service has been unavailable in Glasgow and a few other places for 2 days now. 

To make matters worse it would appear that O2 are completely oblivious to the problem and everyone who calls up is simply told “no fault has been reported” - surely the action of calling about it would constitute a fault report??

One customer has even been told their phone “must be faulty, return it to Carphone Warehouse” 

It would appear that the Apple Store in Glasgow however is advising customers that O2’s network has been down for two days!

My eMail to O2 regarding this was met with the usual ineptitude as Anju Bhatnagar from O2 Customer Serice helpfully sent me nothing more than a link to the 3G coverage map and “there is no reported fault in your area.”

After 45 minutes on hold to O2 they have confirmed there is a major network outage… finally… maybe now they’ll fix it?

Remind me why I’m paying these people?!

As you know, O2 shut down their legacy MMS service following a newly discovered security hole and I have had to adapt O2mms to work with the new service… why has it taken so long I hear you ask? 

Well first the non-techie explanation;

I’ve taken advantage of the O2 downtime to re-write the O2mms app from the ground up to improve performance and expand it’s capabilities with a view to it becoming a native application… and it’ll be back this week!

The new modular design makes it easier to provide more features in the future - including video support and (hopefully) automatic MMS to eMail.

I could have restored the original service quicker - but with the new version so close, it seemed pointless to waste time hacking the old one to make it work

Now the technical one;

The old application used the excellent iUI library to allow pages to be loaded asynchronously but the underlying application was split between 4 or 5 files, all of which opened connections to the O2 servers every time a message was requested.

The application has been re-written from the ground up and now uses the extremely lightweight JSON protocol to communicate with the client-side app running on your iPhone - the end result is that the application is far faster. This JSON API will also allow other applications (think native!) to communicate with my service.

Additionally caching of messages has been implemented, preventing the need to make multiple calls to O2’s servers within a single session - improving performance for all users and reducing the chances of O2 becoming annoyed at the increasing use of my app!

The new modular design makes it easier to provide more features in the future which will include handling multiple formats (not just JPEG/GIF) and also the potential to integrate with other protocols (think IMAP)

Thanks to all my users for their continued support and patience.

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!