Apple/itunes/iphone - fantastic when it works, horrific when it doesn't

Update: DO NOT DO THIS! This process kept the photos, but lost the music :(

My wife's laptop crashed so we found a spare computer for her. Being the optimistic sort I installed itunes and plugged in her iphone thinking "it will just copy the music/photo collection from the iphone". Does it my rear end!

I cannot believe Apple make it so hard, Apple make it impossible - there is just no way to update your computer from your iphone. Syncing offers to wipe out your iphone! How hard can it be! I am just speechless.

At least there is no way to do it *officially*.

Long story short you need to:

- use itunes to backup the iphone (it will do this even if you haven't synced it - right click on the phone under devices and choose "Back Up") - jailbreak your iphone (which luckily I had done on a previous iphone) - install ftp - copy all the data manually onto the new computer - sync

Lame lame lame.

And yes, jailbreaking does prevent the iphone being upgraded to v3.0 when it rolls out, but I don't really care because co-incidentally a shiny new one will be arriving tomorrow courtesy of the fact it was dropped last week and the 7 or 8£ a month I pay to o2 insurance :)

NO! O2 - I (might) hate you!

I love the iphone.  Yeah, I know, sad but true.  I purchased the first generation, and then the iphone3g when it came.  I also bought one for my wife.

I didn't mind paying the mega bucks as I knew that early adopters usually got the chance to upgrade to the next gen.  Not so with the iphone 3G S it appears, at least not according to <a href="http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2009/06/09/o2-customers-furious-at-iphone-3g-s-upgrade-costs/">this link</a>.

Really?  Are O2 that short sighted - I won't be upgrading on principal (I don't really need the new model, just the new OS), so what incentive is there for me to spend mega bucks? 

O2 really need to understand that people like me don't mind spending money, we do mind not feeling special.  I just want to know that I am getting some sort of loyalty discount.

The <a href="http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/paymonth.html">pay monthly cost</a> has also increased - I pay ~£35/month and didn't pay for my handset, now for the same monthly cost I will need to spend an extra £184.98!!!  OK, the disk space has doubled, but I don't need any more disk space!

Sigh.

When the iphone came out it was exciting for two reasons:

 - it was a fantastic piece of kit in itself (both the hardware and OS).  It was a paradigm shift from a phone with a few extra apps to a mini computer with a phone
 - it set a new level for the competition

I would hope the competition has had time to react and respond with alternatives.  Maybe I will start checking them out.

Leopard TimeMachine saved my bacon

Had to hard boot my leopard MacBook Pro 17".  When it came back, everything was wrong - loads of corrupted files etc.

Time for reboot I thought - I had everything backed up using Time Machine and spideroak.  Or so I thought :)

So an hour (ish) later I had a fresh virgin installation.  I could have chosen to restore from Time Machine during the update, but I wanted a bit more control (:)) than that, so I didn't.

I created the exact same username/password (not sure if that is relevant), and logged in.  Clicked on the Time Machine icon and there it was - a beauty to behold - restoring was slightly unintuitive - I expected to be able to right click and restore, but no, I needed to select the ones and then click the Restore icon.

So, no more than 3 hours and I am back up and running.

(yeah yeah, I know, if I had done an entire system image it would have been even quicker).

Didn't have to use spideroak this time, but I will be using it to synchronise mine, and my wife's photo galleries.  Rock on.

ScribeFire and Blogspot and Token Invalid 401

This is my first post from scribefire, which seems to work quite nicely.

To get it to work, I did the following:

• Install the firefox plugin 
• Start it up (I configure it to open in a new window)
• Click on the "Blogs" tab at the top right
• Click on the Wizard button
• Enter the URL (colin.yates.blogspot.com)
• Click Next
• Enter my username/password (username is your full gmail email account!)
• Click Next

and that was it!

Do note, however, sometimes it didn't recognise the blogging platform and asked me to choose one.  Unfortunately, blogger wasn't in the drop down, so I cancelled and restarted the wizard.  It took maybe 3 or 4 attempts before it work.  Now it works fantastically - must do, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.

Hi, world,

My name is Colin Yates and I am a Software Engineer. I am primarily interested in doing software engineering better. Why do we have such a dismal success rate. Successes are more often than not accidents, or at least unexpected ;) Why is that? Why is software so hard to do well? Technologies/processes I am interested in: spring, gradle, groovy, pragmatic development, testing and so on.

This blog will be a dumping ground for pretty much anything I think about that might be worth sharing. Or not.

One warning - I sometimes talk utter tosh, but just occasionally there are little nuggets in there as well. Good luck finding them! To be fair, I will try and separate my posts with a consistent set of tags.