jamezpolley.com

Also — how to make it self-destruct in <10 invalid pass­code attempts.

Shtep One: Down­load the iPhone Con­fig­u­ra­tion Util­ity from Apple

Shtep Two: Futz with the Stuffz

Not shown: there’s an option at the bot­tom where you can stip­u­late self-wipe after as lit­tle as 5 incor­rect passphrase attempts.

Shtep 3: Upload con­fig as per instruc­tions in the “Installing Con­fig­u­ra­tion Pro­files” sec­tion of the Deploy­ment Guide.

Phdone.

Not much time to write. Busy watch­ing great Aussie movie I’d never heard of till you rec­comended it, on the crys­tal clear big wide screen.

All is forgiven.

PS phone is charg­ing off the USB port, a nice touch. Pic related, droid included for scale.

Dear Sin­ga­pore Airlines,

I love you. Really I do. Out of all two inter­na­tional air­lines I’ve flown, your by far the best. I’m only fly­ing cat­tle class, in your planes cat­tle can only be a ref­er­ence to those Japan­ese cows that live a hand-fed, daily mas­saged life.

It’s the lit­tle things you do so well that make the dif­fer­ence: the hot towel imme­di­ately on take­off, recog­nis­ing that just get­ting to the air­port can be a hard day. The fre­quent — it feels like every ten min­utes, but is prob­a­bly more like once an hour — offers of a juice or water. I don’t do booze on flights, but the cou­ple beside me do, and your staff have kept them sup­plied with beer and Bai­leys until they stopped whin­ing (the cou­ple, not the staff — as far as I can tell, bring­ing a con­stant stream of booze for this cou­ple ful­filled the child­hood dreams of the staff, judg­ing by the looks on their faces)

I do apol­o­gise — turns out they weren’t sated, just rest­ing — but once again the host­ess bring­ing the booze seem thrilled to be of ser­vice. It’s lit­tle things like that that make me return every week­end to my favorite local cafe, and will keep me return­ing to your airline.

You get the big things right too — last time I flew SQ, I had the absolute plea­sure of rid­ing in an A380 from SIN to SYD. Being first to fly that plane, some­thing you’re right­fully proud of, is just a small demon­stra­tion of your comitt­ment to remain­ing one of the world’s lead­ing airlines.

Right now I’m treat­ing myself to a run­through of my Liv­ing End albums on my iPod. This is a real treat — their early work remains some of my favourite music of all time, and I don’t get to lis­ten to it often enough.

As nice as this is, it’s not what I had in mind when I boarded your air­craft. You see, you’re famous for your entairn­ment sys­tem, and again, rightly so. The games leave a bit to be desired, but your movie and TV selec­tion is sec­ond to none. It’s not just the num­ber of pro­grams — it’s the vari­ety! Hol­ly­wood, Bol­ly­wood, Euro­pean and Chi­nese — you have a vast range of pro­gram­ming from all over the world. The first thing I did on boad­ing the plane was to peruse your enter­tain­ment guide and plan my next 8 hours of relaxation.

So why am I lis­ten­ing to my own music? Because your entairn­ment sys­tem has failed me. It’s been off for over half the flight. It was off for over 90 min­utes at the start of the flight. Even­tu­ally it came up, but minus the Video On Demand. Even so, I man­aged to watch some of Gomor­rah on broad­cast chan­nel 13 — but before the movie ended, the sys­tem rebooted again.

After a con­sid­er­able time with no enter­tain­ment the sys­tem came back. This time I decided to go for some­thing shorter, so I started on some of the TV doc­u­men­taries. I man­aged a show about gar­dens in India, and most of another show, before the sys­tem crashed entirely. Still about 2 hours from Sin­ga­pore, and my only enter­tain­ment is pro­vided by the music I pro­vided my self, and writ­ing you this rant.

I’m not going to pre­tend this means I won’t be back: an SQ flight with no enter­tain­ment still beats most car­ri­ers. I just want to let you know that flight SQ232 today was almost the per­fect flight — it was only your enter­tain­ment sys­tem that let you down.

I loom for­ward to fly­ing SQ again soon — my next three seg­ments are already booked, the last one once again on your A380, the first mere min­utes after I get off this flight — and look for­ward on par­tic­u­lar to being reminded just how good your sys­tem can be when it’s working.

Same view, 1920.

View Larger Map

That’s the Pow­er­house Museum, located between Pyr­mont and Ultimo. If you could hover above it in a heli­copter, the view would look some­thing like this:

Imag­ine if you could mag­i­cally click a link and jump back in time, and see the same view from some­time between 1900 and 1939…

If you’re lost: in the older pic­ture, look beyond the chim­neystack, and just to the left. Imme­di­ately beyond the chim­ney is a vacant block of land; at the top end of this is a short road, which has on the right a not-quite-right-angle cor­ner. The road then con­tin­ues up the pic­ture — but it’s not quite straight, it bends a lit­tle to the right. If you look at the mod­ern pic­ture, you can see the same not-quite-right-angle cor­ner and the same not-quite-straight road — although now the West­ern Dis­trib­u­tor flys across the not-quite-straight road.

See the large build­ing inside the block bounded by the not-quite-straight road? That build­ing is Global Switch Syd­ney — built in the last days of “Build it and they will come”. It’s only in the last few years that it’s start­ing to reach full capacity.

The rail­way line vis­i­ble in the ear­lier pic­ture was the Dar­ling Har­bour Goods line, which formed the first part of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Goods Rail­way Line. It’s now used as the Metro Light Rail line.

Talk­ing to a work­mate who has a sick cat led to look­ing at Med­ibank Private’s pet cover.

This led to the source of (appar­ently) all pet insur­ance in Aus­tralia; which then led to com­par­i­son shop­ping between the var­i­ous resellers.

The dif­fer­ences are amus­ing, but annoy­ing. One pro­vides 15k total cover; but only $500 for tick paral­y­sis. Another only offers 9k total cover; but removes the restric­tions on what per­cent­age of that can be used for drugs/medication vs how much is for den­tal care. None of them cover treat­ment for leukemia in cats; but some add an addi­tional clause declin­ing to cover any con­di­tion for which there is a vaccine.

I’d like to go with the RSPCA - if some­one has to make a profit, they seem like a bet­ter choice than some of the for-profit com­pa­nies. But the lim­its are half that pro­vided by Med­ibank, while the pre­mi­ums are dou­ble. Sure you can skim profit off the top, but that doesn’t mean I want you to gouge me for every cent I own.

Gah. Choices, that aren’t really choices. Just what I wanted.

After my last post, Rich Buggy men­tioned his own com­plaint, some­thing that I remem­ber from my days as a com­muter — Cityrail, every year, run a Sat­ur­day timetable (with some extra peak-hour ser­vices) for around a week, roughly between Christ­mas and New Years, and usu­ally stretch­ing a few days on at least one side. Despite the reduced level of ser­vice, they still insist on charg­ing full peak fares for any­one try­ing to get to work before 9AM, or buy­ing a weekly ticket. Full details of the reduced ser­vices are still on Cityrail’s web­site.

More inter­est­ingly, an anony­mous com­menter (who I think I’m going to name “Deep Train”) left a com­ment, which got held for mod­er­a­tion. Rather than let­ting it through, I’m going to pub­lish it here, as it’s wor­thy of its own post.

It is worse than you think. If CityRail was in the energy busi­ness it would be called Enron. As I under­stand it, the fig­ures are fudged in var­i­ous ways, but I only have unsub­stan­ti­ated rumours to that effect.

So on-time run­ning is mea­sured only at Cen­tral at the moment. How­ever, I heard today, con­firm­ing unsub­stan­ti­ated rumours, that on-time run­ning is lower than 25% at some stations.

These per­for­mance indi­ca­tors should be mea­sured by an inde­pen­dent organisation.

Right, so we all know that Optus decided to charge inter­na­tional call rates for some local num­bers, to try to claw back some of the money they’re los­ing as cus­tomers choose cheaper options to call home. A more sen­si­ble option would be to pro­vide rea­son­able rates to exist­ing cus­tomers — or set up such a VOIP ser­vice your­self, and let cus­tomers choose between the cheaper lower-quality VOIP ser­vice, or pay­ing more for a “pre­mium” connection[1] — and maybe even snag­ging some cus­tomers from other car­ri­ers. That woud be hard though — so instead, lets just slug pre­paid cus­tomers with addi­tional fees to access the VOIP ser­vices, and pray that not too many of them port their ser­vice to a dif­fer­ent provider.

But that’s just stu­pid­ity. This is out­right theft:

The most recent legal case, decided on Novem­ber 27, also forced Optus to con­cede it had stolen 100 num­bers from a tiny telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions car­rier in Van­u­atu and then allowed a pair of its pornog­ra­pher part­ners, Global Inter­net Billing in Britain and MDC in Europe, to use the stolen num­bers for their business.

Optus then kept the pro­ceeds of these calls, money which would have nor­mally been payable to the Van­u­atu carrier.

[1] Of course, the dif­fer­ence would prob­a­bly be entirely in the mar­ket­ing and not in the imple­men­ta­tion of the ser­vice, but that’s noth­ing new.

Remem­ber when Cityrail decided that try­ing to get trains to run on time was too hard, so they just rede­fined “on time” to make things eas­ier?

Reme­ber how shortly after­wards Cityrail had posters all over the sta­tions with graphs show­ing the huge increase in on-time run­ning com­pared to the same time last year — and didn’t men­tion that the two sets of num­bers used dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions of “on time”?

They’re doing it again. Cityrail has a tar­get of no more than 5% of ser­vices run­ning at more than 135% pas­sen­ger capac­ity — but over the last two years, the actual fig­ure has been 16%. Rather than try­ing to fix the prob­lem, they’re redefin­ing the tar­get to be 17%.

Keep in mind that this is not 16% of ser­vices at full capac­ity: this is 16% of ser­vices at least 35% *over* the rated capac­ity of the carriage.

Well done Shittyfail!

From My New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion: Be A Proud Cre­ation­ist:

The sec­ond mes­sage was even more bizarre. After the excite­ment of the first mes­sage and the real­i­sa­tion that there was only Aus­tralian beer left and the sun hadn’t yet set, we were rapt to see the sky­writer trace out the word ‘THE’. We gazed on as he added, ‘CREATOR’. Intrigued, we cooed as the pilot scrawled ‘IS’… and waited for the payoff…

‘JESUS‘.

Fuck. I mean, that’s not even bib­li­cally accu­rate, surely! Jesus doesn’t come in until after the Tri­wiz­ard Tour­na­ment! Accord­ing to Gen­e­sis, Yah­we­hdidit. He was so clever, he man­aged to cre­ate the world twice in two dif­fer­ent orders!

See, I lost inter­est in this even ear­lier: when I last saw this bit of dri­vel it had just turned into “The”, and I got bored and went back inside. For a few moments before that, the sky had proudly been adver­tis­ing “THC”…

(Side note: I found this past via a ping­back on Stilgherrian’s post “Tel­stra, you god­dam bloody idiots!” — you’ll have to read both posts to fig­ure out the connection)