We’re at Changi airport, which is a great place to stop over if you need to have an extended layover. The airport hotel has unusually large rooms and the world’s only (outdoor) swimming pool at an airport; there’s also a fitness center. There’s a 24 hour food court, a 24 hour mini mart, lots of duty free shopping, free internet, espn, and numerous gardens.

(Written at the airport waiting in line with 8 bags)

I would pay a premium for a service that picked up my bags from home the night before I had to travel and checked them through to their destination. A service like this would make airports work better because passengers wouldnt struggle through lines. It could be built on existing airport shuttle infrastructure (like Shuttle Express) taking advantage of unused capacity during off hours. Seems like a winning proposiition all around.

Here’s one approach to opening up the iPhone:

 One a more serious note, DVD Jon has found a way to activate the iPhone without an AT&T phone plan, otherwise you can’t even play music.

Also, a new PC/Mac tool called iPhoneInterface will have the following features:

• Run any desired application already residing on the phone.
• Control what processes run on the phone (currently implementation is very hackish)
• Move files around on the phone
• Enable viewing of verbose information during the restore process
• Activate the phone without iTunes and without a token

This blog and Beyond411 are now back up after being taken down by a failing disk. There might still be lingering issues, so please let me know if you spot anything wrong.

This was a pretty good fire drill– several of the sectors on the disk started going bad, including some overlapping database tables, which meant that mysql marked the tables as crashed and was unable to recover them. Since the disk appeared to be on the verge of total failure, I had ServerPronto put in a new primary disk and OS install.

Luckily a combination of backups and surviving sectors retained pretty much everything important… I did temporarily lose some autocompletion data but this can be rebuilt and most folks probably won’t notice. I’ve improved my cron backup jobs to make sure that this is saved in the future.

It was a bit of drag (though still much better than in Windows) having to reinstall the necessary linux services as well as Rails, gems, etc.; I would really like to see future distributions of Linux include an easy to use system snapshot features. That’s one of the big draws of virtualization but it seems even without virtualization this is something that could be provided out of the box. (For all I know someone has created such a system snapshot tool already but it doesn’t seem to built into any distribution.)

You may notice that this blog and/or Beyond411 is periodically unavailable over the next few days.

Update, 11pm, 7/8/07 : Both Bogle’s Blog and Beyond411 are back up now. A total disk replacement and reinstall was necessary.

I’m getting hard read/write errors on the disk which affect one of the mysql table files used for autocompletions.

I fear the disk might be in the early stages of failing and I might need to migrate to a new disk and/or machine.

Here’s what the log files look like in case anyone is cleverer than I am at interpreting them; they don’t look pretty.

Jul 8 02:15:36 sp4507a kernel: Buffer I/O error on device hda3, logical block 748303
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0×51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=19095468, high=1, low=2318252, sector=19095464
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 19095464

This faq suggests that it’s a hardware error (e.g. bad sector.)

I got the chance to spend some quality time with an iPhone, and I must say I was blown away with the quality of the experience. It lives up to the hype and glowing reviews.  (One exception was the on-screen keyboard, but for most consumers that’s not going to matter.)

It’s not an inconceivable stretch to imagine the iPhone becoming as dominant in the consumer mobile space as Windows is on consumer desktops. Advances in technology plus lower cost nano editions of the iPhone will make it accessible to a broad swath of the market.

Apple has done such an incredible job with the iPhone that many are inclined to trust their wise and benevolent dictatorship.

But if software choice is real and valid principle, then we ought to apply it consistently.

For example, is it acceptable that Safari is the only browser that runs on the iPhone?  Would it be acceptable if Internet Explorer was the only browser that runs on Windows?

John Lilly of Mozilla has critiqued Steve Job’s keynote speech, which showed Safari gaining market share at the expense of all other third party desktop browsers (but not Internet Explorer!)  He called this “out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking.” 

If the iPhone remains closed and becomes dominant, we won’t even have a mobile browser duopoly, we’ll have a virtual monopoly. The same argument applies to other categories of mobile software– music (will iTunes have a privileged position on the iPhone above all other music sources), video (YouTube only?), and so forth.

One company, even Apple, can’t have all the good ideas in the world. Even Apple will sometimes favor the interests of shareholders and its carrier partner above its customers (as seen in the iPhones crippled wifi support and lack of a Skype client.) 

Choice matters, and competition matters, but we will only have them if we as mobile users insist upon them.