Incorrect time on iPhone

August 10, 2009

There's an epidemic of incorrect time on the iPhone. Well maybe not quite epidemic but it seems I'm not the only one who has seen it. What is particularly odd is that the time, when incorrect is off by two hours. The report on the other site was around Mammoth Lakes on US 395.

On this trip I've noticed it in a couple of spots. First off in the border regions of Nevada and Oregon while southbound on US 95. In this region there is a time difference between the Mountain and Pacific time zones. The same, however, cannot be said for Mammoth Lakes.

Then it happened in Wells, Nevada. The signal here, too, is flighty. A certain testament to regions of the country where iPhone sales will skyrocket when Verizon gets their hands on it. While it was happening today I found that if I turned on Data Roaming the time would be correct. Turn it off and it was back to being the current time plus 2 hours. Even with data roaming enabled when we walked across the street for dinner we were once again two hours in the future. Read more about Incorrect time on iPhone

Follow the money

August 5, 2009

The FCC's call for information on why the Google Voice iPhone app was withdrawn is going to uncover some interesting details. First up AT&T responded with a carefully crafted statement that amounts to "we don't do that". What wasn't said, however, is what control AT&T contractually holds over Apple's process.

Let's back up a minute and look at who stands to gain from this. If the iPhone supports a VoIP application who stands to lose? AT&T. Apple will still sell iPhones and iPods to these customers with their VoIP apps. In fact in many cases Apple may well sell Apps to them as well. Even if the particular app is free trends show iPhone users will buy plenty of other applications to make up for it. So Apple gains nothing and in fact loses quite a bit by having these apps rejected. AT&T on the other hand doesn't get the same black-eye and gets to think it's protecting it's dwindling cellular voice market. Read more about Follow the money

Popups API for Gigya Socialize module

August 2, 2009

Generally I'm not a fan of putting out distributions of modules outside of the regular release system at Drupal. In this case, however, the Gigya Socialize module depends on several small patches to the Popups API. All of the issues are in the queue and hopefully with some review will be worked on and ultimately accepted. However to stem the tide of email requests on how to patch a module I'm going to provide a patched version here. This uses today's Popups API 6.x-2.x branch from CVS with the four patches listed on the Gigya Socialize module page included.

Note I do not plan to update package. The package is only an interim stopgap until some action is taken on the issues in the queue.