Wordpress iPhone Application

A quick one today, but worthy of note is the upcoming now out Wordpress iPhone Application.
This means an update of techdebug.com is on the cards…

You can read about it on the dedicated iPhone page.

via TUAW

Australian Soldier Dies

My petty whinging about iPhone prices and data really means nothing.

My thoughts go out to the family of the recently killed Australian Solder. Since I have a number of family and friends whom are serving members (some overseas) – I have a very small idea how they must feel. I’m an ex-military and ex-Signaller myself: so I know how committed one can be to the job and the corps.

I’m going to keep quiet about tech stuff and remember that Sean McCarthy died for his country; no matter what political and social issues are behind all the hell in the Middle East.

iPhone choices

As I posted late last night – Vodafone had not announced their pricing. They did – then retracted it. This is a major factor for an IT and tech geek who currently uses Vodafone. I’m now seriously thinking of taking my business to Telstra (I use them for Cable and Internet already – so…?!). I have partially ruled Optus out due to their lack of non-metro coverage and decisions to expand their 3G using 900Mhz technologies.

I tried to pre-register with Telstra. They still have sent me as much as Vodafone. Nothing. So I decide that pre-registering is a waste of time. Off to the stores I went:

• A Melbourne CBD Vodafone store – “Sorry we don’t have any information yet”
• A Melbourne CBD Optus Store – “I can’t find the flyers so I don’t know the data rates, but I think you get the 16GB for $2 a month on the $80 cap”
• Telstra’s T-Life Melbourne store – “There is no info in store, come back Friday”

The Telstra bloke actually spent most of the subsequent three or so minutes expanding on my coverage comment. He mentioned “3.5G” at least 5 times, even when I said that the iPhone is a 3G device; not specifically catered to the NextG higher speeds (14Mbps).

So it is left up to me to ignore all the bally-hoo and just make a decision.

As Koops tells me: “Just buy one from elsewhere and use your computer data card to tether it via wifi”. Maybe that will be the way I go too. It’s either going to be a Friday morning purchase, or stick with my old nokia for another couple of months.

Bottom line, Vodafone has may have (see late minute official pricing) lost a customer – They missed the opportunity to NOT think of this as just another phone.

iPhone – Vodafone Australia leaves it too late

If Vodafone Australia don’t release their iPhone pricing/data or respond to my Pre-registration ASAP (and I mean by midday Wednesday only 48 hours before launch) I’m going to unfortunately have to go elsewhere.

What is the point of their pre-registration when:

• One hears nothing back from it except a “Watch your inbox”
• One goes into a Central Melbourne Vodafone shop and they say “We are not owned by Vodafone so don’t know about pre-registration or when the pricing is available”
• One rings the Vodafone Connect number and can NOT find any option – menu – or area that will answer your iPhone questions
• Optus and Vodafone 3G offerings outside Metro areas will use 900Mhz – WTF Carriers!

In fact their automated Phone system hung up on me twice and I gave up calling.

It looks like I’m going to have to go Telstra or Optus. Hmmmm. It may have to be Telstra since:

• they have Nationwide 3G coverage using 850Mhz – iPhone supported
• They will offer free WiFi access at their hotspots (aka any McDonalds)
• It’s that easy to port my mobile numbers away from Vodafone

I know Telstra have yet to list their data usage pricing; but it can’t be as any worse than their previous offerings.

I will take this moment – for the first time – to note here that although I’m not a Telstra employee I currently work on their IT Transformation. So it may be in my best interest to “show company colours” around the office – and have my phone continue to work as I travel the lifts of the many Melbourne buildings.

Come on Vodafone – you will be losing a customer and $2000 a year in money spent on your services. As other bloggers and news outlets have mentioned, they are cutting it too close.

Server Migration complete

I’ve had an on/off outage for most of the past 4 days, so to avoid hassles I put the site into maintenance mode.

I’ve actually had to decommission my 19″ server rack and the multiple servers I had for Tech Debug. There was a DNS server, kerberos, Database and web server. All the separate functions are now hosted on one OpenBSD VM that I’ve built recently. It’s running on the only remaining “non-laptop” left in my residence, which runs 24×7.

The only delay in getting back online in the last 48 hours was the MySQL data export and import. It’s a bit convoluted, and not documented in entirely one place on the MySQL documentation site (backup here, restore here), however once done once it will be easy to repeat. I still like the simplicity of PostgreSQL administration. Specifically the backup and restore:

Backup:
pg_dumpall > savefile.dump
Restore:
psql -f savefile.dump postgres

Well, there are some prep steps you should do; but it is all in one place on their documentation page.

Let me know how the site performs on the VM.