Venu Anuganti Blog

Finally I also own an iPhone now. I ordered this on Aug 22nd and has the phone in my hand by 24th morning 10AM with the default free shipping. Good and fast shipping service from Apple. I used to think Dell used to ship the products asap if they are in stock, and looks like apple is also doing in the same way.

I enabled it using iTunes with another 2-year contract with Cingular with extra 20$ for the unlimited data plan. The phone is real surprise to me in terms of features…very good design and break through technology and most importantly its user friendly.

I thought the following could have been a nice to have features in iPhone as I felt lacking of them is becoming hard to keep the iPhone as the replacement to the other phones (I used to have Cingular PDA 8125 and Blackberry 8700C):

Features that I really liked in iPhone: 

• Light weight and cool UI interface
• Easy navigation to most of the features like stocks, weather, maps
• Safari browser with zoom in and out using two fingers
• Screen scrolling using fingers
• Phone and iTunes together
• Video clarity is too good (especially when playing ipod videos or you-tube)
• builtin Camera photo resolution and its clarity
• Yahoo! mail interface without the need of pop interface

Features that are needed in iPhone for common use:

• Copy and Paste functionality 
• Built in AIM for Yahoo, AOL and MSN
• Improve in the sound quality of the incoming voice, its very hard at times to hear other party and looks like other do not have any problem in hearing
• The home button is not that sensitive in the unit that I got, some times I needed hard press.
•  I noticed the safari browser often crashes and it immediately goes to home screen and you lost what you visiting. Could have been nice if they had a nice auto recovery of the last visited links
• After I place a call, I never able to go back and end the call, automatically the screen is locked by that time.
• Lack of flash support in the Safari is really a pain as we can not use all websites
• Easy way to configuration to support the keyboard with both numbers and letters in one-dial pad.
• Call Log history should have been with some more basic features like distinguishing incoming and outgoing calls along with the total time spent on each call
• Separate TODO list or gadget
• Safari setting to have the default home page (good that they provided a way to toggle between the Google and Yahoo search engine)
• Speaker volume is pretty much limited, it should have been bit more louder
• Maps feature should had a way to change from default Google to Yahoo and/or Map quest as Google maps often gives wrong routes.
• Lack of remote connectivity tools like a shell or terminal, ssh, putty, VNC viewer and a remote RDP client
• Maps is not  fully features (at least should had a way to re-route or finding a alternative way)
• Way to integrate web-based exchange e-mails
• Bulitin RSS reader could have been a great addition
• Could have been nice if ipod had its own Album section instead of going to more and then selecting the albums.

Overall its really a cool toy to play and it mostly suites for day to day software engineers life.

Recently I noticed that my Macbook pro is getting over heated and on the other day I almost felt like it will cause a fire…but the good and old Windows Vista shutdown itself without any notice …I am guessing may be because of the heat or it could have done my Macbook heating sensors.

What is happening is; lately when I goto office, I immediately connect the Macbook Pro to external HP 24″ LCD monitor along with external mouse and keyboard and close the Macbook lid by booting to Windows Vista under direct Bootcamp.

Normally its gets hot and the fan spins like anything under Bootcamp. But otherday it was such that I couldn’t even touch the laptop at all…man ? what kind of air ventilations the laptop has when the lid is closed ? Looks like closing the lid is the actual cause. I only noticed this when my laptop suddenly shutdown itself without any notice (just power-off, not a regular clean shutdown) and powering on back, boots to Windows and then shuts down automatically. After keeping the lid open for 10-15 minutes and then restarting the Macbook seemed to work fine.

So, no more closing of the Macbook LID when connected to external monitor… 

Today CNet blog posted an entry related to Windows virtual machine performance on the Mac and it is interesting article to read when VMWare(VMW) when to IPO. VMWare Fusion 1.0 seemed to out perform Parallels in all the scenarios except that the Fusion is not able to run Quake 4 where as Parallels was able to. Not sure if it is a legitimate test as Fusion was using more than one core in the tests along with 128MB RAM where as Parallels was restricted to single core(it does not yet support multi-crore) along with 64MB.

Using Bootcamp is the best choice as it runs the Windows natively and lately I only boot to Windows using Bootcamp instead of using any of the virtualization software as I always end up into some sort of problems (like OS and/or office activation and random crashes and white screen of death).

Last week I did a clone of my Mac OS X using Carbon Copy Cloner and then repartitioned the hard disk to have Bootcamp partition and then installed the Windows Vista using the complete restore mechanism as I had the complete system backup. Windows Vista Ultimate edition which supports the complete PC backup and restore mechanism built into the Operating System without the need of any third party tools along with incremental full backup (supported in Home Premium, Business and Ultimate editions).

And after the restore, actually I forgot to activate the Windows Vista; as I thought I had 30-days left. But after booted back with Parallels using Bootcamp and later on when I re-booted back to direct Bootcamp the Vista is not fully working and popped to activate with a message An unauthorized change was made to your license and when I try to activate, it always fails with an error Unrecognized error, error code 0×80080250. I tried all possible ways to activate, nothing went in my way. This may be because of my Parallel tools. But funny thing is the same Bootcamp OS works fine when ran through Parallels as it has its own activation.

I left again with another restore last night; and settled not to experiment much with any of the Mac virtual tools until I am done with my work.

Since few days am experimenting with few tools to clone my existing Mac disk to another of my USB backup drive (WD 250GB Passport) so that I can re-partition the existing primary disk to have a room for Bootcamp. This is needed because the OS am running is the image from Yahoo! which has lot of tools thats hard to reinstall back. So having a complete image makes the life much easier.

I found two nice tools which can actually clone the disk and moreover they are free. SuperDuper! Carbon Copy Cloner I could not able to install SuperDuper! for some reason as the downloaded .dmg file is not mountable on 10.4.10, contacted the product support team, and a got a message that the downloaded file is corrupt. I did tried this with all other 3 browsers and from 4 different locations, nothing seemed to be working for me. On the other hand I was able to install Carbon Copy Cloner without any problems and did a complete clone of the existing disk to USB disk using couple of clicks and it just took few hours to complete (~50GB). To test the backup disk how it really works, I rebooted the Macbook with this USB drive and the system seemed to be up and running from USB disk and behaves exactly as the primary hard drive except that it took little longer to boot. Carbon Copy Cloner does not support the incremental updates when you wanted to re-clone the disk back where as SuperDuper! does seemed to support this through Smart Update. Now, its time for me to play with the primary hard disk.