Time machine is a little confused about maths (and iPhone SDK ramblings)

“The backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 4.2GB, but only 22.9GB are available.”

Just posting this bug so I can reference it in a bug report. It may be my fault though, because I’m using an unsupported volume: a drive on a remote machine on my local network backed-up over airport. Worth noting anyway.

Half of the backup happens to be a disc image of the iPhone SDK.

It looks from what I’ve seen so far: i.e. nothing but the video of the Apple announcement, and a few iTunes U Apple Developer Connection introduction videos, pretty good. I’m getting more and more keen to get an iPhone. I’ve been waiting for three things before I do: Version 2.0 of the phone hardware (hopefully with GPS and 3G), the SDK and an end to the network lock-in. I hate being told that to use a specific handset I have to use a specific GSM network, it’s just wrong. Now the SDK is here, I’m weakening…

The info about the SDK looks very impressive so far – Apple taking 30% of the revenue from sales of the apps seems a little bit steep – but (in my opinion) they generally tend to be a benevolent dictator. Symbian has had voluntarily signed apps for a long time, however, very few developers bother to sign their apps, so users tend not to care or know about code signing. Even worse – when they find out about code signing it tends to confuse them. Apple mandating signing of all code means it can be seamless.

Having a single channel of delivery for iPhone apps may, to many, seem draconian and I would imagine it’s not long until someone writes an app which Apple denies distribution, yet most people find inoffensive.

I don’t know…. I’m torn – Steve’s Reality Distortion Field has really got me this time, yet I still in my heart of hearts think ‘hey – this is *my* miniature, hand-held computer – how dare you tell me what I can and can’t install on it.’

My resistance to not having a physical keyboard is also waning, and although being a Nokia devotee since I first had a mobile phone (back in oooh 1996), and therefore a Symbian fan of late – my experience with the mail client on my E61 and the limitations of Series 60 compared to Mobile OS X (network/email/voip config on the E61 is a real bore – and it doesn’t get the concept of falling back to different networks depending on what’s available) make the iPhone a very desirable next phone. Plus I’m familiar with the development environment.

I have noticed, from my limited peeking around, that there is no access to the Bluetooth functions of the phone. I could be wrong about that though. I think that the intention is that most external comms are to be done via TCP/IP over the wifi hardware.

Anyway, enough of my prattling – congratulations to all the engineers at Apple who are delivering the SDK, it’s a stunning feat of engineering.

Communications Specifications for the GlobalSat DG-100 GPS DataLogger

Time for one of my annual blog posts.

I recently bought a GlobalSat DG-100 GPS datalogger, which is a device that records your GPS position over time, so that you can later review those data, and do all sorts of fun things. I specifically wanted it for aviation, so you can review your flight track, and see how good your navigation is and how far off your desired track you wandered.

There are Windows drivers for the device, and only a Windows utility for extracting the recorded tracks and altering it’s preferences. Normally this would preclude a Mac user like me from buying it, however, the nice people at GlobalSat have published the specifications for communicating with the device, and some people have made their own apps for talking to it. There’s a Windows .net application for it and a linux project for talking to it as well.

I’m in the early stages of writing a Cocoa app which will do the same for Mac OS X users.

Anyway – The spec was a bit dry, being a .txt file – so I’ve spruced it up a bit and put it into a web page for Google to index.

[edit] – Good lord, Google indexed this post in less than 17 minutes!