iPhone 2.0 - Unacceptable Quality

I feel terrible as I type this post right now. I’m an avid Apple user, I’ve had my MacBook pro since it came out (it is the original!) and I’ve had iPods and everything in between. I also got an iPhone later last year after becoming an Apple Store retail employee.

This year I decided to sit out and get the iPhone 3G! It was a lot of fun sitting out and was quite an experience but unfortunately the phone itself does not deliver.

In addition to getting the iPhone 3G I had been acquainted to the iPhone 2.0 software early since I was in the developer program. When I heard that the build number on the 3G was the same as last beta of the iPhone 2.0 software, I was terrified. My beta build was riddled with crashes, hangs, slow-syncs, and more.

I hoped this was specific to the iPhone and that the 3G hardware would somehow magically fix this.

It did not.

Just now I received a phone call and “swiped” to answer it and the phone CRASHED. That’s right, it crashed. I restarted it, got another phone call, answered it, and this time it froze for a solid 5 to 10 seconds before answering. After finishing the call, I moved the phone away from my ear, awaiting the screen to turn back on so I could “End Call.” Unfortunately, the screen never turned back on! And the person on the other line (luckily a family member) heard me cussing and hitting my screen to get it to hang up.

This crossed the line.

I can deal with my touch keypad hanging up, I can deal with painfully slow syncing, I can deal with a few instabilities with user-land software. But I can NOT handle that the iPhone — which as I remember Steve Jobs saying the most important part was the PHONE — cannot be a reliable phone.

I will not get rid of the phone, it is far too valuable to me with my contacts, calendars, software, etc. to throw away so easily, but I just have to say: Shame on you Apple, shame on you! How could such poor quality software ship out the door so quickly?

Posted at 1:38 AM | Written by Mitchell Hashimoto | 1 Comment made.

Ruby Enterprise + Phusion Passenger on Slicehost Screencast

Still relatively new, although they are on version 2.0, Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition look like the easy-to-configure and preferred way to deploy rails applications. I won’t go over the benefits of passenger, since there are many resources available already. And if you want true performance without using too much memory, Phusion Passenger + Ruby Enterprise Edition is the way to go.

And despite the relatively easy installation, some people are reluctant to try out new scary things. Below, I have a screencast of me setting up Phusion Passenger + Ruby Enterprise Edition on a new slice and deploying a fresh rails app.

You can view the low-quality video inline below or you can download the high quality quicktime movie.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Note: If you didn’t watch the movie, some features I use in my sprinkle script are experimental features from my own fork of Sprinkle. Therefore, in the download below I have the .gem file which can be installed locally to get the benefits of all these features. Hopefully they will soon be merged into the main Sprinkle release branch.

For the customized sprinkle gem and files used with the screencast above, click here to download it.

NOTE: The package linked above is outdated. Read the comments to see how to fix the couple problems with it. I will update it when I have time but they are fairly trivial fixes so check below.

Posted at 2:49 AM | Written by Mitchell Hashimoto | 13 Comments made.