Alain Fontaine's Jabberbox

Slow iPhone 3G with IOS 4.0.x ? I might have a solution

Alain Fontaine — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:48:49 +0000

After reading many posts from people having the same sluggishness problems as I had on my iPhone 3G with the latest 4.0 and 4.0.1 software updates, I did the following to get my iPhone back to an acceptable level of performance and responsiveness :

Make sure you have a complete, recent backup of your iPhone
RESET your iPhone to factory defaults from within iTunes – let it go through the whole procedure without interruption
Perform a hardware RESET your iPhone after the factory reset, holding the top button and the “home” button together for at least 10 seconds
After the hardware reset, perform a RESTORE of your backup
Next, go to Settings->General->Home button preferences, then Spotlight, to deactivate the Spotlight indexing for those items that you only rarely search on. This frees up some performance and memory

After having performed all of the above steps, my 3G is again behaving reasonably fast – pretty much the same as on the 3.1.x software !

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How to piss off an IT director

Alain Fontaine — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:46:31 +0000

Today was the official launch of Apple’s iPad in Luxembourg. The atHome group of companies, for which I work as head of IT, needed 3 iPads for internal needs, so I drove off to Apple’s main premium reseller Lineheart in Leudelange to get them.

Unfortunately, my mission to give Apple and Lineheart some money, and make the luxembourgish government earn some VAT, came to an abrupt halt when the otherwise friendly sales guy told me “Sorry, today it’s just one device per customer!“.

I explained that this was for atHome group and that they could even write three different invoices on three of the seven companies’ names that atHome Group operates, but to no avail.

WTF!? How business unfriendly is this? It ruined my day because I drove way too many kilometers to their place just to find out that even business customers get treated as everyone else.

It’s noteworthy to say that a couple of months ago, REA Group spent hundred thousands with Apple to equip the whole Australian businesses with hundreds of MacBooks, iPhones, and now also a couple of iPads. Unfortunately, even this is not good enough for us to be able to buy three iPads over here.

Finally, this only confirms my decision of not using Apple as a business IT provider or partner in Luxembourg. They just don’t seem to be up to what I expect.

Now I’m off to find the nearest Apple store in France that will be generous enough to allow me to spend some money with them.

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Brand new chrome orange Lotus Eggxige

Alain Fontaine — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 15:22:43 +0000

For easter, I thought I would get myself the new Lotus Eggxige …

Looks fast, huh?

I haven’t taken it for a test yet, but I’ll update you as soon as it’s eaten done.

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Netbook – I’m taking the plunge

Alain Fontaine — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:54:12 +0000

After many months of thinking and watching the market, and of course trying to figure out why I’d really need (want!) a netbook, I’ve decided to go for one… I’m about to drive to the shop and get myself an Acer Aspire One D250, because it’s cheap and offers the features I’m looking for. As soon as I have it, I’ll install Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook remix (UNR), because I don’t want Windows 7 bloatware on that kind of hardware. Stay tuned for an extensive write-up of my experience in the next two days!

UPDATE : 29/12/2009 at 00:28

We just got back from the shops and from watching one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last few years: AVATAR. Greatly stunning, a must-see ! Back to the netbook: after checking out the D250’s keyboard, I decided it sucked big time, and got myself the ASUS eeePC 1008HA instead. I’m currently installing Ubuntu Netbook Release onto it…

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MailFoundry anti-spam solution : impressive !

Alain Fontaine — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:43:55 +0000

Since a couple of days, we are using MailFoundry as our anti-spam solution on the valain.com domain of my web design company VAlain SA. The service is currently kindly provided by my old friend Joaquim Homrighausen’s company Webbplatsen in Sweden. The results are truly impressive! Even though we have installed MailScanner and SpamAssassin on our mail server, and tuned it as far as we could (know), I personally still got around 30 to 40 spam E-mails a day. Since we use this new service, I receive one to two spams a week. Truly great!

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Affordable NAS devices with iSCSI support

Alain Fontaine — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:32:08 +0000

The NAS device market has showed some good news for the SOHO and small business users over the last few months. While affordable and feature-rich NAS devices have been around for a pretty long time, it’s not until recently that the major players have added (or are planning to add in the next weeks) iSCSI support to their devices. I consider iSCSI support extremely useful as it allows you to build entreprise-like storage for a fraction of the cost that you’d need to spend with going the fibrechannel route. Having done some research, here’s what I’ve found on the Internet.

www.qnap.com

QNAP has a nice list of NAS devices, most of the newer ones supporting iSCSI along with the usual set of integrated features like webserver, audio server, iTunes serving, etc. We use a SS-439 Pro Turbo at atHome Group for our internal development needs, fitted with four 1TB disks, and it has so far proven excellent value and performance. All of our staging and pre-production virtual machines run off of this one. It is interesting to note that they also have 2.5 inch disk models for “increased reliability and better power economy” as they say.

www.thecus.com

THECUS also has announced a new line of products featuring iSCSI. The N5500 also features Dual-DOM for added protection against system failures.

www.synology.com

SYNOLOGY have announced iSCSI support to be available during july/august 2009, for most NAS’s of their product line, as a simple software update to DSM 3.0.

www.drobo.com

DATA ROBOTICS have launched their new DROBO PRO that can handle up to 8 disks and features iSCSI support along with the BeyondRaid technology that allows you to mix any number, size, speed and manufacturer of disks to progressively match your storage needs. The price seems a bit hefty though (around 1000 euro without disks), but I guess it’s still very good for an 8 disk unit.

All of these NAS’s cost around 600 to 700 euro excl. VAT and without disks for the 4/5-disk models, which allows you to build an almost-enterprise-class storage wit iSCSI support and 3TB useable storage for around 1000 euro – wow!

Some help for my friends : HitechPC in Belgium (www.hitechpc.be) can order most of these on request, at very good prices.

UPDATE 13th of July 2009 : I’ve just noticed that QNAP has released another entry-level two-disk NAS device with iSCSI support, the QNAP TS-219P, costing roughly 330 euro excl. taxes.

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The Official Formula 1 Website

Alain Fontaine — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 08:50:47 +0000

The famous Lotus name could return to Formula One racing next season if UK Formula Three team Litespeed have their entry for the 2010 championship accepted by the FIA next week. via The Official Formula 1 Website. Related posts:Brand new chrome orange Lotus Eggxige New Lotus Eggxige... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Related posts:

Brand new chrome orange Lotus Eggxige New Lotus Eggxige...

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Slashdot | Intel Faces $1.3B Fine In Europe

Alain Fontaine — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:26:05 +0000

Intel Faces $1.3B Fine In Europe

via Slashdot | Intel Faces $1.3B Fine In Europe.

“European antitrust regulators, who have been aggressively pursuing what they see as anticompetitive practices among technology companies, could impose their largest fine ever in a market-dominance case against Intel. The commission began investigating Intel in 2000 after Advanced Micro Devices, its arch-rival, filed a complaint. In two sets of charges, in 2007 and 2008, the commission accused Intel of abusing its dominant position in chips by giving large rebates to computer makers, by paying computer makers to delay or cancel product lines, and by offering chips for server computers at prices below actual cost. Some legal experts speculate that Intel’s fine could reach about a billion euros, or $1.3B. ‘I’d be surprised if the fine isn’t as high or higher than in the Microsoft case,’ said an antitrust and competition lawyer in London. In 2004 Microsoft paid a fine of €497M, or $663M at current exchange rates, after being accused of abusing its dominance; the EU imposed another $1.3B fine in Feb. 2008.”

Now this is a lot of money. Then again, will this really hurt a multi-billion corporation like Intel, or do they accept the fact that this is the price to pay every couple of years and just go on with their business as before ?

As the EU is apparently in need of money, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a couple more of these news in the next weeks and months.

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Dell Latitude Z executive notebook

Alain Fontaine — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:14:09 +0000

There seems to be some buzz on the Internet in relation to a new “Latitude Z series executive notebook” that DELL was to release in May, but will now be released sometime around August. A couple of notebook forums talk about rumours of this new, slim, light 16 inch notebook, but a search on Google doesn’t show any relevant information yet.

In an E-mail received from a DELL representative, I read:

Re: New Latitude serie Z 2100 available middle of May !!

Latitude Z Launch will be postponed

The Latitude Z is our new high-end executive notebook within the Latitude range. The exciting Latitude Z product (ultra-slim 16” HD notebook) will not launch until the August timeframe. The original plan was to launch in May but this has been postponed to be ready-to-market.

That’s why I thought I’d give this a try… as there is very little information about this DELL Z series laptop on the Internet, my blog post should attract some considerable audience in the next few days. So, this article is more like a search engine experiment that anything else.

I’ll try to post some traffic data as soon as people start looking for that new DELL Latitude Z series notebook.

(See how I repeat Dell Latitude Z Series notebook quite often? That’s the increase this page’s relevance for these keywords )

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Oracle buys Sun – bye bye MySQL !?

Alain Fontaine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:31:29 +0000

Oh well! I consider this as bad news. Will Oracle keep the competing MySQL range of products alive, or will they just let MySQL slowly die, even if there are a number of customers willing to pay for commercial support…

MySQL has been a very important player in the raise of LAMP web development, and without an easy to install, learn, and use database like MySQL, the world of web application development wouldn’t certainly be where it is today.

It makes me feel very nostalgic. Let’s hope it doesn’t get as bad.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16598

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