Hot or Not? – New iPhone 3GS = toasty

Reports are beginning to come that the new iPhone 3GS can get very hot. Hot enough to degrade the nice white plastic to a 70′s throwback brown. My Nokia E71 gets quite hot when running WIFI or using SymTorrent to download but probably maxes out about 35/40C.

The reports remind me of my beloved (but hot-blooded) Dell XPS M1330 laptop which once got so hot that I had to leave opened and lying on its side in the middle of the drive fearing that it was going to burst into flames and torch my house. Since updating the BIOS and getting the SP1 for Vista I am glad that game of Russian Roulette is over.

If we were not in the middle of a heat wave here I might have a go at writing and marketing the Millets (TM) Handwarmer iPhone app on the Apple store for a few quid. Someone is bound to buy it.

Annoying hostfile quirk – 9 entries per line

Wasted some time yesterday trying to connect to a local VM website. Turns out that the problem was that you cannot have more than 9 hostfile entries per line so for example:

127.0.0.1 host1 host2 host3 host4 host5 host6 host7 host8 host9 host10

hosts 1-9 will work and resolve correctly but host10 will be be ignored. It will then it will try and resolve by DNS and fail.

My advice FWIW is keep your hostfiles with one entry per line:

102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

Just as it says in the (oft seen but ignored) comments at the top of the hosts file:

Each entry should be kept on an individual line

New Solvd site goes live. Cheers all round!

New solvd web site goes live. Spontaneous street calibrations ensue.

New Solvd Beta site goes live

New solvd beta site goes live. Final switchover soon.

Free MS training for Hyper-V which includes modules on HA and Failover Clustering.

Acollection of five 2-hour courses for implementing and managing Hyper-V & creating and managing virtual machines and hosts in a virtual environment.

Goto http://www.microsoft.com/learning/access and enter the promo code:
9350-Y2W6-3676

IE8.0 broken sites fixed via compatibility mode

The IE8.0 compatibility mode button

After trying out IE8.0 I noticed a few websites (who shall remain nameless!) didn’t render that well to the point of not showing some images.

Luckily the IE8.0 team has put in workaround to allow website developers time to fix their code or view historic sites. With IE8.0 now being rolled out via windows update more and more people will bump into this.

The magic button located in the navigation bar just to the right of the address bar (next to the refresh button) and looks like a ripped document.

This will be useful for me as I can now test websites with 2 different flavours of IE without having to drop into my VM.

Windows 2008 Secure FTP through ISA 2006

This excellent article by Tom Decaluwe explains how to do it…

Convert VB to C#

When you get faced with some VB code and need to convert it quickly without having to put your VB head on try this converter from telerik (who make excellent .Net controls). A batch version is also available if you have an example project you want to convert.

Skyfire browser for E71/S60 phones

The browser that ships with the Nokia E71 (excellent phone!) is very good for general day-to-day browsing but does not seem to be able to handle Flash movies (although YouTube seems to work.)

Looking around I tried Opera Mini & Opera Mobile but I also found skyfire and was very impressed!

Apparently it supports Flash and Windows Media videos, including Flash 10 and Silverlight 2.0 which is no mean feat and renders the whole page very fast. This is now my browser of choice (although it did seem to slow down on pages with tons of silly flash adverts).

A review can be found here.

Added the blog feed to the main site

Added the blog feed to the main site www.solvd.co.uk
Took about 10 minutes (and most of that was spent figuring out why the VM could not see the network – no default gateway set).