Lost!

I don’t know who’s bright idea it was to include Access in the MSFT Office suite, but they should be shot, hung, quartered and placed on display for anyone thinking about designing an Enterprise Level Application in Access.

What is an Enterprise Level Application? It’s one of those applications that is pertinent to the organization. It being down, corrupted, gone, broke, etc, will cause havoc, panicking and outrage among your user base. Applications that SHOULDN’T be Access Databases are Technical Support Applications, Training Tracking, Customer Databases, etc.

In closing: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD - STOP USING ACCESS FOR ENTERPRISE LEVEL APPLICATIONS!

I recently took a trip back to the US and figured I’d stop in at an Apple store to play with the iPhone. I liked it - just about loved it, until I had problems with their sales associates.

On my first attempt, I sat and waited for help for 15 minutes. The whole time, I watched the Apple reps talk to the teens that where all over the store. They explained facts that I barely cared about to 16 year old girls who the geeks where obviously interested in.

On my second attempt (this was a Mall - on the way back to the car), I managed to snag a rep in 3 minutes (the girl chatting guy). He was pretty upset at my three questions.

1 - I didn’t know that the iPhone was a quad band phone - thats correct, right? The response was: “…yes…” in a very monotone fashion. I didn’t care much because I liked what I saw. My next question was a severe shot in the dark (very severe), but I had to take the chance. I was willing to drop whatever cash it took if I could have an iPhone. My question: I live overseas due to the military - is there anyway that I would be able to get around the AT&T contract?” and his response was even better than the first one, a very rehearsed “AT&T is the only carrier that the Apple iPhone uses” and he was even more annoyed. My last question apparently hit the annoyance button head on: “Do you know who the provider for the iPhone is overseas?” (I’ll admit at this point that I had been just about as close to off-grid as can be during my vacation - I hadn’t even had time to check online for this answer) He looked at me, gave me a look and repeated his second response word for word in a very pissed off tone. At that, I turned and walked out, finally annoyed at the guy that had just spent a half hour chatting to some teenager about the pros and cons of Apple products in school, at home and how his Apple discount related to her phone number…

Oddly, during the writing of this, I found out that there is a pretty hefty rumor(?) going around about the whole “Use requires 2 year…” being missing from the commercials you all see in the US. I didn’t buy an Apple laptop because they wouldn’t ship overseas to APO (Soldiers and their families) and because I’m a .Net developer in a full Windows environment. Don’t are - I’m done with Apple for at least the next few years. Maybe by the time I’m back to the US I’ll take a look at them again - we’ll see.

At this point, it looks like the OpenMoko is my new phone. I’ve been eying it for over a month now and I think that it’s my best option. It allows me to do what I want, with my own carrier, with more features than most phones and much more expandability than any other phone on the market. I’ll be reading over the website a little more and we’ll see if that’s my new phone - now, the developer edition or waiting till October? Hmm..

After soldiers get called up for a local mission in the US, they are forced to use a Roaming plan. They even explained this to Sprint and Sprint even sold them new phones. Next thing they know, they get letters stating that their phones will be canceled. So sorry - bu-bye…

Greed takes on many forms. Link

-Update: This has hit ZDNet as well: OUTRAGE: Sprint said to cancel nearly 200 military accounts for “excessive roaming”. Link

I originally had a lot more to say on this matter, but I decided to remove it. The most I can say is that, as a military spouse, I’m sickened by this act.

…and here we go again. MSNBC has released a leak stating that the iPhone Nano is coming. Price is expected to be $300. Apparently JP Morgan spilled the beans on some back end supply requests Apple has been making. Story.

If you’re a WRT54G user (Linkysys Wireless Access Point), you’ve probably heard of Sveasoft. They where one of the first “companies”/sites to release updates software to the WRT routers. They released older firmware to the public and decided that if you wanted the latest and greatest, that you should pay. Well ladies and gents, I paid that fee about 2 years ago and I was getting soooo tired of my router dumping connections left right and center. Granted, I stuck with one package and never upgraded, but I never upgraded due to the fact that I started finding out how bad the tactics of the company where. Nothing is more annoying for a developer or blogger for a company to email or post a nasty comment somewhere because of how you feel about software.

Anyway - I’ve finally decided to dump Sveasoft and not pay more for the next “Latest and Greatest”. At this point, I’ve upgraded to OpenWRT’s White Russian release (ie: Newest Stable) and hot damn, I’m happy. Again, I haven’t used the Newest Sveasoft, but my 3 Routers will all be using this within the next 24 hours.

If you really want to see what Sveasoft has been doing to the OSS community, feel free to check out a OpenWRT forum post.