We use the BBC iPlayer and Channe 4 on Demand services at home and I felt a little concerned that somehow I had overlooked this limit and that we would be in line for a hefty charge for additional bandwidth use.

The Virgin Media Acceptable Use Policy says nothing about an exact limit so I emailed the BBC to ask them to explain where the figure came from. They didn’t respond, but they updated the infobox in the article between 11:19 and 15:23.

Below you can see on the left, the original infobox, and on the right, the updated infobox.

There is no acknowledgement from the BBC in the article that the infobx has been updated and now might be more accurate. It looks like they made some factual errors with Sky and Plusnet too.

When I was in the bank last weekend, the lady who was dealing with my question opened Outlook and composed the following email to a colleague:

hi, r u free to see a customer? x

Her colleague replied:

YIP

She finished the conversation with:

lady beside water cooler x

I can’t help but feel that these articles duped me into believing that people analyse every aspect of my professional life based on how I write an email.

Running the following script from the base of your repository will rebuild the empty directories.

#!/bin/bash

# Rebuilds empty directories which are lost by HG but required by SVN

for d in `find . -type d | grep /.svn$`;
do
        # -p to make $d/tmp parent directory
        `mkdir -p $d/tmp/prop-base`
        `mkdir $d/tmp/props`
        `mkdir $d/tmp/text-base`
done

An example of how I used this script:

I had a local directory named recsys where I was working on the recommender system for DSpace. It was an SVN checkout of the DSpace trunk and I liked to keep the prototype in sync with trunk to help prevent bitrot. If I pulled recsys from my development machine to my laptop, I lost vital svn directories for performing SVN updates.

Running the above script from the base of the recsys directory re-created the empty SVN directories and let me continue with my work on a different machine.

delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ hg init
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ hg pull http://example.org:8000
pulling from http://example.org:8000
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 9 changesets with 820 changes to 809 files
(run 'hg update' to get a working copy)
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ hg update
807 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ svn update
svn: Can't open '.svn/tmp/tempfile.tmp': No such file or directory
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ ./create_empty_directories.sh
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ svn update
U dspace/config/dspace.cfg
Updated to revision 3005.

Caveat: I may have totally misunderstood Mercurial. If you think I have, please let me know how I should have solved this problem.

I stood in line on the 11th July 2008 to buy an iPhone 3G. Many people have written about the short battery life of the iPhone, so I decided to evaluate of the battery life in my real-world use. This is not supposed to be the most comprehensive analysis, but it is over a more significant period of time than the major publishers and I didn’t test the battery life exclusively in one task domain.

Methodology

1. Start with a discharged iPhone, defined as when the iPhone shows you this screen:

2. Fully charge the iPhone through the USB by connecting it to a computer. Record the date and time you remove the phone from the charger.

3. Use the iPhone until discharged, as defined above. See the section on Verification for instructions on how I used the iPhone.

4. Record the date and time of discharge and return to Step 2.

Verification

It will be difficult to verify the results of this experiment because there were only two conditions on how I used the phone: the phone must discharge as defined above before recharging it to a full charge. This is not a controlled laboratory experiment because I’m not aware of anybody who uses their mobile phone in that situation.

I use the iPhone to read sports news in Safari, listen to music on the iPod, read GMail (1 hour fetch), occasionally play Hanoi or Labrynth, telephone calls, text messages, take photographs, browse Facebook, and use Google Maps for directions. The brightness is set to the lowest level and the ringer volume varies depending on where I am. Sometimes I used 3G to access the internet but I let the phone choose whether to use 3G or EDGE based on reception.

Usage statistics for my phone after the 2.0.x trial were:

Lifetime Call Time: 7 hours 22 minutes;
Data Sent: 13.5MB
Data Received: 174MB

Usage statistics for the phone after the 2.1.x trial were:

Lifetime Call Time: 9 hours 26 minutes
Data Sent: 17.3MB
Data Received: 219MB

Results

Over the 28 day period from 13th August 2008 to the 12th September 2008, the iPhone held its charge for an average of 46 hours 17 minutes.

Over the 28 day period from 12th September to 12th October, the iPhone held its charge for an average of 81 hours 49 minutes.

The graph below shows charge time in hours per cycle using the 2.0.x iPhone OS and the 2.1.x iPhone OS. The colour coordinated blocks show equivalent charge cycles, the white blocks show when the phone was charging, and the grey blocks show the additional charge cycles when using the 2.0.x software.

There is a slight discrepancy in the total duration between the 2.0.x and 2.1.x and this is because I wanted to let the experiment run until the end of the battery life for the final 2.1.x charge.

Final thoughts

I’d like to hear from anybody who has been taking similar measurements and what their results are, or whether anybody with an iPhone competitor has taken similar measurements. The release of the iPhone 2.1 software encouraged me to take these measurements for another month and I think they confirm, for my use pattern, that there really is “significantly improved battery life, for most customers” using the new OS.

“Best of all, the new 8GB iPhone won’t cost you a penny on our £45 and £75 tariffs. And it’s just £99 on our £35 tariff and new £30 tariff.

If you’d prefer the 16GB version, it’s free on our £75 tariff. Then you’ll just pay £59 with the £45 tariff and £159 on our £30 and £35 tariffs.”

Let’s compare the new tariffs as advertised on the O2 website:

With the exception of the £30/month tariff, the only difference between the contracts is the initial iPhone cost and the number of minutes included in the contract. I thought it would be worthwhile to analyse how the initial iPhone cost affected the total cost of ownership and I’ve decided to share my findings.

Before I jump into the analysis, let me state my assumptions.

1. 18 months is equal to 548 days. Reasoning: if you consider each year to be 365 days long, 18 months is 547.5 days but I round up to 548 days for an 18 month contract because I imagine a cell phone network provider would want to squeeze the extra day of revenue from you.
2. The total cost of ownership = a + (b * 18), where a = iPhone cost, and b = monthly contract cost.
3. No consideration has been made for any additional costs.

8GB iPhone

Free

To receive a free 8GB iPhone, you need to agree to either a £45/month or £75/month contract for 18 months.

The TCO of the 8GB iPhone on the £45/month contract is £810 and includes 1200 minutes of talk time. This contract offers 39.45 minutes of talk time per day. The TCO on the £75/month contract is £1,350 and includes 3000 minutes of talk time. This contract offers 98.54 minutes of talk time per day.

Not Free

If you opt to pay for your 8GB iPhone, you need to agree to either a £30/month or £35/month contract for 18 months.

The TCO of the 8GB iPhone in this case is either £639 or £729. The £30/month contract includes 75 minutes of talk time, which offers 2.46 minutes of talk time per day. The £35/month contract includes 600 minutes, which offers 19.71 minutes of talk time per day.

However, if you choose a contract lasting longer than 12 months with 600 or more minutes of talk time, you are entitled to a free Bolt On. If you take the 200 Anytime Minutes Bolt On, you can upgrade the average number of talk time minutes per day.

16GB iPhone

Free

To receive a free 16GB iPhone, you need to agree to an 18 month contract at £75/month.

The TCO on this contract is £1,350 and includes 3000 minutes of talk time. As stated above, you get 98.54 minutes of talk time per day with this contract.

Not Free

If you opt to pay for your 16GB iPhone, you need to agree to either a £30/month, £35/month or £45/month contract.

The TCO of the 16GB iPhone in this case is either £699, £789, or £869. The £30/month contract offers 2.46 minutes per day of talk time, the £35/month contract offers 19.71 minutes of talk time per day, and the £45/month contract offers 45.99 minutes of talk time per day.

Tipping Points

A commenter worked out the value for money tipping points for talk time use on each offered contract:

If you use 100 minutes/month on the £30 contract, then the £30 contract is better value for money. If you use 630 minutes/month on the £35 contract, the £45 contract is better value for money. Finally, if you use 1,350 minutes/month on the £45 contract, the £75 contract is better value for money.

Graphs

This graph shows the TCO of the 8GB iPhone alongside average daily talk minutes.

This graph shows the TCO of the 16GB iPhone alongside average daily talk minutes.

(I couldn’t figure out how to set the secondary Y-axes title in OpenOffice 2.4. It is supposed to represent the number of daily talk time minutes included in a contract.)

Note: these graphs were updated on 9th July 2008 to add average messages/day data

Conclusion

If you believe you need the additional talk minutes included in the free-or-reduced price contracts, then the extra TCO may not be of concern to you. However, if you do not need the extra talk minutes then I recommend you spend either £99 or £159 upfront to reduce the TCO of your iPhone.

This house is a Bed & Breakfast.

The complete set is hosted at Flickr.

The third item of the Features page on the Camino website, ‘Tabbed Browsing Improvements’, describes what I did and what it adds to Camino.

“Camino 1.6 includes a scrolling tab bar. When more tabs are open than can be displayed in the tab bar, arrows appear at the right and left edges to allow scrolling the bar. As part of this change, the tab overflow menu has been replaced by a menu displaying all open tabs in the current window. “

For those who don’t use Mac OS X, or don’t want to use Camino to find out more, this screenshot shows what the new tab bar looks like:

A couple of details not explained on the Features page: the tab overflow menu at the right has menu dividers to split the menu into 3 sections: tabs to the left of the currently visible tabs, currently visible tabs, and tabs to the right of currently visible tabs; if you select a tab from the tab overflow menu outside what is currently visible in the tab bar, the selected tab becomes the left-most or right-most tab depending on whether you chose a tab from the left or right side of the overflow menu bar.

I think those details are typical of the polish in a Camino point release and I’m pleased with the result of my work. A lot of people helped out during the project and without them I wouldn’t have succeeded, so thanks guys.

I’m keen to see Jeff Dlouhy’s Tabspose work from Google Summer of Code 2007 become part of the upcoming Camino 2.0 release and look forward to hearing the conclusions of the Camino Meet 2008 to learn more about the direction of development for Camino 2.0; Stuart already has some interesting thoughts.

I have been part of a team researching and developing a recommender system for the DSpace digital repository system. Our approach is to extract terms from the stored items and the metadata associated with the items and use the terms to perform a comparison between a pair of items to determine if a recommendation is appropriate. Our work has been exploratory and proof-of-concept.

On 3rd April 2008, we delivered a presentation to approximately 100 delegates at the Open Repositories 2008 DSpace User Group in Southampton, England. On 21st April 2008, we published a technical report through the HP Labs Library detailing the first phase of our work.

I’m rather enjoying my time at HP Labs, there are plenty of interesting projects and a wide variety of extra-curricular activities. For example, the HP Labs Science Lectures are a series of evening events to promote the breadth and depth of science to the public. In January, we were entertained by Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University and his presentation of the work-in-progress discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism. This week, Herbert Huppert from Cambridge University will deliver a lecture on Extreme Natural Disasters and I’m looking forward it!

Finally, I liked Apple’s Think Different corporate culture advertising campaign and was pleased to find a dusty old poster in Building 3 of a corporate culture advertising campaign from HP. I think these rules offer an interesting way to think about your new career, regardless of profession.

March

I prepared my resume over the course of about a month. I constantly tinkered with almost every aspect of the single side of paper that I was preparing to submit. The layout, the content, the style of the fonts, the size of the fonts, the wording of my key points. I tried to enlist the help of my university’s Careers Service but they were nowhere near prepared enough. I wanted my resume to stand out from the rest of the massive pile that would be arriving from students across the USA. I knew that I was competing against a high standard. I hoped that being from a European University and having experience with a well-respected Mac software developer would help me out.

April

I was offered a telephone interview for an internship position within Team A - I had made a mistake in the MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY aspect of my expected graduation date and the recruiter thought I was going back to University after the summer. Almost simultaneously I was offered a telephone interview for a permanent position within Team B. I kindly declined the internship offer and accepted the permanent offer.

My first telephone interview lasted about 90 minutes. We designed - at a high level - a method for performing a commonly requested and used feature of the Team B product.

The person on the other end of the phone was impressed with what I had to say and two further technical interviews were arranged for early April. The first technical interview mainly involved analysing the depth to which I understood the principles of Cocoa development: model-view-controller paradigm, memory management, design principles. The second technical interview involved discussion of my undergraduate project - using network flow theory to determine the elimination status of teams for sports leagues - and my experience of working as part of a team.

Much to my delight I was offered an in-person interview in Cupertino, California in May. Apple paid for my flights, accomodation, and car rental hire. I managed to negotiate 2 extra days so I could take some time to see for myself what like might be like to live in Cupertino and the surrounding area. I flew from Edinburgh to San Francisco 2 days after I finished my final exams which I started to regret while I was flying over Greenland — why didn’t I leave myself any time to rest?!

May

The day after I arrived in California I enjoyed a breakfast burrito and then visited Google in Mountain View to deliver a presentation about my Summer of Code 2006 experience. I shared lunch with Leslie Hawthorn, Mike Pinkerton, and Stuart Morgan - each one of them had been an integral part of my SoC 2006 experience and it was great to meet them. I had to sign an NDA so I shall not say anything in particular about the Googleplex except that it was fantastic!

I interviewed at De Anza Three. My recruiter apologised before handing me the schedule for the day… they had arranged 13 interviews for me.

My interviews took place in Conference Room London and my recruiter performed the first interview of the day. They asked me what I thought my biggest strengths and weaknesses were and why I wanted to work for Apple in California on Team B.

My second interview was a telephone interview with an employee who worked remotely from Arizona. I thought it was a bit cheeky to fly me 6,000 miles to talk to somebody over the phone but I was up for it. The first question of the day was:

Imagine that a string is encoded as sequence of characters. A character can either be represented by 1 or 2 bytes. If the first bit of the first byte is a 0 then this signifies a 1 byte character; if the first bit of the first byte is a 1 then this signifies a 2 byte character. I’d like you to tell me how you can determine where the start of the next character is and where the start of the previous character is. You may assume that you are currently at the start of the current character and for the purpose of this question you may also assume that the string is infinitely long in each direction.

I was totally gob-smacked and I did think about putting down the phone and leaving. I was as prepared as I could be for this kind of question but having to communicate my thoughts over the telephone was a daunting task for the start of the day. I took a deep breath and we dived into the question.

During the rest of the morning I interviewed with the manager of Team C - another open position within the same division that my skills and experience had been matched to - and colleagues. The interviewers prodded at my technical knowledge, questioned my experience and education, and spoke with me about more personal topics too. One interviewer walked into the room and asked “Do you watch Lost?” which was pretty funny. Another interviewer had rescheduled their 30-minute block with me because they had a plumbing problem that morning. After explaining that to me they said that they had not had a chance to read me resume and would I mind telling them about myself. I took this opportunity to write out what I thought were the key points to my resume on the whiteboard. This provided them with a constant point of reference for our conversation and I like to think that my creative solution to the resume problem heightened their interest in me.

I had an interview lunch at Cafe Macs, Infinite Loop. We had burritos and a smoothie and it was fantastic. The sun was shining down and everybody around me seemed to be really excited about what they were doing. I only managed to catch snippets of conversations but it felt like a place that was charged with energy. I was asked what I thought were examples of good design in OS X and examples of bad design in OS X. We chatted about what I had been doing at University and what my interests were.

The first interview of the afternoon was a 45 minutes as opposed to a 30 minutes. The interviewer started by asking questions about my interests and I thought that this was going to be another personal interview until they asked me to design the services daemon for the product of Team B. I should have realised that they were trying to get me to relax before slamming a massive question on me.

During my final interview somebody popped in to inform me that I would have an additional interview. My as-appropriate interviewer introduced themselves as an upper-management employee who wanted to know more about my education, experience, and why I thought I was suitable for this position. We spoke about my Summer of Code project in 2006, a coursework project in which I designed a distributed file system, and my undergraduate project. I asked him what Apple were looking for in filling this position and his response was that the were looking for raw talent.

I was in De Anza Three from 0945 until 1745.

June

3 weeks later my recruiter called me to present 2 offers: one for the Team C and one for Team B. Each manager took the time to call me to tell me more about their team. I really appreciated this because we were in the week before WWDC so they must have had no spare time. I accepted the offer to work in the Team B and my contract was sent via Federal Express.

The Fallout

While trying to sort out a work visa it transpired that my recruiter had made a mistake by assuming that I was in possession of an F-1 visa which would have entitled me to an F1 OPT visa. 2 days after offering me the choice between two jobs, agreeing terms, and sending me a contract of employment, Apple withdrew their offer of employment. They were not able to employ somebody who would be working remotely for 16 months while the petitioned to sponsor me for a H-1B visa. I couldn’t even be guaranteed an H-1B visa because they were issued in a lottery this year due to the massive number of applications.

My advice to those who do not currently have the legal right to work in the USA is to think hard about attempting to gain employment in the USA. The interviewing experience is something that I would recommend but the simple fact of the matter is that any company will struggle to employ you in a timely manner. The state of issuing non-immigrant visas is a total disaster and it is not likely to work out well. The thought of attempting to gain an immigrant visa is even more daunting and appears to be practically impossible. One of my friends suggested that I speak with an attorney in California but I don’t want to sue Apple and I don’t want to leave my name with a dirty mark against it all over Silicon Valley. I intend to leave the door wide open for the future.

The sad footnote to this story is that I had started to tell all of my friends that I had the job; I had started to make a move on canceling all of the services that I was provided with in the UK; I had started looking for an apartment in the Cupertino area. I didn’t think for a second that Apple would default on me if they couldn’t get me out there straight away. I still love what Apple are doing as a company. Even though I knew the job offer had fallen through I still watched the WWDC Keynote updates and I am excited about what is coming in October.

I am currently considering my options.