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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Voice mail doesn't work after upgrading unlocked iPhone

Yesterday I upgraded my unlocked iPhone from version 2.2 to 2.2.1.
After the upgrade, the Voice Mail my Voice Mail configuration was reset - i.e. it didn't work anymore.

So just for reference - here is the guide on how to set the Voice Mail number on the iPhone (at least this work on a Danish iPhone, originally bought from Telia):

If your Voice Mail number is (+1) 123-1234, you should go to the Phone app, open up the dial tab, and type in the following:
*5005*86*+11231234#

Just for clarification, the template is:
*5005*86*[VOICE MAIL NUMBER INCL. +LANGUAGE CODE]#

And then press the Dial button. That's it! You'll probably have to do this after each upgrade.

Please comment if the template looks different for your country/original service provider!

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

VirtualBox 2.1.2 on OSX

Wow, I almost missed this one! VirtualBox 2.1.2 has been out for a week now, and I don't see it until now.

But this is the time for rejoice. An issue that's been bugging me for 4 months now (since 2.0.2) has been fixed! It was actually a pretty critical bug, in my opinion. The issue was that on OSX hosts (which uses a journalising file system) a sudden loss of power might render the windows guest OS unbootable! It took me some time to persuade everyone that this was actually a big issue. I saw it a day that I'd closed the lid on my Mac Book Pro, making it go into suspended mode. It was a friday afternoon and the battery had only about 5 percent left. During the weekend - in which I didn't use the Mac - the battery died, and my windows guest died. Reinstall "fest".

Looking in the changelog for 2.1.2 this is now fixed:

Mac OS X hosts: save the state of running or paused VMs when the host machine’s battery reaches critical level

This sounds as the exact issue I posted:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2267

This is SOOO great, thanks for recognizing the issue Sun! :-)


Outlook and networking

Another note on the changes in 2.1.0 (yes, not the newest one): When using outlook I've seen that in earlier versions outlook took a long time connecting to our Exchange server via http. Since VirtualBox 2.1.0 this is no longer an issue. This makes my day.

iLife '09 first impressions

Today I got my copy of iLife '09 from the local Mac store on the way home from work.
I was especially keen on getting my hands dirty using the new face detection and recognition feature of iPhoto 8 (='09). Secondarily I looked forward into trying the new stabilizing feature of iMovie.

After installing the bundle I booted up iPhoto. It immediately began to search for faces in my about 5000 local photos. It took about 40-45 minutes (dual cpu intel mac book pro).

Then it was my turn. I found the first photo containing faces, and labeled the first one. Then it immediately suggested a lot of other photos that might be of the same face. At first it was a bit imprecise. But after just labeling 2-4 different photos of a face, it actually got very precise! After no time (read about 20 minutes) I'd labeled about 20 faces in almost 1000 pictures. Amazing.

It happens like this: iPhoto suggest a lot of photos when you decide to confirm faces (by clicking a button). Then the suggested photos are shown, where you can either confirm or reject the faces as being of that person. It all goes pretty darn fast.

I actually believe this is the photo management application I've been looking for in years! I used to use Adobe Photo Album 2.0, then Picasa (both on PC) but when I shifted to Mac about 10 months ago I started using iPhoto. I wasn't totally amazed by it, it lacked the speed of Picasa (and Picasas way of easy sharing to picasaweb and geotagging). But now iPhoto supports it all, and more. It exports to mobileme (of course), flickr and facebook. And rocks.

When you've tagged a lot of photos for the same face, it seems to be a bit more reluctant at suggesting new untagged photos, which in my oppinion is a bit of a shame. It gets a bit too precise at this point, ignoring pictures that match the face and those just close. I'd prefer this face search algorithm to be a bit too optimistic, in contrast of being too pesimistic.

Perhaps Apple will fix this in the next fix? Well, it's not a bug at all, just a little nuisance.

Then onwards to the new features of iMovie. I just used it for 5 minutes. But in these 5 minutes I took a small video clip from a family birthday (just under 1 minutes long) which was quite jerky on the stability side. In the 5 minutes before I started writing this blog, I succeeded in applying a theme for it (nice themes they've added!). A theme is a title, transitions and an end effect. Furthermore I added stability to the clip, virtually removing all jerkiness from the clip!

The way iMovie removes jerkiness is of course by zooming in at certain points. But you have full control over the maximum allowed zooming level so you won't loose important details.

I'm impressed. iLife ´09 is a bargain!

I can't help digging deeper into the new features (including green-screen filming and composition of iMovie, learning to play my synth in GarageBand and getting all my older photos imported into iPhoto. iPhoto is definitely my primary (and only) photo management app from now on!

Go fetch.