My Apple tech support experience

Since I've posted the rant about not buying apple products because there was no Java 1.6, Java 1.6 became available and so I bought 2 Apple notebooks this year. Unfortunately my 2008 early model MacBook got some hairline cracks in the casing so I called up Apple tech support, got a case number, and showed up at the Apple store to drop of the machine for under warranty repair. The somewhat lengthy post below describes my experience:

1. Encounter with a tool

When I made it to the genius bar (3rd floor of the Sydney George st. Apple Store) I was approached by John a concierge. He asked me re-enter all the information I already submitted over the phone (this I had to do in order to get the case number).

I did that.

Then he asked me to sign a paper stating in a nutshell that:

- I have a backup of all the data (I do)
- I have removed all the private information from the computer (I most certainly did NOT)

I refused to sign.

My notebook, like most notebooks I imagine, is full of private data. I told him that if the technicians remove the hard drive and give it to me I'll sign the form and let them work on the repair without having any privacy concerns.

Now, John refused.

John informed me that they will not remove the hard-drive nor lend me the tools to do so myself. Instead he advised me to go home, remove the hard drive myself and then come back. The other option he gracefully offered was for me to go out, buy a screw driver then come back and remove the hard drive myself right there at the Apple store. But there is no way they would do it for me or lend me the tool.

I went down to the second floor to ask at the hardware sales desk if they, by any chance, sell the tiny screw drivers needed to take out the hard drive from a MacBook. The sales guy there told me that they don't sell those since removing the hard drive voids the warranty.

Interesting.

He told me however that the "guys upstairs" would surely help me with taking out my hard drive. Given my recent experience I was in doubt so I asked him if he could help me sort that out with the "guys upstairs" to which he agreed. Back upstairs I went, and we ran into non-other than my old friend John. I explained to John that he has effectively advised me to void my warranty by telling me to remove the hard drive myself, at which point he finally caved in and hooked me up with a "Genius" called Alex.


2. Encounter with a Genius

Alex didn't need to be an actual genius to see my point. He took the notebook of my hands promised that in 15 minutes he'll be back either with the whole thing fixed up or the hard drive for me to take home. I signed the papers, on good faith that within those 15 minutes he won't break or copy my hard drive (but hey I can be reasonable), I sat down at the Genius Bar and used my MacBook Pro to write this blog. In about 45 minutes Alex came around with my MacBook fixed and good to go. Though it took him a bit longer than he estimated I would like to thank Alex for being a human with a brain and common sense (at Apple this apparently is called a "Genius") he saved me from going home buying a tool I don't need and voiding my warranty. Thank you Alex.

3. Conclusion

How would I quantify my experience tonight.

Firstly, it's obvious that it takes much more effort to encounter a tool (John) than it does t0 encounter a Genius (Alex).

Secondly, even a otherwise capable organization like Apple with it's very cool stores has it's weak links (John) and it's strong ones (Alex).

Thirdly, the paper Apple made me sign before any work was done is completely silly. I had to agree that my notebook contains no private data (which it does like any other notebook) and the 2 ways I know of to ensure no private data are:
- remove hard drive (but also void the warranty)
- reformat hard drive before submitting to apple and restore data from backup upon return (not very convenient and lenghty)

So perhaps offering to remove the hard drive and then fix the computer may be an option that is more acceptable to a customer concerned about time and privacy such as myself.

gmail feature request: show me the video

Wouldn't it be nice if we could view videos attached to emails right inside the web client? Since Google owns www.youtube.com I cannot see this being a big problem for Gmail. The UI could also make exporting videos to Youtube a single step operation. It would save me time with having to download large email attachments and with looking for codecs to play the downloaded videos (though to be fair with VLC the second point is not so much). The transcoding of videos from * to Flash may be a bit resource intensive but an organization size of Google could just be up to it.
Of course if Google doesn't step up soon, I may just decide to implement this feature myself :)

hacking cotopia

Lately we've been receiving emails about malicious players cloning other login names of other players by exploiting that we use unicode where different characters look the same (e.g. an ASCII 'C' looks like the Cyrillic 'C' for instance)
This is forcing us to restrict login names to the ASCII set.

Go vote

While I am not a US citizen I hope those of you who are will take this chance for a real change. The whole world is watching.

Cotopia GO .. on mobiles near you soon!

We've been quietly working on our next multiplayer title: Cotopia GO
I've been doing some testing lately and I must say that the game looks pretty good. We're currently checking out the latest builds on mobile phones and if all goes well we'll be in beta within a few days. We'll be then depending on the support of our community to give us constructive feedback on bugs/issues etc.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ondrej Michalcak for doing a great job writing this game for us - given how much we pay him he really must be doing it mostly for the love of a good challenge :)

Thank you Ondro and happy B-Day.

Darkstar plugin for NetBeans Updated

I've finally found some time on the train during my daily commute (usually spent sleeping) to implement one of the features I've had on the top of the TODO list ever since the plugin was originally published

Debugging Support

This little feature allows launching the PDS application in debug mode and then automatically attaches the NetBeans debugger.

I've realized that a better approach to the whole project may be to implement Project Darkstar Server as a platform, but I haven't been able to find a good tutorial on how to implement a custom platform. I guess I'll be taking the Java SE platform implementation as a starting point and go from there.

JDWP (wtf?) analyzer in the Open (Source)

During my years with Sun Microsystems I've worked on a number of projects. One of the responsibilities I've held was ensuring that the NetBeans debugger works well with J2ME emulators (WTK, Nokia, Sony Erisson etc.)

This was no small feat given that I've had to analyze the source of a given debugging problem, this could be:

• JDI implementation
• NetBeans debugger
• Emulator (most of the time not supplied by Sun)

and then negotiate with the responsible team(s) to fix the problem (sometimes fixing it myself and supplying a patch). This job would have been a pain if it wasn't for a small command line utility that Martin Ryzl (then my team leader, later my manager, now still someone I very much respect) wrote to monitor the JDWP traffic, when the job was his. Since the job was now mine, I took the utility and expanded it to a full blown GUI tool that can monitor JDWP packets and show detailed information about their contents and inter-relationships.

This was about 4-5 years ago, since then NetBeans including Mobility support went open source and with it most of my code, except for this last piece of work. With a blessing from Martin I am open sourcing it on java.net. It saved me a lot of time analyzing problems and hopefully it will make someone else's life easier as well.

Uninstall IntelliJ plugins on OS X

This is something that wasted nearly an hour of my time today and Google was of little help :(

At work we use IntelliJ and I am running OS X. I've installed the SVNbar plugin using the plugin browser in Idea. I restarted the IDE as asked but it would no longer come up - splash screen just hang there indefinetly.

Fine, I thought, lets just uninstall the plugin and I'll be fine.
Not so easy.
I couldn't find the plugin jars location on my harddrive (how ridiculous). It turns out that plugins go into:

USER_HOME/Library/Application Support/IntelliJIDEA70

which I found by pure stroke of luck.

Mean while the documentation reffers to:
USER_HOME/.IntelliJIdea70/
which doesn't exist.

On that note - NetBeans 6.5 Beta is out. Oh NetBeans, how I love thee...

Some minor points & updates

Since the release of the J2ME client API for Poject Darkstar I've had 36 downloads of the plugin from the NetBeans plugin portal alone. Given that the target audience for this effort is a very small I think that this is quite a success. Too bad I can't cont the number of downloads from the plugin homepage.

Off topic warning!!!

In other news I've been lately listening to a number of podcasts and if you are interested in Sci-Fi but lack the time to read then checking out some of these podcasts may just do the trick for you, it did for me :)

• http://www.variantfrequencies.com/
  
• http://escapepod.org/

There are also a large number of books available from http://www.podiobooks.com/ but not all of them are a good quality read. While I took time to listen to many of them (at least partially) I found these to be excellent:

• Grey by Jon Armstrong, not only an excellent audio book but also one of the very best books I've ever read, period.
  
• Singularity by Bill DeSmedt
• The Failed Cities Monologues by Matt Wallace
• The Rookie by Scott Sigler, while Scott is a legend his work is not for everyone (being action oriented rather than deep and though provoking)
  

Why am I on about pod books? Because they help get me through my day and are FREE - and that's always worth sharing.

Darkstar J2ME API released by Cotopia

So here we go some Good News,

1)
As Promised I've implemented the Darkstar Client API for J2ME. It took about 16 hours end to end + some testing and documentation time but all in all not too big of a job. I've released the binary as well as sources so that anyone can have a go at making improvements, bug fixing and finishing unimplemented functionality :)
Take a look here for the zips (bin, src, javadoc)

2)
In addition to the sockets implemetation I've put together an HTTP based iplementation which connects to Darkstar through a web based proxy. This way of connecting is (obviously) a bit more clunky but at times one has no other option, due to device or service limitations. This functionality is available in source from SVN as well as NetBeans plugins.

3)
Further more I've put together a Darkstar plugin for NetBeans that lets you manage server instances and server applications via IDE UI (nodes, buttons, dialogs etc.) rather than typing stuff into a shell :) This plugin basically lets you define a Darkstar server instance and then you can use that to run/stop your applications.

I did spend a bit of time on this work in the past few months so I hope that the community will take the code, test it out it and post fixes - or at least bug reports :)