Archive for January, 2009

Why is my iPhone 3G screen so flakey?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

For much of the time since I got my iPhone last July, I’ve found the touch screen to be quite intermittant. Sometimes it works brilliantly, often I might as well have a phone wth no buttons.

I don’t know what kind of dark magic Apple have used to make the iPhone work, but it only responds to fingers (or at least, nothing else I’ve tried tapping it with – pens, pencils, erasers – works).

It later occured to me that my hands are often quite dry. No skin crackingly dry, but they could probably do with moisturising more often than I do.  So I began a quick experiment.

Every time my screen becomes non responsive, I go moisten my hands under a tap. In a pinch, I lick my finger (yeh gross, whatever. This is *science*.)

Seems to do the trick pretty much every time.

Guess it’s off to buy some moisturiser then – for the sake of my hands and my iPhone!

Installing Ruby on Rails on Solaris 10 10/08

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Following OpenSolaris rendering itself completely non-booting, I’ve moved back to running Solaris 10 u6 (10/08) on my Ultra20. I’m really not sure what caused the crash, but I couldn’t recover from in the amount of time I wanted to spend (not much) and really I should be focussed on Solaris 10 anyway.

So, how to setup the new box – knowing the end goal is to have a solid development workstation I can use for Ruby, Rails and Solaris development as well as general testing and hacking around… These are my notes. While the end result does work, it took a fair bit of effort getting there. It was a learning experience and ultimately I’m glad of it.

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