Heino R. Pull’s Personal Blog

Summary: Zagg has a $4 charge for replacements even in the case of a defect. I had a defect and after some back and forth Zagg eventually waived the fee, but their policy remains and seems unfair.

I have routinely used Zagg’s InvisibleShield on numerous iPods and a Sony PSP with great success in the past. When I purchased two new iPhone 3Gs on launch day, I didn’t even think about it and preordered Zagg’s 3G version for both phones. It took a week or so for the shields to come in so I had to protect both phones until the shields finally arrived.

I finally installed the shields on both phones and found it the most challenging installation so far. This is from a total of 9 I have installed over the last three years. However, things went fairly well and I was initially satisfied. I waited the recommended 12 hours and then turned on both iPhones. One shield looked just as good as the ones I’ve installed in the past but the second one had numerous vertical lines visible in the entire screen causing a prism effect that slightly shifted the colors on a white screen to a rainbow. Since I’ve installed so many without this effect I instantly thought that one of the two iPhone shields was defective. I checked online and others reported the same defect.

I contacted Zagg on their site and received a response the next day. They indicated that vertical lines was a possible outcome of the shield and that it was not covered under warranty. They offered a one time courtesy replacement for $4 and said that they would not replace any future shields with this issue. They alternatively offered a full refund but that would require me to remove both front an back pieces when all that was needed was a new front. I was really disapponted that Zagg implied that the defective front was normal and that I was being picky (although not directly said, was implied by the one time courtesy replacement offer). It also was diasappointing that I had to pay $4 for the replacement.

Having bought so many InvisibleShields in the past, I felt confident of my ability to spot a defect so I responsed by email to Zagg with a list of my previous order numbers and my rejection of both offers. I was angry at this point and felt that a manufacturer should be responsible for defects and offer a free replacement.

After a couple of days I received a response that reiterated their policy of a customer charge for replacements no matter what but offering a one time exception for me. I have recently received my replacement and I guess I should be happy since the defect is gone and both iPhones look the same. However the policy still seems unfair to me and I wanted to warn others that there are no free replacements - even in the case of defects. You should expect a $4 charge no matter what. Since I did eventually get a free replacement I can’t complain much but I will look at competitors with better return policies in the future.

I’ve just installed the Wordpress plugin for the iPhone and I’m experimenting with posting content. As a side note, I spent 5 hours in line to get one, but the effort was worth it. I really like the iPhone and find it useful for many different tasks.

Having a browser built into the email app is really handy since so much email is HTML based. I read email on my Sprint Samsung Blade phone but most email was unintelligible because of the included markup. The iPhone removes this issue completely. Also the new apps available are amazing and very useful. Typing on the keyboard is a bit of a challenge, but I’m getting better at it every day.

More to come……. (here’s a photo test -watching Security Now while I’m writing this)

We have a suite of regression tests that we wanted to run automatically after our MSbuild build is complete. I’ve implemented these tests as C# code exported from Selenium IDE and preprocessed by some .NET code that I wrote. The tests are then compiled using MSBuild and executed.  The problem I ran into that wasn’t clearly documented anywhere was how to run a Selenium RC test as part of a build process - which requires the Java based Selenium RC server running on port 4444. Since we run our test as part of a scheduled task, how do we maintain the Java Selenium server running across logins of the scheduled task?

My first instinct was to run the Selenium server as a Windows service and I found a forum post that provided a .NET service to do this. The problem is that when the service runs in the LocalSystem’s account context, IE was problematic for enabling the proxy that Selenium RC uses during the invocation of tests.  Trying to modify the service to run as a legitimate user also didn’t work - since the service was running in a different Windows Station and IE did not run correctly in this mode either. 

It turned out the simple solution was to just invoke the Selenium Server from the build batch file and then terminate the server when I was finished with the test. There is a built in command in the command line interpreter named "taskkill" that does the job for me. Here is the .bat file code that I used - and note that the first line kills any java apps that are running so be careful.  I needed this line to abort a server in progress if the script or tests failed and left a java session hanging. My build machine doesn’t have any other java things going on so this worked for me. I’m using nunit to invoke my C# tests contained in "jalisngtests.dll". I’m also using the "sleep" command from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit.

taskkill /f /im java.exe
sleep 5
start "Selenium Server" java ^
-jar C:\selenium-remote-control-1.0-beta-1\^
selenium-server-1.0-beta-1\selenium-server.jar
copy .\bin\debug\*.dll
sleep 20
nunit-console jalisngtests.dll
taskkill /f /fi "WINDOWTITLE eq Selenium Server"

After listening to Leo Laporte’s UGM (ultimate gaming machine) discussion on TwitLive last night, I pondered the question of best choice for a new UGM.  I am running an Intel Q6600 (quad core 2.4 ghz) processor and have been pleased with it’s performance.

There was a spirited discussion on the show of which would be better - a Q9770 ($1400 3.2 ghz quad) or an  E8500 ($277 3.16 ghz dual core).  There was a common opinion that current games don’t make use of a Quad - that quads are for the future.  However, I experimented around Christmas time with this very issue and found that both Supreme Commander and Crysis did make use of 4 cores.  I posted in the chat room that Crysis did max out 4 cores (as I remembered) but after trying this out again - I was wrong. However, Crysis does make use of 4 cores and I do get a satisfying frame rate on my Q6600/8800GT combo.

Crysis

Here is what my Q6600 utilization is while running Crysis at 1280×1024.  Not maxing out, but more than 2 cores are used. The third and fourth cores seem to get active when guns are fired - tracers, etc. Here is a post on the subject : Intel and Crysis Developers comments on Quad Core - Toms Hardware.

Supreme Commander

This is one of the first games to support a quad core processor. In the following run - I had 2 monitors displaying 1280×1024 and a very large scenario (8 players - 1000 units per). Notice that the four cores are not maxed out, but they are definitely in use. The second core is less loaded than the others but is still in use.

Games that Support Quad Core

Here is the list I found of current games that support a quad core:

Games and Dual/Quad Core Support

From the list:

Games that take advantage of Quad Core:
Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Half-life 2: Episode 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Portal
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Unreal Tournament 3

A friend asked how I liked GTA IV and sent him this.  I figured I’d include this on my blog also:

Just as a follow up - here are my impressions of GTA IV.

I’ve been playing it now for about 10 hours and I’m still very impressed with the game (it dominates my gaming time now).  Like the previous games, it is very violent, not for kids, and a little embarrassing in how fun it is. The world of Liberty City is really New York and the software technology in this game is stunning. At first, I thought the graphics were very fuzzy for a next gen game, but I’m realized with time that there is virtually no "pop up" of graphics like in the previous games - you basically have a draw distance that is very large and maintains the realism of the views of the city.  They must have some lower rez background tiles to the 3d that they maintain, so the overall impression is not as sharp as other next gen games, but over time the environment becomes really convincing as you play the game. The main part of Liberty City just opened up to me (Time Square and such), and it is absolutely beautiful - especially at night. The traffic and inhabitants of the city are very realistic and just walking around is fun to do - to listen to their dialogue, discussions, insults towards the main character, etc. The physics are remarkable in the interaction between cars, people and the environment.  There was a large attention to detail in the way that objects interact with each other and the realistic movement of the characters. Getting drunk in the game is a unique experience and interesting.  The radio stations in the car are awesome and eclectic - there is a great Jazz station that I listen to a lot.

Driving in the game is harder than the previous - but is intensely fun. The car physics are very realistic. The cabs in the game are cool too - you can take a cab instead of drive to various missions and you can sit in the back seat and just watch the world go by. The cab drivers sometimes run into things and that is unexpected.  Some of the cab drivers talk to you - and I haven’t heard much repeated dialogue.

The missions are really fun - some are harder than others, but very satisfying. There are a lot of car chases, gun fights, gun fights in cars, etc.  There is a new cover system in the game like Gears of War that really improves the gun fight missions. I’ve played around with hand grenades in Central Park and the animations and such are amazing as is the crowd reaction during my violence.

I played around a bit with multiplayer also and that is amazing in itself.  The whole city is available during multiplayer so there is a bunch of driving cars to find your enemies and gun fights while driving.

I watched a review yesterday of the game on IGN, and they reviewer had somewhat the same reaction as I had - the city is so real, that the cartoon like violence seems almost out of place. You feel guilty breaking the law, so I initially tried to obey traffic rules and such.  It would be interesting to see the software technology used in a less violent game. However, the game has really drawn me in and it is definitely an "adult" guilty pleasure (and definitely not for kids, and probably pretty offensive to female gamers).  However with these caveats, I love this game and I’m totally addicted.

Anyway that’s my take-

Microsoft releases VPC versions of IE (6, 7 and 8 ) for testing.  Here is the link to the Official IE Blog. 

I had to call Charter back the next day - the first provisioning wasn’t performed correctly and now I’m seeing increased performance:

Not 16 mbits, but I like the almost 2 mbit up.

Just called and I’m set up for 16/2.  The pricing is the same as the old 10/1 price.

I have a Q6600 system (quad core) with 4 gig of memory (3.5 gig usable), Windows XP 32 bit and could not understand why I had trouble opening more than 10 or 20 IE windows without  weird issues in the desktop.  I’d be missing portions of the UI, couldn’t bring up windows and generally things slowed to a crawl. How could that be with lots of free VM as reported by the task manager?

Well the answer is a tuning parameter that limits how much memory a given desktop application can utilize. This blog post from 2004 describes the problem in detail and has the fix! Windows XP flakiness - solved

I set my SharedSection value to 8096 and I can now open 30 IE windows with no issues. This has bugged me for months and the problem was forming a proper Google search to find this post. Thank you Kevin Dente!

Janna and I watched Lost last night and we were both blown away. Ben is a "badass" and Michael Emmerson is just an amazing actor to watch. I’m listening to the Jay and Jack Lost podcast on my normal morning walk.