Weaver’s Loom

Today I spent an hour or so trying to clean up some iPhone code that I’ve been working on for Carticipate. I found that I was having trouble with the build that I checked out from our Subversion repository for a bunch of different reasons.

The very first one was that the code was built on an older version of Xcode, as well as an older version of the iPhone SDK, and on top of that the build machine was running Leopard (10.5) while I’ve been running Snow Leopard (10.6) almost since the day it was released.

I tend to try and stay as up to date with software as I can, and most of the time it serves me well. In this case, I ran into several very interesting issues. First thing I did was to check out the code using the command line tools for Subversion. After a few false starts, I got the full directory from the server downloaded to my Projects folder.

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This weekend, AT&T finally fixed my visual voice mail. I still don’t know what they did to fix it, but I’m pretty sure it’s related to a hack that I’ve been reading about which lets the phone do tethering.

Now I didn’t try this hack on my newly replaced phone, but when I asked the AT&T people about it, they said they were working on a fix on their side for a wider problem (meaning I wasn’t the only one who had gone without visual voice mail for some time).

I’m hopeful that this problem won’t recur, but I wonder if perhaps it was caused by AT&T trying to block the tethering hack. Now my phone is happy again, and I’m no longer missing calls (at least as far as I can tell).

A couple of weeks ago, I notice that my iPhone was not receiving voice mails, and I seemed to be missing calls on occasion. In fact, I hadn’t received a voice mail since around the time I upgraded to the 3.0 firmware.

Since I use this as my primary business phone, I was a bit concerned.

I had been seeing occasional error messages about being unable to connect to the network like:

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…Or how to brick your phone with an upgrade, and recover…

Earlier this month, Apple released the fifth beta of their 3.0 firmware for the iPhone. As usual, I raced to the site to download it.

I became very excited by the email that I got saying that submissions to the Apple store have to be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, which to me means it won’t be long before this is a production OS. With that in mind, I strapped on my crazy cap and decided to upgrade my phone to beta 5.

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Recently I downloaded the iPhone beta 3.0 firmware upgrade and decided (without thinking it through) to update my phone to use the new version. In hindsight, Apple makes it pretty clear this is a bad idea, and warns you that you won’t be able to revert to a prior version of the software:

But warnings were meant to be ignored, so I blithely went ahead and updated with the new firmware. Immediately after doing so, I had a d’oh moment when I realized I better not have my business phone running on beta software, so I wanted to revert.

No problem I thought, I’ll just follow the steps to downgrade that I wrote about previously …

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