w00kie’s ramblings

I'm getting reports from my friends with iPhones here in Japan, since I still haven't gone crazy and taken one as a second phone. Some features have been completely borked by Softbank:

• There's no + for international calls. Apparently, Softbank's network does not support the + (country code) (your number) that is industry standard on all modern phones. Instead, they customize their keitais, which are manufactured to Softbank's specs by the nicely compliant Japanese manufacturers, to replace the plus sign with a special prefix: 010.
• The mail address @i.softbank.jp is not "push-compatible". This means you have to initiate a mail check to see if there is mail waiting, unlike @me.com mail which pushes the mails straight to your phone through the network without actual polling on your part.
  Softbank has implemented a sort of fake notification which must be a background process continually polling the server for new mails, showing the butt-ugly greyed-out fullscreen popup whenever you receive a message. Of course, there is no chime nor vibration hinting to a new event while the phone is in your pocket, making that mail address basically useless...

I hope Softbank gets its act together before I need to change phones. Sadly, even after knowing all these caveats, I still want one...

So people have been lined up in front of the flagship Softbank shop in Omotesando since Monday, all reservations that were taken in the first days after announcement have been canceled and now my friend Jon tells me that he called the main Softbank shop in Kumagaya, Saitama-ken and they are having a raffle for what will probably be 5 measly units on Friday.

If you want to get an iPhone here in Japan, you'd better start tossing a lot of ５円 coins at the local shinto shrine to buff up on luck and scour the raffles every weekend arount the countryside as we all did 2 years ago during the darkest times of Wii hunting.

Note: the photo is one of mine at Meiji shrine for New Year, that's the image that comes to mind when I think about a crowd in Japan...

Update: Jon won the lottery and got his iPhone, only problem is Softbank's servers are on their knees and they couldn't activate his phone. It's that crazy...

A press release just appeared on Softbank's website and suddenly Twitter went ablaze: the official pricing details for the iPhone have been published.

Here's the lowdown:

• 7,280円 per month for basic white plan and unlimited data
• 960円 per month for the 8GB version, 1,440円 per month for the 16GB version (for 24 months)
• specific email address for xxxx@i.softbank.jp (normal plans are xxxx@softbank.ne.jp)

Of course, these prices are without any calling minutes. I wonder if I'm going to be able to get the iPhone without any plan, activate it and use my corporate Softbank SIM card in it.

I missed the Keynote because I'm sick like a dog (went rafting/canyoning this weekend in a 7ºC mountain river) and couldn't bear to stay up until 3 A.M., but today I'm telling my boss I'm taking a day off on July 11th.

Update: link to the official Softbank press release.

Tonight (at least in Japanese time) is Steve Job's WWDC Keynote. It is widely accepted that he will be announcing the new 3G enabled iPhone and I am secretly hoping he will give us a release date for Japan live from the Moscone West.

These past weeks, I've been developing a live-blogging system for my other website to cover the event minute by minute. It's a challenge to devise a system, both software and hardware-wise, capable of handling the huge loads involved in such a big event. We are expecting more than 50.000 persons to follow the Keynote via MacBidouille.

Until now, all our attempts have failed. But this time, I'm trying something new with an Ajax based interface running on the new Google App Engine platform. It's been really fun using a new technology, Python, on Google's own architecture.

I have no idea if this new system while withstand the load this year, especially with the tight quotas in place for the beta phase of App Engine. But I sure hope Steve announces the iPhone launch in Japan starting tomorrow and I'll take the day-off to rush to the Apple Store in Ginza as soon as it opens...

やった！

「iPhone」について
2008年6月4日 - ソフトバンクモバイル株式会社

この度、ソフトバンクモバイル株式会社は、今年中に日本国内において「iPhone」を発売することにつきまして、アップル社と契約を締結したことを発表いたします。

SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.

Why am I so happy? Because my corporate phone is a Softbank, so I should legally be able to change my crappy Sharp phone whose battery cannot hold more than 10min of conversation anymore for a snazzy 3G iPhone and still have my company pay for it. :)

Mac OS X 10.5 is driving me crazy! I'm trying to open an FTP access to my machine for sharing some files with a friend. Obviously I turn to the newly renovated file sharing tab, activate it and open FTP sharing. A new feature of Leopard is a new "Sharing Only" user profile that lets you create users for file sharing that will not be able to login to your machine. So I create one of those and give him access to my share folder.

Now that should be the end of it, 15 seconds to share a folder cleanly and securely with someone else. But no...

Thanks to some crazy security freak somewhere in Cupertino, if you try to FTP to my machine with this Sharing Only user, it won't share, just give you a stupid error that "this user may not use FTP". It makes absolutely no sense.