I discovered a bug on my iPhone. The issue was around Daylight saving. Thanks to Dock I was able to take screenshots which was much better then photos.

In Calendar when you select 1am on the scrollers, you get 1am as the start time. When you select 2am, the start time goes to 1am. When you select 3am, it goes to 3am as expected.

I installed Dock on my iPhone and it gave a very handy and wanted Screen Shot function. So now I can show my present iPhone screen. It looks like:

Apart from the obvious differences of different and more icons, I have by background behind icons, and I’ve turned off the text, so you need to know the icon means. Still, it’s wicked cool.

I’ve finally taken the plunge after wanting to for some time. This is what I did, all steps are from using the iPhone directly, no computer required.

NOTE: I can’t take responsibility for anything that happens to your iPhone. As the warning for the installer program states, “This software comes with absolutely no warranty of any kind. If it should cause any harm to your iPhone or data, we shall not be held responsible.”. That said, there are instructions to Virginizing your iPhone to 1.0.2. So if you ever had to return the phone to Apple you would need to do this first.

Part 1. The Installer
NOTE: This only works if your Phone has firmware Version 1.1.1. If you have the iTunes button you have 1.1.1 (as at 01-Nov-2007). You can find our your Version by going Settings -> General -> About and look for the Version value.

1. Disable Keyboard Passcode Lock if enabled (Settings -> General -> Passcode Lock -> Off), Disable auto-lock (Settings -> General -> Auto-Lock -> Never), enable Wi-Fi (Settings -> Wi-Fi -> On) and get connected to a wireless network (Settings -> Wi-Fi -> Join Network)
2. Using Safari Browser, goto http://jailbreakme.com/.
3. Click on Install AppSnap link. The phone will appear to do nothing before it returns to the initial screen, with Slide to Unlock. (It took less then a minute for my iPhone to go back to Slide to unlock, other notes indicate up to 5 mins)
4. Slide to unlock. You will see a new icon called Installer. (Don’t click it yet)
5. Power off your phone, and power back on. (I’m uncertain how long this will take, as I did it slightly different, but don’t be alarmed if it takes at least 15 minutes this first time, as that what it took for me.

Note: At step 4 I selected the Installer button (it asked me to Update, which I did). This was bad idea, it went to Downloading package and never recovered after 5 minutes. I needed to do a reboot via holding down menu button. Click on the Installer button again, and it simply doesn’t start properly, going back to the main page. Turning off via power button freezes as well. After 5 minutes, tried holding down first the menu button, then the power button, no luck. Froze on the shutdown spinning icon for at least 15 mins.

Part 2. The Necessary Programs

You can now install the following programs when selecting Installer. Note: after each installation it will go back to the initial slide to unlock screen.
Note also the initial order, in particular the first 3 are important.

6. Installer -> System -> BSD Subsystem (Version 1.5, 6.6 M)
7. Installer -> Sources -> Community Sources (Version 3.0, 165 bytes) Update This happens automatically now.
8. Installer -> System -> OpenSSH (Version 4.6p1-1, 696k)
9. Installer -> System -> Term-vt100 (Version svn198, 81k)
10. Installer -> Package -> Summerboard (Version 3.0a11, 693k)

This then gave me access to SSH to my phone, SSH out to the big bad world, and ability to have different themes, changing the look and feel, see Summerboard themes for example.

Part 3. The fun applications.

I installed to start with the following application, you should choose what you like.

Installer -> Games -> Sudoku (Version 1.0-1, Size 24k)
Installer -> Utilties -> Erica’s Utilities (0.36, 42k)
Installer -> Utilities -> Erica’s iPhone Utils (0.06, 12k)
Installer -> Utilites -> Erica’s Ported Utils (0.06, 2.5M)
Installer -> Multimedia -> VoiceNotes (0.21, 60k)
Installer -> Productivity -> Crosswalk (1.01, 362k)

Practically everything is from www.modmyifone.com. Many references available online helped including here. Thanks James for the demo and points to success.

Some darn wicked stuff.

One of the cool things, being able to save Call History, SMS messages and Notes. Did via SSH with the following commands:

PATH=/var/root/bin:$PATH;export PATH
sqlite3 -line /private/var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db 'select address,text from message;'
sqlite3 -line /private/var/root/Library/Notes/notes.db 'select data from note_bodies;' | sed "s/^.*data = //"
sqlite3 -line /private/var/root/Library/CallHistory/call_history.db 'select "* " || address || " (" || ((duration/60)+1) || "  minutes)" from call;' | sed "s/^.*= //"

I really don’t like the backquote character (`). This is primarily due to it’s use by MySQL in internal and community tools.
MySQL allows objects, .e.g table names, column names etc to contain both reserved words and spaces, providing they are appropriately surrounded by backquotes, so tools now simply enclose everything with backquotes. Really annoying.

Last week while on a client site I was told a funny story. The CEO of a company bought an iPhone however was unable to use it at work due to the WEP key for the Wireless access in his organization includes a backquote. I’ve confirmed it, the iPhone keyboard does not have a backquote key. So now, because he is the CEO, everybody will have to change their Wireless WEP key just because of the iPhone.

But it gets better. Around midnight last Saturday between Slate Plus (for Dinner & Pool) and going down to SOHO for more drinks, Farhan had to change a cron job. As his battery was running low, he was trying to find it, you guessed it, the backquote character on his OQO. Just lucky it’s Windoze and if you can find the character map application, you can insert the character.
Rob and Michelle were on hand, and with my new EOS 40D and 50mm 1.4f lens I was able to take a series of photos without flash and without alerting my unsuspecting subjects.

Today I got back home to my iPhone bill. Lucky for me it was only 15 pages long. Rather stupid, but this news has been circulating for a few days. You can read More Google News stories including creative titles like “How many trees did your iPhone bill kill?”, “A 300-page iPhone Bill?” and “iPhone: The 800-Pound Gorilla Spawns a 300-Page Bill”. Not only did they waste trees, but I read one article stating it cost AT&T $7 in postage for one bill.

The present news is that the only way AT&T will address this is if you accept to get a paperless bill. How stupid, how about they just not print every data transfer, it’s not like you can actually get on a data plan that’s not unlimited anyway.

I am not alone in my experience as a corporate AT&T/Cingular user wanting an iPhone. See my last post iPhone activation – Finally after 3 days. In the past 30 minutes I’ve read the same pain from many people. How can Apple and AT&T get this so wrong?

Some posts of interest:

No iPhones for corporate accounts?!
Anyone else here on an AT&T corporate account?
Apple, er AT&T, tells corporate types to pound sand
No iPhone for business account customers at launch?