GPS "technical difficulties" in South East US

FAA has put an advisory warning pilots that GPS will be unreliable or unavailable from January 20th through February 22nd, 2011 due to Department of Defense tests. 

The CSFTL tag means Commander Strike Force Training Atlantic which is the Navy. 

FAA Advisory CSFTL11-01

During testing DoD could be turning civilian usage OFF on some GPS satellites which will reduce the accuracy of the GPS in concentric circles shrinking with a decrease in altitude as shown above, and explained in the NOTAM.

   

It is unclear on what will happen on the ground but the test will turn GPS OFF for periods of 15mn each hour and some observers on the ground claim their GPS was flashing different values yesterday.

So just in case take a paper map with you, and it is NOT an iPhone new bug.

FAA Advisory URL

SDCard in iPad2? Not!

Saw this morning that everybody is repeating iPad2 will have an SDCard slot, which does not make much sense to me. People keep repeating the same thing over and over without thinking. If you search for "iPad 2 has higher-res screen, SD card" with quotes you get 1200+ hits climbing 20 hits an hour. This morning the number was 1170 hits!

In December I posted in iPad2 Shells that the reported large slot at the bottom did not look like an SDCard slot but more as an extra ventilation, which meant more powerful chipset and graphic chips in iPad2. 

I don't believe Apple is stupid enough to put an SDCard slot in the iPad2. Why? Because SDCards connectors are crappy, they will increase hardware problems especially at the bottom. iPad users are NOT computer geeks and will find ways to insert stuff in reverse and if I was Apple I don't want that. 

In addition Apple makes tons of money on accessories and they sell all sorts of adapters for photo, SDCard, so why would they undercut their own market? The probability of an SDCard socket is low, asymptotically tending to zero.

A new chip set on the other side is certain. Apple current chipset, the A4 is a PA Semi design, the ARM Cortex A8 CPU with Imagination PowerVR GPU produced by Samsung. On the graphic side Apple is a large stockholder of Imagination with Intel.

New devices, the iPhone 5 and iPad 2, will most certainly use a 2GHz Capable Cortex-A9 Quad Core Processor Implementation with the latest Imagination PowerVR SGX543. That's a quad core CPU.


I would go on a limb here and say that Apple will underclock to 1GHz on a first release then if all goes well, turboboost these devices to twice the speed by a firmware update.

I could be wrong, but I used to design these toys, and that's what I would do. 

IOS Developer Certificate and Profile Nightmare

Each year around this time, I have to renew my developer certificate and Provisioning profile. This is the second time I am renewing and it is always the same nightmare. It is a frustrating experience!

Problems generally begin by the nagging alarm warning message on your iPhone or iPad devices "Provisioning profile so&so is about to expire in XYZ" and two buttons Remind Me (that's my button) and Show Me which I hate because usually you turned your phone to do something else and the warning message is really not welcome at that time.

A few days later you are compiling the latest version of your app, and kaboom, you get an error telling you that you have a signing problem. What? A signing problem?

You click ^⌘O to open the XCode organizer, and holly crap most of your profiles have a yellow triangle in the left column and a large, looming sign below telling you that you are doomed!

Quick search on the Apple developer forum for "A valid signing identity matching this profile could not be found" will return a big zero!

Google is better and will return 1500+ hits of miserable IOS developers, in the same predicament, who also suddenly lost their profiles and are searching for a solution. I like the "What the @$! is a Signing identity?" post. This guy is kaput for a week at least.

Solution

1. Hope you got a valid developer account and/or renewed your membership. If not Renew!
2. To check certificates and Profiles Go to IOS provisioning portal 
3. If your Developer certificate is invalid
1. Click on Certificate and verify that you have a valid certificate
2. If not Apple does not tell you how to renew, because there is no renew
3. You must revoke the certificate using the button on the righ
4. Recreate a new certificate from zero exactly as you did the first time (Check the How To)
5. Wait a few seconds and click refresh. Apple does not refresh these pages automatically and the first time I did that I waited like an imbecile ten minutes in front of that screen.
6. An Email is sent to the big kahuna who manages your account, the "Agent", to accept your demand. If you are the Agent, you see a line appear in the Team Signing Request, click Approve or Reject if there was an error. 
7. Refresh the view and you certificate should be ready to download!
8. Download the certificate (A file ending in .cer)
9. Double click on it to install it in your keychain
10. Wait a minute here. If you changed your developer certificate, provisioning profiles could be invalid and you may have to do the steps below too. Don't forget to click on Edit to reenable the developers.
4. Renew your developing profile(s) 
1. Apple provided a Renew button here but remember to check with Edit>Modify that you are using the new Developer certificate and that your developer identity is checked in the Certificates section.
2. Select the devices used for debugging
3. Submit
4. Wait a few seconds, and refresh the view until you see the download button
5. Download the developer profile (ending in .mobileprovision)
6. Drop the file in your organiser

If you didn't do it already download the iPhone Configuration Utility it is a very useful tool to check certificate, profiles etc/

I use it also to quickly install and enable or disable apps in the devices by uninstalling them, instead of running XCode or using iTunes.

You can also quickly install profiles in your device

Verizon iPhone 4 will start in February

At the news conference in New York, Verizon said it will start taking pre-orders on Feb. 3 for existing customers and February 10 for new customers. No precise launch date for the device was given. This is for a CDMA device only and not for the 4G.

They did not announce a 4G version, and we suppose Apple will have the upper hand in that. Big Apple news are always Steve Jobs' news.

This announcement is extremely important because unknown to most Google passed last week the iPhone at 26% of the market being Android based for 25% begin iPhone. Research In Motion still holding 33.5% of the market due to the business people reluctance to adopt the iPhone.

AT&T is in trouble. Their customers are quite unhappy with the quality of the service in many areas, 88% of AT&T users are locked in a two year contract, and AT&T is late on its 4G network.

AT&T  Beware the Ides of March!