Monthly Archives: February 2010

Life Imitates Political Art

Posted on Friday, February 19, 2010 by Robin Bloor

I live in Austin Texas. Yesterday in Austin, in the most surreal event to happen so far this decade, a software engineer called Joe Stack (good name that, for a software engineer) flew his his Piper Cherokee PA-28 airplane, loaded with 50 gallons of fuel, into the IRS offices in Austin.

Joe Stack simply snapped. It was an irrational gesture born of a hatred for the IRS, with whom he’d clearly had an adversarial relationship for years. Joe snapped. He put a suicide note on the Internet. He drove his wife and child out of the house. He set the house on fire and then he got in his airplane and crashed it into the Austin IRS building.

Events like this happen in good times, but they seem more common in harsh economic times. OK It’s tough out there.

Political Art

This was no more of a political act that me putting the cat out at night. It happens every now and then. In America as elsewhere, sometimes people snap. The normal outcome is that they get a gun and shoot a few people, before they get taken down. They don’t normally crash airplanes into buildings.

The only previous examples of crashing an airplane into a building was the immensely political strike of 9/11 and the strange loner action a few months later when a 15-year-old boy crashed a Cessna into the 42-story Bank of America Plaza building in Tampa, Florida. This too was a political act, if a very strange one. The boy left a suicide note indicating that he acted alone and that he supported Osama Bin Laden.

However, in America right now, the media, especially Fox News (the broadcasting arm of the Republican Party), tries to turn everything into a political act.

“If you put your cat out at night, the terrorists win.”

I heard about this event over the phone by the way. Probably because I live in Austin. The local jungle drums may this time have worked a little faster than Twitter. My wife was on the phone to  her boss (she was working from home) who was interrupted on the call by her husband who had just been told of the event that had happened a few moments before.

The Austin press and TV were all over it instantly – and well they might be, because all the footage of everything could be syndicated across the world. Reporters were out interviewing the neighbours of the guy. There were reporters at the airfield just North of Austin, where the plane took off and there were reporters interviewing the survivors who had evacuated the building. Luckily only a few people were killed. It could have been worse.

Watching the news happen, I noticed the usual misinformation effect. There were reports, for example, that the air plane had been stolen. Not true. One wonders where they came from. Two jets were scrambled from Houston, in case some larger terrorist attack was in progress, but it clearly wasn’t.

It Was Just Life Imitating Art

We are all capable of delinquent, destructive and suicidal acts. We choose not to do them, indeed we choose not to even think of doing them. We could buy guns and shoot. We could go on the Internet and find how to make explosives and then make bombs. We could derail trains. We could drop concrete blocks onto traffic from bridges. Society has no defence against a lunatic who doesn’t mind dying. It has no defence against someone who snaps. But socity is big. It can take hits like that and move on.

If this had been a gunman, it would have been “just another crazy shooter”. But this was an airplane suicide and all previous acts of this nature in America were political. This event was tailor-made for the political amplifiers of every description.

  • He was white and not Islamic. So was he another Timothy McVeigh?
  • He hated the IRS. So was he a Tea Party wing nut?
  • There was (almost unbelievably so) an FBI office and a CIA office in that building. So is there a conspiracy here?
  • Will Fox News claim that “he was driven to this desperate act by the Obama regime”?
  • Will MSNBC claim that Glen Beck has incited such crazies to acts like this?

No. He just snapped, and killed himself in a very destructive manner. That is all.

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How To Unbrick The iPhone

Posted on Sunday, February 7, 2010 by Robin Bloor

It was Saturday morning. I plugged my iphone into my Mac to charge it up. And I left it to charge. After the battery was shown as fully charged, I was politely informed by iTunes that there was another version of the iPhone OS (and firmware I suspect).  Should I load it?

Apple frequently informs me of upgrades and I always take them. Nothing ever seems to go wrong. It’s been that way since I switched to the Mac in 2004. Saturday was the exception.

How My iPhone Became a Brick

The software began to download. I waited. It started loading on the iPhone. Just before it completed it gave me a message.

“Unable to restore iPhone. Error 14 Unknown error”

My iPhone was now a brick. I wasn’t concerned immediately. I just figured it was a random irregularity. I hadn’t jail-broken the iPhone or anything, so it had to be a simple problem. So I tried again. And I got error 14 again. So I went to Apple’s site and read Apple’s suggestion on what to do, such as reboot your Mac/PC then try again, or try it on a different iMac.

I had lost the data on the iPhone, by the way. Once your iPhone is a brick, it gets amnesia and never recovers. You have to reconstitute it. However all data was backed up, so I wasn’t worried.

To cut a long story short, I tried everything Apple recommended, then tried every idea I could find on various iPhone forums. I wasted three hours and all I got was error 14 every time, except once, when iTunes suggested I needed to load different firmware. Well Duh! So I decided to visit the AT&T shop from whence I got the phone.

They were utterly useless. They plugged it it, tried to fix it and gave up after 5 minutes. They knew nothing. I was tempted to tell them that “my phone was now a brick so please replace it.” But I didn’t, because they suggested that I visit the Genius Bar at the local Apple chapel, and I knew that if AT&T gave me a new iPhone there would be hassle in getting it configured to my number. So I went to the local Apple Store, only to discover that I wouldn’t be able to get an appointment with an “Apple Genius” until 11.50 the following day. But never mind, a helpful assistant said he’d see what he coudl do and waltzed off with my Phone. He returned 20 minutes later, to inform me that only a genius could fix it. So I booked in for the following day and went home.

How To Unbrick The iPhone

When I got home, I started to think my way through the problem. I realized I hadn’t done that. I’d just tried every suggestion I’d run into. Most likely the iPhone was corrupted at an OS or firmware level. Quite possibly the download I had originally tried had become corrupt. So, I needed to clean down the phone.

Quite possibly the download I’d loaded was lurking somewhere on my Mac. So this is what I did:

  1. I cleaned down the iPhone by putting it in DFU mode (Where DFU stands for Device Firmware Upgrade).
  2. I found the download on my Mac and deleted it.

DFU mode. You put an iPhone in DFU mode by doing the following:

  • For about 7 seconds keep the “power/lock’ button (top of the phone) and the “home” button pressed – until the iPhone screen goes black.
  • Keep them pressed for an extra 2 seconds, then release the “power/lock’ button
  • iTunes will then see the the iPhone after about 10 seconds. Now you release the “home” button.
  • The iPhone is now in DFU mode.
  • You can now reformat the iPhone by reloading everything, but first delete the previous download.

New download. I acquired a valid download by doing the following:

  • I went to /library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/
  • There was a file there which has a name similar to iPhone2,1_3.3.3_7E18_Restore.ipsw. This ipsw file was probably corrupted. So I deleted it. If you don’t delete this, iTunes will try to load it and you’ll have the same problem as before. It all probability, this file is corrupt.
  • I restored the iPhone and it worked – because I had reformatted the iPhone and got a fresh update for it.
  • Once the iPhone was restored, I reloaded the phone from the last backup.

The only way that this is likely to fail is if the download of the new OS/firmware gets corrupted. So, if it fails, repeat. If this doesn’t work then the odds are that you have a hardware defect and it’s time to get the handset replaced.

The reason I have explained all this is that I couldn’t find an explanation of this on the web. There may be other stuff out there that tells you what to do, but I couldn’t find anything that tells you why you’re doing it.

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