iPhone Again

I pulled my iPhone 3G countdown timer off my site, as I no longer give a shit. AT&T's screwing their existing customers (as mentioned in my prior post), and Steve Jobs misled the public at WWDC, when he announced $199 and $299 for the two new phones.

I spent 20 minutes on the phone with AT&T today, explaining why I feel I'm getting screwed here, and pointing out that I was forced to upgrade last time -- it wasn't an upgrade of my choice, but one of AT&T's choice (i.e. shutting down their CDMA network).

Apparently I'm not the only one who called and complained about it, as the CSR read me a memo, explaining that companies routinely shut down old services in favor of new ones, i.e. the impeding switch from analog to digital television, and that shutting down CDMA was to my benefit, as it provided better service and communication, blah, blah, blah.

Both companies get a D- for how this one was handled. :(

iPhoneverse

Again, a stretch without any updates. So here's a tome.

The iPhone

I'd planned on getting an iPhone 3G on July 11th, but it seems AT&T plans on screwing existing customers. An AT&T customer, who isn't currently using an iPhone, has to be "eligible" to upgrade to an iPhone. I am not, because... several months ago I was forced to upgrade my old phone, because AT&T shut down their CDMA network. Had I not upgraded my old phone, it wouldn't work any longer with AT&T's cellular network.

And since I wasn't working, I wasn't about to pay the small fortune for the original iPhone.

But I am working now (see below), and a new iPhone has been released, so I'd planned on getting one.

However, since I'm not eligible, due to my prior upgrade, AT&T tells me they'll be more than happy to let me upgrade for an additional $200 over Apple's price on the phone.

WTF?

I fired off an email to AT&T complaining about this idiotic decision, but I doubt it'll go anywhere. They're looking for a means of fleecing yet more money off their customers, without regard for their having forced their customers to upgrade when they shut down their CDMA network.

The Job

I'm now working at Multiverse, a game company in Mountain View. It's a 6-8 week contract position, and I need to make sure it turns into a permanent position. I've been there two weeks, and like all the people there, and find the work interesting, and hope it all works out.

Yesterday I spent the day doing battle with Microsoft (ugh). I have a process running as a Windows service, and needed to have this process perform some background operations updating some files on a server. Only services run as LocalService, which didn't have permission to write to the directories in question. So I changed the properties on the service to log in as me, but upon restarting the service, the restart failed.

Looking into this I learned that I had to specifically grant permission to my account to log in as a service. But the Local Security Policy utility, which used to be in the Administrative Tools panel, isn't there any longer. I checked XP and Vista boxes in the office, and it's just plain gone.

Searching around further, I found a command-line tool (yes, a command-line tool) on the Microsoft site, for Windows 2003 Server. This tool, when run, gives a list of options, changing the security policy of the specified user account. Only there wasn't an option to update my account to permit logging in as a service.

So I did some more searching, and found another page on the Microsoft site, listing some more options, which weren't given by the security tool (sigh). Sure enough, on the web site, was an option to grant an account permission to log on as a service.

So I ran the tool, started up the service, ran the background process I wanted to execute, and sure enough... it ran! Woot!

For the life of me, I can't understand what idiocy would direct Microsoft to make it so difficult for a user to manage their own account security settings.

Anyway, this is an example of some of the things I've been working on. In my work at Oracle, I never had to deal with Windows at this level. There I'd log in, and start writing code. There was to dealing with services, or security policies, or things like that. So it's all new, and fun.

I figured, after taking 2.5 years off, that it'd take a while to get back into the work routine. I figured about a month, and think that after two weeks I'm finally back into the routine. Yesterday was great, solving this Microsoft problem. There were other accomplishments, but I can't really discuss them.