iPhone 3.0 firmware installation info

Many sites have commented on the current release of the 3.0 firmaware. I definitely could not call myself competent to give a proper analysis on it, but I am pasting the installation information that you are informed about upon upgrading to this version of the firmware.

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iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update

This update contains over 100 new features, including the following:

Cut, Copy & Paste with shake to undo
• Landscape keyboard in key applications
• Enhanced Messages application
- Send and receive photos, contacts, audio files, and location via MMS*
- Forward and delete single or multiple messages
• Added search feature in Mail, Calendar, Notes and iPod
• Spotlight search across iPhone
• Support for CalDAV and subscriptions in Calendar
• Improvements to Safari
- Performance
- HTML 5 support
- HTTP Streaming audio and video
- Auto-fill usernames and passwords
• New Voice Memos application
• Sync Notes with a Mac or PC via iTunes
• Internet Tethering over USB and Bluetooth*
• Browse and download movies, TV shows, and audiobooks from the iTunes Store**
• Stereo Bluetooth***
• Wi-Fi auto login
• Enhanced Stocks application
• More Parental Control options for Apps, Music, Movies and TV Shows
• iTunes account creation and login**
• YouTube account login and access to subscriptions, ratings and favorites**
• Shake to shuffle
• New languages, dictionaries, and keyboards
• Find my iPhone and Remote Wipe via MobileMe (subscription required)**
• Support for more Exchange policies
• Create and send Exchange meeting invitations
• Search mail on server (Exchange Server 2007 and supported IMAP servers)
• Search LDAP company directory
• VPN on demand and VPN proxy support
• Encrypted configuration profiles
• Encrypted iTunes backups
• 1,000 new developer APIs, including:
- In App Purchases
- Apple Push Notification Service
- Accessories support
- Peer to Peer Connectivity
- Embedded Maps
- iPod Library Access
• Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3G S

* Compatible only with iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S and requires support from your wireless provider.
** Not available in all regions or in all languages.
*** Compatible only with iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S.

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guide for your iPhone at:


For more information about iPhone, go to:


To troubleshoot your iPhone, or to view additional support information go to:


For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:

GAK = YUK

Considering the after-taste after using the on-line music instrument company this is certainly true. I was ordering some guitar stands for myself all-in-all three items were purchased and paid for. Considering this was bought in the UK and the company is based in Brighton the postage was extremely high - ₤10. I had good experience from a previous purchase from this company when I bought a guitar amplifier.
After the purchase I started to receive e-mail messages where it was just stated that the "Your order has been updated...". It also stated that you should look on the website for more information but once there there were no useful information whatsoever. This was happening for over a week and I got ticked off and started to wonder what happened to my order.
When I called them they told me they did not have one of the items in stock - WHY didn't they tell me that or even better, why is that not stated on the website. To top it all they, in the end, dispatched only two of the three ordered items. No apologies were made.

Then came the next problem - delivery. It is terrible. They use a courier service that comes at only certain times of the day and if you are not there that's it. The problem is that rearranging delivery does not help as I am employed and cannot be at home all day for some stupid delivery. If they would have used the Royal Mail I would be able to pick it up without much drama, however this courier service would require me to travel about three hours!!! Crazy.

In the end GAK just was unable to get the items to me and I called them up. Despite their apologies they still decided to blame me for the non-delivery despite I made the order in good faith and they charged the courier to me. I even asked them to deliver to my work address, which is just 3 miles away from my home - NO, was the answer. They just did not budge. - Fraud, apparently, was the reason. Now, if I was a fraudster, would I really have bought a few items and then called them up to deliver the items just down the road from where I lived. The workplace is actually a respectable company and the company's name is listed in the postcode database.

One of the things that ticked me off is how inflexible they were for such a small company. Also in this day and age where the credit crunch is pressing down, you would think that serving the customers would be a top priority - not standing behind a corporate policy like idiots.

And also, the first item I bought was the before mentioned amp. After just a few weeks it went dead so quality of their products is questionable. When I asked to deliver it back to me I used my work address. Did that help, oh nooooooo. It was like talking to some computer controlled drones with no practical reasoning. I sort of wished that the crunch will force them to close their business as I sincerely don't think they should be in business with that sort of attitude towards clients.

So whatever you do, do not use this company. I have used Amazon (a proper faceless drone corporation) with hardly any problems for years.

Running Premvet on an old PC

You have probably been in the same situation, you would like to use another terminal to access Premvet but find it difficult to buy another PC,e specially when considering you might have one or two old machines laying around gathering dust. This was a case with an old Dell Inspiron laptop. It had Windows XP installed but you had to take a holiday before being able to do anything on it. Considering the laptop was useless and could be just as good if it only ran Premvet then it would be better to have a more lean fast operating system installed.

I looked around the Linux distros and found ArchLinux. The fact that it was very technical and not for noobs scared me. I have dabbed into Linux a little bit and have even installed Ubuntu on my personal laptop (and kept it) - I gave it a try.

The download was relatively quite small and once I burned the .iso image on a CD-ROM I had a viable install CD. The system will first ask you to install a Live CD. I thought this was wrong and that I perhaps downloaded the wrong iso image. Don't worry, this is just an instance that helps you do the actall install on your hard-drive. The installation went smoothly and recognized my network card so I could install the FTP way.

First thing I remember doing was to create a user with non-admin privileges - I was consistent with the Network Solutions system and created vet. I had some problems logging into this user so I found the best was is to use the verbose method by just entering the useradd command. Also make sure you have inetutils installed. Also it makes it easier if you automatically log in to the "vet" user. This can be found here.

If everything works fine and you can login to a user automatically then all you have to do is to automatically call the telnet command from the bash:

telnet [premvet-server-ip-address] [port-number]

Some information is available here: http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/fofc00/telnet.html

To automate this you should add this line in the /etc/rc.local file.
I also made an alias for the user to shut down the machine at the end of the day. I made an alias called end for the command sudo poweroff
Sudo is to tell Linux to execute unser root privileges as Linux wouldn't be Linux if verything wasn't very secure. A normal user cannot even power off the system without special privileges. There is probably another way of doing this but I gave the user "vet" some priviliges in /etc/sudoers - you can edit this in an editor like nano or you can call it up directly in vi with "visudo" (http://www.go2linux.org/sudoers-how-to).

To make it even easier for my colleagues I even found a way of automating the login once the Premvet server was contacted. This is by using Expect. It successfuly logged in and entered the username and rendered the extra carriage return needed to get to the Premvet user login screen. The only problem I could not solve and I presume is a bug in Expect is, that it messes-up the rendering of characters in Premvet. The characters used to format the boxes is all wrong. This shouldn't have happened and I found no workaround.

So now the user must still enter the unix username and hit enter twice.

don't forget to change the terminal settings for Premvet for that machine: http://www.premvet.co.uk/premvet/manual/pv5/ch29b.html#29b2

There has just been one other snag besides Expect not working - colours. Premvet doesn't load a clolour scheme for this type of terminal so everything is in black&white. you can change the colours manually in Premvet for that machine but there is probably a workaround for that.

Running the Premvet client on Ubuntu Linux

PremVet is a veterinary practice management and clinical records computer system based on Unix, made by a Scottish company VetSolutions.

Running the Premvet client on Ubuntu is actually very simple and worked very well. I was using Ubuntu 8.10 with the Gnome desktop. All you have to do is:

• start the Terminal and enter
• run the following command telnet [ip-address] (where the ip-address is the IP address of the Premvet server)
• voila

It managed to draw the characters, including the lines that are used for graphics, right out of the box. There was only a couple of glitches. The bacspace did not work. To fix this it might be better to use a dedicated profile in terminal and change the setting for this profile by going to Edit - Profile Preferences. Click on the Compatibility tab and change the value for Backspace key generates from whatever it is (in my case it was ASCII DEL) to Control-H.

If you want to save yourself from extra typing you can create a launcher, but would somehow have to be able to set the profile for that launch. This is how you do it.

The only thing I could not get to work is the colours of the user interface.

Accessing Premvet on the iPhone

I got tired of keep having to go and see the waiting list on a PC that could have been away from the tea-room, making you get up and walking to the other side of the surgery only to find out there is nobody waiting for you or, worse still, someone has been on your waiting list for 15 minutes and nobody has told you about them.

So after getting my iPhone I wandered if there could be a way of seeing the waiting list on it. To give you the short version - YOU CAN. But there are a few pre-requisites. First of all you need a relatively secure Wi-Fi connection and that connection has to be open to the internal practice's network and the Premvet server must be visible from it. you can try calling the server's website or you can use other iPhone apps to ping it.

Please be aware that WiFi networks are a potential open back-door to your system and should be set-up by a pro or someone who knows what he is doing. Don't complain to me if the system gets hacked so consider yourself warned!

If you have successfully established a connection to the internal network you can follow this by installing the appropriate terminal emulator app on your iPhone.

Many of the settings that need to be entered can be found in the configuration of you Anita terminal emulator. If you don't have an Anita installed on any PCs you might have a wee problem.

I have tried several apps for this:

1. pTerm (from Instant Cocoa), cost: £2.99
   which is based on the popular terminal emulator called PuTTy. Was the first one I tried and worked relatively fine.
   - You set-up a new host, enter a nickname - something that will distinguish this connection from possible others.
   - Enter the username - this s the username which you enter in the Unix system before you get to Premvet.
   - Port - this is the port number that is open on the Unix server. On our system it was 23 but check with an Anita connection to see what is yours.
   - Protocol - must be set to Telnet
   
   Advanced settings can help with some in-depth configuration. I set-up the Terminal (3rd one down). Set Rows to 25 and Columns to 80. Type strings to »ansi«. I left the variables as is.
   The emulator worked relatively fine but the age-old problem of drawing lines was repeated on this app. Instead of showing lines it is returning some weird characters. Also I could not make the delete button to work, if you use it it seems to freeze the emulator :-(
   
   This app is quite nice to manouver in, if you tapp the emulator window it will bring up the keyboard. Tapping it again will remove it. Premvet keyboard shortcuts worked fine - the ever popular w-s for the waiting list summary. However the emulator froze on many occasions when I wanted to leave that page to get back to the main menu. Closing the app did not help.
   
   
2. MTelnet (from Mocha Telnet Lite), cost: FREE
   looks like absolute winner, you set up the Server IP address, port (23), I left the Termtype to vt220 and it worked fine, using the username in this app actually worked and was able to auto-login to Unix, however pressing the return button is still needed. It worked like a charm and also drew the lines in Premvet - nothing garbled. Did I mention the Lite version of the app is free! The app is much different to pTerm and has a shortcut on the screen to the keyboard and has a permanent Return/Enter command button on top.
   Keyboard shortcuts worked nicely and the emulator seemed more stable than in pTerm. There is a more extensive payable edition (for £3.49) of this app but I'm not sure if you will need it. The Lite version just rocks.
   
   
3. Telnet (from ThroughPut Inc), cost £1.19
   This app fared the least. The setup seemed to simplified and the output was not impressing the whole Premvet login page was a complete mess.
   
   
4. iSSH (from Zinger-Soft), cost £2.39
   This app I have tested the least. Might give more info on it later.