Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Are you an iPhone 3G user with a “No Wiki” greyed out on your settings? Do you see this when you access your phone’s settings?

For me, I’ve only seen it once. I have a first-generation iPhone. The solution and fix for this problem was simply to do a soft reset by holding down the top power button and the home button until it restarted, at which point the wifi was working again. As another point of reference, I use FIOS and have the ActionTec router they supply.

You should also check out iPhone WiFi Problems (aka greyed-out “No WiFi”) from earlier this year, where he indicates that for him, it was a hardware failure:

I have to say, after hours of working through all the things other people have tried, I am finally at the same place – I am pretty convinced that my colleague’s iPhone at least, is also a solid hardware failure.

I was reading Motorola legal tie to pull pricey Aura phone off eBay, and it struck me that some scary stuff is going on if you are going to have to spend $2000 on a phone, only to never be able to resell it:

A source close to the company told Register Hardware that in order to maintain Aura’s glow of exclusivity, buyers will be required to “sign into a contract that states they can’t sell it on eBay”. The source added that if an Aura owner wants to sell their phone after they’ve bought it then they’ll only have one option: to sell it back to the manufacturer.

Presumably, each Aura sold will carry a unique id number, possibly above and beyond an IMEI code, that’ll be linked to a specific buyer. So should you shirk your contractual obligations and offer your handset for auction, then Motorola’s legal department will come knocking on your door.

I would think that reselling your own phone would be covered by the first sales doctrine or consumer protection laws. What do you think?

If you’ve ever tried to get an animated .gif file to continue playing in IE after a link is clicked, javascript runs for a form submit, or the window.location is set to a new URL, then you’ve probably already gone through the phases of frustration, and come straight to Google.

Here’s the setup. You’ve got a piece of javascript redirecting the user on a click (yes, I know this is a bad idea). Hopefully you got this from a legacy app:

<script language="javascript"><!--
function go(href) {
     $('spinner').style.display = '';
     location.href = href;
}
//--></script>
<a href="defaultAction.htm" onClick="go(this.href);return false">go</a>

Internet Explorer stops animated gifs when there is a javascript event, so if you try this code, it’s going to fail dramatically. What you need (for IE6 and IE7) is a hack:

<script language="javascript"><!--
function go(href) {
     $('spinner').style.display = '';
     location.href = href;
     $('spinner').src = $('spinner').src;
}
//--></script>
<a href="defaultAction.htm" onClick="go(this.href);return false">go</a>

Yes, reassigning the src attribute of an img will cause the image to keep animating, even when in the process of loading the next page. Note–this doesn’t work as well in Firefox. For that, you should either (a) upgrade the application to load data through AJAX, not URL redirection, or (b) use an iframe pointing to the image.

PS, if you need some ajax loading indicators, there’s a bunch!