This weekend, two of my friends have sent me an MMS message each. Then they sent me follow up SMS messages because I didn’t get a single one of the MMS messages. This is a widely lamented missing feature of the iPhone, and I totally agree something as basic as MMS should be included. That however, is not my gripe. 

When an MMS message is sent to a non-compatible handset such as your mum’s old Nokia, to your little brother’s old Sony or even to your own iPhone, the phone carrier will generally send an SMS containing a code that can be typed into a website that will then display your newly received rubbish picture multimedia message. Odd, I thought, that I didn’t get a message telling me I had something new from my friends, so I logged on to optuszoo and tried in vain to view my inbox. No dice. No picture messages for that matter, either.

I left it for a couple of days of seeing this message, and on the third day I did call the Optus company itself to see what they had to say. The lady I got through to was exceedingly nice and very understanding once she realised I knew what I was talking about, so no complaints there. After I explained the situation, she was somewhat surprised to read a new training reference page she pulled up in reference to this problem. She read it word for word to me and paraphrased and muddled through the memory of my head - it basically went like this: “..as of 13th October the MMS servers have been rolled over to a new Linux system, and the SMS notification system has been disabled, permanently.”

I push a little harder for information and she found that there had been “hundreds of complaints” and there could be a fix in the works, but there was no firm plans and definitely no ETA for that plan. I asked why I can’t access my messages on my allotted 5MB of online ‘Zoo’ inbox. “that functionality has been removed and disabled for people without MMS capable handsets” - Here’s the kicker. If you do have an MMS capable handset, you get access to online MMS services. If you don’t, you can’t access. Apparently there are no switches or options that can be turned on my the service staff, this connectivity is totally reliant on the phone sending settings to the Optus servers. 

This would explain why my Optus service wasn’t working like it should any more. What it wouldn’t explain is why they decided to push ahead with an incomplete system and why they didn’t inform customers of this change. Now all Optus iPhone owners and everyone who doesn’t have an MMS capable handset have no way of viewing these messages. Not only do we not see them, or any trace that they were ever sent, but the sender still pays for them. Arse backwards? You bet. But I’m coming to expect that from Optus. 

Now, how do I jailbreak this thing?

Edit: On the 23/10/08 I sent this to Optus Customer service:

To Whom it may concern, I have been an optus customer for about 2 and a half years. I’m writing to enquire as to why I am no longer receiving alerts that I have been sent an MMS message, and am no longer able to log onto the Optus Zoo website to view the MMS messages in my 5MB of provided inbox.

I have an iPhone, and realise that they are not compatible with MMS messaging. However, I have been able to log onto the optus zoo website and manage my account from there. Last weekend, I was sent a few messages from friends via MMS and did not receive anything. Not an sms saying where I could retrieve them, not even an sms saying that this service is no longer available - but that I had been sent something.

So I called up the Optus customer service department and the lady I spoke with informed me that Optus had rolled the MMS servers over to a Linux setup, and the SMS alert service was a casualty of this rollover. Not only that, but there was no ETA on when a replacement service was on its way in, or even it there was one coming at all!

I think its incredible rude for this service to be taken away without informing customers, I’m sure many people who have iPhones and other non MMS capable handsets receive MMS everyday and are quite unaware that they may be receiving messages. And not only are the messages not being received, no one is being informed that the message is not getting through (either the sender or the intended recipient) and the sender is still being charged. If all this wasn’t bad enough, I was told by the customer service rep that people with MMS capable handsets are able to log into the site, view their MMS messages and manipulate their inbox - have full functionality. But the people who don’t have the MMS handsets have been flagged as so and are not able to access any online services with regards to viewing MMS. This seems to be completely the wrong way around.

I don’t mean to be a pain, but this is incredibly frustrating for me. I would like to know why my service isn’t what it was a month ago, why I’m not informed of my friends trying to contact me and why I wasn’t informed of this feature being taken away.

 

Edit: On the 18/12/08 Still no word, what gives Optus?

So here’s something I’m liking at the moment. My new desktop!

There’s been quite a few updates to the site in this version, which I officially released today, including:

• Unified theme - we finally decided on a consistent look for the page, which has been implemented, with the side effect of largely simplifying the number and content of files it takes to get the site looking like this
• Contact box - now AJAX-ified and slick; available on all pages
• Updated Lightbox (the cool image viewer in the gallery item pages) - it’s now quicker and better
• 404 Page - a custom “404 not found” error page has been created and implemented
• Slimmed down - the site is now about half the size (megabyte wise) as it was before, as many redundant images/style files have been removed
• Gallery index - there’s now a notification when there are no items under a certain category, rather than just nothing
• Gallery items - more modular for Timmy, more flexibility (ie can do image-only projects… page dynamically updates according to what’s in the database. If there’s no brief, the heading won’t show :))
• Maintenance page - nice little page which I can pop up while I’m editing the site

Yet to do:

• Matt: Change the iconset for the Blog… Done
• Matt: Add the About and Downloads pages
• Tim: Populate the Gallery

Woohoo!!!

Now, to re-rip all my CDs at a higher quality and import all my old crap my dell and Marvin, my poor iBook.

Wonderful game here, Great graphics, great story, much more grown up than previous titles. I’m not going to bother reviewing it, because every man and his dog already has, however I will outline some cool bits.

• Mobile phone is the lifeline of the new game, the game is much more social this time around and the phone helps get this across immensely (Also, the way it ‘interferes’ with your TV speakers if a nice touch)
• Graphics are stunning
• The constant in-jokes and silly names are brilliant, as always

24″ Display

3.06Ghz Core 2 Duo
2GB 800Mhz DDR2 SDRAM - 2×1GB (Will eventually be upped to 4GB, but this ram is faster than the last model with different DIMMs, so will have to wait for shops to update their lines)
nVidia Geforce 8800 GS 512MB
500GB HDD

I’ve compiled a list of things that you’ll see is going to change very soon as the site - a to-do list if you like. Since there’s a problem, with no less than three content box themes, and one of them not playing nice with resolutions of 1024 by 768 (seriously does anyone run that anymore?). So, a glassy, plasticky, ‘unified’ theme is going to be applied that renders well and is more attractive even at small resolution! Go legacy support! (if you can call 1024 by 768 legacy…) Anyway, onto the to-do list:

• Homepage - Unified theme, better welcome message and image
• Gallery - Unified theme, thumbnails need to be finalised
• Product Page - Content added, thumbnail size changed, layout and breaks inserted
• Blog - Blogo moved to correct position, sidebar tweaked (calendar centred, search bar fixed, internet explorer problems squashed, links inserted) and last, but not least the emoticons are hideous. Hello, aliasing!
• Downloads - Unified theme, layout
• About - Unified theme, known issues, site map, version history, links
• Contact - still to be coded, but design is done. Keep an eye out for that one.
• Help - How to navigate, download things, report bugs, contact me, helpful links

As the middle of the year is fast approaching I thought I’d better get my ass into gear and get poor Timmy’s site finished. So I’m attempting to do that… If you’ve been checking out the site occasionally, you’ll notice new updates to the Blog as of this morning… You can now comment your life away, the sidebar has been updated, and I’ve also implemented search so you can find the ramblings you wish with the greatest of ease.

We’re also rejigging a couple of things on the main site… There’s a lot that’s half finished at the moment, so hopefully this week we should be able to get some polish happening, and tick some boxes on the “finished” list.

By the way… I’m v. proud of the Gallery hehe… For those of you who are more technically minded, I would like to gloat that the gallery is actually generated using fairly basic content management system that I wrote. Like very basic. But it brings together a few technologies (most of which I still only have a vague knowledge of) which we’ve done at uni, such as:

• XML
• XSL (XML Stylesheets)
• XSLT (XSL Transformations)
• Javascript
• PHP

Hehe. It’s my baby

Anyways I do believe that’s enough rambling on my part. If you find any technical issues with the blog/site, please let me or Tim know and I’ll fix it up as soon as possible! But overall I’m pretty happy with how the beast is progressing

There really isn’t much to say on here other that w00t for no more Daylight Saving Time (For six months at least), horrible bloody invention that was.

I’m still undecided how I’m going to treat this blog - as a personal slash design oriented page or similar? Who knows. Anyway, for the craptacular first post after a large weekend, I think it suits the site at the moment. More soon.