#Iphone

And I quote from AppleInsider;

The U.S. government on Monday announced new rules that make it officially legal for iPhone owners to "jailbreak" their device and run unauthorized third-party applications. In addition, it is now acceptable to unlock any cell phone for use on multiple carriers.

According to The Associated Press, the government approved a handful of new exemptions to a federal law that prevents the circumvention of technical measure that prevent users from accessing and modifying copyrighted works. The report noted that every three years, the Library of Congress' Copyright Office authorizes exemptions to ensure existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material.

Following stations are giving a problem:

• Aalst,
• Asse,
• Brugge,
• Mechelen

Trying to find a fix.

Issue: All those stations give an additional intermediate page with the question to confirm your station choice.

Old solution: could be by-passed by adding “[B]” to the end of every station name but this has recently changed and is no longer working.

Current solution: none yet. Working with cURL to check the POST data.

Report additional broken stations to bugs@irail.be please.

After careful consideration with my lawyer Ywein Van den Brande, I have decided to put iRail back online.

The copy of the letter to the NMBS/SNCB can be viewed here.

Minor modifications have been made to make it work correctly again with the new route planner of the NMBS/SNCB (changelog); and I’ll keep working on it to optimise it (next on the todo list is a better results page). Also, feedback is always welcome… But mail me; not the NMBS/SNCB. ;)

As I have no choice.

Geachte,

NMBS heeft onlangs vernomen dat u de uitbater bent van de website www.irail.be.

Uw website is, zoals u het zelf vermeldt, een route planner waarbij alle gegevens en informatie van NMBS website komt (“all data and info is retrieved from the B-Rail website”).

uw website maakt hergebruik van de data van NMBS. Hierdoor schendt u haar intellectuele rechten, zoals haar auteursrecht en databankrecht. Tevens maakt u zich daardoor schuldig aan het strafrechtelijk misdrijf van namaak.

Let me remind you, iRail is NOT affiliated with the NMBS/SNCB in any way.

This website was created during my spare time (and mainly for myself). It is also maintained during my spare time. NMBS/SNCB never helped to create or maintain this website (nor did it show any interest to do so).

I never got paid (or earned any kind of money) for this website. The website is free to access from any device (but it’s built to be used on an iPhone or iPad).

Source.

Click below.

Apparently the NMBS/SNCB website now makes a difference between “Brussels-Midi” and “Brussels-Midi Eurostar”; same station, different track.

Due to this change, iRail was no longer able to provide any scheduling information which included Brussels-Midi.

I’ve made a quick and dirty work around (by including “+ Eurostar” in the drop down menu), solving this bug.

However, please, NMBS/SNCB, please please please provide an API or report such changes to web developers.

As it is now, if you manually fill in Brussels-Midi and do not add the Eurostar text, the iRail website will not be able to to look up the requested information.

Took me a while to notice, but iRail.be was displaying the wrong year by default (2011 instead of 2010) and the NMBS website doesn’t have the 2011 time tables yet. Resulting in errors.

Anyway, fixed!

And the smart playlist syncing issue.

Syncing smart playlists, with “live updating” checked, bugged the playlists on the iPhone (there were songs in the playlist that didn’t belong there). Hoping this bug would be fixed ASAP I tried to ignore it as long as possible… However, it so far hasn’t been fixed.

As I was pretty fed up with unchecking “live updating” for 6 playlists eachtime I synced my iPhone, I tried to play around and find a fix.

All I can say: “Not impressed”.

Too big to be mobile, missing too many key features to be useful.

Actually, I guess Gizmodo said it all.

And besides that, no iPhone OS 4? No working iTunes? Anything truly useful?