Today's interesting bug

I spent a lovely weekend with Maz and Ivan. On Friday night I was introduced to the delights of Guitar Hero which has now been added to the list of things to get for the PS3.

One of the consequences of a weekend away is my phone battery was practically drained by the time we got home. While down south I had noted the paucity of signal for my T-Mobile connection but I didn't notice until this morning that my fully re-charged phone was still displaying zero bars of signal. It was unlikely the Manchester area was suffering a massive phone network failure so I power cycled the phone. Once it had returned from it's ludicrously long reboot sequence a flood of messages arrived confirming it's self imposed solitude. It looks like the phone powers off it's GSM chip when really low on power and forgets to turn it on when it has a few more joules at it's disposal.

One of the things I take for granted with open source applications is the availability of public bug trackers. You could report a problem with a consumer application to some faceless email alias but nothing beats a public bug tracker where you can add an email address to the CC list. It's interesting to note that the OpenMoko project already has one and the Google Android people are already talking about it. I'm wondering how long it will be until I can get my hands on a proper open phone platform. Even if I don't get around to coding for it myself there are plenty of benefits to an open platform.