Location Date Local Time DescriptionWhat’s This?
SAN PABLO, CA, US 10/13/2009 1:40 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
SAN PABLO, CA, US 10/12/2009 3:51 P.M. IN TRANSIT-PACKAGE LEFT IN A CONTAINER / DELIVERY RESCHEDULED
PARSIPPANY, NJ, US 10/07/2009 1:36 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
SAN PABLO, CA, US 10/02/2009 3:09 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
SAN PABLO, CA, US 10/01/2009 8:43 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
PETALUMA, CA, US 10/01/2009 7:36 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
10/01/2009 6:51 P.M. ORIGIN SCAN
US 09/29/2009 8:00 P.M. BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED
Tracking results provided by UPS: 10/13/2009 10:09 A.M. ET

The delivery date, which was originally 10/8/2009 when I first signed in to track it, is now 10/19/2009. I’m not sure what exactly has happened here!

Related: Twitter search for posts tagged #upsfail turns up more interesting anecdotes:

• KeithPipes: Oh, and thanks for the call yesterday letting me know you’d make the delivery between 8am and 7pm. #upsfail
• ladycatie: UPS delivered my alice.com order to the wrong person/apartment! #UPSFail
• DocOccupant: #UPSfail So, UPS lost my shipment of books and have now decided to refund my company instead of me. So, no books and out the shipping.
• ppdiva: @MomTV I have tried the 1-800 number. They are no help. Never returning any phonecalls that were promised. It’s so aggravating. #UPSFAIL

Genetic programming is combined with program analysis methods to repair bugs in off-the-shelf legacy C programs. Fitness is defined using negative test cases that exercise the bug to be repaired and positive test cases that encode program requirements. Once a successful repair is discovered, structural differencing algorithms and delta debugging methods are used to minimize its size. Several modifications to the GP technique contribute to its success: (1) genetic operations are localized to the nodes along the execution path of the negative test case; (2) high-level statements are represented as single nodes in the program tree; (3) genetic operators use existing code in other parts of the program, so new code does not need to be invented. The paper describes the method, reviews earlier experiments that repaired 11 bugs in over 60,000 lines of code, reports results on new bug repairs, and describes experiments that analyze the performance and efficacy of the evolutionary components of the algorithm.

Literally, they wrote some small samples of code that said “here’s what I want this buggy program to do” and then their genetic algorithm actually went off and hacked away at the code (much like many of us flesh-and-blood programmers) and made it work. They have several nice examples, including one on automatically fixing the infamous Zune date bug.

The dream of automatic programming has eluded computer scientists for at least 50 years. Although the methods described in this paper do not evolve new programs from scratch, they do show how to evolve legacy software to repair existing faults.

Vronko said the iPhone 3GS’s heat problem is evidently tied to the battery, because the pictures of discolored white iPhones reveal the outline of the battery. He noted that although thousands of iPhone 3GS users probably own defective handsets, the risk of causing fire or explosion is low because the iPhone’s battery cell is extremely small.

I decided to do a small test and played two rounds of Star Defense on the phone while on Battery power. Here’s what I found using an infrared thermometer. Initially, ambient temperature of the room was 80°F and the iPhone measured 83°F on the back. After playing the game, the room temperature had dropped 2° to 78°F while the iPhone 3GS measured 102°F on the back. More interestingly, there was a temperature gradient:

I’ve also felt the phone get much hotter than this quick test, probably proportional to how much load you put on its battery. There’s an Apple support document called Keeping iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS within acceptable operating temperatures which documents some obvious “leaving your phone in the sun” cases which can cause overheating:

- Leaving the device in a car on a hot day.
- Leaving it in direct sunlight for extended amounts of time.
- Using certain applications in hot conditions or direct sunlight for long periods of time, such as GPS tracking in a car on a sunny day or listening to music while in direct sunlight.

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.