https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers

Really interesting article by Ian Grigg (from 2005) on how digital signatures (and third-party signatories) can take bookkeeping to the next level.

[This is the error report I sent to Apple at radar.apple.com]

Summary:

While upgrading to iOS 5, the final restore of the backup taken at the beginning failed. A few days later, iTunes offered to try again, which I accepted. Unfortunately, the pictures I had taken during those days were deleted by the restore.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Connect an iPhone with iOS 4.3.5 to the computer.
2. Answer “Yes” to iTunes question “There is a new version of the OS for your phone available. Do you want to upgrade?”
3. Wait for iTunes to download iOS 5.
4. Wait for iTunes to backup the phone.
5. Wait for iTunes to upgrade the phone.
6. Answer “Yes, I want to restore the phone to its previous state”
7. See the restore mysteriously fail with an error (-35) [IIRC]
8. Shrug and sync the phone the normal way and see all your apps end up on lots of pages instead of in the folders which apparently couldn’t be restored.
9. Travel to Barcelona with a girl of your choice.
10. Go on a lot of sightseeing, taking lots of pictures of each other and of La Sagrada Família, Parc Güell, and various other spectacular things.
11. Remember to go by the house where you lived 17 years ago of which you don’t have any pictures and take a few nice shots.
12. Come back home and plug in the phone in order to sync the photos to iPhoto.
13. When iTunes pops up a window asking “The previous attempt to restore iPhone failed. Do you want to try again?”, answer yes.
14. Wait for the restore to complete.
15. Go through the “welcome to iOS 5” setup. Answer in the affirmative to everything.
16. Start iPhoto. There should be no pictures to import.
17. Curse. Ask friends for more cuss words. Repeat.
18. Chat with the girl and agree that going back to Barcelona some other time sounds like a nice plan.

Expected Results:

In step 13, it would have been really nice if iTunes would have pointed out
a) that the backup to be restored was five days old
b) that anything added to the phone in the interim would be lost,
c) including those 100 or so photos you seem to have taken

Yeah, that would have been really nice. Barring that, it would have been really nice if in step 16, there had actually been a lot of pictures to import.

Actual Results:

I have no photos of my stay in Barcelona.

Regression:

N/A

Notes:

I blame myself more than anyone else. I know what a backup and restore means. I even thought about the few text messages that would be deleted and decided that was not a problem. But still: a little extra logic would have prevented this.

To raise the max size for file uploads, it’s not enough to set upload_max_filesize to 50M.  One also has to set post_max_size to something that is at least as big.  I don’t think that’s how it used to be, or I wouldn’t have spent an hour looking for the solution.

I’m running Ubuntu now, so I put the extra settings in a separate file that I upload to /etc/php5/conf.d/ using chef.