I keep a series of ‘notes’ in my iPhone about when to pay bills, new ideas, and general things to remember. Today as I entered a new item, the entire page vanished and a single line appeared at the top:
“What do you think of that?“
Can anyone explain what happened? I am working in a coffeeshop, but the phone isn’t connected to the internet. This is mostly irritating because my long list is gone now, but what’s with the question? Has anyone else’s iPhone behaved so strangely in the past?
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
In what application are you working?
There have been rumbles of security issues on the iPhone, but the OS does not allow one app to arbitrarily modify another.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Just ‘Notes’–the yellow screen app that comes included where you can simply type. And I should add, I’m using the oldest iPhone model with updates installed.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:58 pm
That application does not have network capability itself; indeed this a complaint about Notes. It simply stores to a backend DB and you have to use another program (like Mail) for network capability. I would be very surprised if this was a security issue, as there is no way for anyone external to connect to this program.
Sounds more like a glitch (with a Daily WTF style error response) to me.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Thanks Walker. Lack of network capability puts me at ease a bit. This phone’s been missing calls and significantly delaying message delivery for months so given this new problem, it’s past time for a replacement.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Sheril, have you learned NOTHING from this sojourn with Chris into the science/public contact space? Don’t just replace your iPhone, sell it on eBay for thousands of dollars!
http://www.excommunicate.net/ghostinajar.html
Money quote:
“just want everyone to know that the person with the other”Ghost in a Jar” has nothing to do with mine.”
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
A haunted cell phone? That would be a cool 21st century update to Disney’s Haunted Mansion.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Seriously, this looks like an Easter Egg/debugging message. Sometimes programmers will insert little messages like this when a condition arises that should never arise. In other words, the code might look vaguely like this:
IF (impossible condition that should never arise)
{ erase bad data and put up warning message “What do you think of that?” }
So if you report the message to Apple, it might eventually wend its way down to some programmer who will shout “Omigod, it happened!!!”
You might check issues such as memory usage. If your data memory was near full, this might crop up during garbage collection. Or, even more likely, if you had a bunch of different apps running simultaneously, you might have run out of program RAM. Here’s the worst-case scenario (from the programmer’s point of view): you turn on your iPhone and run lots of different apps, including some games (games always play fast and loose with the rules). The iPhone’s RAM gets really cluttered up into lots of bits and pieces. The garbage collector tries to fix it, but somehow the process doesn’t work out properly (perhaps a game disrupts the process). A while later, your NotePad app runs straight into the fractured RAM, hits the garbage, the code gets confused, and the safety-trigger code above triggers, providing “graceful error handling”. Your iPhone doesn’t crash or freeze, and you get this mysterious little message. After all, if you got the message “Error: stack overflow in System stack #1a94CFF9″ you’d probably freak out. It’s sorta like the surgeons learning to say “There!” instead of “Oops!”
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I had a feeling Erasmussimo would offer some possibilities. Thanks. I have relatively few apps and no games.
I’m curious, what would be an example of an ‘impossible condition that should never arise’?
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Oh, there are lots of those. The most common are stack errors. While a program is running, it stores lots of temporary variables onto a stack. Let’s listen in on Mr. CPU(NotePad) at work:
Ho, ho, ho. I’ll just push the X-value onto the stack for when I need it later.
The stack is now 1 piece high.
Now I’ve got the Y-value. I’ll push that onto the stack, too.
The stack is now 2 pieces high.
Now I’ve got the Z-value. I’ll push that onto the stack too.
The stack is now 3 pieces high.
Now I’m busy with some other things.
OK, now I’m ready to use X, Y, and Z.
I’ll grab the piece at the top of the stack; that’s Z.
The stack is now 2 pieces high.
Next I’ll grab the piece at the current top of the stack: that’s Y
The stack is now 1 piece high.
Lastly, I’ll grab the piece at the current top of the stack: that’s X.
The stack is now empty.
Now I add X, Y, and Z, and I’m done.
Piece ‘o cake, right? But what happens if Mr. CPU(CrazyGame) jumps in while Mr. CPU(NotePad) is asleep (these things happen in a multitasking processor. Now, Mr. CPU(CrazyGame) is expected to play fair and leave the stack exactly the way he found it, but let’s say he’s a little weird (he was programmed by a 16-year old high school student who doesn’t follow all the rules of good programming) and he gets sloppy and accidentally leaves the stack one piece shorter than it was when he came in. In other words, the stack had three things on it (X, Y, and Z) that Mr. CPU(NotePad) was using, but Mr. CPU(CrazyGame) left only two things on it: X and Y. Now when Mr. CPU)NotePad comes back to use it, he grabs the top item on the stack, which he thinks is Z, but is really Y. Then he grabs the next top item on the stack, which he thinks is Y, but is really X. Then he grabs the next item on the stack — wait a minute, the stack is empty!!! This can’t be happening! This is impossible! Danger, Will Robinson!
Now, the guy who programmed NotePad is a responsible programmer and put in some test code just in case some idiot screws up the stack, which is highly unlikely. But in your case, it actually happened, so now you get his error message.
That’s how it COULD have happened. I’m engaging in total speculation here. There are a million ways this could happen. This is just one possibility. All of which leads to my second rule of programming: When in doubt, shoot the programmer.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
@Erasmussimo: I agree, it might be an easter egg (perhaps some particular text sequence was entered?).
Memory corruption on the other hand, while possible, is unlikely (and would suggest a bug in the low level memory handling functions of the OS) and the stack-thing is completely impossible: the stack is private to each single process and is – in these days – never programmed explicitly. There is not way another process can mess up another process’ memory and inconsistencies would point to a compiler/runtime bug (also unlikely).
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Yep, stack crashes are really hard to generate these days, but they’re easier to explain than the messier garbage collection problems.
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
SK, If you’re planning on putting a haunted iPhone on ebay let us know, I’ll bid.
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:33 pm
I can see the blog headlines now:
“Accommodationism leads to eBay woo”
“Unscientific America author turns to eBay spiritualism”
On the other hand:
“Were pictures from beyond taken with haunted iPhone?”
“Chilling predictions for 2010 made by voice in iPhone”
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Reading down this thread, I’m sticking to my ancient Bell desk phone with a wire in the wall.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:45 am
@13 Marion Delgado,
Totally.
@12 Cain,
I’d only be interested if it might raise money for charity, but doubt I could compete with Marion’s ‘ghost in a jar’ example.
@14 Anthony McCarthy,
Those are still around?
Thanks again to Erasmussimo, Lorenz, and Walker for insight on the trouble.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:14 am
It’s a good thing Steve Jobs got his liver and survived so far, is all I’ll say. Then again, Sheril (and her phone) would be Keynote speaker at Macworld 2010 if he hadn’t.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:13 pm
@4
Don’t be surprised if your message and calling problems are the network, rather than your phone.
September 24th, 2009 at 4:59 am
A couple things about reception problems with the iPhone:
1) Overall, AT&T was -completely- unprepared for the flood of new users, and even more so the flood of data traffic on their network, that came with iPhone exclusivity. Since the introduction, the company has still not built up their network sufficiently to handle the traffic.
2) One way AT&T has been trying to deal with the service problems is to replace the older EDGE towers with GSM towers. Although this increases their 3g capacity of the network, it has actually hurt network reliability: EDGE towers have greater range and interference robustness than GSM, but transmit data at a slower rate; by yanking out the EDGE towers, they have taken away redundancy. Additionally, 1st-generation iPhones (like yours) are EDGE-only, so over the last couple years AT&T has been slowly removing the pieces of the network that you rely on.
I love my iPhone, but I sure do hate AT&T, and would switch networks in a heartbeat if I could.