I’ve pretty much tried every instruction that’s out there which has anything to do with enabling mobile internet. Removing SIM-card, resetting APN (even though my provider doesn’t even need any APN settings), completely resetting network settings – along with disabling+enabling mobile data connections and/+ 3G for a thousand times. The “E” or the “3G” was showing up fine (depending which one I enabled), nevertheless, no connection could be made from any app.

Then I remembered something from previous days: I was using SBsettings along with toggles (one for EDGE, one for 3G), and I usually enabled or disabled both of them at the same time. Enabled them when I needed mobile internet, disabled them in order to save battery. So, depending on whether 3G was available, the bar was showing “3G” or just “E” – however, it was also still showing “E” even when I disabled both 3G and EDGE via toggles. I.e., an “E” was showing, but there was no connection – any app would confirm no connection. Furthermore, if I had EDGE disabled via toggle, I could enable 3G – and get a shiny “3G” – but still no connection possible.

So, the fact that if – in the current state with iOS4 – I disabled mobile data connections and there showing no “E” at all, made me presume that in earlier days my “mobile data connections” was always enabled and I was just switching EDGE and/+ 3G on and off. This could also mean – with remembrance of the “E” always showing in earlier days – that when I enabled mobile data connection now, I could enable 3G all I wanted, there would be no connection if EDGE was disabled (which I couldn’t enable, since I’m on iOS4 without toggles).

On order to prove or test this, I had to find a way to enable EDGE without the availability of a jailbreak and therefore with a lack of toggles. My dear friend Andre (special thx again) had a diff run on his iTunes MobileSync backup – once with EDGE enabled and once with EDGE disabled via toggle. He came to the following result:

In the backup file d67ab43d1c47dd60d7cf3a7a3939775f6938a8ef.mddata (3.x) or 8218978e4ab0a48035bb92653145a6be872ea858 (4.0) you will find the following excerpt (note the “ip1“):

<string>com.apple.CommCenter (ip1)</string>
<key>com.apple.CommCenter</key>
<dict>
    <key>AllowNetworkAccess</key>
    <integer>1</integer>
    <key>Available</key>
    <integer>1</integer>
The integer following the Available-node switches between 1 (EDGE toggle on) and 0 (EDGE toggle off). That basically meant, that for enabling EDGE without a toggle, I had to alter this value and get it back into my iPhone.

Simple way to do it:

1. Backup/Sync iPhone
2. Restore iPhone
3. manually edit the above file (depending on your OS version) in the current backup folder
4. Recover iPhone with the backup you created and edited

That’s it – it worked for me. EDGE seems to be enabled, and I can use the OS switches for data connection and 3G as I like, they work, as well, as expected+desired.

Hope this helps.

Recently, when I watched the (quite brutal) movie “Unthinkable” I saw a real killer:

We see some technician punching gibberish into a spreadsheet already filled with a lot more gibberish, haha.
And it gets even better if you consider what the guy typing is actually doing. See the following spoiler to find out:

Well – so much for today and a real funny idea for a computer screen.
And as a side note: Carrie-Anne Moss also plays the main actress in The Unthinkable .

I thought easy peasy, I’ll just get the textarea element by its ID and set its innerHTML to the desired XML data:
xmltext = loadXMLText( xmldoc );
document.getElementById(targetid).innerHTML = xmltext;


This did work in IE 7 as well as in FF 3.5, but Opera (10.10 at the time) displayed a strange behavior. It rendered to content of appearing nodes (from the XML data) but replaced the node tags with spaces:
<object><name>Foobar</name>
</object>


would be rendered as (mask to see spaces):
              Foobar       
         

It took me a while (despite the use of Dragonfly, Opera’s debug tool) to figure out that the problem was not the <textarea>. Throughout my history with Opera and other browsers I gathered that if a website is viewed “incorrectly” in Opera, it usually meant that there was something wrong with the code.
I then switched to the method of adding a new node to the DOM tree, which included the text from the XML data I wanted to be inserted:
xmltext = loadXMLText( xmldoc );
textnode = document.createTextNode( xmltext );
document.getElementById(targetid).appendChild( textnode );

This now worked just fine in Opera. And so I assumed that creating a new DOM node via createTextNode() was the correct method if you wanted to insert any form of text (whether it’s source code shown as raw text or just text).

Since then I’ve googled and read a few things about innerHTML, createTextNode() and Opera. It seems that throughout its versions Opera went from supporting innerHTML (the same way other browsers did) to not supporting and to supporting again and so on.
I am usually the kind of guy who thinks “if this code is wrong, show me so I can see it’s wrong, don’t try to guess what I meant” – even though guessing what web developers meant seems to be the specialty of most browsers. But in this case we can’t really say that using innerHTML is “wrong” even though it’s not the best thing to do. One of its advantages might be speed (especially if you’d have to create a lot of new nodes), but on the other hand it’s not a standard, so we can’t blame browsers if they don’t display it the way we want it to.

So as a final note, I’d like to say that I hope people having trouble with innerHTML and Opera find this blog post so they can fix their problem.
And for those open to discussion about whether it’s bad/wrong/good/whatsoever to use innerHTML, I recommend this article which offers a nice list of ups and downs of innerHTML along with a whole bunch of scenarios and alternate ways to reach your goal without using a non-standard method .