Newton’s Lore

If you were frustrated at getting your iPhone/iPod Touch/MobileMe activated over the weekend you weren’t the only one (although I’m sure you could have found something better to do!). Someone took the time to come up with an “I’m an iPhone” video, and JoyOfTech also had a take on the BlackBerry schadenfreude, short lived though it was. Or check out “How to get broke by buying an iPhone”
Meanwhile, Australians weren’t left out of the picture with a certain phone company’s activation system going offline before the launch. Which was probably better than Optus (i)phone users in Queensland being unable to dial emergency 000.

If you’ve got the latest Apple Developer tools installed, you’ll notice that attempting to ./configure the clamav-0.93 package doesn’t work because of a gcc compiler bug. The way I found around this is to “fink install gcc43″, then retry the configure command after having set the CC to be /sw/bin/gcc-4 and then you can make and make install as per usual.

A very cool article over at Macworld shows how to enabled hidden features in Leopard’s built in Screen Sharing to give Apple-Remote-Desktop-like features such as 

• Drop colour resolution to improve performance on low bandwidth connections
• Switch between controlling and observing the remote Mac
• Locking out the remote Mac’s keyboard and mouse, or hiding on-screen activity
• Taking screenshots

Picked up a 500Gb Time Capsule. Got home and was somewhat in a hurry. Power cable was a bit hard to get pushed in properly, although there was no visible evidence of why this would have been the case in either the plug or the socket.
Ignored the “Install this first” CDs, as usual, and fired up Airport Admin utility under Leopard on the wired LAN and it found the existing Airport Express. Did a “Save As…” to save the config of the existing Airport Express (including passwords). Then unplugged the Airport Express and plugged in the Time Capsule, attached to the network cable that used to be plugged into the airport express. Interestingly the assistant offered me the chance to use the Time Capsule to replace an existing wireless access point, but it wanted me to find it (and I’d just unplugged it :). So I plugged it back in to power and the LAN, but the Assistant couldn’t seem to find it. I gave up at this point, hit the Manual button and just imported the settings from the Airport Express (seemed like a safe bet) into the Time Capsule’s settings. This seemed to work. Changed security to WPA Personal and restarted the Time Capsule.
So, now turn on Time Machine on the Leopard box and get it started. That was at 18:30, and it’s now done 47.3 of 69.44Gb (1,396,130 items from my 80Gb drive) after some 5.75hrs (over Gigabit).
Meanwhile, every other machine had to have its Airport connection changed to WPA Personal, and even though I’m pretty sure I typed the password in several times, it took a while to register and stick (at least I hope it’s stuck now!).
Are network speeds faster? Hard to tell. I haven’t maxed out the speed as currently we need backward compatibility with 802.11g until the next round of upgrades. It offers 802.11n on 2.4 or 5GHz, and 802.11a compatibility as well as 802.11n/b/g.
Other noteworthy things are that the Airport Admin utility displays a set of warnings about the current Time Capsule configuration (ie no DNS, multiple DHCP, etc.).
The Time Capsule also offers to sync with a timeserver, and also flash its light if there’s a software update available. This is much less useful as it’s going to be stuck in a separate room where I’m unlikely to see its flashing light.
There’s also support to “Advertise configuration globally” via Bonjour, or so it seems to make it available globally over the internet. I don’t enable this.
I’d heard rumours of it running hot. Sure, it’s warm, but not really any warmer than my ADSL router, and it’s been doing a lot more work for the past 5 hours. Plus it’s got an internal power supply, so it’ll be warmer from that alone.
The other thing is now there’s an extra shared volume appearing in the Finder. Logging into it reveals a shared disk onto which I can put stuff. Cool. Checking in the Airport Admin shows it’s a guest read-writable volume, which is probably not good by default. Now locked down
So far, it seems to be behaving pretty much as expected. I could do setup in a hurry without too much pain. It claims to be backing up at a reasonable speed.
Now I just need to test recovery

Even though products based on FireWire S1600 standard were due to market soon, the 1394 Trade Association has announced that as of January its FireWire S3200 standard is awaiting ratification. This standard will allow up to 3.2Gb/s transfer speed

Edition.net are offering dedicated Xserve server solutions for US$250 (presumably per month, plus US$400 setup). For that you get “MacOSX Server featuring Xserve - 1.33Ghz PowerPC G4, 60gig storage, 512MB ram, WebObjects 5″. Although the RAM (and storage) seems a bit small. There are other options available which include WebStar V, FileMaker Unlimited (version 5?), and Lasso Pro 6 (not 8!). They do offer “flat-rate pricing with no traffic surcharges”.

digital.forest offers an Enhanced plan for US$30 setup and US$19/month (+US$10/month for MySQL) with perl, PHP5, Python, Mac OS X and more, 100MB of storage, and 3Gb of data transfer. Not sure what their colocating price is like though as you need to contact a salesdroid. Digital.forest have been around since 1994 and have a long time association with Mac newsletter TidBITs.

From the Mac OS X 10.5.2 release notes, here are some of my observations: User Interface:

• Apple has added a Time Machine icon to the Menu bar (it can be turned on in the Time Machne control panel)
• The menus are less translucent (who would have thought with everyone complaining that that would have been a problem) and transparency can be turned off in the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane
• List view is back in the Stacks (presumably they got a lot of complaints), and they have a new grid view background (presumably for better visibility)

It remains to be seen if they’ve added the Size column back to the Spotlight column view though.

Support for new things (ie you may want to try plugging some old stuff that didn’t work in again to see if it does now!):

• You can now iSync Samsung D600E and D900i phones
• Airports Express and Extreme now support more printers connected via USB
• New RAW camera formats supported:
  • Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
  • Canon Powershot G9
  • Hasselblad CF-22
  • Hasselblad CF-39
  • Leaf Aptus 75s
  • Nikon D3
  • Nikon D300
  • Sony Alpha DSLR-A700
• Supports more 3rd party routers in iChat and Back To My Mac

Interesting bugs fixed:

• Fixed a problem when ejecting a CD could write to it! (presumably instead of just ejecting it)
• Fixed a problem where the Leopard Setup Assistant would re-appear (as noted in this TidBITs article by Glenn Fleishman)
• Mail now automatically disables the (unsupported) third-party plugin GrowlMail version 1.1.2 or earlier to avoid issues.
• Addresses “accuracy issues” with the web content filter (in Parental Controls) perhaps to now block unboxing porn?
• The computer will now shut down if an automatic disk repair does not succeed during startup. (Hopefully it tells you why it just shut down?)

TidBITs announced that there will be no more Crazy Apple Rumors. A site that will be sorely missed by the insane Apple fan demographic I’m sure

If you’ve got an old PowerBook that supports CardBus you can buy an nQuicky 802.11n card from QuickerTek for US$64.95 to talk to your Airport Extreme base station.

Recently I swapped out a 100Mb (annoyingly capitalised) NETGEAR FS108 switch for a 1Gb D-Link DGS-1008D switch. Unfortunately, after having done this the Airport Express that was plugged into the D-Link switch would repeatedly hang, dropping the wireless connection and requiring power cycling the Airport Express.
Unsurprisingly this didn’t take long to get annoying, so I did a quick trip to pick up a 1Gb NETGEAR GS108 switch. After removing the D-Link and putting the NETGEAR in place, the Airport Express hasn’t fallen over yet. Conveniently the NETGEAR “Prosafe” versions (more expensive but in a nice solid metal case rather than plastic) have their status lights above each port on the front of the box, which makes it easier to see which cable is doing what, despite it being a bit uglier with all the cables hanging out the front.
I’d previously heard about the dodginess of D-Link, I guess I was overdue for a reminder.