Newton’s Lore

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.

Everyone seems to be offering shareware bundles at the moment. MacUpdate Promo are offering

• ForkLift
• RapidWeaver
• Swift Publisher
• Marine Aquarium
• Xslimmer
• MemoryMiner
• Yep
• XMIND 2008 Pro (after 1000 sales)
• iStabilize (after 2400 sales)
• Pulpmotion (after 5000 sales)

Cost is US$49.99 (currently the total bundle value is US$234.80), only 5 days 11 hours left at the time of posting.

Meanwhile MacSanta is offering 20% off various titles all day (after end of the day the discount drops back to 10%)

Finally the disembodied heads at TidBITs mentioned the Give Good Food To Your Mac site, with products from European Mac developers and a tiered discount of 30% for 3 apps, 40% for 5 apps, 50% for 7 apps and 70% for 10 apps. Only 2 days 11 hours left on these deals though at the time of posting. Titles include Unity Indie, Tables, Pixelmator, Together, Feeded, FotoMagico Express, Art Text, Money, FreeWay 4 Pro, Freeway 4 Express, RapidWeaver, Merlin, Geophoto, Contactizer Express, Contactizer Pro, CSSEdit, PulpMotion, Video Pier, BannerZest, Cheetah3D, iStopMotion Home, Expert Wine Cellar, iDive, Morphage, Magnet, CoverScout, Personal Trader and Remote Buddy.

In Leopard if you try to connect to a remote server in the Finder and have ‘%’ in the password, NetAuthAgent will crash with a bus error. As reported on Macintouch (and indirectly on MacEnterprise). I’m not sure if this behaviour persists in 10.5.1.

Macintouch reader reports indicate that having a slash ‘/’ character in his computer name (in the ‘Sharing’ Preference Pane), or having the computer name empty broke Leopard’s Time Machine. Interesting, given that when I installed Leopard it changed my computer name.

If you’re into C++/Cocoa/Objective-C then you might be able to score a Mac developer job at Skype. According to the original poster although it says the job is in Estonia you may be able to convince them otherwise.

You might want to check out this documentation if you want to set up a redundant DHCP system.

If after upgrading to Leopard your postfix installation gives you the error

user postfix has same user ID as _postfix

then you need to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and change mail_owner to postfix and setgid_group to postdrop.

This is a postfix installation I installed myself from the source distribution, not Leopard server.

The very cool Eye-Fi wireless memory card is now available (at least to those in the US). With 2Gb of RAM for photos, and a WiFi card built in you can upload photos directly to your Mac or PC (I believe it was demoed at WWDC uploading into iPhoto directly). Or you can upload to the Eye-Fi service and into your favourite photo site (Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, etc.)

Well, really in a fight between a leopard and a tiger I’d be betting on the tiger

So, how am I preparing for the transition on my server box?

• Make sure I’ve got my order for a copy of Leopard in
• Backup everything
• Try to see if I can get fink working on Leopard (dev box) before I do the install
• Check to see if postfix, clamav, amavisd, mysql, php, gallery2 and wordpress are all going to be happy under Leopard. Not to mention Retrospect and SuperDuper.
• Wait for 10.5.1
• Bite the bullet and do the install