Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Trash Talk and Wifi When I posted about Conference Wifi I said When people create and share networks from their Powerbooks, it causes collisions that interfere with everyone's access. Turns out I am wrong, Macs are the victims here, as Kevin Marks pointed out: The more common problem at conferences is Windows users accidentally creating private networks with the same SSID as the public one, causing routing failures, The Mac Airport software will not allow this to happen, unless you explicitly over-ride a lot of options. Asked Nikolaj from Organic Network, he said Kevin was right and they create the disruption for the mac powerbooks, as the powerbooks will often default to the p-2-p (adhoc) network rather than the infrastructure (ap). Kevin pointed out this was Apple following the spec and it assumes all senders with the same SSID are part of the same network, so they choose the one with the strongest signal. Meanwhile, Jeremy's Trash Talking idea has progressed and someone has even started coding it. Seems the app for Macs would be to signal to them why their wifi won't work. Perhaps being a friendly informant is more constructive than vigilantism. It could also suggest ripping the PCMIA card out of their neighbor's PC, if it felt nasty. Kevin suggested: The real tool you need is one that finds the rogue Windows AP box and sends it a popup message to stop it. Lazyweb? This is a real big problem for even less than big groups and I hope someone solves it. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "postCosmos" hasn't been defined.] 6:33:25 AM    comment []

Pepsi Promotion I still need to redeem my Pepsi Bottle Caps for songs. Yesterday I got a winner out of the Pepsi Machine at work. [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "postCosmos" hasn't been defined.] 6:05:40 AM    comment []

There Is an "I" in iPod Was there any doubt in your mind that Steve Jobs has his hand on every last detail of Apple's products? Well, erase it. MacCentral reports that Jobs is one of three Apple employees listed on a patent application for the iPod's user interface. [business2blog] [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "postCosmos" hasn't been defined.] 6:04:01 AM    comment []

TechTool Pro eDrive Micromat's TechTool Pro 4.0 includes a brilliant module called eDrive, which allows you to create an invisible, bootable emergency volume on your hard disk. Much faster than booting from a CD-ROM in case of emergency, but I assume if your drive is really toast, it's still toast. I use repair and recovery utilities primarily on other people's computers, but many times they've saved my booty when I can't boot. It's nice to have them readily available. Macosxhints.com had a very cool tip about eDrive. You can copy any other utilities you'd like to run from the eDrive by simply dragging them from your startup volume's Applications folder to the eDrive's Applications folder. I've added DiskWarrior and DataRescue, because you can't always be sure which one is going to work best. [Mac IT] [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "postCosmos" hasn't been defined.] 5:51:59 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Paul W. Swansen.