Category: Technology

• BeOS was JFK. – They both got gunned down before we could possibly see any downsides to them.
• MS-DOS 1.0 was Herbert Hoover, aloof to the problems of the common man but friend of the engineer in all of us. Also discovered Transformers.
• Mac OS 7-8-9, all Franklin Roosevelt, very competent, lead us through difficult times, but left a legacy of programs which have become quite a mixed bag.
• Windows 3.1, Dwight Eisenhower, amiable enough, competent, but leaving historians (and many contemporaries) very wanting.
• Windows 95 thru ME, Lyndon Johnson, one of the boys, very able at getting things done, but in the end a disaster, rightfully ceding his throne.
• Windows NT, Richard Nixon, the archetypal back-room politician, ruthless, and ultimately brought down by little faults, but many believe he was a great president and did much to modernize the Republican Party.
• Windows XP, Ronald Reagan, everybody who hates him never met him, he could charm anyone, the Great Communicator. Bought Iranian weapons for contras with drug money.
• Mac OS X, Bill Clinton, cheerful and smart, if not the most productive. Known for his speeches.
• Vista, George W. Bush, elected because of his name, even though the prior iteration wasn’t especially respected or well-liked. Introduced instability and performance issues, all in the name of “security”. Many of the corporate interests who promoted him early on are having second thoughts.

Taken from this discussion on Slashdot. Credit to cmowire and iluvcapra.

I think they have a problem when they call the program “Installer”.

Between my wife and I we have 3 Macs. She has a Blackbook and I have a Macbook Pro and a Whitebook from work. The two Macbooks have been connecting just fine to our Linksys router for quite some time. I don’t have any sort of encryption, as our nearest neighbors are too far out of range. I’ve setup MAC address filtering and disabled SSID broadcasts. Nothing too fancy. Well, as of late I’ve been having issues with the Macbook Pro. I could start the machine up, connect to the router and surf for about 5 minutes. Then my conneciton would drop to nil and the Airport icon would show zero bandwidth. It would also choke if I put the MBP to sleep and latter tried to reconnect. So I tried everything to fix this problem. Fixed permissions, reinstalled security updates, updated the router’s firmware, changed channels on the router, updated the OS and everything else you could possilbly think of. Except for one thing.

I didn’t reset the router back to it’s default settings.

So tonight, after literally a week of banging my head against a wall (Cause after all the 2 Macbooks were working. Why wasnt’ the Pro? What is going on? It doesn’t make sense! AHHHHHHHH!!!) I’ve finally fixed my wireless issue. I’m now slowly tweaking the router, adding the MAC filtering and tweaking other various settings. We’ll see how long this lasts so cross your fingers.

Sidenote: Along my journey into wireless hell I came across a very ‘perplexing’ entry in both the system and console logs:

Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: getifaddrs ifa_netmask for fw0(7) Flags 8863 Family 2 169.254.129.184 has different family: 0
Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: SetupAddr invalid sa_family 0

I have no idea what this means. It’s talking about DNS entries for the Firewire port or some such nonsense. But in the Network Preference Pane I don’t have the Firewire port active. Curiouser and curiouser!

I’m (was) having some difficulty with my network connection on my Mac. This is an unrelated error, but I found it digging in Console.

2007-02-22 11:10:26.479 Mail[428] Loaded Letterbox bundle
2007-02-22 11:10:26.479 Mail[428] Posing…
2007-02-22 11:10:26.821 Mail[428] Bwahaha! I am a LetterboxExpandingSplitView, and I shall always be vertical!

Many thanks to Aaron Harnly the developer of Letterbox for such a humorous log